Every week, Rabbi Karp visits a young woman at a state psychiatric hospital. She has lived with schizophrenia for years. Her psychiatrist first treated her in private practice, shortly after her illness began, and she has now been in the hospital for quite a few years.
Most weeks, she can’t respond in a way that shows who she is, or who she was before she got sick. So after one visit, when the psychiatrist asked her how it had gone, the psychiatrist did not expect much.
“I expected the brief non-informative perfunctory responses to which I’ve become sadly accustomed,” the psychiatrist says in the JEEP film. “But instead she opened up.”
She talked about the visit and what she and the rabbi had done. She connected it to her earlier life, when she had done these things before. “Her joy, her authentic depth of emotion was so obvious and apparent.”
For the hospital staff, it was a reminder. “We’re not dealing with the shell of a lost person,” the psychiatrist says. “We’re dealing with a terribly sick person who still lives within.”
That is why JEEP keeps coming back, week after week, even when nothing seems to happen. The Baal Shem Tov taught that the greatest treasures lie hidden in every Jew. Sometimes it takes a long time to see them.
“You have to come in every week and just build and sustain that relationship knowing that sometimes, sometimes the magic will happen.”
A psychiatrist at a state hospital
Read about JEEP’s hospital chaplaincy →
From the JEEP film.