From Introduction

Often, when he came to visit, my grandfather would bring me a present. These were never the sorts of things that other people brought, dolls and books and stuffed animals. My dolls and stuffed animals have been gone for more than half a century, but many of my grandfather's gifts are with me still.

Once he brought me a little paper cup. I looked inside it expecting something special. It was full of dirt. I was not allowed to play with dirt. Disappointed, I told him this. He smiled at me fondly. Turning, he picked up the little teapot from my dolls' tea set and took me to the kitchen where he filled it with water. Back in the nursery, he put the little cup on the windowsill and handed me the teapot. "If you promise to put some water in the cup every day, something may happen," he told me.

At the time, I was four years old and my nursery was on the sixth floor of an apartment building in Manhattan. This whole thing made no sense to me at all. I looked at him dubiously. He nodded with encouragement. "Every day, Neshume-le," he told me.

And so I promised. At first, curious to see what would happen, I did not mind doing this. But as the days went by and nothing changed, it got harder and harder to remember to put water in the cup. After a week, I asked my grandfather if it was time to stop yet. Shaking his head no, he said, "Every day, Neshume-le." The second week was even harder, and I became resentful of my promise to put water in the cup. When my grandfather came again, I tried to give it back to him but he refused to take it, saying simply, "Every day, Neshume-le." By the third week, I began to forget to put water in the cup. Often I would remember only after I had been put to bed and would have to get out of bed and water it in the dark. But I did not miss a single day. And one morning, there were two little green leaves that had not been there the night before.

I was completely astonished. Day by day they got bigger. I could not wait to tell my grandfather, certain that he would be as surprised as I was. But of course he was not. Carefully he explained to me that life is everywhere, hidden in the most ordinary and unlikely places. I was delighted. "And all it needs is water, Grandpa?" I asked him. Gently he touched me on the top of my head. "No, Neshume-le," he said. "All it needs is your faithfulness."

This was perhaps my first lesson in the power of service, but I did not understand it in this way then. My grandfather would not have used these words. He would have said that we need to remember to bless the life around us and the life within us. He would have said when we remember we can bless life, we can repair the world.

My grandfather was a scholar of the Kabbalah, the mystical teachings of Judaism. My parents and my aunts and uncles took a dim view of this study, some seeing it as an embarrassment, a paternal idiosyncrasy, and others as something highly suspect, a sort of dabbling in magic. When he died, the old handwritten leather-covered books he had studied daily simply disappeared. I never discovered what had happened to them.

According to the Kabbalah, at some point in the beginning of things, the Holy was broken up into countless sparks, which were scattered throughout the universe. There is a god spark in everyone and in everything, a sort of diaspora of goodness. God's immanent presence among us is encountered daily in the most simple, humble, and ordinary ways. The Kabbalah teaches that the Holy may speak to you from its many hidden places at any time. The world may whisper in your ear, or the spark of God in you may whisper in your heart. My grandfather showed me how to listen.

One is encouraged to acknowledge such unexpected meetings with the Holy by saying a blessing. There are hundreds of such blessings, each one attesting to a moment of awakening in which one remembers the holy nature of the world. In such moments heaven and earth meet and greet and recognize one another.

There is a blessing that is said whenever one encounters something new and of significance in one's experience. My mother was present at the moment when I met my grandfather. Soon after I was born, she took him to the hospital to see me for the first time in my incubator. She told me that he had stood regarding me in silence through the viewing room window for a long time. I had been very premature. Concerned that he was anxious or even repelled that I was so small and frail, she was about to reassure him when he whispered something under his breath. She had not quite heard and she asked him to repeat it for her. He had turned to her with a smile and said in Hebrew, "Blessed are Thou, O Lord Our God, King of the Universe, who has kept us alive and sustained us, who has brought us whole to this moment." It is a blessing of gratitude for the gift of life, and it was also the beginning of our relationship.

My grandfather was a man of many blessings. These blessings were prescribed generations ago by the great teaching rabbis, and each is considered to be a moment of mindfulness--an acknowledgment that holiness has been met in the midst of ordinary life. Not only are there blessings to be said over food; there are blessings to be said when you wash your hands, when you see the sun rise or set, when something is lost or when it is found, when something begins or ends. Even the humblest of bodily functions has its own blessing. My grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi and he said them all, tipping his black fedora to the Holy many times each day as he dealt with the smallest details of daily life.

