Rabbi Joe Ozarowski reflects on his career in the rabbinate, Jewish spiritual care, and the role of Star Trek in chaplaincy.
About our guest:
Rabbi Dr. Joseph S. Ozarowski, BCC
Rabbi Joe has enjoyed a fulfilling career as a pulpit rabbi, educator, prolific author and board-certified chaplain for more than 40 years. He has worked full-time at JCFS Chicago since 2005 and presently serves as Rabbinic Counselor and Jewish Chaplaincy Services Chaplain.
Rabbi Ozararowski serves as President of Neshama: The Association of Jewish Chaplains. A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Rabbi Joe completed his undergraduate (honors) work at Loyola University Chicago, was ordained with Semicha at Skokie’s Hebrew Theological College, and received a Doctorate from Lancaster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania.
Rabbi Joe’s first book, To Walk in God’s Ways: Jewish Pastoral Perspectives on Illness and Bereavement is considered a standard in the field of Judaism and Pastoral Care.
About our host:
Rabbi Edward Bernstein, PBCC, is the producer and host of NeshamaCast. He serves as Chaplain at Boca Raton Regional Hospital of Baptist Health South Florida. He is a member of the Board of Neshama: Association of Jewish Chaplains. Prior to his chaplain career, he served as a pulpit rabbi in congregations in New Rochelle, NY; Beachwood, OH; and Boynton Beach, FL. He is also the host and producer of My Teacher Podcast: A Celebration of the People Who Shape Our Lives.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein 0:00
Shalom and welcome to Neshama cast, exploring Jewish spiritual care Today brought to you by the Shama association of Jewish chaplains. I'm your host, Rabbi Ed Bernstein. Welcome to the launch of Neshama cast. Neshama is the association of Jewish chaplains or NAJC is the professional organization of Jewish chaplains worldwide. In this podcast we will meet Jewish chaplains providing spiritual care in a variety of settings. Through their stories and collective insight. We will learn what they do and why their work in spiritual care is important, both to the Jewish community and to our community at large.
On this inaugural episode of NeshamaCast, we have a most fitting first guest: Rabbi Joe Ozarowski. He serves as the president of NAJC. In his day job, he serves as rabbinic counselor and chaplain for Jewish Children and Family Services of Chicago. He is an esteemed scholar with publications that are considered standards in Jewish spiritual care. Most important he is a husband, father and grandfather and I might add an all-around mensch. Rabbi Joe, welcome to NeshamaCast.
Rabbi Joe Ozarowski1:36
Thanks. That's a very undeserved, but appreciated introduction. Thank you very much. I it it's a joy being here. And it's a joy to be able to launch this podcast for NAJC with you. And thank you for all the work you've put into it.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein1:50
It's really my pleasure. So Rabbi Joe, to set the stage for a discussion of Jewish spiritual care. I'm interested in learning a bit of your origin story, and the path that led you to become both a rabbi and the chaplain. So just let's start at the beginning. You grew up in St. Louis, right? What was your childhood like?
Rabbi Joe Ozarowski2:15
I'm a child of Holocaust survivors who both ended up in St. Louis during and after the Second World War, Yiddish speakers from Poland originally, and I guess, religiously, I grew up what we would call nonobservant Orthodox, meaning the shul my parents wouldn't go to had to be an orthodox Israel. There was no Reform or Conservative in Poland before the war. So we were not particularly praying people or believing people, or synagogue goers, but they did send me to an orthodox day school. So I have the background of somebody who's been in a school for pretty much my entire life. And yes, there was some cognitive dissonance over it and what I was getting in school didn't always match what I was getting at home, but it was a happy growing up, you know. We had friends, I went to JCC summer camps that means that essentially, in terms of family traditions, I grew up with the St. Louis Cardinals and the Holocaust. That was my childhood on many ways.
I became observant as a teenager and chose to come to yeshiva in Chicago for my sophomore year of high school. Following that I spent two years studying at an Israeli yeshiva, Shaalvim then came back to Chicago to go to rabbinical school, the Hebrew Theological College also known as the Skokie Yeshiva. That's right, I did my rabbinical work. I have an orthodox smicha. At the same time, I was doing my undergrad work at a good Jesuit school, and yes, go Ramblers, that’s the team.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein 3:34
Loyola University. They were in the Final Four.
Rabbi Ozarowski.
I still follow them a little bit. Then the Cardinals are still, you know, part of my life.
