What is Jewish Healing?

Meir Sendor

From Sh'ma: a journal of Jewish Responsibility October 3, 1997
Reprinted with Permission

Healing remains one of the genuine mysteries of our daily lives. Real healing from physical or emotional illness is a multidimensional process, and new medical fields such as psychoneuroendoimmunology indicate a growing modern awareness of the intricate interrelationship between mind and body in illness and health. The Jewish approach to healing is traditionally one that recognizes this mystery in all its complexity.

On the one hand, healing is a divine preserve, one of the areas of life in which we can really feel the hand of God at work. Prophets such a Elijah and Elisha used healing to demonstrate God's power. On the other hand, healing is a mitzvah, and the efforts of health care professionals to help us deal with illness is considered to be a realm of high human endeavor. This is not a contradiction, but a genuine and inspiring partnership between God and us. While you can find extreme fideist positions in the Jewish theology of healing, such as R. Aha (in the tractate Berakhot 60a), or Nahmanides (in his Torah Commentary Leviticus 26:11), for whom anything less than complete reliance on God for healing through prayer alone is a grudging compromise, by far the overwhelming consensus of Jewish thought endorses a more proactive position that sees divine and human action as fully integrated.

The normative Jewish view is expressed in Ben Sira, ch. 38: ``From God, the physician gets wisdom... God brings forth medicines from the earth... By them, the physician soothes pain and the pharmacist makes a remedy.'' God's role in healing is intimately immanent, and we are encouraged to make therapeutic use of all the resources with which He has endowed creation.

• Feeling God's Pain
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