Maps and Meaning: Levitical Models for Contemporary Care

Empathy, Overload, and the Ash Heap: The Unmoored Caregiver

4 Empathy, Overload, and the Ash Heap: The Unmoored Caregiver With his threefold role, the levitical priest was a Moreh Derekh who accompanied community members along their physical, emotional, and spiritual journeys. In the last chapter, we explored some of the parallels between the levitical priest and contemporary clergy. In this chapter, we expand our lens to include all trained, professional caregivers. Clergy represent but one type of professional caregiver, all of whom encounter profound and enduring similarities in their journeys from the camp to michutz lamachaneh and back again. Drawing on a single, terse biblical verse that describes the priest’s movement from michutz lamachaneh to the camp, we invite others in helping professions to read themselves into the life of the levitical priest and to consider what he teaches all of us about our own transitions. Being michutz lamachaneh has a profound effect on caregivers because of the depth of our empathic attunement to the people in our care. Pastoral educator Barbara Breitman cites the work of psychologists to explain the steps involved in the experience of empathy. First, we perceive the other person’s verbal and nonverbal 79 affective cues; then we surrender to affective arousal ourselves, as if the other person’s affective cues were actually our own; finally, we have a period of resolution in which we regain a separate sense of self. In Breitman’s words, “[E]mpathy requires both a capacity to identify with others and a capacity to differentiate oneself from others. It also requires a capacity to move in and out of these psychological states with fluidity.”1 This ability to identify and differentiate, and to do it with comfort and ease, is the ideal. However, we are all familiar with the reality that sometimes we struggle to separate ourselves after an encounter that profoundly touches us. Truly seeing another’s pain has the potential to cause us pain. With our mirror neurons activated, the neural loops that trigger our physical and emotional responses can be identical to those experienced by the people to whom we are offering care. This can lead us to feel genuine pain as we become aware that someone with whom we have developed a caring bond is suffering. The circumstances that are causing that person to suffer, or the depth to which we identify with the person, have the potential to knock us off our moorings and shake everything we have come to believe. In the words of Ann and Barry Ulanov, “The work of ministry requires one to put oneself in such places where one’s entire safety is in jeopardy.”2 These words are a prescient description of the profound risks all caregivers take as they enter relationships of meaning. We find a rich parallel in the experience of the levitical priest to this notion of danger. Paradoxically, preparing a substance that would help someone else regain taharah left the priest in a state of tumah. As he prepared the mei niddah—the watery substance by 1. Barbara Eve Breitman, “Foundations of Jewish Pastoral Care: Skills and Techniques,” in Jewish Pastoral Care: A Practical Handbook from Traditional and Contemporary Sources, ed. Dayle Friedman (Woodstock, Vt.: Jewish Lights, 2001), 99. 2. Ann and Barry Ulanov, The Healing Imagination: The Meeting of Psyche and Soul (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), 102. Maps and Meaning 80 which others regained their tahor status after coming into contact with a corpse—the priest was rendered tamei. Numbers 19 describes how Eleazar (one of the priests) took an unblemished red heifer michutz lamachaneh to be slaughtered and burned. Its ashes were then stored in a special place, known as a makom tahor (literally, “a pure place”), also outside the camp, to be saved until they were needed.3 Addressing the paradox of the priest’s resulting state of tumah, David Kraemer explains that “the impurity of death ‘leaks,’ and when you are involved in ‘cleaning up’ this impurity, it is inevitable that you will be stained in the process. There is no protective garb that could be powerful enough to avoid the consequences.”4 To return to the camp and reenter the holy precincts, Eleazar had to go through a purification process, which is described as follows: And the priest laundered his clothes and washed his body in water. After that he entered the camp, but the priest was tamei until evening.5 Before he could resume his...