UCSF and the Jewish Home partner for research A world of interests ...

For Jews in particular, dementia
raises thorny theological issues.
One that especially troubles me
is our self-image as “the people
of the Book” – a people to whom
learning and literacy are central.
What happens to a Jew who can
no longer read the Book? What
becomes of her relationship
to the Jewish people, to Jewish
history, and to God when she
cannot read the Bible, the
prayers, or the Haggadah?
What else does our tradition have to offer? In a little
gem of a book about Jewish spirituality, Rabbi Samuel
Dresner takes the emphasis off the mind and directs our
attention to another precious sign of the image of God –
the human soul. In Prayer, Humility and Compassion
(1957), he writes:
“Man is like a cord tied at two ends: bound to the earth
through his body and to heaven through his soul. He is
partly animal through the physical aspect of his being
and partly angel through the spiritual aspect of his
being. He is mortal yet immortal, transient yet eternal,
filled at once with misery and grandeur. …”
Even as his father neared the end of
his life, Rabbi Sheldon Marder found
a way to “remain in relationship.”
… According to Maimonides,
when God said, “Let us make
man in our image,” God was
referring to the intellect. Our
… How, then, do we touch the soul, the divine element
in every human being? How can we find the grandeur
amidst so much misery?
… Empathy, relationship, creativity. These are my
three doorways into the land of dementia, my three
suggestions for touching the divine soul of the man
or woman in “the valley of trouble.” Each doorway is
“Empathy, relationship, and creativity. These are the ingredients of a
Judaism that is habilitative for people with dementia, a Judaism that can
help a person hold on to what remains, for as long as possible.”
Doorways of Hope
likeness to God, he said, is not physical, it is mental.
Does this mean that the person with dementia
becomes, in the course of his illness, an increasingly
flawed and, in the words of Rabbi Hershel Matt,
“fading image of God”?
… And then there is the loss of memory. What is the
Jewish religion without the memory of the exodus from
Egypt? … What is Judaism without yizkor and kaddish,
our cherished prayers of remembrance? Who are we
if we no longer remember the Sabbath day, to keep it
holy? If we no longer remember the evil wrought by
Haman and Hitler? Who are we when we cannot share
the collective Jewish memory of slavery in the land
of Egypt?
… We are a people of the book, a people of intellect, a
people of memory. Learning and remembrance have
been effective Jewish survival strategies for centuries.
But we also have to recognize that these strategies,
which place the mind at the center of religious life,
cannot function for a Jew facing dementia.
a petach tikvah – an opening of hope. None of these
doorways depend on the learning, literacy, and memory
so central to the Judaism most of us practice. Therefore,
I want to suggest that dementia requires a different
kind of Judaism.
Poet Tess Gallagher, who was the caregiver during her
mother’s 17 years of Alzheimer’s, writes that during
that time she and her mother achieved something
surprising: “We moved beyond forgetting. … From stage
to stage I kept insisting, until I did manage to stimulate
both doctors and caregivers toward the sense that,
even though her condition might be ‘hopeless’ in the
ultimate sense of what medicine could offer, there
were still unexplored things we could do to make life
better for her.” (Beyond Forgetting, ed. Holly J. Hughes,
2009) This daughter hoped for something better for her
mother: a life that was less confusing, more secure, and
more attentive to her mother’s feelings.
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Jewish Senior Living 2009/ 2010