The first time Sherri Mandell visited Rena, a 67-year-old woman with lung cancer, she decided to read a Psalm to her:
“I look to the hills; from where will my help come?Let my help come from GodWho shapes heaven and earth.”
As she read, Rena said the words together with her and began to cry, but a minute later she corrected Sherri’s Hebrew and laughed. Rena could say the whole Psalm by heart, and soon Sherri discovered that she knew the whole book of Psalms by heart. Sherri had found a way to connect with a patient, which was often a difficult thing to do. In her training as a pastoral counselor, she encountered many patients and their families, even staff members, who did not know what it meant to be a pastoral counselor. Sherri herself was in the process of learning what it meant to be a pastoral counselor. As she visited people with cancer and other life-threatening diseases, many of them in their last days, she tried to help them find a greater meaning in their lives, sometimes just by being there.
“I wanted to be a pastoral counselor because I needed to dwell in the underworld of the hospital. I wanted to help the people there, and I needed training to help the children and families I worked with through the Koby Mandell Foundation. But I knew it was really me who needed help. Because I had another dream: I hoped that I would meet a guide there who would reveal to me the secret of how to emerge from the darkness.”
The Koby Mandell Foundation is the organization that Sherri and her husband Seth had established in memory of their son Koby, who had lost his life in a horrific act of terror at the tender age of thirteen. It was their way of creating something positive out of the heartbreaking tragedy of Koby’s death. Through helping other bereaved families, they attempted to give meaning to their loss. In pastoral counseling, Sherri was searching for another way to help her cope with her loss, a loss so great it never stopped drawing her back into the darkness of her grief.
Sherri Mandel made aliyah in 1996. A writer who had taught composition and business writing at the University of Maryland, Sherri and her family settled in Tekoa in the Judean Hills. It was less than a half-mile from their home in Tekoa that her son Koby and his friend Yosef Ish-Ran were brutally murdered by terrorists in May 2001.
“Nobody is equipped to deal with such horror, but I felt particularly unprepared,” Sherri Mandell writes. “I had grown up on Long Island where there had been no tragedies in my life, only the deaths of grandparents in old age. I’d had an All-American childhood.”
What happened to Koby and his friend Yosef is the worst nightmare of any parent. “He was a normal teenager and I yearned for him. In some ways, I wanted to die with him, but I had three other children and a husband who were all suffering. I didn’t know how to help them – or myself.”
A few years after they tragically lost their firstborn son, Sherri and her husband Seth created the Koby Mandell Foundation. The foundation runs a summer camp for children who have lost an immediate family member to terror or other tragic circumstances, in addition to women’s programs and other activities for bereaved families who lost a loved one in an act of terror. Sherri also wrote a memoir, The Blessing of a Broken Heart.
“My husband Seth and I became public exemplars of resilience; of transforming tragedy into transcendence... but that was the public me, the one on the stage. The one who was frantic to prove she was okay. The one who spoke and wrote in a voice of triumph. The private me was different.”
In Reaching for Comfort, Sherri Mandell, a sensitive and talented writer, takes the reader with her as she searches for the comfort that her work in the Koby Mandell Foundation had not been able to give her. Reaching for Comfort is a brave book, brave in its openness and honesty. As we read, we accompany the author into hospital rooms where she visits people suffering with cancer and other illnesses and tries to give them spiritual support. We are with her in her consultations with her teacher, Michael, and her discussions with her classmates as she analyzes her visits with patients. As Mandell goes through her training, she learns what it means to provide spiritual support to people who are suffering and in many cases, close to death. She struggles with how to talk to the patients, how to best support them and provide them with comfort.
With some of the patients, Mandell feels that she has made a difference, but with others, it is much harder. In her work at the hospital, she gets to know people from backgrounds very different from her own and faces her fear of working with Arab patients. Mandell writes about her feelings throughout the process, her desire to help patients coping with such difficult realities, and her insecurities about saying the right thing to them in order to be helpful. Her writing reminds me a bit of Rachel Naomi Remen’s Kitchen Table Wisdom. The prose flows smoothly and effortlessly, making a book about such difficult subjects actually a book that is easy to read. The author has a way of making the reader feel as if she is telling her story to only them.
Pastoral counseling, also known as spiritual care, is a rather new field in Israel. The Association for Spiritual Care in Israel was founded in 2015 and establishes uniform requirements for the profession, defines standards of practice, and accredits and supervises training programs. According to its website:
“Spiritual care is new in Israel and still relatively unknown. We are working to integrate spiritual care – regardless of religion – into a ‘whole person’ approach to health care and social services. In Israel, dozens of spiritual caregivers currently work in hospitals, clinics, oncology and palliative care services, nursing homes, and private rehabilitation centers. Through public outreach, advocacy, lobbying, and raising awareness within the most relevant professions, we are leading the way for making spiritual care accessible to all – in hospitals, nursing homes, and other health care settings.”
In her quest to provide spiritual care to people who are suffering, Sherri Mandell saw herself as a “wounded healer”. Ultimately, the unfathomable pain left by the tragic loss of her son Koby made her search for comfort a search that brought her new experiences, new understandings, and new feelings. When she herself has to become a patient in the hospital, she understands the people she had been working with on a completely different level.
The book ends on an upbeat note when Mandell, having recuperated from her own medical crisis, goes hiking in the North. As she walks in nature she realizes that her experiences with critically ill patients had given her something she needed and that she finally “emerged from the underworld.”
“I had gone to the dying to learn how to live. To find comfort. And all this time it was the world of the living – my husband and children and family and friends and the wild, beautiful earth, nature, mountains, sky, trees, grass, flowers, streams, birds – that had just as much to teach me.”
REACHING FOR COMFORTBy Sherri MandellBen Yehuda Press 148 pages; $14.95