Join host Dr. Jonathan Weinkle and guest Rabbi Kara Tav on Healing People, Not Patients as she reflects on her frontline chaplaincy at NYU Brooklyn during the earliest, most devastating weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Discover how chaplains dwell in uncertainty, support spiritual needs when medicine reaches its limits, and help both patients and providers find meaning amid profound suffering and not knowing.
What happens when medicine says "I don't know" and chaplains step in to hold the unknown?
In Episode 11 of Healing People, Not Patients, Rabbi Kara Tav shares her experience starting as a palliative care chaplain at NYU Langone Brooklyn just weeks before the world recognized COVID-19 as a pandemic. She describes transforming hospital units, supporting weeping doctors who couldn't admit uncertainty, ministering to isolated dying patients, and navigating moral injury amid refrigerated trucks, empty trains, and public gratitude that didn't fully grasp the horror. Drawing on Jewish teachings, she explores chaplaincy as presence in the "who knows," helping access inner spiritual resources for healing, and emerging from trauma with hope that survival itself is a miracle.
Top 3 Takeaways:
About the Guest:
Rabbi Kara Tav, MA, BCC, is a rabbi, board-certified chaplain, educator, and spiritual counselor based in Pittsburgh. With extensive experience in hospital chaplaincy including as manager of spiritual care and palliative care chaplain at NYU Langone Brooklyn during the height of the early COVID-19 pandemic she now offers consulting, counseling, teaching, and community education. She specializes in supporting spiritual needs in times of illness, crisis, and uncertainty, drawing on Jewish tradition to help individuals and professionals find meaning and resilience.
🔗 Connect with Rabbi Kara Tav:
🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rabbikaratav
About the Show
Healing People, Not Patients explores ways to enhance medical practice by infusing it with compassion, humanity, and a deeper sense of purpose, aiming to help healthcare professionals rediscover the "soul" of their work. Framed around the four questions of the Passover Seder, it probes how to transform medicine for the better, promoting an empathetic and supportive approach that empowers patients to create meaningful, sober lives, while drawing on Jewish teachings about community and friendship.
"Our theme song, "Room for the Soul," is available on Bandcamp at https://jonathanweinkle.bandcamp.com/track/room-for-the-soul."
About the Host:
Dr. Jonathan Weinkle is an internist and pediatrician who practices primary care at a community health center in Pittsburgh. He strives to be a "nice Jewish doctor" focused on patient-centered healthcare, emphasizing effective communication and holistic well-being.
He teaches the courses, “Death and the Healthcare Professions” and “Healing and Humanity” at the University of Pittsburgh, authored the books Healing People, Not Patients and Illness to Exodus, and runs ‘Healers Who Listen’, where he blogs on healing and Jewish tradition. Once an aspiring rabbi, he now integrates faith and medicine to support other physicians and his own patients.
🌐 Website: healerswholisten.com
🔗 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jonathan-weinkle-3440032a
📸 Instagram: @HealersWhoListen
📘 Facebook: @JonathanWeinkle
[00:00:00]
I was in New York City on February 20th, 2020 to take in one of Billy Joel's artist in residence concerts at Madison Square Garden. Manhattan was as loud and crowded as it ever was from the train station to the bagel place, to the sidewalks, to the broken escalator in the garden that we had to walk down surrounded by thousands of our new closest friends.
A month later, six years ago this week, Manhattan was a literal ghost town filled with scenes from apocalyptic horror movies. My guest today, rabbi Kara, witnessed many of those scenes firsthand working as a hospital chaplain in Brooklyn during the worst months of the pandemic. The episode before this dropped on the holiday of Purim, the story of which is told in the biblical book of Esther.
In Esther chapter four, Esther's uncle Mordecai admonishes her, who knows if you became Queen for a time such as this, and our conversation, rabbi Carl will teach us that chaplains are the people who dwell in the who knows. By the end of the [00:01:00] conversation, I found myself thinking that she came to her profession for a time such as this.