I was the child of two dedicated socialists, who viewed all religion as the "opiate of the masses." Although such blessings were never said in my own family, saying them with my grandfather felt quite natural to me. At one time I knew many of them by heart, but I have long since forgotten them. What I have remembered is the importance of blessing life.

When I was young, I seemed to be caught between two very different views of life: my grandfather and his sense of the holy nature of the world and my highly academic, research-oriented uncles, aunts, and cousins. All my grandfather's children were doctors and nurses, and many of their children are as well. As I grew older and time created a greater distance between us, my grandfather seemed to become an island of mysticism in a vast sea of science. Desperate to be successful and make a contribution to society, I gradually put him in the back of my memory with the other things of my childhood. He had died when I was seven. It would be many years before I would make the connection between his ways and the work of medicine. Sometimes if you stay the course long enough, divergent paths reveal themselves to have the same destination. My grandfather blessed life, and his children served life. But, in the end, it has turned out that these may be one and the same thing.

As a young doctor, I thought that serving life was a thing of drama and action and split-second judgment calls. A question of going sleepless and riding in ambulances and outwitting the angel of death. A role open only to those who have prepared themselves for years. Service was larger than ordinary life, and those who served were larger than life also. But I know now that this is only the least part of the nature of service. That service is small and quiet and everywhere. That far more often we serve by who we are and not what we know. And everyone serves whether they know it or not.

We bless the life around us far more than we realize. Many simple, ordinary things that we do can affect those around us in profound ways: the unexpected phone call, the brief touch, the willingness to listen generously, the warm smile or wink of recognition. We can even bless total strangers and be blessed by them. Big messages come in small packages. All it may take to restore someone's trust in life may be returning a lost earring or a dropped glove.

Blessings come in forms as simple as the greeting commonly used in India. On meeting even a total stranger, one bows and says NAMASTE: I see the divine spark within you. Here we are too often fooled by someone's appearance, their age or illness or anger or meanness or just too busy to recognize that there is in everyone a place of goodness and integrity, no matter how deeply buried. We are too hurried or distracted to stop and bear witness to it. When we recognize the spark of God in others, we blow on it with our attention and strengthen it, no matter how deeply it has been buried or for how long. When we bless someone, we touch the unborn goodness in them and wish it well.

Everything unborn in us and in the world needs blessing. My grandfather believed that the Holy has made all things. "It is up to us to strengthen them and feed them and free them whenever possible to find and fulfill His purposes for them, Neshume-le," he told me. Blessings strengthen life and feed life just as water does.

A woman once told me that she did not feel the need to reach out to those around her because she prayed every day. Surely, this was enough. But a prayer is about our relationship to God; a blessing is about our relationship to the spark of God in one another. God may not need our attention as badly as the person next to us on the bus or behind us on line in the supermarket. Everyone in the world matters, and so do their blessings. When we bless others, we offer them refuge from an indifferent world.

The capacity to bless life is in everybody. The power of our blessing is not diminished by illness or age. On the contrary, our blessings become even more powerful as we grow older. They have survived the buffeting of our experience. We may have traveled a long, hard road to the place where we can remember once again who we are. That we have traveled and remembered gives hope to those we bless. Perhaps in time they too can remember this place beyond competition and struggle, this place where we belong to one another.

A blessing is not something that one person gives another. A blessing is a moment of meeting, a certain kind of relationship in which both people involved remember and acknowledge their true nature and worth, and strengthen what is whole in one another. By making a place for wholeness within our relationships, we offer others the opportunity to be whole without shame and become a place of refuge from everything in them and around them that is not genuine. We enable people to remember who they are.

I first learned to do this from people who were dying, people who had moved into a more authentic relationship with those around them because only that which is genuine still had meaning for them. These people had let go of the ways in which they had changed themselves to win approval, and so they made it safe for others to remove their masks as well. Their unwavering acceptance allowed me to remember something almost forgotten. In their presence I realized that many of the ways I had changed myself had made me smaller and in some ways weaker. Parts of myself that I had judged and hidden for years were welcomed and even needed by those who were dying. I felt the life in me blessed by such people; felt it expand to become its real size and shape and power, unashamed. It was a long time before I realized that you do not have to be dying in order to bless others in this way.