And I was involved in Jewish youth work for many years. And then I went to the pulpit for several decades, not in Chicago, other places Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Berkeley, California, 13 years in Long Island. And during that time, I finished my doctorate at Lancaster Theological Seminary, which is a good Protestant Divinity School. And part of the fun in my life is, you know, figuring out which skills and experiences from my yeshiva years, from my Jesuit undergrad years and from my Protestant graduate school, how do I sort that out to help the people with whom I am working and that's still a lot of fun to me.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein4:18
Yeah, and I'd like to unpack that a little bit but to spend another moment on your Jewish education and rabbinical training. Take us for a moment into Skokie a Shiva. I believe you've studied with a great scholar, Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits of blessed memory. Can you just say a word about him and his legacy and what you take from him going forward in your life.
Rabbi Joe Ozarowski4:43
There were some interesting people isolated within HTC and Dr. Berkovits was one of them. I spent a good deal of time with him. He was our philosophy professor and I also spent a lot of private time with him. I like being with a first-class theologian and I would often hang out with him after school and I even helped him pack his seforim when he made aliyah in 1975 I think was the year it was. He was a master teacher, but a bit of an elitist. You know, he didn't suffer for people who weren't willing to do the work and think things through with him. But someone who was a systematic theologian, which we don't have a lot of those, certainly not in the Orthodox community. His understanding that the rabbis were the heirs to the prophets. And part of his view was that the goal of halacha, Jewish law, is to raise us higher and develop an ethical and moral society. And in fact, the last course he taught at HTC was an analysis of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s Halachic Man. So hearing Dr. Berkovitz critique Rabbi Soloveichik, it was really a tough class. And I like him it had not been translated to English yet. But I remember I asked him at one point, you know, is the difference between you and Rabbi Soloveichik that you see halacha as raised us to heavenly life. And Rabbi Soloveitchik says that imposing halacha from above is an ideal system. And he thought about it for a minute and said, Yeah, I think you're right. I think that's a good analysis. He certainly missed I think his voice is certainly missed.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein6:05
Yeah. So you have this rich, rabbinic education from Skokie. And then you also, as you noted, have studied in a Jesuit institution and a Protestant institution. So, what was the process like in your mind integrating learning from those different environments?
Rabbi Joe Ozarowski6:24
Well, I'm a curious person by nature and a lifelong learner and also a people person. So at least that's how I see myself and all those aspects and skills fed very nicely into my eventual migration into Jewish chaplaincy, the synagogue rabbinate, it was an exciting endeavor. And I really enjoyed the communities in which we live. But the pastoral part, the pastoral part of the organ, the teaching part of my work, where the favorite parts of my work, which is what led me to the doctorate that I did at Lancaster Theological Seminary, you know, it was a lot of good professional training, a lot of good thought work. And then the dissertation eventually became my first book, To Walk in God's Ways, Jewish Pastoral Perspectives on Illness and Bereavement. I finished the degree in 92. The hardcover came out in 95. The softcover came out in 2004. I understand the hardcover is out of print. But you can find the softcover on Amazon actually put my name in there. It's there.
It's funny, I did the work before I got to the chaplaincy. But it's funny that I anticipated a lot of what I'm doing today, when I did that research, and when I did the publishing and the writing of it, what's lovely when I think about it, you know, I didn't know where I'd be at this stage in the game 50 years ago. You know, if you asked me, where, when I was Bar Mitzvah, when I first started as a rabbi, were you going to be 50 years (from now), and I would think nothing like this. You know, an activist and a part of the rap that that hadn't even been invented yet. But I got to do some insane thing. And how lucky is that? I feel very blessed that God said, I'm gonna go somewhere else good chance to live out some of his vision. I feel very, very grateful that I got to do some of that.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein7:59
Wonderful. You have an essay in a book edited by Rabbi Haim Herring Keeping Faith in Rabbis: A Community Conversation on Rabbinical Education in which you talk about a curriculum for Jewish spiritual care for rabbis going forward that you envision. You wrote this about a decade ago in reflecting on your own education. I gather when you were in Skokie, yeshiva, you did not have the equivalent of Clinical Pastoral Education. So I'm wondering if you could talk about how you came to have formal Chaplain training and what that was like for you as you developed those skills.
Rabbi Joe Ozarowski8:37
Though the Jewish community, the rabbinate, did not embrace CPE until much later in the game. CPE has been around for a long time, Anton Boisen came up with the 20s and 30s I believe, the first Jewish CPE supervisors were Fred Hollander who is no longer alive and Jeffrey Sipar, who is alive and they were active in the 60s and 70s.
