Rabbi Mychal Springer, BCC, reflects on the approaching High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot through the lenses of: the ongoing crisis in Israel and Gaza since the terror attacks of October 7, 2023; her personal biography; and her career in chaplaincy.
Rabbi Mychal B. Springer is the manager of Clinical Pastoral Education at NY-Presbyterian Hospital. She founded the Center for Pastoral Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in Manhattan in 2009. Over a ten-year period she oversaw an intensive hospice chaplaincy training program in collaboration with Metropolitan Jewish Health System’s Hospice. She began her career as a hospital chaplain in New York City, and in the 1990s became the director of the Department of Pastoral Care and Education at Beth Israel Medical Center. Mychal was the first Conservative rabbi to be certified as an Educator by ACPE: The Standard for Spiritual Care & Education. Mychal served as The Rabbinical School at JTS’s associate dean and director of Field Education. Her publications include Sisters in Mourning: Daughters Reflecting on Care, Loss, and Meaning (Cascade Press, 2021) with Dr. Su Yon Pak and “Presence in a Time of Distancing: Spiritual Care in an Acute Care Setting” in Jewish End-of-Life Care in a Virtual Age: Our Traditions Reimagined, Friedman D, Levin D, Raphael SP ed. (Albion Andalus, 2021).
Mychal received her BA in Judaic Studies and Religious Studies from Yale College magna cum laude. She was ordained a Conservative rabbi and received her Master’s in Judaic Studies and Doctor of Divinity at JTS. Mychal is a certified Jewish chaplain in Neshama: Association of Jewish Chaplains.
In the interview, Rabbi Springer recalls her friend from childhood, Aaron Kushner, and how his tragic illness and death inspired his father, Rabbi Harold Kushner (who died in 2023) to write his best-selling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Here is Rabbi Ed Bernstein interviewing Rabbi Harold Kushner in 2013.
Rabbi Springer makes cameo appearances in two memoirs:
”Choosing My Religion: A Memoir of a Family Beyond Belief,” by Stephen Dubner
”The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions,” by Jonathan Rosen (Rabbi Springer’s husband).
Here are links to other resources mentioned by Rabbi Springer:
Palestine 1936 by Oren Kessler.
Dr. David Senesh interviewed on the Invisible Wound podcast.
Haverut: The Healing Arts led by Rachel Ettun.
The solemn prayer Un’tane Tokef that is recited on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur was the inspiration for Leonard Cohen’s “Who By Fire.”
Rabbi Ed Bernstein: As this episode of NeshamaCast was nearing publication, news broke of the murder of six Israelis held in captivity since October 7, 20023. Among them was the American-Israeli dual citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin of blessed memory. Many members of NAJC have connections to Hersh and his parents Rachel and Jon. At this heavy time we remember Hersh, Ori Danino and Eden Yerushalmi, Almog Sarusi, Alexander Lobanov, and Carmel Gad. May their memory be for a blessing, may the remaining hostages speedily return home and may this horrific war end. Now on to our program.
Shalom, and welcome to NeshamaCast, exploring Jewish spiritual care today, brought to you by Neshama Association of Jewish Chaplains. I'm your host, Rabbi Ed Bernstein.
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, the great 19th century leader of German orthodox Jewry, said that the Jewish calendar is the catechism of Jewish tradition. More than any specific doctrines, the soul of the Jewish people is shaped by how we mark time and create communal space in specific times. Rabbi Hirsch's concept of the Jewish way in marking time is felt profoundly across the Jewish community at the end of the summer and early fall. The month of Elul is the final month on the lunar-based Jewish calendar, and it begins this year on September 3rd, lasting until Rosh Hashanah, beginning this year on the night of October second. Jewish tradition over the ages, has developed Elul into a month-long on ramp to the Jewish New Year. During Elul, Jews begin the process of introspection that we engage in most intensely at the start of the New Year, in the 10 days from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur. For Rabbis, cantors, and other Jewish leaders who guide Jewish communities, the month of Elul adds an additional layer of stress because the High Holidays are the quintessential gathering of the tribe. Synagogues are at their fullest, and Jewish religious professionals worry about making a strong impression during one of the few times of the year they are likely to see many of the rank and file members at one time. As a rabbi who used to serve congregations, and who has served high holiday pulpits since my move into professional chaplaincy, I personally have lost a lot of sleep during Elul worrying about writing sermons for the High Holidays, and how to craft just the right messages to inspire my congregants.
