This was a week that held a lot of loss. Yesterday, Topol passed away, and his legacy will forever be felt in the way that Jews and Judaism were given a place on the mainstage. Last Shabbat, Judy Heumann died. Judy was a fierce activist and for decades led the fight for disability rights. There were other losses, of course, personal ones that are near and dear to members of this community. And I want to share with you about another loss this week, the loss of a teacher of mine named Paul Steinke.
The Reverend Paul Steinke taught chaplaincy students, almost exclusively clergy students, at NYU Langone Hospital and Bellevue Hospital in New York City. In the summer of 2011, while I was a seminary student, I completed a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education at Bellevue, with Paul leading our group. Paul was viewed, in the chaplaincy training world, as one of the very best, and I was eager and excited to learn from him.
Paul was keenly astute. In sessions that were often likened to group therapy where the goal was to better understand ourselves so we could pastor to others better, Paul would sit at the head of a conference room table and doodle on his notepad. Every so often, with tensions sometimes running high and occasional tears flowing, Paul would look up, stop his doodling and ask one simple question or offer one short sentence of wisdom that could change the entire conversation.
Paul wasn’t an outwardly warm fuzzy kind of guy, but his soul ran deep and he could look at you, your whole being, and know that yours did, too. Paul understood what it meant for our presence to matter to others. He knew that less is often more. He taught that our ability to listen is far more important than the words that we might offer.
When analyzing a conversation with a patient, Paul would often ask us, “what’s the music behind the words?” He used the phrase so often that it became somewhat of a group joke, poking fun at him. But there was so much truth to this question Paul would ask, this way of trying to understand what was underneath what was actually said. What was an emotion underlying the words? What was someone not saying yet, but may have been playing in the background ? It was our job in the role as chaplain, pastoring someone, to hear that music, even if perhaps they didn’t hear it themselves.
I have incorporated so much of what I learned from Paul into my rabbinate. As I heard of his death on Tuesday, I was flooded with memories from that summer of long days at Bellevue Hospital. Paul and I didn’t keep in touch much after that summer. My time actively learning from Paul is long in my past, but surely, he is deeply influential in my present. I pray that his memory will forever be a blessing to all who knew and were influenced by him. I know that it will be to me.
