There have been a lot of complaints recently about the postal service and so I assumed they were to blame when I received three weeks worth of New Yorker magazines in the mail all within three days. But then I saw that Jill Lepore, the historian, author, and frequent contributor to the magazine had a piece about this week’s Torah portion and I realized that it was the “True Postmaster General” who arranged for the timing of the magazine delivery.
Lepore’s article is a history of burnout – a word that is almost ubiquitous in contemporary life but which has its origins in research undertaken in the early 1970s by Dr. Herber Freudenberger, a Jewish refugee from Germany who received training in psychoanalysis in New York and went on to work as a therapist among drug addicts in St Marks Place. Freudenberger noticed that the same dejected exhaustion among care providers at the clinic characterized the demeanor of some of the adicts they were treating.
The term spread and now burnout, and related terms like “hitting the pandemic wall” surround us and help us make sense of our experiences. While Lepore focuses her article on the modern history of the word and explores some of the social changes that make us more prone to burnout today, Lepore also acknowledges some evidence of burnout in the ancient past including in our Torah portion when Moshe seems to have reached his limit. After the Israelites complain about wanting more meat in their diets, and complain about the “free food” we enjoyed in Egypt Moshe turns to God and exclaims:
…לָמָ֤ה הֲרֵעֹ֙תָ֙ לְעַבְדֶּ֔ךָ וְלָ֛מָּה לֹא־מָצָ֥תִי חֵ֖ן בְּעֵינֶ֑יךָ לָשׂ֗וּם אֶת־מַשָּׂ֛א כׇּל־הָעָ֥ם הַזֶּ֖ה עָלָֽי׃
…“Why have You dealt ill with Your servant, and why have I not enjoyed Your favor, that You have laid the burden of all this people upon me? Did I conceive all this people, did I bear them, that You should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom as a nurse carries an infant,’ to the land that You have promised on oath to their fathers?
Without using the word, this is perhaps the earliest recording example of burnout. And, our own familiarity with the concept can help us make sense of this curious episode in Moshe’s life. Why does Moshe despair at this instance and not at any of the earlier moments of his life? Why was this moment the element that pushed him over the edge?
Moshe returned to Egypt to serve as God’s emissary to free the Israelites from slavary. He lead us through the red sea and brought us to Har Sinai. There, he served as the intermediary for the greatest transaction in human history as the Torah itself was given to us. After the disaster of the golden calf, Moshe rises to the occasion and pleads for mercy and is so successful that his words are still echoed thousands of years later in our own prayers.
And then, as we embark on what Moshe had thought would be a short walk to Eretz Yisrael Moshe hears complaints about meat and he reaches his breaking point. Is wanting some tasty quail worse than worshipping the golden calf? Is the challenge of finding food for people who are bored of eating mann every day more daunting than marching into Egypt and demanding “let my people go?”
No. Burnout theory provides an answer: the precipitating moment of the burnout can be arbitrary. It’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It’s a child whining about not wanting to take a bath after a full day of putting out fires at work. It’s the deep despair from a broken dishwasher during a week when your kids are home from school on quarantine. [Any resemblance to real episodes in my life are purely coincidental].
Parashat Beha’alotcha is the turning point in Sefer Bamidbar. And that turning point runs straight through the middle of the parasha itself. For the first 10 chapters of the Book of Numbers everything has its place, everything has its number, everyone has a role to play and a job to perform, and there is unanimity about where we are going and how we will get there. Moshe bubbles with optimism as he tries to convince Yitro, his father in law, to remain for the journey: “we are going – nosi’im anachnu” you can imagine Moshe shouting.
With the complaints and plagues in Chapter 11, right in the middle of Parashat Beha’alotcha, Moshe understands that he is not going to lead the Israelites to Eretz Yisrael in the next two weeks, or two months, or even two years. Moshe will have to defer his dreams of completing his mission and retiring.
Moshe intuits that the burden that had been upon him two years earlier when he stood at the burning bush would not lift from his shoulders until the day of his death decades into the future. In the words of Christina Maslach, writing in her 1981 book ‘Burnout: The Cost of Caring’ “burnout is a syndrome of emotional exhaustion…and reduced personal accomplishment that can occur among individuals who do ‘people work’ of some kind.” In Parashat Beha’alotcha Moshe realizes just how much ‘people work’ remained in his future and he felt the “cost of caring” in a heavy way.
But there is another element of burnout that Freudenberger emphasized in his work among drug addicts and the therapists who cared for them and this too sheds light on Moshe’s predicament.
In 2018, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, Leo Eisenstein, at the time a fourth year medical student (and someone I’ve known for his entire life; our families have been friends for years) wrote about burnout among physicians and explored an often overlooked element of Freudenberger’s research:
…Eventually, a physician will encounter patients whose health problems derive from a wicked, multigenerational knot of poverty and marginalization, and even the most astute, excellent physician may well find herself outmatched. Facing patients’ adverse social circumstances as an individual clinician is a recipe for disillusionment: the physician who believed she was maximizing her individual agency comes to feel utterly powerless. No longer the lone hero — just alone.
If individual powerlessness is the crux of this source of burnout, then organizing toward collective action should be part of the solution. Each of us can advocate for our homeless patients to be put on waiting lists for public housing. But what would happen if all doctors with homeless patients organized to demand more affordable housing? Organizing is both strategic and therapeutic.
In Parashat Ba’alotcha, Moshe realized that he faced a community with an inherited trauma of four hundred years of slavery. He realized he faced a community that not only could worship a golden calf out of fear, but who had an extraordinary capacity to kvetch and yearn for the lifestyle devoid of responsibilities that they left behind in Egypt. Teaching and guiding this community -teaching and guiding us – was a task that isolated Moshe. He had no real peers and he had no capacity to ensure that we would make responsible and ethical and religiously appropriate choices.
This community is coming out of a traumatic year. For some of us that trauma is in the form of deceased relatives and friends. For some the trauma takes the form of lost jobs or loss of job security. For some the trauma took the form of loneliness due to enforced isolation and missed interactions with others. All of us are at risk of burnout or “hitting the covid wall” or whatever phrase best describes reaching a point where you can’t go forward.
Get professional help if you can. Every mental health professional in the country has a waiting list now, but that’s no reason not to get your name on the list too. Also, there are special mental health resources available to our community through JCFS and people here who can help make referrals.
And also: community is the most effective and sustainable cure for loneliness and isolation and the sense of powerlessness. Together we can receive support and help from one another, and also, together we can contribute to others and to building something bigger than ourselves. It feels so warm and safe when others offer us needed support, but it is energizing and inspiring when we can accomplish something for others. Stay for our light kiddush in the parking lot, not because you desperately need the caffeinated seltzer (which is awesome) but to meet some of the people who have moved to Lakeview in the past year. Make and deliver baby meals for the Chessed committee or sign up to be a mikvah attendant or teach a Shabbat morning children’s group, or carve out time in your schedule to attend weekday minyan. What a wonderful paradox that by giving to others we can break out of our pandemic funk.
Moshe, after his moment of crisis, picks himself up, and installs a Sanhedrin to help him teach and guide his people. The Torah praises Moshe’s humility. He had no desire to be the lone hero and only prophet: וּמִ֨י יִתֵּ֜ן כׇּל־עַ֤ם ה֙ נְבִיאִ֔ים would that the entire nation of the Lord were prophets! Eventually, that more diffuse leadership model sustained us for 40 years in the desert and laid a foundation for Jeiwsh life up to this day. The same tools can help us as well. Join with others, connect with others, find ways to do so that are safe and responsible and meet your unique risk profile and risk tolerance, but by all means, connect.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 