What does it mean to care for the sick—not just medically, but morally and spiritually? 

In this episode of Identity/Crisis, Yehuda Kurtzer invites Sara Labaton, Director of Teaching and Learning at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, to share her essay, Permission and Obligation: A Jewish Paradigm for Care, from the Spring issue of Sources: A Journal of Jewish Ideas. Drawing from personal experience and Jewish texts, Sara explores the complexities of caregiving, and examines the role of doctors, patients, and the community in the healing process. 

A Jewish Paradigm for Caring for the Sick – with Sara Labaton Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, we’re recording on Monday, May 5th, 2025.

One of my all-time favorite rabbinic texts comes from Babylonian Talmud Sota 14a. Rabbi Chama son of Rabbi Chanina asks, what does it mean when the Torah instructs us to follow God? The phrase, “Achare Hashem elokechem telecho.” Rabbi Chama asks, is it actually possible for a human being to follow in the footsteps of the divine presence? He goes on, doesn’t the Torah also tell us that the Lord God is an all-consuming fire? Shouldn’t we keep our distance?

This is playful exegesis. Certainly we know that the instruction to follow God does not mean to follow God literally. For Rabbi Chama, to ask this question, rather, is to invite the opportunity to use the prompt of that text to teach us something, suggest something different about what it means to follow God than what we might think is obvious.

You could imagine in a religious text that Rabbi Chama would want to teach us, maybe the most obvious reading of the text, that following God would demand of us the traditional behaviors of God intoxication. Things like prayer and meditation, loneliness, piety, Torah study. That would be a kind of conventional explanation of following God.

In fact, the text, I think, is designed to invite us to consider that and reject it. Rabbi Chama instead offers us a deeply anthropocentric theology. We are meant not to follow God literally, but to imitate God’s behaviors. And the text provides a list of kindnesses that humans are meant to provide to one another.

As God clothed the naked, as God did for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, so too must we clothe the naked. As God visits the sick, since the Torah describes the moment when God, through God’s messengers, visits Abraham following his own circumcision, so too we should visit the sick and so forth, comforting the mourner and burying the dead.

The text is really subversive. The tradition takes basic behaviors of lovingkindness between people and argues that these are not merely interpersonal obligations. They’re not merely good ethics. Instead, it argues that these are the ways to properly worship God. Maybe there’s an implicit suggestion here that the very dichotomy between ethics and religiosity, between interpersonal ethics and spirituality, that that dichotomy is completely overblown.

I remember back to the first week of the pandemic, this was just over five years ago now, my uncle who was already not doing well suffered a significant setback and was hospitalized in critical condition. I rushed to the hospital to be with him. The hospital was in a panic. I think this was on day two of the lockdown. And the staff were really uncomfortable with my just being there. I had no function visiting my uncle. He was in a coma. I just wanted to sit near him, say a little tehillim, some Psalms, talk to him a little bit. But all I can remember around me in that emergency room was fear and anxiety. The nurses let me stay for a few minutes and then quickly rushed me out.

He passed away a couple days later and his funeral was anxious as well. Only 10 people allowed at the cemetery. A rushed service, all of us standing far apart from one another. And I remember the next anxious few months. Surely you do as well. Our family was huddled together in our home, feeling warm and safe, but haunted, for months by the sounds of constant sirens. Frequently throughout that time, I thought about how many people were dying alone, unvisited. How many couldn’t be buried by their loved ones. How many mourners couldn’t properly be comforted by their friends.

According to the Talmud, that experience was not merely a human tragedy, a loss of the opportunity to do acts of kindness or moments of ethics. According to the Tomlid, that experience was a godless one. These were some of the thoughts swirling in my head, some about our tradition, some about what it means to be in the presence of those who are sick.

These are some of the ideas I was thinking about when I read my colleague, Dr. Sara Labaton’s magnificent new essay in the latest issue of our journal, Sources. Sara’s essay is an original work of Jewish thought on how we and the medical community should think about the ethics of care. It’s an essay informed by her experience, sitting alongside her father and accompanying him during his prolonged illness, but it’s powered by her careful reading of Jewish sources. In Sarah’s hands, Rabbi Chama’s unification of the spiritual and the ethical finds new and urgent expression. It’s an essay that deserves wider attention, and I’ve offered her this platform today to share her essay with you.