And the NAJC wasn't founded until the late 80s, early 90s. So there were other things going around at the time. But the idea of pastoral training being an integral part of rabbinic work, I always sense that as even as an undergrad, even when I was a yeshiva bucher, when I was going to Loyola, I thought that we need to know about these things even before the field or its training had been invented or accepted in the Jewish community. And I gradually migrated over to this over a period of years, even before I became a chaplain and I was playing with chaplaincy. So even before I took CPE in my last years in Long Island, before we moved back to Chicago, I was actually doing some chaplaincy work, and I think I was okay at it.
But I knew I was missing something. Finally, several years after I came back to Chicago, I took a detour I went into, I guess, rabbinic administration. And then I realized that I was missing the teaching in the pastoring. So, when I went to work for JCFS, Jewish Child and Family Services, I said, you know, something, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do it right and it's time for CPE. And I began taking it, you know, with my job, and I became board certified in 2012. The writing actually came before what I wrote in Haim Herring’s book was that I think that every rabbinic student should have a unit of CPE. Because even if you're not going into the field, the training, the gifts, the things you can get out of it are just immeasurable. They will help you no matter what you do in the rabbinical world, in the world of clergy.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein10:28
How does CPE differ from typical rabbinic education? What are the different goals you have in those different settings?
Rabbi Joe Ozarowski10:37
That's a great question. So no matter which flavor of Judaism you identify with, whether it's the type of Orthodox yeshiva as I went to, or whether it's a non-orthodox rabbinical school, essentially, it's, we would call it an academic training. This means you're studying sacred texts, and you have to master text, it's Talmud, it's halacha. It's philosophy, it's Bible, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, the Hebrew language.
CPE, Anton Boisen's original concept was that one should study the human personality, the human spirit, the human soul, if you wish, the way one would study sacred texts. So that's why it's clinical work. The work is not didactic, there are didactic pieces to it, but it's really mostly not classroom learning. After the first week or two of orientation, they throw you out, you visit patients, and you write them up in verbatims. And you share them with your cohort. And you look deep inside yourself. You look deep inside your own feelings, you do group process, you're part of a multidisciplinary team. I didn't do any of this at yeshiva, none at all. Yeshiva was basically it was Torah study, what I really worked very hard at especially in my final two units of CPE was integrating the head and the heart, the text and the relationship. To me, that's what we strive for. And sometimes you do better at it than others. But that's the goal. We try to strive for that the text, the sacred texts of our people, inform the work that we do and inform ourselves personally. But we translate those into the relationships that we build the presence that we offer, the support that we give to people who are suffering and who are grieving who are dealing with life's difficulties and stuff and trauma.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein12:11
In your writing and in Herring’s book, I think you say something to the effect that in yeshiva, we learn texts from the master teachers and in CPE, and chaplaincy, the people we serve are the texts and the teachers. That's correct.
Rabbi Joe Ozarowski12:27
I got that idea from a CPE supervisor who wasn't mine. It was Paul Stankey of blessed memory who died recently, who basically said that, in other words, they're the teachers and we're the students. From my perspective, what we're doing is flipping the rebbe-student relationship on its head. But that's the point. We're learning how to navigate life from the people that we are serving and supporting. And so we listen and support comes from receiving whatever they are sharing with us. And frankly, if we do it well, we will grow from that as well. And part of the secret of that is having good supervision, which is another way that let's say chaplains differ from itinerant congregational rabbis or people in other parts of the rabbinic world, is that, you know, most rabbis are on their own and a part of rabbinic groups or associations or denominational setting. But having clinical supervision is something that was new to me when I began experimenting with chaplaincy, and it was revelation that supervision means something very different. It's not somebody on high telling you do this, or don't do that once in a while, you have that administratively, but mostly it's somebody helping you sort through your own experiences and feelings and helping you be the best Chaplain rabbi, a person that you can possibly be.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein13:39
Can you tell me about your first CPE teacher?
Rabbi Joe Ozarowski13:42
I had a couple of them over the years, Susan Gullickson, here in Chicago Lutheran general. And then I spent a couple of units with Baba Sheehan, who I consider my rebbe. And CB, is a Catholic nun retired now, she ran a program called the urban CB Consortium, which was one of the few nonhospital CPE programs around. And I was able to do my clinical work here at JCFS, as well as the hospital system that I was working for, at the time, the Northshore System. I have retired from that last year, but I spent 15 years there, on the side of my fulltime work ACFS. And she was again a master of the trade just really, really good, forcing us to stretch ourselves and think about our things. And she learns from us as well as any good CP educator would do. So I taught her a few things about Judaism and where we share and where we differ. And she taught me about how we can deal with ourselves and our inner soul as well as the souls that we're dealing, because we share that as humanity as part of humanity.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein 14:41
Beautiful. We've talked a bit about your scholarship already, and I want to take a bit more of a dive into that. You are a prolific writer, and in addition to your book, you've had many articles and essays published. Do you have an overarching goal when you write is there particular interest of yours within the realm of chaplaincy scholarship and Jewish spiritual care?