Since many Rabbis share this experience, rabbinic organizations often sponsor sermon seminars in which scholars and acclaimed preachers offer guidance and sermon sparks to rabbinic colleagues. I've often attended such gatherings convened by the Rabbinical Assembly and the Jewish Theological Seminary, whose sermon seminars are geared towards Rabbis in Conservative Judaism.
In recent years there is one recurrent speaker whose presentations I always make sure to attend: a Rabbi who touches my soul with her blend of scholarship and wisdom of the heart, and that is today's guest, Rabbi Rabbi Mychal Springer. Rabbi Rabbi Mychal Springer is the manager of clinical pastoral education at New York Presbyterian Hospital.
Previously, Rabbi Mychal Springer, was the founding director of the Center for Pastoral education at the Jewish Theological Seminary, which she ran from 2009-2019. Prior to that she was associate dean and Director of Field Education of the Rabbinical School at JTS from where she was also ordained. Rabbi Mychal Springer was the first Conservative rabbi to become a certified educator in ACPE, the standard of spiritual care education. She is also a board certified chaplain in Neshamah, the Association of Jewish Chaplains. Rabbi Mychal Springer lives in Manhattan with her husband, Jonathan Rosen, a renowned author. Rabbi Rabbi Mychal Springer—welcome to NeshamahCast! It is an incredible honor to have you with us.
Rabbi Mychal Springer: Thank you so much. Thank you for that lovely introduction. I'm moved and so thrilled to be here.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein: You are among the founders of the craft of Jewish professional chaplaincy, or at least, if not a founder, certainly early second generation, and we will dive into that. But I as background, I'd like to ask you to share a bit of the spiritual and religious backstory of Rabbi Rabbi Mychal Springer. What was your spiritual life like growing up? And what was the path you followed in your youth and young adulthood that led you to Jewish spiritual leadership?
Rabbi Mychal Springer: Well, maybe I'll begin with my name. So, my name, Mychal, was a gift from my parents who had not quite settled into the reality that they were going to live in this country, so they didn't quite anticipate that nobody would be able to pronounce my name here. And living with a name that clearly belonged elsewhere was a part of my identity as the daughter of somebody who was born in Tel Aviv. My mom and my father, who was an ardent Zionist. So, they were, they both grew up in orthodox homes, but they joined a Reform temple in Boston Temple, Israel which was a wonderful home in many ways but at a certain point it became clear to them that we were not learning Hebrew, my siblings, and I. So, they pulled us out of public school and sent us to Solomon Schechter.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein: That’s a Jewish Day school, under the auspices of the Conservative movement.
Rabbi Mychal Springer: Yes, that that identity for me as somebody for whom Hebrew was essential and Judaism was complex and multifaceted stayed with me. I loved Solomon Schechter. I loved the learning that I did there and I lived with connections to the Reform and the Conservative worlds for many years and thought that my professional life would take place in a Jewish day school, so I applied to Rabbinical school, and I thought that would be my path. But when I was in Rabbinical school, I had a crisis of faith and suddenly a path that had seemed so right to me for so long became very hard and I thought maybe I need to leave. That was after four years of Rabbinical school. My faith was really in a shambles and I began seeking out mentors and wise people and anybody who could really talk to me. I was living with depression and my faith didn't seem like the kind of faith that was going to be helpful to anybody if I were to serve them as a rabbi and one of the people I spoke to Dr. Sam Klagsbrun, who was the chair of pastoral psychiatry at JTS, and a personal friend and a mentor, and my Professor Sam sent me to do clinical pastoral education at Memorial Slane Kettering and it was that experience that really reshaped my understanding of who I wanted to be as a rabbi, and eventually who I could be as a rabbi, as a chaplain, and as a chaplain educator.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein: Dr. Klagsbrun was a teacher of mine as well in pastoral counselling at JTS. And he just died within the past year or so, and he was an important supporter of NAJC as NAJC got on the got off the ground.
