Can you identify with an emotion never having experienced it personally? Can you learn from someone who shares his life story of survival from a life-threatening illness, never having been unwell yourself? The premise of Rabbi Elie Kaplan Spitz’s recently published book, “Healing from Despair: Choosing Wholeness in a Broken World” (Jewish Lights, 2008), assumes that you can.
As a sophisticated and deeply caring rabbi, Spitz has both the credibility and familiarity to bring his own struggles to light. Throughout his book, Spitz softly guides his readers through the searing, existential pain he endured; a pain so intense it nearly led him to commit suicide.
The value of Spitz’s book is found in its openness, its willingness to discuss an often ignored, even stigmatized topic. Its direct style provides a rare glimpse into severe clinical depression and spiritual darkness that Spitz was fortunate to survive. “Healing from Despair” gives hope to all who might have contemplated suicide. It can also aid and give valuable insight to those living with family or friends who have or continue to struggle with thoughts of self-destruction.
Spitz arranges his narrative by weaving biblical and rabbinic texts into his firsthand account. The book of Ecclesiastes provides one such example. The ancient text mentions, “There is a time for healing,” to which Spitz amends: “And healing takes time.” Healing from blue feelings does take time; it also requires resources that come from a supportive family, loyal friends and competently trained mental health-care professionals.
Drawing on rabbinic sources, Spitz informs his readers that suicide is not mentioned in the Mishnah and is given scant reference in the Babylonian Talmud. His section on “The Evolving Jewish View” dispels misconceptions many Jews have regarding burial in a Jewish cemetery of a suicide victim. Not until the legal tractate Smakhot (believed to have been written between the third and eighth centuries C.E.) do we have a rabbinic legal opinion regarding self-inflicted death. As it turns out, the traditional mourning ritual for a suicide is indistinguishable from that for other causes of death, except for the exclusion of a public eulogy and the immediate family’s rending their clothing.
Many reasons cause one to contemplate suicide, not least of which can be an imbalance in one’s brain chemistry. The author contends that avoidance of past emotional trauma or loss can be a significant factor as well. To Spitz, the operative word is “understand,” that is, one must grapple with past ordeals. In his words, “When we do not process a loss, we remain slaves to our despair and fail to see crisis as a source of new beginnings.”
While much of Spitz’s book deals with his “new beginning” — his triumph over suicide, and his emotional and spiritual epiphany, which led him to leave his lucrative law practice and ultimately pursue the rabbinate — it is laid out for us with great humility and love, out of a noble desire to help others who struggle with similar mental and spiritual threats.
By the author’s own admission, the book’s reality is further catharsis to his own recovery. The bitter truth is Spitz’s past mental illness made it possible for him to become a caregiver — a particularly empathic caregiver. As he details his encounter with suicide, highlighting its physical effects on his body and his soul, we see how Spitz was hurled into a frustrating and lonely quest to find relief from an unrelenting darkness that repeatedly threatened his existence.
Spitz eventually tries intensive psychotherapy and psychotropic medications, including a stint in a hospital psychiatric lock-up ward. The pangs of self-destruction become great; he yields to his caregiver’s recommendation that he undergo electric shock as a therapy of last resort. Fortunately, for him it works.
Spitz’s personal account, which also offers helpful resources, is not a light, breezy read. It is, however, a highly important and necessary one. The value of his “holy mission,” his sharing his intimate quest, is that we can, in fact, learn from his all-encompassing pain. We can begin to comprehend and benefit from some of what Spitz went through, never having necessarily done so ourselves.
Michael Gotlieb is rabbi of Kehillat Ma’arav Synagogue in Santa Monica.
