Jewish Customs and Teachings Meet Hospice and Palliative Care

“Go, for the Holy-One sends you. Go, the Holy-One will be with you...”

- from an Ashkenazi death-bed liturgy

 

When the boundary between extending life and prolonging death becomes increasingly fuzzy, we need to reconsider the teachings of our tradition about death and dying in light of the current medical, legal, and ethical realities. We will examine relevant rabbinic texts on dying, liturgies for the deathbed, and Jewish definitions of death together with the state of the art in palliative medicine and hospice care and share our own personal experiences in order to articulate our own personal preferences to help structure the atmosphere and rituals of our own dying.

Michael Tayvah currently works at the Hospice of the Abramson Center for Jewish Life, located in Pennsylvania’s Delaware Valley. Serving primarily — but not exclusively — Jews, he works as part of the hospice team as a Spiritual Care Coordinator where his role is to address issues of spiritual pain as people approach the end of their lives. A havurahnik since his teens, this is Michael’s tenth institute.