Another prominent figure in the Jewish world who died within the last year or so was the late great Rabbi Harold Kushner of blessed memory. And you, you know you mentioned your experience at Solomon Schechter in Boston, and believe you were a classmate of Aaron Kushner, the son of Rabbi Kushner, who had a tragic genetic illness and died as a teenager, and that prompted Rabbi Kushner to write When Bad Things Happen to Good People. I'm curious. What are your memories of Aaron? And how did that experience as a youngster affect your development and later pursuits?
Rabbi Mychal Springer: Sure. Aaron was actually a little bit older than me, and he was a grade ahead of me. He died in the fall of his 8thgrade year, which was my 7th grade year and I forget lots and lots of things, but I will never forget the sound of a door slamming, which somehow I understood to be the sign that Aaron had died. We had known that he was sick for a long time and his death affected everybody who knew him very profoundly. As a kid who'd grown up with him, we knew he was sick. It was. It was only when he was really nearing the end of his life, that we came to understand that he wasn't going to be sick forever, that he couldn't live with progeria for very long and I wasn't a close friend of Aaron's but I was in a circle with friends of his who were very close to him and it was an early experience for me, both of grieving and of trying to comfort my friends who were grieving, who were who were closer to him in his class and it had a profound effect on me because any simple answer that anyone would want to give about why it is that people suffer clearly made no sense and when Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote his book, I remember going back to Schechter to hear him read from the book. And there was something comforting about his father, a rabbi trying to understand something and speak in a language that would ultimately comfort so many people. I think what stays with me is how alive Aaron was, how impish and age appropriate he was, even as he was also full of wisdom that he had to come too much too early to cope with the reality of his life.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein: Thank you for sharing that and bringing a bit of him into the present time so many years later. So, let's fast forward into your chaplaincy career. In 2009, you became the founding director of the Center for Pastoral education at JTS. And this was, after many years of being a hospital chaplain, a CPE teacher, and at a certain point you came back to the seminary or you. You were at the seminary and you founded this program. Could you describe the need at the time to create such a center, particularly in a Jewish space, and how you implemented your vision to develop the program.
Rabbi Mychal Springer: Well, there's a lot to learn to become a rabbi. The curriculum is chalk a block with subject matter that needs to be mastered in order for someone to go out into the world and say that we know enough to be called Rabbi. So, when I started working at JTS in 2002, there wasn't much room in the curriculum to add in anything for pastoral education. There was a little bit of a rotation, 40 hours,
Rabi Ed Bernstein: That what I did in the nineties.
Rabbi Mychal Springer: So, I loved that rotation. I would often host it at the hospitals that I was working at. But the students were really clear that they needed more and it was my good fortune that when Arnie Eisen became chancellor, he went on a tour around the country to talk to rabbis and communities about what was working well in the rabbinate, and what could be improved. And across the board people talked about rabbis needing more pastoral training. The rabbis themselves talked about it, the congregants talked about it, and there was this pressing mandate which was fantastic because I was just at that point where I was, realizing that if I that I couldn’t stay at JTS unless I could do something that was more clearly focused on pastoral education. I was the director of field education and associate Dean. I loved it, but I had a very clear calling, and the timing was so beautiful that when Arnie Eisen came back, he and I were able to talk. He fully supported our creating a center for pastoral education. The other, the other big factor here was the Charles Revson Foundation, which was eager to fund us, at a moment in 2009, when nobody was being funded for anything, they came forward and enabled that to happen, and UJA Federation funded us, and we had other funders. So, a lot of people who cared about this came together to make the creation of the Center possible. But it was really the people, the Jews who said: We need this. Rabbis who were being ordained, said that they were scared to go out into the pulpit world because they didn't feel that they knew how to be with people. I mean, you sort of start with Aaron Kushner. People are sick, people are dying, people are in crisis. We have to know enough to know enough that we can meet those moments respectively. Well. Not to be so scared of ourselves and of others, and that all lined up in our being able to do something that really changed how Conservative rabbis function and the Center for Pastoral Education wasn't just for Conservative rabbis. We had people from all different Jewish backgrounds and all different faith backgrounds. And so, the center has been an incubator for just beautiful learning and care for a long time. So, what I loved about creating the center at JTS is that the pastoral approaches were very deeply researched and evidence-based, and the Jewish side of it was very deeply traditional and grounded, and the two came together with this really wonderful balance of both being multi faith and having a strong Jewish lineage.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein: Let's shift now to the approaching High Holidays and the particularly fraught time in which we find ourselves right now on the secular calendar. The 1st anniversary of the October 7th attacks will fall right in between Rosh, Hashanah, and Yom Kippur. Of course, the on the Jewish calendar, the anniversary will always be on Shemini Atzeret, 3 weeks after Rosh Hashanah. During this ominous time, with war still raging, as we're recording today, it's the eve of Tisha BA'AV in the middle of August. We don't know what's going to happen by the time this episode releases. But it's a very tense time, to say the least. Given this backdrop, how are you getting yourself ready for the High Holidays this fall?