Stay tuned in here for yourself.
[00:00:00] I'm back with my dear friend, rabbi Karara Tav. Rabbi Karara is a chaplain at UPMC McGee Women's Hospital. she also has a private practice doing spiritual counseling and. I won't get into the details of how we first got to know each other. It's been a long time and very glad to have her back in town in Pittsburgh, although we are not together this evening because there's a sizable amount of snow outside and it's very cold.
So we're both in our warm houses car. How are you doing this evening? Thanks for asking. I am very well. I'm happy to be in my warm house, as you said, and I've had a couple of days off work because I can't get anywhere, so I'm feeling rested and relaxed right now . Great. I'm glad to hear it.
I have an intuitive understanding of what it is that you do, but I know that there's, especially in this day and age, a lot of confusion about what chaplaincy is. Two episodes ago I had on my friend Rabbi Miriam Fester, who is a halachic advisor. she works a lot with people with both physical [00:01:00] illness and even more so these days with mental illness.
About navigating where their religious observance and their health needs, whether those are mental health or physical health get into conflict with each other and helping them navigate a path through that. And she made a very clear distinction between her work and chaplaincy. So. Having further muddied the waters.
Can you try and clear that up for us and tell us in simple terms, what does a chaplain do? What is your role in someone's medical journey? That's a great place to start. Start at the very beginning. So my role isalongside the medical staff. The medical staff have particular parts of the patient.
Forgive me for putting it like that, I'll use my own language that they minister to. There are, doctors who care about livers and there are doctors who care about hearts and there are doctors who care about the mind. And there are doctors who care about, the [00:02:00] bones and chaplains care about the spirit.
And so we work alongside the medical team. And I say alongside because sometimes we lead the way for the medical team, and sometimes we follow the medical team and sometimes we're literally alongside. So I picked alongside, it seems friendlier. And really what I do is help people to access their inner resources in order to work with the medical team to heal themselves.
'cause Doctors don't heal patients. Doctors can heal parts of patients, but only with the participation of the patient. you guys don't go in and fix someone, do you? You're making a face like you don't think that's correct. Well, only because now you're gonna make me retitle my podcast, which is called Healing People, not patients.
But I take your mean. I may need to, have you change the title of your podcast in that case. 'cause All [00:03:00] right, you do heal people, but you don't heal them alone. I guess that's what I'm saying. For sure, for sure. I'm saying that you can't heal them unless the patient cooperates.
Mm-hmm. they have to use the regimen that you offer them. They have to take the medication, they have to tell the story. they have to do the things that you need in order to help them to heal. Yeah. So that's not unlike me in that. I help people heal by giving them a framework so that they can help themselves heal.
We talk a lot about, spirituality is sort of like a. Marshmallowy term, it's sweet and sort of nondescript. I lived in eastern Europe for a year and during that year I worked in the Jewish community of Romania. And during that time I worked with college students and other people in the Jewish community.
[00:04:00] They would say like, what do you eat? What's like a treat that you know about, that I don't know about? And they loved peanut butter. And I said, well, you know, in America and in Canada and in Israel, actually, people eat peanut butter with marshmallow fluff. And the answer to that was, what's marshmallow?
I know you Can make marshmallows, but really, I'm not sure what's in marshmallows. Yes. Spirituality has that feeling like, you know what it is, when you see it, you know what it is. Can you say exactly what spirituality means?
Like how it manifests in us. And the answer is that spirituality is the thing that we know gives our life meaning. It might be gardening and it might be making music and it might be listening to music and it might be God.
And it might be prayer, [00:05:00] and it might be our work, maybe our work gives our lives meaning. But there's like another level of those things which I would call spirituality. I have two thoughts following what you said. One is in terms of giving a definition of spirituality,
I take after my father, I'm a sci-fi fan. And in the second version of Battlestar Galactica. Yeah, the Cyborg race get very, they get religion very early on in the show and about, somewhere along about season three, the human characters have been like, a few of them have been.
