Twenty hours into my Yom Kippur fast, I lay down on a couch and opened The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain 950 – 1492, translated and annotated by Peter Cole. A day before the start of Yom Kippur, my friend Aviya Kushner, brilliant poet and writer, posted on her Substack, On Being and Timelessness, a piece on the great poet Yehuda Halevi (1075 – 1141) and the relevance of his work to Yom Kippur. That’s what inspired me to read, during the few hours away from synagogue, a little Halevi. The first poem of Halevi’s I landed on is “Heal Me, Lord”:

Heal me, Lord, and I will be healed
     Don’t let me perish in your anger.
All my balms and potions are yours
     to guide to weakness or to vigor.

It’s you alone who chooses, not me;
     you know best what’s flawed and pure.
It isn’t my medicine on which I rely—
     I look instead toward your cure.

The first two lines could have been included in the mahzor, the special prayerbook for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. During Yom Kippur services, Jews pray, s’lach lanu, m’chal lanu, kaper lanu; forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement. While Halevi’s “Heal Me, Lord” may be a request for healing of the body, it could just as easily suggest healing of “ills” that come from committing any number of transgressions: gossip, lying, obstinance, bribery, infidelity, business dealings, wielding power, and more. The right medicine may cure physical ailments. The cure for moral or spiritual sickness may come in the form of teshuvah, our sincere repentance and return to a wholesome way of living accompanied by God’s forgiveness.

My inclination that afternoon was to read “Heal Me, Lord” metaphorically. That, after all, is how I read many of our prayers. How else to read, for instance, prayers that represent God as a writer who keeps two books, the book of life and the book of death? During the High Holidays, we pray to be inscribed in the book of good life for the coming year.

But Cole’s translation made it hard for me to read the poem just metaphorically. “Balms” and “potions”: I could read them as metaphors. “Balms”: compassion. “Potions”: mitzvot, God’s commandments which, if we keep them, will heal us and the world. “Medicine,” however, insisted on being read literally. “Medicine” doesn’t even sound like the other words in the poem. And that’s where my resistance to the poem’s vision really kicked in.

Hell no, I thought! I’m not going to rely on God, whatever God is, for my physical healing! Give me a human doctor! A doctor who knows her science! Give me a doctor who engages in best practices, as determined by the medical profession based on years of research! That’s a doctor I will trust, a doctor I do trust, a doctor I have trusted!

When, shortly after I turned thirty, I was wheeled down from my room at the Medical College of Pennsylvania to the operating room for a bilateral femoral-aorta bypass, I trusted that my surgeon, the head of vascular surgery at MCP, would perform a successful operation. Nonetheless, I was afraid of anesthesia. Before an aide parked me outside the OR, I was given a shot of something—morphine?—to calm me down. When the nurse in charge of the OR, a good friend of my mother who was directing MCP’s Women’s Auxiliary at the time, checked on me, she was surprised that I seemed to be fully awake. She put her hand on my shoulder and, in a soft voice said, relax and let the medicine work. A moment after that, the anesthesiologist appeared. Seconds later, I was out! A balm: the nurse’s hand on my shoulder and her soothing voice. A potion: anesthesia.

About thirty years later, I had a similar experience when I was waiting to have my porcelain gallbladder removed. Was there anything I was afraid of, the nurse anesthetist asked me while I was being prepped for the procedure. As luck would have it, she was the daughter of dear friends of mine. Yes, being anesthetized. She, too, reassured me, and, with her hand on my arm, said she’d be with me throughout the entire procedure. A balm. On neither occasion did I turn to God for Her cure.

After reading and rereading “Heal Me, Lord,” I turned to Cole’s note on the poem. First, I was reminded that Halevi was a physician! Indeed, the poem originally included a heading: “And he wrote this when he drank a potion.” (Physician, heal thyself?) Halevi’s experiences as a physician underlie the poem, which works, writes Cole, “by way of analogy to compare the man who has prepared himself properly to receive the divine influence to a well-trained physician who is trained in the preparation of appropriate medicines and is able to explain to patients how they are to be administered.” Yikes! I misread the poem! I thought the poem was appealing directly to God the ultimate Physician whom the poet appeals to for diagnosis and prescription for medicine to heal him.

Becoming a “well-trained physician” in eleventh-century Spain “was not,” writes Hillel Halkin in his biography of Halevi, “accomplished by going to school.” Rather, it involved “independently mastering the available literature.” And the “appropriate medicines” available to physicians at that time, writes Halkin, “were limited…and restricted largely to herbal remedies, changes in diet and lifestyle, and psychological counseling.” I can see how the training and work of a physician can be seen as analogous to the discipline of Torah study (“mastering the available literature”) and living according to God’s laws (halakhah). But there’s also this letter of Halevi, sent to a rabbi and included in Halkin’s biography, to consider: “I work day and night and in between at the vanity of medicine, which heals not a thing.” Maybe this is why Halevi calls upon the Lord to heal him. He sees that his own medicine doesn’t work. “It isn’t my medicine on which I rely— / I look instead toward your cure.” Of doctors at the time, Halkin writes, “those who were able to charm, impress, or help enough people gained a reputation and prospered. Halevi was one of them.” Despite his doubts along with his frustrations that his work as a physician was taking him away from poetry, Halevi was apparently a successful physician.

The stakes couldn’t be any higher. “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life,” God instructs us in Deuteronomy. This is the existential situation a physician finds herself in with every patient she sees. This is also the situation a religious Jew finds himself in with every choice he makes in his daily life. Is this also the situation in which a serious reader—of poetry and sacred texts—finds himself?

“Analogies and metaphors,” writes Edward Hirsch in A Poet’s Glossary, “are both modes of relational thinking.” Reading itself might also be considered an experience of relational thinking. Think of the relationship between one text and another. Think of the relationship between a poem and the poet. Think of the relationship between a devotional poem and God. Think, too, of the relationships between a reader and a poem as well as, in this case, the poet’s representation of God and the reader’s own relationship to God.

Because of the moment in which we are living—a time when legitimate, professional medical and scientific research is under attack—”Heal Me, Lord” provoked me. Because of the day on which I read it, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish year, the poem also turned my attention to my own relationship with the Divine. When I have been in need of medical care, I put my trust in physicians. In the future, perhaps, thanks to “Heal Me, Lord,” I can trust physicians and remember that human intelligence is one of the gifts of creation. And for that I can feel if not express gratitude for a Creator who endowed us with both the desire to heal and the intelligence and skills to study illness and develop cures for disease.

Richard Chess has published four books of poetry, the most recent of which is Love Nailed to the Doorpost. Professor emeritus from UNC Asheville, where he directed the Center for Jewish Studies for 30 years, Chess serves on the boards of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, where he co-directs its Faith in Arts project. You can find him at www.richardchess.com .

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