In attempting to practice what I preach, I recently invested time with our Food & Nutrition team to educate myself about healthier eating habits and guide our bikkur cholim team in assembling 200 beautiful, colorful, tasty, and healthy mishloach manos for our patients. (Whole wheat hamantaschen – who knew they could taste so good?) The gifts are generously sponsored by a local shul whose members now have renewed appreciation for their health and understand the importance (and challenges) of responsible eating.
Assume that at least one in three hospital patients will have some kind of diet restriction and educate yourself as to how best to support and promote their health. Even for those that aren’t on special diets, you can support their wellbeing by avoiding products that feature sugar among the first few ingredients or are high in sodium. Another good rule is to avoid products that have ingredients you can’t easily pronounce.
- Do you need to bring food at all? Might the patient’s family members appreciate a meal being prepared for them even more than the patient? Often, the most important gift you can give patients (and anyone really) is the gift of your attentive presence. Even if you do feel the need to bring food, your presence is likely to be remembered long after all the food is gone. For example, though it has just passed on Purim, try using some of the rich metaphors inherent in the holiday and gift-giving. For example, ask someone about the best or most surprising gift they ever gave/received.
Invite them to speak about their hopes, concerns, and dreams (past and future). What do they remember about their youth? What charities did they support during the year? What are the gifts in their lives today? If they could have any gift/wish right now, what would it be?
Bikkur cholim aficionados and beginners alike can benefit from enhancing their skills. Fortunately, there are great resources online, one of the best being www.jbfcs.org/BikurCholim. Many hospitals also provide internships (during the summer or part-time during the year) for women or men to engage the art and science of professional chaplaincy and gain invaluable skill/experience in a clinical setting under expert guidance.
- Be creative. What other ways can you benefit patients? For those over 18, you can donate blood or platelets every 56 days to save lives. At North Shore, visitors can drop into our blood donor room and within hours their gift can be used to heal our patients. Or perhaps you could start a magazine drive to donate used magazines to benefit patients. Or send them an iTunes gift card so they can de-stress and/or alleviate boredom.
- Wash your hands before and after every contact with a patient’s environment. This is the #1 way to prevent the spread of infection, especially if you are going room to room to distribute gifts. Our bikkur cholim volunteers that give out over 100 Shabbat boxes every Friday are exemplars. As you pause at the Purell station outside each hospital room (or preferably a real wash station), I find that this is also a great time to offer a short tefillah for Hashem’s wisdom and guidance during the upcoming encounter.
- Over 80% of New York’s Jews are not halachically observant and many have little idea/recollection of what the holidays are. If they do remember something from their youth they may well have difficulty understanding how or why the Yom Tov should be relevant to them beyond childhood. (The same is true for many orthodox Jews who also carry a childhood understanding of these holidays throughout their life; certainly we may experience particular difficulty relating to a chag from the physical and emotional confines of an illness/hospitalization.)
So prepare. Start a conversation at your Shabbos table in the week or two before Yom Tov about how your understanding of its key themes has developed over time. Use Facebook to share a quick reflection or teaching about a metaphor or minhag of the chag that particularly resonates with you. And search the internet (e.g. rabbisacks.com) to add contemporary meaning to your festivities and practice. You’ll then be able to share some of your thoughts in a way that can bring meaning to and engage others, enhancing their connection to the Yom Tov and to yiddishkeit.