More than Platitudes

...2003, 234 pp., $12.95 RABBI JACK RIEMER We have had women rabbis now for some thirty years...

...The death of an embryo or the death of a newborn may be just as real and just as painful as any other loss and brushing them off and telling those who grieve to move on as if nothing has happened may be no favor...

...And yet she is still somehow able to pray...

...It is a book that should be in every rabbi's library and ought to be in the libraries of all Jews who may ever need to visit someone who is ill or who may themselves someday be ill—in other words, all Jews...

...There are also prayers that come from within the tradition—from the Psalms and the Siddur and the Talmud and the Midrash—that the people of this generation are entided to know exist...

...And I think that it is clear by now that the focus of their rabbinate has not been preaching or fundraising or institution building...

...Merle Feld is angry, rightfully angry, as any normal, healthy person would be at such a moment...

...Now we are not so sure...

...We used to say that the Halachah was kind in not requiring mourners of a miscarriage to sit shivah...

...Everyone who reads this book will have his or her own favorites in the collection...

...If this is so, then this book becomes a valuable weapon that should be included in the armory of the patient, the doctor and the family as they wage war together for complete healing of body and spirit, the goal of all true medicine...

...There are other new prayers in this book on themes that are not available in traditional prayer books, such as: "A Yizkor Meditation In Memory of a Parent who was Abusive," "A Prayer on Behalf of the Healers," or "Upon Terminating a Pregnancy," or a prayer for those going through a divorce...

...We rabbis always knew that prayers for healing and paying attention to the sick were components of Judaism, but most of us never really knew what that meant...

...Now we have this book to educate us on how to carry out the mitzvah of healing...

...It has taught us that if body and mind are one, then a person's recovery depends in part on paying attention to his or her loneliness, fear and aspirations, as well as to blood count and temperature...

...She wants no shallow comfort and she wants both stupid people and new mothers to leave her alone...

...She asks for two things: open my heart to my husbandlover- friend so that we may comfort each other, and open my womb that it may yet bear living fruit...

...it has been healing...

...It is jam-packed with so many valuable essays, so many instructive texts, so many powerful stories, poems, and meditations, and so many new and old rituals that I don't know which ones to focus on...

...She admits that in the space she had made inside herself, where she had moved over in order to give her child room to grow, there is now a tight, bitter knot of hatred...

...Now we know that the synagogue is not only meant to be a social institution, devoted to the survival of the Jewish people and to the transmission of the heritage to the next generation...

...I can only tell you that I put a piece of paper at every page that I want to go back to and reread, and when I finished, I was surprised to see how many pages I had marked...

...Now we know better...

...Sick calls were something we had to do but we did it perfunctorily, with little thought and preparation, so that we could get back to doing more important things...

...When I was studying to be a rabbi, no one ever told us that we would have to be involved in helping people who were suffering from the emotional turmoil of such experiences as mastectomy, rape, abortion, spousal abuse, miscarriage or the death of a child...

...The Jewish Healing Movement is probably the most significant spiritual movement of this generation and it is largely the work of Jewish women...

...Jerome Groopman, the eminent physician and medical researcher, has recendy written a book The Biology of Hope, in which he argues that there is therapeutic value to hope and that, therefore, medicine has to address both the body and the spirit...

...it is also meant to be a caring community, that reaches out to those individuals in its midst who are in need of support...

...Mine are the new prayers written in our time, such as the prayer after a miscarriage by Merle Feld...

...This is the kind of prayer that one can share with a mourning woman without embarrassment, for it recognizes and respects her anger, and does not seek to paper it over with platitudes...

...We used to think that it was better for them "to get on with their lives...

...And it has taught us that while there may be times when we can no longer cure, there is never a time when we can no longer care...

...The Jewish Healing Movement has taught us that caring for the sick is not a small mitzvah...

...I guess we knew that such things happened, but no one taught us how to bring strength and comfort to those who suffered from them...