Rabbi Joe Ozarowski15:08
An interesting question. I have a number of goals when I write different things, it depends what I'm writing. But I think my attempt is to join the sacred scholarship and the wisdom of our sages with the needs of real people who live in the real world. So for example, when I write for AJC, and you're a member, you're a member of our board. And so you've seen, I always put a text and there's always to read text, sometimes I borrow from pop culture as well. And then I integrate them and try to take a message that will speak to the hearts of the people who were supposed to be reading this, and I always keep them in mind, I try to look at it from the readers perspective, it's been it's understandable to me as a reader, that is probably understandable the people that I do it as well. So that's really my overarching goal, to try to meld those together in this type of cogent message that is going to actually help people. I think about why did I get in the real buy business in the first place a long time ago. It's used to help people and I get to do it. And I feel very blessed because of that.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein16:10
Yeah, one thing that struck me and your book To Walk in God's Ways is your discussion of incorporating spontaneous prayer into pastoral visits. I could relate to that from my own personal, rabbinic and pastoral experience. My own training, similar to yours, was very text focused. And in my early rabbinate, if someone was sick, I would pull out the appropriate text from Jewish liturgy to pray for healing. It wasn't until I started taking CPE that I encountered spontaneous prayer. So, I'm wondering if you could talk about your use of this practice as a tool and how you use it, say with either less observant Jewish people or perhaps non-Jewish people, and perhaps how you've incorporated spontaneous prayer into more traditional Jewish clients or patients.
Rabbi Joe Ozarowski17:04
So let's talk about scholarship first, then how I actually use it. You know, there are a number of sugiyot in the Gemara that talk about being the mevakesh rachamim, to ask for God's mercy in Nedarin 39 to 40. It is a long sugya, a long section dealing with bikkur cholim, visiting the sick. So the question then becomes what did the rabbis mean by being the mevakesh rachamamim, asking for God's mercy. When we ask most literate Jews What's the prayer for the sick? I told them, misheberach, the God who blessed our ancestors. There's a beautiful Debbie Friedman song on it. That's what they'll tell you it is.
But the best scholarship we know suggest that the earliest recorded misheberach was in the center of the Maharal, which was 13th century. Maybe he didn't write it, he got it from the 12th century. Clearly, it doesn't go back much further than that. Keeping in mind that the sections of the Talmud are fifth century, give or take 100 years here or there. So if the Mishna hadn't been written for, for the better part of a millennium, then what were they talking about? We've been talking about spontaneous prayer. It has to be there was a tradition of spontaneous prayer that we've lost them early. We got into fixed liturgy, we got away from spontaneous prayer. And you know, who picked it up? The Protestants. And that's where I got the first idea from, spontaneous prayer. I wrote a story in my first book about it, seeing how wonderful this was for my Protestant colleagues. I thought I would try it myself. This was back in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, you know, a bunch of years ago. And I was with my one of my congregants in the hospital, I said, we'd like to say a prayer with you at the bedside. And he said, Oh, Rabbi, why would you want to do that? And I thought, oh, okay, I guess I don't. It took me a while to develop those skills. After the book, and I published this in a publication for what used to be called the National Center for Jewish Healing. It's still out there on the internet, where electronic Rabbi Soloveichik gave an shiur that I actually heard it was the last one of the last public lectures he gave. He later published it in his sefer called Shiur leZechera Avi Mori
Rabbi Ed Bernstein19:03
A lesson in memory of my father, my teacher.
Rabbi Joe Ozarowski19:06
Rabbi Soloveitchick, he suggests there are two forms of prayer. One he calls Steela, fixed prayer expire, and the other tza’aka, crying out, which he defined as unfixed prayer. In other words, unsettled prayer, and basically fixed periods, what's in the book, unfixed prayers, whatever comes from your heart, there's no fixed formula. It's whatever you need to say to God at that particular moment, I'd say that this is a halakhic source we're talking about, but it fits right into the theology of it.