And I want to dedicate this episode to a dear friend who’s also a podcast listener whose health I pray for every day, who I can’t visit in person as often as I would like to, but who I think about all the time.

I think moments of illness are times for us to confront all of the fear, all of the discomfort that accompanies these types of experiences, those are experienced by others, and to invite us into a place where we can merge the ethics, the ethical and the spiritual. May we merit caring for our loved ones with the ethics that Sara offers here. May all of our sick find healing and full recoveries. Here is Sara.

Sara: Permission and Obligation: A Jewish Paradigm for Care, in memory of Dr. Warren Enker.

During 15 years of living with cancer, my father accessed the best that modern medicine had to offer. Multiple surgeries, long courses of chemotherapies, and radiation lengthened his life and gave us hope. Throughout his illness, my father developed relationships with remarkable physicians whose care, in the sense of social and interpersonal administration, went beyond the confines of researching and treating his cancer.

Over these years, however, my family also witnessed a medical system that paid scant attention to care. It was painfully hard to find people who could communicate honestly but compassionately about the impact of disease and eventually about death. There were doctors who offered short-term fixes without consideration of my father’s pain and quality of life, and other doctors whose casual references to his dying hit like blunt force trauma.

Similarly, even those of us intimately connected to my father as family members and friends said things and did things that were at best awkward and at worst profoundly insensitive. It turns out that it is not simple to care for those who are sick, whether you are in the profession of providing medical care or you are someone whose care is motivated by personal love and concern. Illness is a stark reminder of the frailty and unpredictability of our bodies, our mortality, and the lack of control we exercise over our lives. This naturally elicits a range of emotions, including discomfort, disgust, sadness, and anger from those who encounter the patient clinically or personally.

It bears mentioning that because the contemporary medical landscape allows for the siloing of those who are sick in sterile and out-of-the-way environs like hospitals, sickness itself is alien to those of us who do not encounter it regularly. The reality of sickness and what it represents therefore triggers complicated emotional reactions that can interfere with caring for those who are sick.

Likewise, although we live at a time that has brought forth awesome and life-saving medical interventions, illness and care are both subject to limiting phenomena, including the corporatization of medicine, the Byzantine and punishing bureaucracy of health insurance, the larger epidemic of loneliness, and the ways in which medicine has become politicized.

The result is widespread mistrust or confusion for those personally connected with the patient and fatigue or even callousness among medical professionals. I wrote this piece to acknowledge how complicated it is to care for sick people and simultaneously to push those of us within the medical community and without to think more deeply about caring for them.

I believe that the classical Jewish tradition, when read and applied in a particular way, is a provocative resource for considering our moral obligations in the face of illness. I’m especially interested in how the medieval Jewish scholars, Maimonides and Nachmanides, reimagined what they likely regarded as obsolete rabbinic traditions about healing, while embracing the rabbi’s view of the obligation to visit the sick. In doing so, I believe that they created compelling models of caring for the sick that still hold today, even though our medical knowledge and technology have advanced far beyond what was available when they were writing.

Several rabbinic texts grapple with the tension between the idea found in various biblical texts that God is responsible for inflicting illness and the reality that people go to doctors for healing. If God is the source of bodily malfunction, it follows that the power of healing belongs to God and not to humans. Within that model, it would seem that because medical care inappropriately intervenes with the divine will, people should not seek out doctors and doctors should not practice their craft.

But the rabbis also recognize that medical care exists and the rabbinic tradition mediates the tension between these ideas in different ways. One well-known rabbinic teaching does so by deploying the language of permission in formulating an approach towards healing. The Torah outlines what should happen when a victim recovers from an assailant’s assault. “If he then gets up and walks outdoors upon his staff, the assailant shall go unpunished, except that he must pay for the loss of his time and heal he shall heal.” (Exodus 21:19.)

The rabbis of the Talmud read this verse as mandating that an assailant must pay for both the victim’s lost wages and for their medical care. (Bava Kama 85a.) The school of Rabbi Yishmael infers from the double language of healing, “Heal, he shall heal,” that doctors have permission to perform acts of healing.