Kidnapped to take on a mission on this very small ship, and they're talking with one of the cys and he defines religion as the feeling that this is not all that we are. It's interesting that Cyborg said that because religion is very different than spirituality in that it comes with [00:06:00] trappings, it comes with words and clothing,
I would say that religion actually has a box and spirituality doesn't always have a box. I am a fairly observant Jew. I pray regularly. I make it to Shul Shabbat when the weather isn't horrible. And I can vouch for that.
And do I always have a spiritual experience? I dunno. Mm-hmm. I'm not sure. I don't think so. And so I think that religion and spirituality have while they're, they fit in a Venn diagram, I think that they are definitively separate. Yeah. the Venn diagram is when all the trappings actually move you to a space where you can connect with the spirituality, right?
Yes. the other thing that I was thinking of is something that , this is rabbinic advice that I quote often as Rabbi Harold Sch, who talked about the doctor patient relationship [00:07:00] as covenant, right? and he was saying that specifically because he was recognizing that medical professionals can't heal somebody on their own.
There needs to be a mutual relationship and a specifically a mutual relationship where the doctor is helping the person uncover their own healing potential and the patient is helping the doctor uncover their own. Woundedness imperfection need for assistance as well, so that maybe they're on a more even footing.
Mm-hmm. And certainly the hardest work that I've done has been where I realize that I am not all that. It's terrible when doctors find that out. Yeah. Speaking of a time when doctors all found that out. So I don't remember when you entered chaplaincy as a profession.
You'll remind me of that in a minute, but one of your roles that you entered at a very inconvenient moment ended up having you serving as a hospital chaplain in probably [00:08:00] the most difficult moment in American medicine, at least since the AIDS epidemic. And you know, maybe going back further, all the way to the great influenza, you were a hospital chaplain that started a job a month before the lockdown, at the beginning of the COVID Pandemic . And I know from reading your Facebook posts and then from talking to you after we reconnected in IRL as it were how incredibly difficult that was. But you would occasionally post about some wins and some really meaningful things that you were able to do.
What did you learn from that experience? But even more so, what things that you already knew did you draw on? To be able to do your work in that space. Wow. Yeah, that's a big question. First of all, it was two weeks, not a month. Oh. It was still February, right? So it Was in the previous calendar month, you're not totally wrong , but two weeks in a month are totally different.
For many reasons I'll get into in a moment. But before that, I'll say that I had worked as a [00:09:00] chaplain for coming on 10 years. When I got the job at that hospital I had been the manager of a department, and the palliative care chaplain, which is my, specialization. Previously this position was.
Exciting in a number of ways, predominantly because it was formerly, a community hospital. I work best in community hospitals. Unfortunately, this one, I can say why in a minute, if that's interesting. formerly this hospital had been. Lutheran Hospital in South Brooklyn.
So it had been acquired by NYU only maybe five years before. But the Lutheran Hospital was a neighborhood, landmark.
everyone still referred to this hospital as Lutheran, not Lutheran Hospital. Not, where do you work? Lutheran? Like if I [00:10:00] would've said I worked at NYU Brooklyn, they would've said, which one is that? But if you say, I worked at Lutheran, everyone knew what I meant. so community hospitals, this one in particular
I only worked in two other community hospitals. I shouldn't say of all the community hospitals I've worked in, but in like between the two, this one had a family feel as in there was a surgeon whose father had been a surgeon at Lutheran. And his son Was at medical school at NYU.
This was literally the family business without the business part actually. so I started at NY U2 weeks before the pandemic broke out. And when I say broke out, I mean before the world understood that this was gonna be something, more than a long flu. People were still talking about thesymptoms as [00:11:00] flu-like, and most people, you know, it's fine.