And that's the basis of prayer that as I see it, that we do with the patient. So in terms of how we actually do it, what I do is use prayer as in many ways, a summary of the visit by reflecting back to the patient or the client, what took place and what did I hear what were the feelings that I heard? Is it pain? Is it fear? Is it suffering? Is it joy? Is it hope, what are they and lift them back up to God and that's part of what I do past counseling my office. That's the difference between me and a social worker or a therapist. In other words, they don't give blessings or prayer. I do. Chaplains do. We all do. We that's how we do it. And in terms of the formula, it all depends on where they're coming from. If they are people who are relating to six liturgy, I might include the Nisha Vera or parts of the Misheberach in there. If they don't relate to it, I'll let it go. Or I may do a hybrid of that. It all depends on what I'm receiving from the client or the patient.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein20:29
Speaking of scholarship, I believe you have a certain level of bekiyut, broad broad knowledge in Star Trek lore. And I'm wondering if you could share examples of the nexus of Star Trek and chaplaincy.
Rabbi Joe Ozarowski20:43
This is one of my favorite Chaplain stories. It's also the funniest deathbed experience I've ever had. I did 15 years of hospice work in my work at ACFS. I've had a lot of deathbed scenes, and as congregational rabbi, I had them as well. So I was at Skokie hospital. And I was called to, I was on call. It was the night, irregular hours. But the pager went off. Somebody wanted the Sacrament of the Sick. I was told they were dying. So of course, I'm not Catholic. I can't do Sacraments according to their rules and my rules, but I can arrange it.
So they're dying. So, I went to the room. Every Chaplain does an assessment of some sort. When you go into the rooms, what's going on? What are we hearing, and the patient was on the bed wearing a breathing mask. There were other people around. But for someone who was dying, he was awfully gregarious talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. And what were they talking about? They were talking about Star Trek. And I realized that listening to the conversation, these are not just Trekkies. These are not just the people who go to the conventions. These are the people who organize the convention. And he's saying when I get to heaven, I'm going to organize sky con 17.
Now, you know when the story took place. All right. I'm a Trekkie, too. All right. I've seen all the series I've seen everyone in the TV shows more than once. I've seen all the movies. So I have some bekiyut, I have some knowledge of trivia. I don't have Vulcan ears or a Starfleet uniform, but I know quite a bit about it. So I said to the patient, I said as my way of entree conversation, oh, are you planning on going to Silvercore? Now, for those of you who are not Trekkies, I need to give the Rashi, the explanation what is silvercore? It's our Trek Universe. The Klingons are one of the alien races. They're the warrior race. So and they play a big role in all the various Star Trek series. So still, the core is the Klingon heaven. It's where the Klingon warriors go when they die in battle. They thought it was really amusing that this guy with a yarmulke knew what still the core was.
And that started a lovely conversation of all things trek for about close to an hour actually. It was great with wonderful conversations back and forth and back and forth. And finally came time to do what I was sent there for which to arrange Sacrament of the Sick, and I asked him about it, and then I decided to throw another one I said Would you also like me to do with you the Klingon death ritual? Okay, for those of you not preppies. What is the Klingon death ritual you're wondering. When a Klingon warrior dies, another Klingon warrior grasps their head really tightly, and lets out a blood curdling scream, to let the Warriors and stove accord know that a Klingon warrior is on their way. They busted out laughing, they thought it was hilarious that this guy with a yarmulke not only knew the Klingon death roar, was prepared to do it. And the patient says no, no, no, no, no, no. Can you get me a sci fi priest, a sci fi priest? I can get your priest, the Sci Fi part I can do with you. We'll call this the more sci fi here. So we spent another 15 minutes, it was great, and I blessed him in three different Star Trek languages. Vulcan blessing, everybody knows “Live long and prosper” with the priestly you know hand signal, but also in Klingon the blessing is happlah which is the closest Hebrew word is hazlacha which it means success. And in Romulan just “Jolin true,” which is roughly equivalent to shalom, hello, goodbye, and blessings.
Then I went to get the priest. I haven't gotten to this part of the story yet. So I circled back about an hour later and I got to see the priest. He did not look like a sci fi priest, like your typical elderly priest, the head white here and small wire rimmed glasses. But I did get to meet the patient's wife who was not there the first time and she thanked me so much for arranging the sacrament for him that she obviously got. But then she said, he's told me to tell you, she says to me, that the time he spent talking with you about Trek was more meaningful than the Sacrament of the Sick.