Rabbi Mychal Springer Let me go back for a little bit. When Hamas inflicted its massacre on Shemini Atzeret, more commonly known as October Seven. It brought me back to the period of the War of Independence. I know it brought everybody back to different places. But I mentioned before that my mother was born in the Yishuv in Palestine. Her birth certificate has her as a Palestinian citizen. She was born in Tel Aviv in 1930 and in my 1946, my mother turned and she joined the Haganah. You had to be 16 to join and it was her life story that at the moment when one would most want to be able to join the Haganah, she was the right age to be able to do it and it completely shaped the rest of her life. So, when I was growing up, I lived with a very palpable sense of the fragility of the existence of the state of Israel. My mother loved to buy the records that celebrated Yom Atzmaut, the day of Independence every year. So, my siblings and I would dance to these records every year that were the songs of Israel. I remember the 25th Anniversary album was a big one in our home and the fear that Israel might not survive was palpable to me in a way that I never talked to any of my peers about this, because it was just part of who I was in baked into the fabric.
But when the Hamas massacre happened, I realized that that part was still in me to such a degree that I could recognize very early on that. This was the same drama. It had never actually gone away, it had changed and evolved. But the issues that were in front of us in 1948 and in 1973 and in 1967 they were in front of us in the same way. And we had to find a way to think about that. So, one of the things that I did this year is I read an amazing book by Orin Kessler, called Palestine 1936, the Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict. He just won the Roar prize for nonfiction and Palestine 1936, tells the story of what was happening in the Yishuv in Palestine. Really, starting from the beginning of the mandate, the British mandate period, until the establishment of the State of Israel. Well, it doesn't go all the way through, but it goes to through 1939, and it provided such aa nuanced and important look at the relationship between the Arabs in Palestine, the Jews in the yishuv of and the British. And the way that the British both supported a Jewish homeland in the land and were also trying to find a way to appease the Arab populations. And different key people would lean towards more towards one or towards the other. But I think that those of us who felt like, oh, we, we kind of managed this like Israel, exists, and the forces inside of the Arab world that are bent on annihilating us that they recognize that we're here now. Actually. No. There are plenty of good Arab people who would like to live in peace with the Jews who are in the land and there are too many people in power who are determined to wipe us out of the land. So, when I was a child the words were: We’ll push them into the sea. And then it got cleverer, and from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. But the thought is has always been the same, and the people who are chanting that really do have it in their mind that the Jews shouldn't be there. And the great spiritual challenge is to keep our hearts open to people who want to partner with us in having there be peace in the region, and enough home for everybody while being realistic about the people who spew hate. And here we are on the verge of Tisha Baav with Iran, saying that it plans to launch a major offensive, and I don't know what the next few days will bring. I pray that it will be okay. But we have to take those threats seriously.
Rabbi Bernstein: We are all carrying the weight of history, and you especially given your roots in Israel. As the High Holidays approach, what are you doing to get yourself spiritually, spiritually ready for this ominous time of year, which has, you know. the all the liturgy around, repairing ourselves, doing teshuvah, repentance, and all of that. How are you approaching the spirit of the holiday with the backdrop of everything that's going on?