It's very contagious, but you know, most people are okay. You just have to stay home and Drink lots of fluids and stay in bed and everything should be okay. So at NYU, we already knew that wasn't the case. and. I'm saying I'm a lot interesting. And by the time I started my job, the hospital had totally transformed, meaning the units were not where they said they were.
We were already saying if you're called to. 3,100. It's actually in the 50 eights. so I just started there and didn't know where the 30 ones were or the 50 eights. I never saw the cafeteria in this hospital. I didn't know there was one, because by the time I got there, we already had, I would say.
[00:12:00] Maybe 30 patients that were COVID positive. And that was two weeks before the pandemic broke out, so we're already deep in it. Right. Two weeks before they called it a pandemic. Two weeks before people even acknowledged that it was a thing.
Mm-hmm. Most people were talking about it as if it was nonsense. Mm-hmm. Oh, this is ridiculous. Everyone is overreacting. Well, it turns out they weren't really overreacting, were they? So that is where I started a job that I think this position helped put chaplaincy. On the map in a very different way.
Because Doctors and other medical professionals don't do a great job in the, space. Those three words don't come out of a lot of medical professionals' mouths. [00:13:00] Only in an idiomatic way. Oh, I don't know, maybe, you know, like that. But I don't think that too many doctors look at their patients and say, I don't know what's wrong with you, and I don't know what we're gonna do about it.
AndI don't know why these symptoms are showing themselves as they are. So I dwell chaplains, not I personally, but chaplains dwell in the unknown. Mm-hmm. We travel with God and with that spirituality that we were talking about a minute ago that you can't really pin that down.
And so I felt perfectly comfortable in a world where. I don't know what was coming out of everyone's mouths. I'm like, okay, so you don't know. And that made for an interesting beginning to my work particularly because when you work as a chaplain in hospital, medical professionals come to you.
They don't come to you out loud. They come to you very quietly. They don't come to you in a way where [00:14:00] anyone would know, but. All hospitals I've worked in, I would say 50% of my patient body are medical professionals. Versus doctors. like social workers.
'Cause they have access to the chaplains and they use it 'cause they need it. ' I can totally identify you and I have never worked in the same hospital, but I can tell you that of the many conversations I've had with various colleagues of mine who are chaplains, the one who comes most easily to mine is Pastor Rich Freeman, who's the Chaplain Children's Hospital.
Mm-hmm. I've had many conversations with him where Ur, we were talking about a patient that we were both caring for de facto, I was the patient. Right. I was going to him, to my Baptist minister friend who always tells me that our tree is the same even though our bark is different. Because I needed to hear his very well spoken wisdom at a really hard time.
So [00:15:00] yeah, I can completely identify with that. Chaplains call you the identified patient. Like, we can be having a large conversation with a family and the patient and the whole medical staff and there's only one identified patient. Mm-hmm. Or, sometimes there's more than one, but the identified patient doesn't always, who everyone thinks it is.
Definitely not always the person in the bed. I started work at a time when not knowing was comfortable for me. Mm-hmm. And everyone needed me to be comfortable in that place. I had a lot of frustrated, weeping doctors. They would come in my office. They would kick the door, closed behind them, turn to face the corner, squeeze a tear or two out, look at me and say, thanks, rabbi, and [00:16:00] leave.
Because they just couldn't stand the pressure that was coming at them. That they, and all they had to say was, I don't know.
it's amazing that I asked a question about what wisdom you drew on and the wisdom that you drew on was not knowing. Yeah, you're right. You couldn't get through medical school on that, No, but I could have treated a lot of doctors with it. Yeah. At some point though, I know from our conversations over the last three or four years that it got to be too much in some way.
Share what you're comfortable with telling. so you know that I'm very much into the parallels between illness and the experience of Being in the mitri, in the narrow space whether that's an actual enslavement or a trying time, a situation that you don't feel like you have a way out of.