Those who bless and serve life find a place of belonging and strength, a refuge from living in ways that are meaningless and empty and lonely. Blessing life moves us closer to each other and closer to our authentic selves. When people are blessed they discover that their lives matter, that there is something in them worthy of blessing. And when you bless others, you may discover this same thing is true about yourself.

We do not serve the weak or the broken. What we serve is the wholeness in each other and the wholeness in life. The part in you that I serve is the same part that is strengthened in me when I serve. Unlike helping and fixing and rescuing, service is mutual. There are many ways to serve and strengthen the life around us: through friendship or parenthood or work, by kindness, by compassion, by generosity or acceptance. Through our philanthropy, our example, our encouragement, our active participation, our belief. No matter how we do this, our service will bless us.

When we offer our blessings generously, the light in the world is strengthened, around us and in us. The Kabbalah speaks of our collective human task as Tikkun Olam; we sustain and restore the world.

As a child I had loved the story of Noah and the Ark the best of all my grandfather's stories. He had given me a coloring book that had pictures of all the animals, two by two, and Noah and his wife, looking much like Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus but dressed in a different way. We spent hours coloring in this book together which is how, at almost four, I had learned the names of many animals. We had also discussed the story at length, and wondered about the surprising possibility that even God sometimes makes mistakes and has to send a flood and start all over again.

The last picture in the book was a beautiful rainbow. "This represents a promise between God and man, Neshume-le," my grandfather told me. After the flood, God promises Noah and all of us that it will never happen again.

But I was not so easily fooled. This whole thing had started because people had been wicked. "Even if we are very naughty, Grandpa?" I asked. My grandfather had laughed then. "That is what it says here in this story." He looked thoughtful. "But there are other stories," he told me. Delighted, I asked him to tell me another one.

The story he told me is very old and dates from the time of the prophet Isaiah. It is the legend of the Lamed-Vov. In this story, God tells us that He will allow the world to continue as long as at any given time there is a minimum of thirty-six good people in the human race. People who are capable of responding to the suffering that is a part of the human condition. These thirty-six are called the Lamed-Vov. If at any time, there are fewer than thirty-six such people alive, the world will come to an end.

"Do you know who these people are, Grandpa?" I asked, certain that he would say "Yes." But he shook his head. "No, Neshume-le," he told me. "Only God knows who the Lamed-Vovniks are. Even the Lamed-Vovniks themselves do not know for sure the role they have in the continuation of the world, and no one else knows it either. They respond to suffering, not in order to save the world but simply because the suffering of others touches them and matters to them."

It turned out that Lamed-Vovniks could be tailors or college professors, millionaires or paupers, powerful leaders or powerless victims. These things were not important. What mattered was only their capacity to feel the collective suffering of the human race and to respond to the suffering around them. "And because no one knows who they are, Neshume-le, anyone you meet might be one of the thirty-six for whom God preserves the world," my grandfather said. "It is important to treat everyone as if this might be so."

I sat and thought about this story for a long time. It was a different story than the story of Noah's Ark. The rainbow meant that there would be a happily-ever-after, just as in the stories my father read to me at bedtime. But Grandpa's story made no such promises. God asked something of people in return for the gift of life, and He was asking it still.

Suddenly, I realized that I had no idea what it was. If so much depended on it, it must be something very hard, something that required a great sacrifice. What if the Lamed-Vovniks could not do it? What then? "How do the Lamed-Vovniks respond to the suffering, Grandpa?" I asked, suddenly anxious. "What do they have to do?" My grandfather smiled at me very tenderly. "Ah, Neshume-le," he told me. "They do not need to do anything. They respond to all suffering with compassion. Without compassion, the world cannot continue. Our compassion blesses and sustains the world."

Recovering a greater compassion may require us to confront the core values of our culture. We are a culture that values mastery and control, that cultivates self-sufficiency, competence, independence. But in the shadow of these values lies a profound rejection of our human wholeness. As individuals and as a culture we have developed a sort of contempt for anything in ourselves and in others that has needs, and is capable of suffering. It is not a gentle world.

As life becomes colder and somehow harder, we struggle to create places of safety for ourselves and those we love through our learning, our skills, our income. We build places of security in our homes and our offices and even our cars. These places separate us from one another. Places that separate people can never be safe enough. Perhaps our only refuge is in the goodness in each other.