Rabby Mychal Springer: The yamim noraim, the trembling holidays are really about balancing hope and fear and we need to have enough fear to look honestly at ourselves and change what needs to be changed? If we didn't have any fear, we would just carry on the way we are. And what’s the problem? And if we had too much fear, we become immobilized, and we can't do anything at all. So, the yamim noraim invite us to be real about the fear, the recognition that we are mortal, that we have one life and we need to think seriously and hard about what we do with it. So, there are no easy answers or cheap solutions and we cannot give in to hate. And we can't hide.
I think these holidays call on us to come forward with real integrity about who we are and how we want to be in the world. Which means not pretending about the risks that we live with. But challenging ourselves to embody the values that we hold dearest to be the best people and the best Jews that we know how to be. While we try to make good decisions and hope that our leaders will do the same.
The liturgy for Shemini Atzeret Is this the prayer of Geshem which is the prayer of rain. It's when the seasons change and rain and life are intertwined, especially in the land of Israel, where, if you don't have rain, you don't have a harvests, so there is no life without rain. So the prayer for rain that it gets recited in its long version on Shemini Atzeret as we switch over to adding a little line, mashiv haruach umorid hagashem, who causes the winds to blow and the rain to fall and that line is inserted into the second blessing of the Amidah, the standing prayer that we say 3 times a day and it the second prayer, the second blessing mechayye metim, who gives life to the dead and as we move towards Shemini Atzeret, the grief for everyone who's died since last Shemini Atzeret is so intense. The people who were killed on Shemini Atzeret, the soldiers who've died since then, the people of Gaza, who've died, so many people who’ve died in this horrible conflict. And the prayer gives me a lot of hope. The death is not the end, I think, going back to when Aaron Kushner died, and I was talking to God that night. Saying, Well, where, where is he? Where's he gone to? Are you taking care of him? Just the kind of basic questions that we might ask when somebody dies.
The prayer says to us that God is in charge of all life, even the life that comes after death. And for me, as a chaplain, having experiences with lots of people who've died. I do have a core comfort that this form of life is only one form of life. But I can only hold that if I also make room for grief in its complexity, in its horrors, when it's horrible! And this year death has been horrible. So, as we approach the holidays, we need to know that that grief is going to come back in a powerful form as we come towards Rosh Hashanah, and we remember what place we were in last Rosh Hashanah, whether we felt that the world was a safe place, or we feared that the world was not a safe place. Whether we felt that Shemini Atzeret bore out our deepest fears or shook us to our core because it didn't even capture what we thought was possible. I think that's a lot of the work that's going to be happening over the holidays this year.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein: A lot of us rabbis, as well as lay people, approach with trepidation the prayer on Roshan, on Yom Kippur, Unetane Tokef. We read in one section all of the different calamities that could happen. Who shall live? Who shall die? Who by fire? Who by water? And it's bone chilling to read that. And then after that we read a response, repentance, prayer, and righteousness avert the severity of the decree, and in Rabbinical school and in sermons, seminars over the years, we often talk about how the 1st part is the stuff that's out of our control. But there are certain things that are within our control, Tshuva, Tefilah, Tsadaka, repentance, prayer, and righteousness, and there will always be things out of our control. But we can muster the forces that are within our control to get on with our day. And that is true, and I may refer to that.
And yet. as a result of October 7th, it just seems so overwhelming. And I'm wondering how you're processing that particular piece of liturgy this year.
Rabbi Mychal Springer: I think a lot about the Jews or alive in the late thirties and the forties, annihilated, and what it means right now to have people chanting that there needs to be a finishing of the final solution, as we heard in Washington recently. So I I think this this question of what's in our control and what isn't in our control and what is what changes through our teshuvah, through our repentance and through our acts of righteousness. And through our prayers. And what are the things that don't change by that alone, that need clear-sighted activism to say that when Iran says that they're going to commit genocide and wipe out the Jewish people that we have to be listening to that, and, God willing, they will not throw the worst attack at us in the next few days, and we'll be having a conversation like this in mid-September. But we've been listening to voices from Iran say this for decades now actually. I was on the campus of Columbia when Ahmadinejad spoke. There must have been around 2004j, 2005, somewhere in the mid 200s and he was clear that there's no place for a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel. And we can't listen to this hatred and hope that it will go away. I don't know what makes it go away. It’s a terrible, a terrible reality to have to face. And when I do my own taking stock for me, it's important that I push myself to say what I believe to be true and not to be afraid to say what I believe to be true. What’s happening right now with Iran's proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah and the Hoothies and the ring that they've created around Israel. This is a noose that is as intense as the noose around Israel in the days of 1948 that could easily have led, not to the creation of the State of Israel. And my own individual life is one life in a chain. And I pray that there will be a chain that comes after me that goes on for a very long time.
