Healing from Despair: Choosing Wholeness in a Broken World (review)

For twelve years, on the second Wednesday of every month, Jews in New York City who have lost a close loved one to suicide have gathered to give and get support from one another in a network called M’kom Shalom. Reeling from their terrible trauma and tragic losses, they turn to the Jewish community and the Jewish tradition seeking something—understanding, meaning, a safe place to grieve, some form of “healing.”

As the founder and co-facilitator of this group, having myself been personally touched by suicide, I am repeatedly struck by the driving, seemingly universal need to tell the story, to somehow put the pieces together in some coherent narrative—and yet how complex and elusive that project generally turns out to be.

In Healing from Despair: Choosing Wholeness in a Broken World, Rabbi Elie Kaplan Spitz weaves accounts of various kinds: among them, his family’s Holocaust legacies and his own first-person encounters with near-obliterating darkness; the existential struggles of Rachel, Moses, and Job; Rambam’s crisis when his beloved ḥman’s tormented soul; the odysseys of Lincoln, Churchill, and Buber; and the bold, somewhat “implausible” history of our people’s triumphant survival and flourishing against the odds. Powerfully, Rabbi Spitz traces the Torah’s treatment of God’s grave disappointments and despair, God’s regret over creation, divine rage and divine forgiveness as role-modeling instruction for our own processes on the bumpy road of life. Throughout, he shares his own hard-won wisdom and insights, an authentic and “takhlitic” gift-of-the-self that ensures that the teacher is as present as the many texts he lays out before us.

Perhaps the downside of this extremely readable book—with just five chapters, large type, generous space between lines, and accessible “tools” following each chapter—is that some matters are necessarily given short shrift. The pervasive, underlying problem of shame, for example, needs much greater discussion, as does the complicated path of forgiveness; the use of Psalms for healing is similarly complex if not knotty, and requires more explication. And the clinical reader may bristle at some popular treatments (e.g., even Elizabeth Kübler-Ross acknowledged that the five stages of grief are not linear, and “acceptance” of a loved one’s suicide is certainly multifaceted and ongoing).

But developing all these angles would have yielded a weighty tome less helpful to those who are struggling, and to those who are struggling to help them. I recently shared chapter 3, “Forgiving the Lost Soul,” with the M’kom Shalom group. This chapter takes us through the stories of the biblical suicides of Samson, Saul, Ahitophel, and Zimri and then traces the evolving Jewish approach to suicide from the Talmud through the Middle Ages and into contemporary times—a moving testament to our tradition that truly “gets” suffering, reveres life, and seeks to respond, imitatio Dei, with presence, compassion, and comfort, so that we can all become a blessing. We owe Elie Kaplan Spitz much gratitude for the personal and professional Torah that he interlaces in Healing from Despair.