Pain, Patience and Purpose: Judaic and Philosophical Reflections
Jonathan Crane, Raymond F. Schinazi Scholar in Bioethics and Jewish Thought at Emory University's Center for Ethics and an associate professor of Medicine and of Religion.
“But pain is perfect misery, the worst Of evils, and, excessive, overturns All patience.” (John Milton, Paradise Lost, VI:462-464)
As Milton implies, pain and patience are inextricably linked but are not perfectly coterminous. Sometimes patience awaits pain’s arrival or emerges long after pain’s onset. At the other extreme, pain often overturns patience while in some cases patience transcends and outlasts pain. This imperfect alignment between and purpose of patience and pain has been a subject explored by Jewish sources for thousands of years.
Perhaps the most famous is the book of Job. With God’s imprimatur, Job is inflicted with a rare and severe skin inflammation by the Adversary. The story repeatedly insists that his painful inflammation is for nothing or no reason. When his patience finally dissipates, he seeks no intervention, just escape. A rabbinic midrash describes a woman (Yalkut Shimoni, Deuteronomy, Eikev 114 / §817; Yalkut Shimoni, Proverbs §943) whose patience during her natural and psychologically painful senescence has waned. She too yearns for escape. Whereas her escape is on to death, for Job it leads back to life.
Two Talmudic stories reaching back to the 1st century CE also explore the complex relation between pain, patience and purpose. One (BT Sanhedrin 101a) involves Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus becoming deathly ill. Some visiting disciples and colleagues cry but one, Rabbi Akiva, laughs. Akiva’s explanation of why he is happy to see his beloved friend in pain develops a theological way to understand the purpose of patience and pain. The other story concerns Naḥum of Gimzo and how he became quadriplegic, blind and inflamed with boils (JT Pe’ah 8.7/21b; BT Ta’anit 21a). Naḥum intends his patiently endured self-imposed suffering to be instructive and not cause for either intervention or escape. Both his pain and his patience have pedagogic purpose.
The rich relationships between pain, patience and purpose depicted by these ancient sources are then put into conversation with more contemporary philosophical scholarship. Emmanuel Levinas, for example, thinks patience “—the passivity of undergoing, and yet mastery itself—....[willfully] breaks through the crust of its egoism and as it were displaces its center of gravity outside of itself” (Totality and Infinity, 238-239). If patience can get one beyond one’s pain even as that pain continues, it can be delinked from that pain. In this way patience may be akin to what Colin Klein calls a secondary reaction to pain. For Klein, patience may be like suffering, which is not a feature of pain but a response to pain (What the Body Commands, 46). Since suffering need not be a necessary component of pain in itself, pain may be unnecessary for patience. These philosophical perspectives may not sever altogether the relationship between patience and pain but they do trouble it. Medical and bioethical significance of these religious and philosophical accounts of pain, patience and purpose will be explored in the paper’s conclusion.
As Milton implies, pain and patience are inextricably linked but are not perfectly coterminous. Sometimes patience awaits pain’s arrival or emerges long after pain’s onset. At the other extreme, pain often overturns patience while in some cases patience transcends and outlasts pain. This imperfect alignment between and purpose of patience and pain has been a subject explored by Jewish sources for thousands of years.
Perhaps the most famous is the book of Job. With God’s imprimatur, Job is inflicted with a rare and severe skin inflammation by the Adversary. The story repeatedly insists that his painful inflammation is for nothing or no reason. When his patience finally dissipates, he seeks no intervention, just escape. A rabbinic midrash describes a woman (Yalkut Shimoni, Deuteronomy, Eikev 114 / §817; Yalkut Shimoni, Proverbs §943) whose patience during her natural and psychologically painful senescence has waned. She too yearns for escape. Whereas her escape is on to death, for Job it leads back to life.
Two Talmudic stories reaching back to the 1st century CE also explore the complex relation between pain, patience and purpose. One (BT Sanhedrin 101a) involves Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus becoming deathly ill. Some visiting disciples and colleagues cry but one, Rabbi Akiva, laughs. Akiva’s explanation of why he is happy to see his beloved friend in pain develops a theological way to understand the purpose of patience and pain. The other story concerns Naḥum of Gimzo and how he became quadriplegic, blind and inflamed with boils (JT Pe’ah 8.7/21b; BT Ta’anit 21a). Naḥum intends his patiently endured self-imposed suffering to be instructive and not cause for either intervention or escape. Both his pain and his patience have pedagogic purpose.
The rich relationships between pain, patience and purpose depicted by these ancient sources are then put into conversation with more contemporary philosophical scholarship. Emmanuel Levinas, for example, thinks patience “—the passivity of undergoing, and yet mastery itself—....[willfully] breaks through the crust of its egoism and as it were displaces its center of gravity outside of itself” (Totality and Infinity, 238-239). If patience can get one beyond one’s pain even as that pain continues, it can be delinked from that pain. In this way patience may be akin to what Colin Klein calls a secondary reaction to pain. For Klein, patience may be like suffering, which is not a feature of pain but a response to pain (What the Body Commands, 46). Since suffering need not be a necessary component of pain in itself, pain may be unnecessary for patience. These philosophical perspectives may not sever altogether the relationship between patience and pain but they do trouble it. Medical and bioethical significance of these religious and philosophical accounts of pain, patience and purpose will be explored in the paper’s conclusion.