And one of the things that I took out of the four or five years of work that I [00:17:00] did in that space is work itself. Is not only a thing that for me as a primary care doctor often breaks my patients, especially people who do hard physical labor. But it also breaks a lot of my colleagues, whether they're in medicine proper, or nursing, or administration, or in chaplaincy.
and I know that the work took a toll on you as well. Yes. The work certainly took a toll on me. I didn't know that it was taking a toll on me for a very long time. it's difficult for me to talk about concretely because there was a lot of emotion and not a lot of words.
Chaplains don't have chaplains. I did, thank God. Mm-hmm. But not all chaplains have chaplains. The dynamic of moral injury as commonplace was very complicated for me to deal with. There was a lot everywhere. It was like you could lick it off the walls. The doctors and the [00:18:00] nurses were. Challenged by one another. Mm-hmm. but they were also challenged by politics and poverty and life in community.
I worked twenty four seven. I was on call 24 7. I took four trains to South Brooklyn every day, and four trains home empty trains, in those empty trains. I had time to write, to process what was happening around me When I got off the train, I would walk from the train station home During that walk, which was often around seven people would be doing the clapping and pot banging out their windows, right?
And I was walking by in scrubs with my tag that says I'm allowed to be on the train, which everyone could [00:19:00] see from a mile away 'cause nobody was allowed on the train. And they would shout and they would thank me and all I could think was, you have no idea what I see. And I love that you can lean out the window and bang on your pots and feel gratitude for your safety.
But I can't promise you that you're safe, So in some ways that was my moral dilemma because people were very grateful. A lot of people expressed gratitude. They sent gifts, they sent food, they sent music, I got more than once large boxes filled. When I say boxes, if you've ever moved, you know what the size of a book box is?
Yep. Mm-hmm. So I received two book boxes filled with Hershey's kisses. People really were grateful that those of us who went to the [00:20:00] hospital every day were there. But I think that they didn't totally understand what they were being grateful for. They knew that they felt gratitude, which was enough for me, but it was very hard for me that they didn't understand what they were actually grateful for.
They were grateful for every breath they took. They were grateful for every delivery that came to their door. What do they call it? Touchless delivery. Yeah. Yep. Contactless. Contactless. So I'll say, which is also part of this for me, I had no idea what was happening in the real world.
So people were. Standing in line to go to the grocery store and they were standing six feet apart and they were lined up around the block in New York City. I never stood in line for groceries. I never went into an empty grocery store with three other people. I didn't know the pain of [00:21:00] not being on the front lines 'cause there was pain in that.
People knew there was something to be afraid of, but they were baking sourdough bread and doing puzzles and feeling connected to their families. 'cause everyone was home. But I wasn't, I wasn't home and I didn't feel connected to my family. my brother in Toronto
And he's a physician. I'll just put that out there. Made jokes about
quarantining. They would drink quarantining. Mm-hmm. They would get outside and they would get together with their neighbors and make quarantine. Yeah. And I was thinking, yeah, I wasn't outside ever, and I never had a quarantine.
[00:00:00] so a lot of my moral distress came from
knowing that people didn't know. yeah, if you were a New Yorker, then you heard the. Governor talk to the city every night. Mm-hmm. I think around the country, people listened to him, lie to everyone. Mm-hmm. See, that was the thing. People were like, oh, isn't he just wonderful?
If it weren't for Governor Cuomo, I don't know. I wouldn't know what I'm thinking he's lying to you. He's not telling you the truth. And I didn't wanna be that kid. Like it's bad enough. And if they're getting some comfort from a paternalistic voice who's got charts and other things, I don't know.
I never saw it, but that's nice. And it's important. It was as much healing as anything. It was as much healing as puzzles and sourdough bread and quarantining, but it wasn't true. And that was very hard for me. Well, and you used a [00:01:00] word connected a little bit ago when you were talking about people who were able to be home and were connecting with their families it was my reality
I spent 10, 12 hours a day in front of a screen doing telehealth visits and then. Bracketing that with meeting, after meeting for this community or that community, the other community that I was a part of about how do we keep the community safe and apart, but still connect virtually through things and all of these things.