But what I get from Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and Unetane Tokef in particular, is that I will die. I don't know when I will die. How I will die I will die. And the reckoning that I need to do is to say that I've lived in the best way that I know how. That I've used my voice and my power, and my convictions, and my love to be open-hearted. And to try to meet the challenges of this moment in the best way that I know how, and these are great challenges. I don't want to be part of perpetuating hate. And I don't want to be part of ignoring hate that is coming to us, that is existentially threatening.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein: Very powerful. What other pieces of the high holiday liturgy are striking you this this year in ways they might not have in the past?
Rabbi Mychal Springer: I was born on sukkot on the 19th of Tishre I've always loved everything related to Succot. I always feel a little sad that the masses check out after Yom Kippur, and it becomes a much smaller crowd on Sukkot. So I decided last year that I would go to shul every day on Sukkot, on Yom Tov to begin Sukkot, and then on chol hamoed Sukkot I went to shul every day. I don't usually go to actual synagogue every day. and I brought my lulavin, my etrog, and it was so beautiful. was so beautiful. and I ate in the Sukkah every day. and II felt a profound sense of home. We talked about the catechism of the holidays of Rabbi Samuel Hirsh. If let my sense of home and groundedness in this holiday, with the roof that lets t eh rain in. That’s the Jewish sense of home. Home is not that we have bricks and mortar, home is because God protects us. And I loved being in shul so much, and on chol hamoed Sukkot in particular that I put in my calendar for the following year, I blocked out, to be sure that I could go to shul on those days, and not to have work commitments so that I could really be in shul on those days, and recently I've started to see that those calendar appointments are there from last year that, like little messages that I sent myself that this is where I want to be.
And then, of course, the massacre of Shemini Atzeret happened and in some ways it changed everything. but fundamentally it changed nothing. It has only made me want to be in shul on Sukkot even more. Because we need to be together and we need to be in a roof where the rain comes through, so we don't have any illusions about not being impacted by the world around us. We are impacted by the world around us, and we have to open our hearts to the divine. I don't know any other way to do it.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein: I I've been so like perhaps many rabbis I've been so wrapped up in thinking about Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I haven't even gotten to Sukkot yet, and yet it is so integral to the whole holiday season. and this year. more than ever. How does the theme of Zichronot, remembering, resonates with you this year. I I'm thinking, back to teachings. I've learned from a teacher, I believe, who taught both of us the late Rabbi Neil Gilman and he talked about how it's actually not about remembering. When we talk about God, who remembers us, we're actually appealing to God to selectively forget things, to selectively forget or at least to look over our less good deeds and only focus on the good things. And remember those to lift those up. I'm just kind of riffing with you now. I'm wondering how the concept of Zichronot is working for you this year when we have these raw memories of what has unfolded for us in the last year.
Rabbi Mychal Springer: Well, Rabbi Neil Gilman was a beloved teacher of mine, and the father of my dear friends, Abby Gilman and Debbie Gilman. He’s a big reason why I went to JTS. So when I think about Zichronot, I think about trauma. everybody who isn't Israel loves Israel holds a lot of trauma and it's very hard to access those memories in a linear way. They just, they live in our bodies in very powerful and unruly ways. So we need to be mindful when we're inviting people to go into a place of memory that we want to be very gentle and allow people a lot of autonomy and agency in determining what kind of memory is good for them and what kind of memory is not? There was a Nova exhibit here in New York. And people who were at the Nova festival were speaking about what happened that day, and I did not feel like I could go to that exhibit. I understand that for a lot of people who went it was very moving and powerful.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein: it was. I went to see it and it was very powerful.