Wow, I walked away from this encounter with such a smile on my face. This has got to be the funniest deathbed scene I've ever had. But I also learned a couple of things from it. Number one, that all the time I spent watching Trek was people Torah, it was not wasted time I should have spent studying Talmud, it prepared me for this particular encounter. So Number two, what is spiritual care all about, what is chaplaincy all about? It's about connection, essentially. And there are many ways to connect. You know, sometimes we connect in Jewish tradition, in ritual spirituality, culture peoplehood. But sometimes we connect through Hollywood-based mythology. And that's a valid connection as well.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein25:19
That's a great story. I want to turn now to your work at JCFS. JCFS and its counterparts around North America have been cornerstones of organized Jewish life in North America for over 100 years yet, there are many people who don't know what they are, what does JC fs do and what role does it play in the Chicagoland community?
Rabbi Joe Ozarowski25:46
So JCFs used to stand for Jewish child and family services, they rebranded it essentially, it's probably the only one but it's the major Federation, affiliated Jewish social service agency in the Chicago area and their agencies like it in most other organized Jewish communities, Jewish Family Service type agencies, it's a huge agency. It's got about a $30 million budget for 500 employees. They are in the schools, they've had fostering programs, there's all sorts of counseling and interventions they do for children, and just many, many different things.
The part that I work with, I'm based in what's called the Jewish Community Services Department, we do the programming within the Jewish community. So, I'm very closely tied to the team that does addiction and recovery support, adoption and fertility support, very deeply involved with the bereavement programs. Here, we have a very robust synagogue partnership program, we have many shuls that are contract with us, for us to provide services to them. We embed people within the shuls and I do a bunch of rabbi-related things for them. I'll do trainings on teaching, some writing. But most of my time is spent running the Jewish community chaplaincy program that I co-created, I don't want to take more credit than I'm entitled to. But I did co-create it and I get to run it now, which is just a wonderful thing. And we have a team of myself and four other chaplains and a coordinator who is not a chaplain, and we meet with people one on one to deal with whatever they'd like to talk about spiritual support, spiritual care, we do programming in senior facilities, we are a resource both within the agency as well as outside the agency just in the last seven days. And I'm not saying this to boast but to give an idea of what we do. I did a training for the clinical staff and the teenage clinical staff and the adult clinical staff here at our site, we have a half a dozen sites. And in the same week, I dealt with two hospitals in the area that want Jewish support for their Jewish patients, whether it's helping them hire a chaplain or providing training for their CPE residents and their clinical staff. We talked about all those things. So, we are available to the broader community to support our people and people who are in need.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein27:54
So how does chaplaincy in a Jewish community differ from rabbinic leadership in a synagogue community since you've done both?
Rabbi Joe Ozarowski28:04
A really good question, first of all, chaplaincy as a subset of clergy is relatively recent. And a lot of people don't understand what it is. In other words, what's a chaplain? Is it Charlie Chaplin, our adult chaplains, Christian chaplains pray with the dead. And the answer is Charlie Chaplin was a gifted actor and comic but he wasn't the chaplain. Most chaplains are Christian, because most Americans are Christian, but there’s NAJC and I'm honored to serve as president. We have 500 Members, we have that as far as praying with the dead. We do that a little bit, but it's a fraction of what we do. We do much more when we set up the program. And that was in 2016. It's hardly within seven years now. We have to spend a lot of time doing this dog and pony show marketing chaplaincy? So I spoke in a lot of places. We also did videos. I mean, you could still see them on our website. I did a couple of these one or two minute videos. What is spiritual care? What is spirituality? What is chaplaincy? And I'll define a theory.
I'll give you the elevator speech right now because I think some of our listeners may not be chaplains. And they'll want to know people, who are chaplains know exactly what I'm going to say. They probably said it themselves. Many times, spirituality is essentially dealing with the bigger issues of life, the huge questions of suffering, loss, hope, purpose, meaning: Why is this happening to me? What is my place in everything? And in both the personal sense as well as in the clinical sense as research on this? It's the question of being part of something larger than we are. So as Jewish chaplains, we are able to connect with Jewish tradition, Jewish culture, Jewish law, Jewish philosophy. Pick your access points. All of those are valid access points.