And that went on for a lot longer than anybody expected that it would. And my gung-ho, you know, anything I need to do for as long as it takes really started to unravel. somewhere around the beginning of 2021, about three years later. So after everything had basically gone back to what now passes for normal, I was talking to a colleague of yours out westwho's a congregational rabbi.
He said, I think I probably buried more people who died [00:02:00] of the consequences of the pandemic than who died from COVID. talking about older congregants of his who were separated from family and who were dwindling away lonely. Really I think that piece of it really broke us, and I think for a lot of health professionals not being able to connect to everybody else because we had such a different reality.
whether it was because we were on the front lines in the hospital like you were, or because we had to be the mean, fun ruining voice of, no, you can't do that yet. Really isolated us a lot. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's true. I would add to that and say that a lot of people died not from COVI, but because of CVID.
Not loneliness and isolation, but they were ill and they couldn't go to hospital. So if you had a cancer diagnosis in March You had done [00:03:00] a certain amount of treatment, but there was more to go and you were afraid to go to the hospital. They told you to stay home. They told everyone to stay home and many of those patients started to trickle back
Our pandemic was longer, I think, than the Pittsburgh pandemic. So they started to trickle back shortly before I left Pittsburgh three years ago. They were at the end of their lives already. Yeah. And that was shocking. Like nobody tells you what that's gonna be like. Mm-hmm.
People who die in hospital because they're sick. Not because they were afraid to come to the hospital. Yeah. and people who didn't let that fear get in the way often then did die of COVID. I lost somebody who had just finally gotten her kidney mm-hmm.
In September of 2020 who caught COVID, after being on immunosuppressants for a month and didn't make it out. Right. A number of. [00:04:00] Older patients of mine, whether they were on dialysis or getting cancer treatment and continuing it and it wasn't their other disease that got them.
It was the COVID because they were continuing to get treatment. there was no winning, That's right. There was no win. Mm-hmm. people felt like there was a certain amount of. I wouldn't say they felt like I was lucky. Nobody felt like I was lucky, but there was something about being able to go out in the world and do something normal.
Mm-hmm. I got up at the same time every day. I walked to the train. I got on the train, I got off the train at work. I worked all day. I got back on the train. Like it had a sense of normalcy to it that other people's lives didn't have. And I felt like, I didn't even know, I didn't know how to use Zoom when I moved to Pittsburgh.
I didn't see that laugh. That's like everyone knew how to zoom, became like the way we talked to each other, except I didn't know how to use it when I moved here three years ago. Right. I think I had to walk you through it. You talked for a class of mine when you were [00:05:00] still in New York. That's true.
I had to explain the process. That's right. I was like, I'm gonna just talk and you're gonna just, I'm like, yeah. Like that's what you were like uhhuh. Exactly like that. so those were the practical things that wore me down. four empty trains every day in both directions.
The clapping, like, which I was grateful for, but was uncomfortable with. But also there were the patients who died without someone in the room with 'em. That was very hard. like I wrote a prayer and laminated it and I made, I don't know how many copies of it.
I made a stack of them and I gave them to all the nurses that I knew, which was all the nurses and the night nurses, the day nurses, the everyone. like sometimes the women who cleaned the floors, the environmental staff. I gave them these prayer cards. That were a way of acknowledging the loss [00:06:00] and saying, we see that you have died and we know that no one was here and we're sorry.
Yeah. I actually should have thought to take it out to show you. I have one. Somewhere. my colleagues and I really tried to find ways to help the staff feel helpful.
They didn't feel like they knew anything. Sure. And many of them felt very put upon. It was dangerous to clean rooms after someone died of COVID. It was dangerous to clean rooms after an RRT. And they had to go in and clean the rooms, and then they had to go home at night to their children and their families, and that was terrifying to them.