Rabbi Mychal Springer: Yeah, and I think it's really important.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein: And I'll never be able to unsee the things that I saw. And it wasn't graphic. I mean, they edited out a lot of the most graphic stuff, but it was still there was no mistaking what was going on. It was very chilling.
Rabbi Mychal Springer: Yeah. So I think it's really important that people have the ability to say I I can listen to that, I can see that, and I can't listen to that, and I can't see that because memory is a really precious part of ourselves, and we have to respect the way that the brain works in relation to horror.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein: I was going through my high holiday files, and I gave a sermon in 2021 as the world was emerging from the dark days of the Covid lockdown, and I found that, lo and behold! I had quoted you from a sermon seminar that you led that year on resilience and post-traumatic growth, and how we can come out of the pandemic with a sense of resilience. And you know you can never give the same sermon twice. You're a different person every year, even if the same Parsha, the same Torah portion or the same holiday comes up, and people are different. And I I'm not in a headspace to think about post traumatic growth now, because we're in the midst of trauma. I mean, it's still going on. There are still hostages being held as we're speaking. How do I hold out hope? How can we, as rabbis? Help! Our congregants have a sense of hope that will lead to that place where we can again think about post traumatic growth, what are themes in the liturgy that might help us along that way.
Rabbi SPRINIGER: Well, one of my very important teachers in post-traumatic growth is David Senesh. who is the nephew of Hannah Senesh and David's a psychologist who is a trauma specialist. He himself was a prisoner of war in in Egypt, in 1973 and he drew on that experience as he became interested in resilience. And he is very dear to me, and his teachings are very dear to me and all of my friends and family in Israel, who I love so much are devoting themselves to being part of post-traumatic growth. Recognizing that the wounds are very intense. And I have particular admiration for the people I know, who make themselves available for journeying with people in these places of despair. And not knowing what will come next and nevertheless continuing to live every day and we’re still here.
So what one of these people I have, I have many our cousins, the beautiful work that they do, and friends and former students, and one colleague and friend of mine is Raquel Atun, and she just sent me a video of her organization Chaverut, which is Jewish arts and healing organization in Jerusalem. They had a conference a couple of weeks ago. And the video showed everybody singing and just watching the faces of these people who were singing and in their singing they were saying. We are still here we are still here and that is resilience.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein: So as we near the conclusion of our time together, even though I wish we could just geek out on these texts for hours, because I feel like I can do that. But as we near our conclusion, is there anything else you would like to add regarding the challenging times that we're in the High Holidays, or anything else on your mind relating to spiritual care for our people at this moment.
Rabbi Mychal Springer: Yeah I have people I love whose the world a little differently from how I do. And thinking about the things that I've said today they would challenge me or put the emphasis differently. And I just want to say that I have room for that, too, and that's part of our demonstrating our open heartedness is in having room at the table for people from all different perspectives with the hope that we can create a possibility of actual peace and coexistence. The times are really dark and it can be hard, especially with threat so real, so enormous. But we are blessed to be a people with many perspectives. And I hope that we will always have room for one another because that's a great strength of ours even in duress.
Rabbi Mychal Springer, you are a chaplain's chaplain. I am so honored that you came on NeshamaCast to have this conversation with me. It was real, it was emotional. it was authentic. Thank you for reaching down into yourself and sharing all that and putting it all on the table for our listeners, and I pray that you will be blessed with courage and strength to continue your sacred work.
Rabi Mycal Springer: Thank you so much for having me. It's really been sacred journey with you, and the questions that you've asked, and the Neshama that you've brought into the conversation. Thank you.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein: NeshamaCast is a production of NAJC, the National Association of Jewish Chaplains.
Thank you to our guest, Rabbi Mychal Springer. Check the show notes for more information about her work. Please consider making a contribution to NAJC and NeshamaCast and all of the vital work that NAJC does to promote Jewish spiritual care.
Click on the link in the show notes to donate. Thank you to Rabbi Katja Vehlow for technical support and production assistance. Additional thank you to Allison Attenborough, the NAJC executive director and Rabbi Jules Caplain and the NAJC social media committee. Transcripts for this episode and other episodes of Neshamacast are available at Neshamacast.simplecast.com and are usually posted one week after the episode first aired.
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May we all work together to heal our world.