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October 22, 2004/Cheshvan 7 5765, Vol. 57, No. 8
Patients receive divine care
MICHAEL MIKLOFSKY
Staff Writer
At Banner Thunderbird Medical Center, patients now receive spiritual care along with their physical care - the hospital has just added a rabbi to its chaplain staff.
Rabbi Rafael Goldstein just moved to the Valley from San Diego, Calif., where he served as the Jewish community chaplain, and before that, as director of Los Angeles Jewish AIDS Service. He began working at the Glendale medical center on Oct. 4.
As the San Diego Jewish chaplain, he helped found the Jewish Healing Center of San Diego, and held a position as the center's presiding chaplain.
"For some reason, I've been blessed with an ability to work with people living with serious illness and to help them through it ... with it and their friends and families," he says.
Goldstein was ordained as a rabbi in 1994 by the Academy for Jewish Religion in New York and received his chaplaincy certification in January 2004 from the National Association of Chaplains.
After living in California for several years, he decided to move to the Valley because he has friends living here and he wanted to become involved in Temple Chai. He says that he hopes to become an active lay person in the synagogue.
At the medical center, his duties include visiting patients "who are in need of spiritual care, where looking at their spirit might be helpful in working through their issues of illness," Goldstein says.
"We're the guys that get to help put together the package so the person walks out of the hospital, if they get well, feeling unified as a human being, feeling together," he adds. "We live in such a secular world and a world that values lots of stuff that isn't all that significant. The real issues are who we are as human beings and how we connect with other human beings ... the quality of our lives on a daily basis."
Goldstein says that he hopes to bring to the Valley's Jewish community an opportunity to participate in bikkur cholim groups, where Jewish people visit patients.
For the entire Valley community, he says he wants to offer, "an opportunity for the non-Jewish world to see that there are Jewish people who care about and for non-Jewish people living with serious illness."
Contact the writer here
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