Religion and Remedy

The current image has no alternative text. The file name is: DA-0029-scaled.jpg

To a large extent, my academic interests in the last two decades have traced the course of my own life, both its challenges and blessings. My recent book, Mother’s Milk, was undoubtedly the product of my own life as a mother. It emerged not from the fluid unfolding of such a life, but rather from the disruptions and dislocations along the way. The specific needs of my children, and even my own dislocation from NYC to California- that is, establishing a household unmoored from the more familiar Jewish landscape of my childhood- all these factors exposed cultural and sociological dynamics that might have otherwise unfolded out of sight.

These disruptions brought the dynamics of early childhood to the surface. In particular, they brought me to recognize the supreme importance of the first months and years of life in the making of the person, and in the making of the Jew. The importance of family life in the making of the person is not unique to the Jews. As legal theorist Patricia Williams has said, “We are talked into the world by our forebears. (Williams, 2021).” Household and family relations form the matrix within which lasting cultural formations take place. We are all finished through culture, as Clifford Geertz noted over a half-century ago; not through culture in general, but through culture of a particular sort (Geertz, 1993).

An emphasis upon early childhood in the making of Jewish history unlocks a mystery that often resides in its telling, namely: what accounts for the long history of the Jews, given the evident disruptions, ruptures and changes over time? The answer, I believe, lies in the major role of early childhood and family life in the formation of these broader social formations. Family relations play a critical role in the formation of what Pierre Bourdieu called habitus, that is, the schema of perception and action that ensure the stability of social formations “more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms. (Bourdieu, 1990).” The household is a central node in the making of Jewish culture; it is the site both of transmission and modification of Jewish culture over time.

My experience raising children, therefore, brought me to write a Jewish counter-history, that is, an account of Jewish history that emerges not from the study of its large institutions, literary collections, or major ruptures over time, but through attention to the continuous labors of care in Jewish households.

My current interest has brought me to a far more peripheral aspect of Jewish culture: medicine and healing. This too, emerged from my own experience in recent years. I have gone through various chronic disturbances to my health in recent years, and each time I have experienced the immense benefits of homeopathic medicine. I therefore decided to to immerse myself in the study of homeopathy.

As a scholar of Jewish studies, I began to wonder: what is the place of medicine in classical Jewish texts and traditions? The functioning of our body is so essential to human experience, so basic, indeed, to the experience of all living things. What, then, is the place of the healing arts in Biblical and Rabbinic texts, and in Jewish culture more broadly? Does the medieval period mark a shift in the place of medicine in the Jewish curriculum? What about the prominence of healing, both as art and metaphor, in the careers and writings of Hasidic masters in the modern period?

My initial inquiries into this topic brought to me a mix of disappointment and inspiration. I came to understand that the healing arts have a relatively weak position in classical Jewish texts. At the same time, building upon the thought of Moses Maimonides, it is also clear that Jewish practices offer innate benefits to those who practice them. What I hope to work on in the coming years is a notion of religion as remedy: the possibility that traditional Jewish practices contain within them the remedies sorely needed in our time.

Please join me for my upcoming lecture, “Religion and Remedy,” at the Graduate Theological Union.

Please also join my monthly homeopathy zoom: Curious about Homeopathy.