So we did a lot of work to try to help people just hold [00:07:00] on. Just hold on. It'll be okay. Just hold on. If you have, God, now's the time when you need to access that God. Mm-hmm. If you have gardens, you need to cut out pictures of flowers and stick 'em on your computer screen. whatever it is that helps you to trust that you're gonna make it through this you need to do.
We had,
like refrigerated trucks with bodies in them? Yeah, the morgue trucks. Yeah, morgue trucks. But when you have as many as we had we had a morgue too, I don't mean to laugh, but it was really quite a horrific thing. And the National Guard came in to help move bodies because we had to keep.
Shifting them. There was a lot of gory stuff that I don't talk about that you don't want on your podcast, I don't think. But there was everything from the most granular to the highest that I [00:08:00] held. Not 'cause because I asked to, not because I was trained to, but because I was there.
And I saw it and. The one thing I'm trained to do is hear with both ears, my regular ears like everyone else's, and my chaplain ears. Yeah. That hear the things that hear the story behind what they're saying. Mm-hmm. that's one of my favorite catchphrases by the way, is listening with both ears.
It's true. I can listen with both ears and in that time there are things still that I can't unhear. That, that I can't unsee. Yeah.
there's a text in which we talk about how people, there are people who have eyes, but they don't see. Mm-hmm. They have ears, but they don't hear, and they have hands, but they don't feel
It's one 15. Ears, but do not hear nose, but do not smell hands. But they do not feel feet, but do not walk. They do not make a peep from their throat. Yeah. And I mean, that's a text that people [00:09:00] say in, I don't know if you've ever been on a kha, but that's a text that we say when we're preparing a body.
But in the case of this, there are so many things that I saw and felt and smelled and heard
that have to stay with me. And yet you got back to doing chaplaincy work again. Yep. How did you do that? We have to have an MTA at the end, we can't end on that note. The answer is
our wounds heal. You know, we are wounded warriors.
there are things that I'm never gonna not hear when I hear a siren go by. It doesn't sound the same to me as it does to anyone else, but that doesn't mean that I haven't found ways to heal. When you ask how I think the answer to that is, I don't know. Which is a favorite answer of mine per the beginning of this talk.
Yeah. it seems to be popular. Yeah. [00:10:00] But also I think.
Things turned around. In the heat of this time, I had no idea whether anyone was gonna survive. I didn't know if we were gonna survive, it was possible that we were all going to die of this. I had colleagues who died. there was staff around the hospital who went home 'cause they were unwell and they never came back.
I mean, it was totally conceivable that we were gonna all die, so we didn't, and that counts for something. Yeah. We didn't die. We're still here, thank God. Yeah. You know, if we're going back to the piss off story, like we talk about it as a miracle. Like what miracle we were, you know, enslaved for 200 years.
Like, think of all of the. children that were supposedly killed and people that were born and died as slaves, but collectively we survived. Right. Collectively. And that's supposed to be the lesson. And y Yitz Greenberg talks about this is the lesson that this means that [00:11:00] people weren't meant to be in that condition.
People were meant to be free, that God cares if we're free. And it's the same. People weren't meant to be sick and miserable. No, were meant to get better. Were not meant to be. Abjectly sad. Right. We're meant to rejoice. That's right. And illness kills people, not God. Mm-hmm. Something I had to remind people a lot in that time and
the people who survived. Thank God. I guess that's a powerful lesson. if the U of three years ago had come to you now. For some chaplaincy counseling, what might you have said to yourself? Ooh, how would I have counseled myself? Yeah.
That is sometimes how I kick myself in the pants. If I'm not getting myself together, is like, if I were my doctor, what would I tell myself? So, That's a hard question to answer. I think. One thing I would say is. It's true. We might all die, but we also might [00:12:00] not all die. Mm-hmm.
And I think I also would say that someday we will have learned enough from this to be able to look back on it and say, this is something good that came of this, and it did. I mean, we learned very important things and so. Think about it, we learned about Zoom. You know, you say that in jest, but No, I don't.