The idea of permission to heal returns in Berakhot 60a, where the Talmud debates the question of whether bloodletting requires a blessing. As Rav Acha said, “May it be Your will, O Lord my God, that this enterprise be for healing and that You should heal me. As You are a faithful God of healing and Your healing is truth.” Because it is not the way of people to heal, i.e. healing is a divine and not a human enterprise, but they have become accustomed to trying to heal through medical interventions. Abaye says, one should not say this, as the school of Rabbi Yishmael taught, “And heal, he shall heal.” From here, permission is granted to a doctor to heal.

In this passage, the Talmud evinces two perspectives. Rav Acha suggests that ideally, people should refrain from seeking and administering medical care. But given that they do so anyway, it is proper to recite a prayer asking God to heal the patient through the operation that follows. Abaye, alternatively, cites the school of Rabbi Yishmael’s interpretation of Exodus 21:19 to argue that God permits healing and that Rav Acha’s ambivalence and prayer are consequently unwarranted.

Even Abaye, though, who views healing as a legitimate practice, assumes that it is necessary to get permission to heal and locates that permission in a technical piece of biblical exegesis. In the medieval period, Rabbinic discomfort with medicine finds expression in thinkers like Abraham Ibn Ezra, the 12th century Spanish biblical commentator, who also characterizes Exodus 21:19 as a sign that God gave doctors permission to heal.

Distinctively, he limits this permission to the healing of external, visible injuries. He considers internal injuries those with no discernible cause to be for God and not doctors to heal. Ibn Ezra’s resistance towards medical healing also manifests in his comment to Exodus 15:26, where God identifies as “rof’echa,” your doctor, and promises not to inflict Israel with the diseases of Egypt if they observe the divine commandments. As Ibn Ezra explains, God can accomplish supernatural feats that defy medicine, a phenomenon the Israelites themselves have already witnessed.

Maimonides, the celebrated 12th century philosopher, codifier of Jewish law, community leader, and doctor, diverges sharply from this traditional ambivalence towards medical care. In his commentary to the Mishnah, Maimonides insists, “It is an obligation from the Torah for the doctor to heal the sick of Israel. And behold, this is in the category of what the rabbis say in their explanation of the biblical phrase, you shall return to him from Deuteronomy 22 to include his body.”

Here, Maimonides draws on the rabbinic notion found in the Talmud that saving someone who is drowning or under attack falls under the legal requirement to return a lost object, as it is akin to returning to them their life or wellbeing, which was almost lost. In extending this requirement to include medical care, Maimonides turns healing into an obligation.

Nachmanides, the 13th century Spanish exegete, mystic, halachist, and doctor, adopts Maimonides’ stance, but with a significant twist. He writes in Torah Ha’adam, the Torah of the human, a treatise on mourning, that healing is a reshut de mitzvah, a permission for obligation, a seemingly paradoxical legal category of his own creation.

Nachmanides explains that the permission to heal is necessary to alleviate doctors’ anxieties that their attempts to heal might actually be harmful, while the obligation to heal is justified by verses like, “Love Your Neighbor as Yourself,” from Leviticus 19:18, and rabbinic categories such as Pikuach Nefesh, the notion that saving a life supersedes nearly every other commandment. Indeed, he casts doctors who refuse to heal as guilty of shedding blood.

Thus, Nachmanilis diverges from prior traditions in three ways. First, he assigns the practice of healing to a new legal category, permission for obligation. Combining the Talmudic notion that doctors require permission with a Maimonidean notion that doctors are obligated to heal. Second, he provides a different reason why divine permission is necessary for healing, namely that it serves as theological insurance for medical malpractice. This is far from the notion that the domain of sickness and health belong to God alone. Finally, he affirms that healing is obligatory because of the moral principles of loving one’s neighbor as oneself, the ultimate value of saving human life, and the injunction against taking a life.

Permission, obligation, and permission for obligation constitute three different paradigms for understanding healing that continue to influence Jewish thinking about medical care. When it comes to the paradigm of permission, human healing is not presented as an obvious or automatic response to illness, and no singular moral force attaches to it.

One position in Berakhot 60A permits bloodletting because it has become a social convention and only with the incorporation of a blessing, while the other position permits such medical care only because of a redundant term for healing in the Torah. The language of permission appears in some Haredi Jewish communities today where it is common for patients to seek a rabbinic imprimatur for various medical procedures.

