Living Our Best - 5785

Rabbi Neil Comess-Daniels

As some of you might know, since becoming emeritus, I spend many hours of my week working with a hospice agency that hired me as a “Spiritual Counselor.” I have the gift of being an equal partner in a team for each patient, including a nurse, a social worker, and a certified personal caregiver. I also meet people I would never have encountered in the “Jewish professional” part of my career.

Hospice and palliative care is a humbling endeavor ok. For some of my patients, I am a surrogate for their families who live far away and,even for those whose families are closer but, due to a variety of personalissues, don’t visit very much, if at all. For others, I’m a person who comes with no agenda but to listen. And for others, I’m a bit of accompaniment to a challenging part of life’s path.

I began this work with some confidence borne out of my more than 40 years of experience as Beth Shir Shalom’s rabbi, which certainly included visiting congregants when they were ill at home or in the hospital. I should not have been so self-assured. Hospice and palliative care are different from anything I’ve previously done. First of all, I don’t know these people. Of course, I come to know them over time (if they can interact), but we didn’t have the benefit of a relationship before they fell ill and ended up on my list of patients. I often get to know one or more of their family members as well. I quickly learned that my role was to fit into their lives and complex circumstances in a way that would be most helpful to them. At times, this means hearing that they aren’t interested in a visit from a non-denominational spiritual counselor. I admit, at first, I took those rejections personally. I’m not proud of that reaction; I’ve developed a more sophisticated response over time. I realized I was seeing people through the lens of my job->description, my background, and, honestly, my ego, not through their lens as complex human beings who are dealing with various physical and emotional discomforts and who didn’t want someone they didn’t know, coming into their space and leaping instantaneously into a conversation about their spiritual status. My chaplaincy teacher, Blake Arnall, told me there is a particular problem for clergy that is even more intense among rabbis. “Rabbis love to hear themselves talk!” he said. He was right. Do you think it’s true that if you get two Jews in a room, you have at least three opinions? You should try a room full of rabbis! Actually, it only takes one.

My role as a Hospice/Palliative Spiritual Counselor is not to give answers. My role is to be an involved, sympathetic, empathetic listener. Becoming that listener is still a work in progress. I am markedly better than I was three years ago. I learned from my coworkers and, mostnotably, from my patients. As the Talmud teaches in the name of RabbisHaninah and Yehuda haNasi: “Much Torah have I studied from my teachers, and I have learned more from my colleagues than from them, and I have learned more from my students.” My patients are my teachers. They are showing me how to be more empathetic.

Every patient is unique. As the writer Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in her book “Braiding Sweetgrass,” “Perhaps there is no such thing as rain, only raindrops, each with its own story.” One of my patients is a Jewish woman who recently turned 101. The family history isn’t clear,but somehow, she evaded the Concentration and Extermination Campsand escaped Hungary. I

I consider her to be a Holocaust survivor, nonetheless. We visit on Thursdays, but we pretend it’s Shabbat. I sing all the Shabbat melodies I can think of, especially ones with an Eastern European background or sound. When she says anything, she speaks in a language all her own. She articulates seemingly unrelated syllables to the listener, but I’ve noticed her phrases usually rhyme, have a cadence, and often have a faint melody accompanying them. “Puta puta shu/Duna dunta fiu”. She is quieter than she was a year ago, frequently beginning our sessions just staring at me or perhaps at nothing at all. Her son and daughter are usually there. During one of my most recent visits, she started to rock back and forth to the rhythm of the music, and then she began to clap her hands – very much to the beat. She smiled and laughed. When this happens, we all grab all the celebration we can get!

​A patient recently assigned to me is half the age of my Holocaust survivor and is suffering primarily from complications brought on by just one chemotherapy treatment. From that treatment, she became extremely ill extremely quickly. She almost died. She has decided that she will not receive further chemotherapy and will go it alone, eating healthfully and “listening” to her own body. She is a physician, and sheis determined to be self-reliant for the rest of her life. She knows that her life could end at any moment. She is ready.