How do we differ from synagogue clergy? So chaplaincy is a rather recent development here. I think the major differences are that synagogue rabbis are not always trained in the skills that we learned in CPE, although that's starting to change. Part of what I wrote in that chapter in Haim Hearing’s book was that it's a welcome development that allows you to use those skills in the congregation. But even so the setup is different. When you're working for a hospital, or a Jewish social service agency, or a prison or the military or some other pastoral framework, you're working within the framework, you're not working for a large group of congregants who pay your salary and sign your contract, you're working within the framework. So in some sense, it's easier, you don't have 500 bosses. But in some sense, it's harder, the framework might even be a Jewish one. Or if it's Jewish, it might not be your particular denominational setting. And you have to be willing to be flexible to operate within that broad setting, and relate to a large variety of people. So you may not end up being the posek, the ruler of Jewish life, that's where you're coming from, and you know, a traditional setting, but you get to reach people on a level that many congregational rabbis don't. Sometimes, a rabbi specializes in pastoral counseling, if they're trained to it, that's a wonderful thing. Many don't, many prefer not to or just aren't able to, we get to. Another major difference is that congregational rabbis get tospend a lifetime, or at least the part of a lifetime, however long they're serving in a congregation.
When you're in a hospital, it's kind of on the fly, you may not see them again. But the 10 minutes or hour that you spend with them can often have a dramatic effect on their lives. So there's a quantitative and a qualitative difference. But essentially, you're dealing with their emotions, their souls at a time when they are extremely vulnerable. And chaplains get to help people at a time of vulnerability. And part of that we have to look at our own vulnerability in order to help support somebody else's vulnerability. And so there are a number of differences. But like I said, using Torah to help people may be the atza hashave that may be the common denominator there. And that's why we still see ourselves as part of the Rabbinate, at least those of us who are rabbis, not all chaplains aren't, some are cantors. Some come from a non-clergy perspective, but we share the Jewish tradition, and we share the abilities and desires to use Torah and the spiritual tools of our tradition to make a difference in people's lives at these really little moments.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein32:11
In addition to your professional leadership as chaplain and Rabbi, You have been a leader for many years of Neshamah, the association of Jewish chaplains, which is producing this podcast, what does NAJC do and why is it important to have an organization of Jewish chaplains and to put it another way, what is Jewish about Jewish chaplaincy?
Rabbi Joe Ozarowski 32:38
Lovely question. So I've always believed even before I got active, and certainly when I got active in the professional field of Jewish chaplaincy, and the organizational field, which is NAJC that the Torah has something to say about these life, issues of suffering and purpose, and meaning and connection and community, the clinical sources of spirituality and I guess I started as a congregational rabbi, you know, knowing some of these things when I was an undergrad at Loyola, I thought about these questions in a much more elementary style.
And I found NAJC to be really the best place to not only express these in a professional way, but to connect with other people who have similar Clinical Pastoral Education Training, as well as doing the same kind of work. So NAJC is a place for chaplains who are Jewish, and many of our chaplains do not work in Jewish facilities, they are serving in non-Jewish places, some don't even serve Jews. Or theirNeshama, which is our name, is Jewish and they want to be informed by Judaism. And clearly, as we say, in the public, kal vachomer how much more so for those Jewish chaplains who are serving Jews, and who are serving Jews in Jewish facilities, let's say three different venues, of course, that there needs to be a place where we can talk to each other, learn from each other, share best practices for each from each other, and have the chavership and frankly, the chavership or the collegiality has always been my favorite part of NAJC.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein34:07
What is NAJC is relationship to other organizations, what we call the cognate organizations like Catholics and Protestants and Muslims. Can you talk about sort of the constellation of chaplaincy writ large and how NAJC fits into that?
Rabbi Joe Ozarowski 34:24
The chaplaincy is a growing field I think the pandemic got us out there in many, many ways where people often had no place else to turn but the chaplains who are accessible and available because there was often wasn't anything else that could be done in the world of chaplaincy. We are part of what are called the strategic partners. I think we use the word, they use the word cognate. But the term that they like these knows strategic partners, there are five groups that are connected with each other. We're not the same group but we have a common table at which we set standards and share ethics and a lot of other friends. They are the APC the Associate Professional Chaplains and ACC which is the Catholics Chaiplansgroup, the Canadian group CACS and the ACP, which is not a membership group, it is the group of educators and supervisors who run the CPE training program. So, we share standards with each other share information with each other. We do a lot of other collaborative things. We sit at the same table on a regular basis. And that's part of how we promote the field of professional chaplaincy.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein35:22
Rabbi Joe, we're recording this interview on the cusp of the new year 5784 on the Jewish calendar. There's a lot of pain in the world right now from all of the things that you would expect to cause communal distress, natural disasters, violence, political instability, and the ongoing effects of the COVID pandemic. What can you say as a rabbi and chaplain to bring hope to our broader community in the new year?
