The chaplain’s tale of bedside prayers and a final song

When Rabbi Eryn London was working as a hospital chaplain as part of a multifaith team in New York, she met a non-Jewish patient who asked her to sing something. What sprung to mind was Psalm 23, The Lord is my Shepherd, which is often sung at seudah shlishit, the third Shabbat meal.

While she explained she could sing it only in Hebrew, he said he knew the psalm in English and told her to go ahead. When she finished, “he told me that day I would sing it at his deathbed”.

Nearly a year later the man succumbed to his illness. “It happened to be a day that I was in the hospital and I got called to his bed. I did sing the song. About half an hour later he died,” she said.

Helping someone in their final moments may be one of the most delicate tasks for a chaplain but it is something they have to be prepared for.

Rabbi London, who now lives in the UK, has drawn on her experiences to co-author a handbook that will be useful to anyone who regularly practises the mitzvah of bikkur cholim, visiting the sick.

She and co- author Rabbi Chava Evans found that many of the prayers they used in their work in the wards were not contained in a single volume.

So they have brought out a compilation of prayers and rituals that includes Mishaberech Lacholim, the blessing for healing, the Vidui, the confessionary prayer, and ten of the most “go-to” psalms. As well as Hebrew, there is a translation and transliteration into English letters.

“We wanted to make it as user-friendly as possible because not everyone who is working with Jewish patients can read Hebrew or feels fluent enough,” she said.

They also wrote some prayers of their own; she contributed one about pain and suffering and another on organ donation. Rabbi Evans also produced a version of Kaddish that could be said without a minyan, Rabbi London said, “because many times people want to say a prayer in the hospital after someone dies”.

Raised in a Modern Orthodox family in New Jersey, she is a graduate of the pioneering Yeshivat Maharat in New York, which ordains Orthodox women, and was the first alumna to use the title “rabbi” in the UK — rather than “rabba” or “maharat”.

At university, she actually majored in theatre studies alongside psychology and Jewish studies before coming to London to take a masters degree in applied drama at Goldsmiths.

She moved to Israel to study at the Pardes Institute, while working as a therapist running activities for residents at a nursing home. Then she enrolled at Midreshet Lindenbaum, whose five-year advanced Torah programme is the equivalent of an ordination course for women in all but name.

eryn london

Delicate tasks: Rabbi Eryn London (Photo: Getty Images)

She said: “I told them in my interview I wanted to do pastoral care, teach people and lead community.

"The rabbi on the interview panel said, ‘So you want to become a rabbi?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I just didn’t think I could say that out loud.’”

After three years at Lindenbaum, she returned to the US to complete her studies at Maharat. Her course included clinical pastoral education, since even if graduates don’t specialise in chaplaincy, bikkur cholim is likely to be a pastoral duty for most community rabbis.

After ordination, she did two years as a chaplain at the New York Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Centre.

She would tend to patients of all faiths, not just her own. If, on her rounds, a patient wanted communion, she would notify one of the Christian chaplains, as they would her when the patient wanted a rabbi.

Very often she would have to make up a prayer on the spot, for which she would use Mishaberech Lacholim as a basis.

Should visitors find themselves being asked to do the same, she advises not to fret about the formula.

The shortest prayer in the Torah, she points out, was a mere five words in Hebrew, four in English —when Moses asks God to cure his leprosy-stricken sister Miriam: “Please God, heal her.”

Of her hospital experiences, the one she particularly recalls, is “working with the nurses who planned a birthday for a three-year-old whose mother was terminally ill”.

Nurses are overworked at the best of times, but they went “above and beyond” to organise the occasion. “Being part of a team who cared so deeply for the people they were caring for is amazing,” she said.

Marriage brought her to London in 2019, where she knew the religious politics would make it hard to break into traditional chaplaincy, as the Orthodox establishment does not recognise women rabbis. But then Covid and lockdown came.

Chaplain

Newly published: a Jewish chaplain's handbook

Now 38, and the mother of a young daughter, she eventually secured a role running a training programme for lay hospital visitors in the Reform and Liberal movements. It’s now called the Honeycomb Project and has since expanded, including publishing Jewish resources on wellbeing for festivals.

She wrote a six-week course for it, each session beginning with reflection on a Jewish text. The most difficult area for a visitor is establishing boundaries, she said.

Sometimes a person needs to be able to say “No, I can’t phone you every day, or acknowledge that they cannot help but can signpost the patient to another organisation that might.

Of her favourite pieces of rabbinic wisdom, she said, “I love the idea that visiting the sick takes away one 60th of the illness or pain. So often when we visit someone they might not want us there, we don’t know what we are doing, we leave and we feel we haven’t done anything.

“And what the text is saying is you did something. Something happened, whether or not you feel it, whether or not you notice it, something happened in that visit and that’s the important thing.”

Kol Halev: A Jewish Chaplain’s Handbook, by Rabbi M Chava Evans and Rabbi Eryn London, is published by Lioness Books and Media, $24.99

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