​I’m younger than 101 and older than the patient I just mentioned. I can’t help but be aware of my mortality as I go through the day. The Talmud tells a story about a particular rabbi that hits me where I work and live: Rabbi Nechuniah Ben Hakanah used to say a short prayer when entering and leaving the house of study. “They asked him: What is the purpose of this prayer? He told them: When I enter, I pray that I should not be the cause of any problems, and when I leave, I give thanks for my portion (Berachot 28b).” I didn’t know this little piece of rabbinic wisdom before I began working as a Spiritual Counselor. It is a beautifuldescription of what goes on inside me as I walk into a patient’s home or the facility where they live. Now that Rabbi Nechuniah’s story is a part of me, I try to keep his simple and important philosophy in my pocket all day. I try to find only positive things to say to my patients, listening for subtle invitations from them to tell me more and to be grateful for the circumstances of my own life. That latter part of my inner work should not occur in comparison to the life-conditions of my patients. Gratitude isn’t really pure if it comes at the expense of another’s difficulties.

​This bit of Talmud brings me to words of wisdom from my late father-in-law, Lenny Comess, something I unequivocally see as worthy of Talmudic inclusion. He used to say, “Getting old isn’t for sissies.” I haven’t met any sissies in my work. In fact, I’m almost constantly overwhelmed by the courage, strength, and hope I encounter.

​What could possibly be the source of this courage? My patientscouldn’t all be the bravest of heroes, capable of coming to their own rescue. These are ordinary folk, like those individual raindrops. Each of them has their own story, a unique journey heading, like it will for all of us-other-raindrops, towards the inevitability of hitting the ground. What will be their fate? Will they be directly absorbed into the earth? Or will they first fall onto a street or sidewalk? Will they form a puddle with other drops to become a drinking fountain for some birds? In the end, it’s all the same. In the end, despite our uniqueness, aren’t we all the same?

Rabbi Israel Salanter, who began the Musar Movement, which is the study and practice of Jewish moralistic and ethical teachings, said,“No sickness is more dangerous than losing hope.” How can my patients, these regular raindrops, who are so near that final segment of their fall, still live with hope? Enjoy a bite of food? Be visibly uplifted when visited by a friend or family member or even by me playing music or praying a prayer in their tradition that might lend them strength? How do they choose to struggle with as much vigor and optimism as their bodies and souls can muster?

What’s so wonderful about what I am privileged to witness in my patients is that it’s not rare or random. It’s very common everyday heroism; its “regularness” astonishes; it is beautiful and inspiring. Why am I, in my relative health, not more appreciative of every grain of every moment in which I breathe, walk, speak, interact with others, receive love, and do my best to give love? Do I need to reach the very conclusion of my life to have enough perspective and clarity to feel the priceless value of existing for a while as a conscious human? I hope not,and I am deeply grateful to my patients who model the best of this for me without intending to model at all.

John Donne wrote, “…Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind…” All of my patients’ deaths touch me because their lives touch me. Even more so, I realize there are other people out there whose lives and deaths I will never know, and I am involved with them as well. Isn’t this how we should all feel all the time?

It may seem like I’m asking for the impossible, but I am not. President Biden, in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly, quoted Nelson Mandela, who said, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” About a year and a half ago, my 101-year-old patient becameinfected with Covid. No one expected her to survive—until she did. I have watched everyone around one of my patients buckle down for the worst – until they got better. One patient was extremely weak and lethargic. I would come in to sing and pray with her, and she would peek out from beneath the covers (she covered up on the warmest of hot San Fernando Valley days). None of us on her team had any hope for her. The last time I saw her was for me to say goodbye, not because she was dying, but because she was better. When I arrived at her room, she wasn’t in her bed. I got an awful feeling in the pit of my stomach that something happened, and she had a turn for the worse. I looked around the facility and found her sitting at the dining table, feeding herself some cake! She asked for a second piece. We all thought this was impossibleuntil it was done. She wasn’t done. There was still cake in the world, and she was going to eat it until she couldn’t.

John Donne’s reminder of the inextricable link between our livesends with his famous, ominous warning to stop asking, “Who died?”when we hear a bell tolling. “It tolls for thee,” he tells us.

My patients die. We all will. Before the inevitable happens, let us live our best — thinking of and doing for others, closely known or in the great tapestry of humanity. Let us give more than we take and be grateful for what we receive. Above all, let us feel the heartbeats of others, and let us live with hope and resolve. And when we reach theend, may our unintelligible syllables be rhythmical and rhyme. May our last exhale create an everlasting song of love, caring, and empathyamong us, both our beloveds and those we don’t know, as we float and occasionally soar, in and out, in and out with everything that sharesbreath of life