Rabbi Joe Ozarowski 35:53
So let me give it to you in the form of a dvar Torah. That's also a basis for clinical work. There are three terms that we often use for forgiveness, I'm going to start individually and then maybe we'll broaden it to the world. Chaplains are not politicians. We're not doing the type of negotiation, navigation, we're going to political world but I think a lot of what we do on the individual world can and should be broadened because the idea of reconciliation and healing is something the world needs.
There are three terms that we often use in our liturgy and in our practice. And then on Yom Kippur, they're very much liturgy: slichah, neilah and kapparah and they often are used for forgiveness or atonement. They're often used interchangeably. And then on Yom Kippur, of course, you know, if you're at slach lanu, mchal lanu, kapper lanu. And it's very much a part of the Vidui, the professional service across the board, we asked for those three things. But they each being three different aspects. And I think there's some really good clinical things we can derive from those three approaches. And I'll try to tease them out for you.
Slicha, I would define as earned forgiveness. And I think those of us who've studied some of this know that Maimonides has all sorts of formulae for how you earn forgiveness, you have to articulate what you did wrong, you have to apologize, you have to resolve to do better, you have to change the behavior and being a security, where you chant, you've changed the behavior and in some ways that resembles what's called an therapeutical CBT. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is very similar to it. So that's earned forgiveness, according to Maimonides.
Then there's mechilah, which is also translated as forgiveness, but it's a different type of forgiveness, I would call it unearned forgiveness. It's not something you have to do to get it's a choice that you get to make to forgive someone else. The closest clinical equivalent is letting go. In other words, it's not somebody who asks you or earns it or deserves it. It's a choice you get to make to let go of what's been troubling you from somebody else. And this is what God does for us as well. If we follow you know, Yom Kippur, we've asked God forgive us, we believe that God forgives us and we ask God to forgive us and let go of things as well. And that's true of how we interact with each other also.
And then there's a third level, and that is kapparah. Most people think of kapparah as Kippur, as atonement. And there's the famous, you know, homiletic drash, the devices you put in hyphens at one meant, so reconciliation, which is lovely, I've used it myself, but I'll give you another approach to it. In the Torah, the word kippur has another meaning. The kapporet was an ark covering that was used in the ancient mishkan, the tabernacle that served their ancestors in the desert. So kippur has the connotation of covering. Another clinical approach to this is that sometimes what's gone wrong, we can't work through fully and we can't get rid of fully, but we can do some partial work on it by covering it up putting it in a drawer, or put it up on a shelf where it's still there. But it doesn't get in the way of day to day life. These are three different dimensions of forgiveness and reconciliation. And I think that we can certainly use I use them in my chaplaincy work when it comes up when somebody comes to me and I can't give absolution although I've been asked but not a Catholic priests don't do it. We don't do that. But I can help them work through these in their own way using this Jewish model as a model for something even bigger than that, just what we do in short, and I think the world could learn a few things from that as well. I think the communities at large with the nastiness that has befallen our community and it happens in social media, and it's in politics where we need a little bit of slichah, we need to earn a little bit of mechilah. We need to let go of it a little bit. And we've got kappara. Oh, we can't get rid of that we can put it on a shelf that doesn't get in the way of day to day life. That's my hope for this coming year.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein39:37
Rabbi Joseph Loski it has been an honor to share this time with you may you be blessed with good health, strength and courage to be able to touch people's lives and make their world a bit brighter. Thank you for all that you do and for being on this inaugural Neshama cast.
Rabbi Joe Oarowski 39:57
And as the kids say, Rabbi, right back atcha you very, very much and I wish you the same as well.
Rabbi Ed Bernstein40:02
Neshama cast is a production of Neshama association of Jewish chaplains. Thank you to Rabbi Joe Ozarowski for being the first guest on the Shama cast, and for all of his support as NAJC president to make this podcast possible. For more information about Rabbi Ozarowski. Check out our show notes Special Thanks for technical and logistical support to Alison atterberry, and NAJC Chief of Operations. Rabbi Ben Flax NAJC Executive Director and Rabbi Drew Kaplan and the NAJC Social Media Committee. Our theme music is a niggun for Ki anu amecha, written and performed by Rabbi Cantor, Lisa Levine. Please help others find the show by rating and reviewing the show on iTunes. We welcome comments and suggestions for future programming at NeshamaCast@gmail.com. And be sure to follow NAJC on Facebook to learn more about Jewish spiritual care happening in our communities. May we all work together to heal our world.