In a highly technological world we may forget our own goodness and place value instead on our skills and our expertise. But it is not our expertise that will restore the world. The future may depend less on our expertise than on our faithfulness to life.

Remembering how to bless each other is more important now than ever before. The solution to the destructiveness in this world is not more technical knowledge. Repairing the world may require us to find a deep connection to the life around us, to substitute the capacity to befriend life for our relentless pursuit of greater and greater expertise. It has been said that it has taken us thousands of years to recognize and defend the value of a single human life. What remains is to understand that the value of any human life is limited unless there is something in it that stands for the benefit of others and the benefit of life itself. A woman who lives in Pinson, Texas, sent me a quotation from Exodus that I think my grandfather would have loved: "Build altars in the places where I have reminded you who I am, and I will come and bless you there." The blessing we will receive when we have remembered how to bless life again may be nothing less than life itself.

I have learned a great deal about blessing and serving life from the people that I see in my office, perhaps because cancer forces people so deeply into their own vulnerability that they have touched the place of knowing that we hold such vulnerability in common. Once this is seen, there is no way one cannot respond. I have seen so many people emerge from their encounter with great loss more effortlessly compassionate and altruistic than before that I have come to wonder if blessing life is not a final step in some natural process of healing from suffering. A blessing is a place of refuge, a connecting back to the place in us where we are coherent and whole. A remembering of who we are.

One of my patients, a civil rights lawyer who almost died of cancer, told me several years afterward that this experience had enabled him to discover an unexpected power. "I find something in others that I have found in myself. Something struggling to break through obstacles and live whole," he told me. "I can see its struggle and speak its language. So I can strengthen it"--he paused thoughtfully--"as others have strengthened it in me. My wife tells me that I have finally opened my heart. Perhaps so, but that's not exactly it." He falls silent. "If it didn't sound so odd to say, I guess I can bless the life in other people and be blessed by them. I do it in my work, but it goes beyond my work. It seems just now like the most important thing I can do."

A friend and colleague told me about the first hours after she discovered that her fifteen-year-old son had drowned. She had gone downstairs to get a cup of tea, and another woman, herself shaken by grief, had chided her, asking her how she could drink tea at a time like this. "Up until then, Rachel, I had been a person who was always afraid of doing things wrong, always hesitant and full of self-doubt over the smallest action. But when she spoke to me I suddenly knew that in this I could do nothing wrong: This had struck me to a place of such depth that everything I did or said or thought or felt in response was completely true. This was beyond rules, beyond judgments. This was all mine."

Her healing has taken time, more than eighteen years. She works now with groups of people who have cancer, helping them to move through their grief and losses in order to connect back to the place in them that is coherent and whole. Speaking of this she says, "For me, the loss of my son went from a singular event to something that is woven into the fabric of my being. It is always present to me, part of my work, part of my experience. Having experienced that deep a grief, that suffering, I am no longer afraid to go back there. I have been around it and with it and come through it and I know it very well. I have also somehow survived it. I think the people in my groups know this. They know that I am not afraid anymore. It gives us permission to go to that place of grief or suffering, to acknowledge our losses and their deep significance, if that is where we need to go. I think it brings a kind of safety to the room."

She pauses thoughtfully. "It is also very affirming to return to that place because it is a place that has enormous meaning for me. Sometimes it is as if I get to be with my son again, sometimes in those moments when there is that kind of grief in the room."

The thirty-seven years that I have been a physician have shown me that any of the stuff of our lives--our joys, our failures, our loves, our losses, even our sickness--can become the stuff of service. I have seen people use anything to bless life. There is such a simple greatness in us all that nothing need be wasted.

The power to repair the world is already in you. When someone blesses you, it reminds you a little--untying the knots of belief and fear and self-doubt that have separated you from your own goodness. Freeing you to bless and receive blessings from everything around you.

One afternoon when he was very sick, my grandfather spoke to me of death and told me that he was dying. "What does this mean, Grandpa?" I asked, worried and anxious. "I will be going somewhere else, my Neshume-le. Closer to God." I was struck dumb. "Will I be able to visit you there?" I said, filled with distress. "No," he told me, "but I will watch over you and I will bless those who bless you." Almost fifty-five years have passed, and my life has been blessed by a great many people since then. Each of you has my grandfather's blessing.

Reprinted from My Grandfather's Blessings by permission of Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright (c) 2000 by Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.