I mean, I just laughed because it seems absurd, but it's totally true. you know, because of the lessons we learned in primary care and pandemic, I saw a. Non Jane patient, that's a person in their nineties. For those listeners who don't remember what non Jane is today on video, who would never have left their house to come see me and who six years ago I wouldn't have known how to conduct a visit with them.
But not only did I see them over video, but I. [00:13:00] Figured out very quickly what they needed and came to a solution. Right. And otherwise they would've been waiting until the plows were all fixed, which could be three or four weeks. So, and go know what would've what condition they would've been in, in three or four weeks.
Right? Yeah. I mean, We have to trust that there will be miracles. Yeah.I know there's a text about not leaning on the miracles, but Yes. I'm willing to do that right now.
And something else. I think that right now it's necessary. Mm-hmm. Because if we don't lean on the miracles, there's nothing to lean on. Yeah.
I knew what I was getting myself into when we started this conversation. Yeah. I mean, if I'm gonna walk away from this with one thing, it's that the three most important words that get us through the worst of times is, I don't know. And that's okay. And that can actually be an inspiration rather than a disappointment.
Yeah. It should never be a disappointment not to know. it's almost like a challenge. Okay. You don't know, but you will. Great. Alright , Cara, [00:14:00] this is long overdue and I'm really glad you agreed to do this conversation. Thank you. It was lovely. This was a very sensitive conversation and I appreciate it.
Thanks. You're welcome.
[00:00:00] The beginning of the exodus from Egypt was the moment when the Israelites cried out to God, and God took notice the beginning of an individual's exodus from their own narrow place as the moment that a human being acting, but Sedimental Kim in the image of God takes notice of their cry. I think Rabbi Cara did a beautiful job of teaching us that this is the essence of chaplaincy.
And I think I spend so much time with chaplains and the hope that some of their ability to take notice will rub off on me and my colleagues in medicine. I'm a primary care doctor, and even though Rabbi Carra pointed out that there are doctors who take care of livers and doctors who take care of hearts, I'm a doctor who takes care of people, whole people.
It's in the title of the podcast that I'm recording right this second. How can I take care of them if I can't take notice of their suffering? It isn't pleasant. The cultural meme of ugly crying didn't originate in the internet age. There are people doing it as far back as the Bible. AOV cries a great bitter cry when he [00:01:00] realizes that Yako has stolen his blessing.
The Egyptians, not the enslaved Israelites. They cried a great cry when the plague struck their firstborn. And in the Purim story, before Mordecai goes to Esther and wonders aloud if perhaps this is the time for which she was allowed to become a queen, like we talked about in the intro. He cries a great bitter cry, just like the one aef cried.
Why are some cries bitter and some not? Who knows? The same painful stimulus can feel completely different in different contexts, different frames of meaning with different beliefs, social supports or coping skills. On the other hand, people who have nothing in common, even the bitterest of enemies, are united and suffering by a common, tragic experience.
The job of the healthcare chaplain. And the lesson they have for every healthcare professional is to be present for that experience, not to fix it, not to take sides, not to know what comes next, just to be present. In that we may hear something of why one is bitter [00:02:00] and the other accepting, one angry and another serene.
And our presence may be just enough to make the bitter waters of those tears sweet. Notice how Rabbi Kara spoke of her own, emerging from the darkness of the pandemic. It's not that she has unheard those cries, whether the silent ones of the doctors facing the wall in her office or of the lonely dying patients in their isolation rooms surrounded by medical professionals looking like the bad guys in et.
It's that we're still here a possibility that KAA didn't take for granted in 2020. For clinicians, especially clinicians who are used to winning the battle with their chosen disease or organ that suddenly find themselves losing. It can be tempting to despair the way many of us did back then. The only thing they may think of to say is, there's nothing more we can do for you.
But there is, and what Rabbi Kara is trying to teach them to say instead, is I am here with you. It's good to be here together. Talk to [00:03:00] you soon.