More commonly, the belief that doctors and medicine function as divine instruments fits this paradigm as well. In this context, some argue that while it is certainly permitted to consult with doctors and engage with medicine, it is God’s will and God’s will alone that is decisive when it comes to the healing of the patient.

Further, for certain segments of society, the notion that the medical establishment infringes on people’s freedom entails a belief that their own permission, not God’s, is necessary for doctors to practice. The paradigm of permission assumes that doctors are somewhat hubristic in interrupting the divinely or naturally dictated course of events. In transforming healing from something permitted to something obligatory, Maimonides changes the moral and theological stakes of medicine in accordance with his broader philosophical outlook.

For Maimonides, doctors are potential lifesavers, and their obligation to provide medical care stems from a greater obligation to help someone whose life is in danger. Because Maimonides treats illness as part of the natural cycle of life in the world and advances a more naturalistic conception of divine providence, it stands to reason that he views doctors as operating independently of God. Even when Maimonides expresses the position that virtuous people can avoid misfortune through their knowledge of God, many scholars read this non-literally and non-miraculously, arguing that Maimonides’ God does not manipulate a person’s cellular makeup and inflict them with disease because of their misdeeds or lack of virtue.

This approach to both illness and healing is one that resonates for many liberal Jews today. And indeed, it resonated most strongly for me over the course of my father’s illness. I never blamed God for his cancer, but I also never thanked God for successful surgeries or beseeched God to save my father. As a pulpit rabbi, my father would get questions from his dismayed congregants of, why you? Why is God making you endure this?

In response, he would say, why not me? His cancer originated not with a divine choice, but with an errant cell. This does not mean that he was stoic or fatalistic, but that his emotional and intellectual efforts were directed not entirely to God, but to getting the most effective medical treatment available.

Nachmanides’ paradigm of permission for obligation subtly opens new dimensions when it comes to healing. First, it takes the anxieties of doctors seriously, a position that is consistent with Nachmanides’ understanding of how medicine emerged as a divinely sanctioned enterprise.

In his commentary to the Torah, Nachmanides presents the ideal state as one where a relationship between Israel and the divine precludes a need for doctors. Leviticus 26:11. In this utopia, God inflicts and heals according to Israel’s conformity with the divine will. However, once Israel accustoms itself to going to doctors, and following medical regimens, God retracts from actively intervening in Israel’s affairs and lets nature, rather than sin or virtue, take its course. In this vision, therefore, it is not just the case that doctors cure and save in a godlike fashion, but also that they assume the role previously occupied by God.

This highlights the awesome consequences of their work, and why they require, or feel they require, permission to heal. The permission, and Nachmanides permission for obligation, therefore, is a function of social convention and divine retraction. Once patients opt into medical care, the doctors are permitted to treat them without concerns about either accidentally killing them or arrogating to themselves divine powers impeding their work.

Nachmanides combines this understanding of the doctor’s position with the reality that once a patient steps through their door, they are morally obligated to treat them. It is here that Nachmanides takes the needs of the patient seriously. In couching healing, not only as saving a life, pikuach nefesh, but as loving one’s neighbor as oneself, Nachmanides centers the social, emotional, and physical needs and preferences of the patient.

Integrating the permission to heal with the obligation to heal reminds doctors that their ability and mandate to heal are not absolute, but rather require some type of limitation, whether it derives from God or from the patient. In both Torat Ha’adam and his biblical commentary, Nachmanides profoundly humanizes both the doctor and the patient.

While ideally, an intimate relationship with God might preclude the need for doctors, Nachmanides seems to understand that in the normative world, when confronted with sickness, bodily dysfunction, and pain, some people, perhaps most, would prefer to engage with the concrete ministrations of doctors and not with God.

While medical healing has elicited a range of attitudes among Jewish thinkers, the requirement to offer material and social support to those who are ill has remained fixed. The Mitzvah of Bikkur Cholim, visiting the sick, has laid the groundwork for cadres of volunteers and robust Jewish charitable organizations, all devoted to caring for the sick.

Moreover, in a 2002 piece, The Sick Visit (Bikkur Ḥolim): A Model for Medical Humanism, Dr. Rachel Katz-Sidlow, an expert in medical education, demonstrates how the practice of B’chor Cholim can help cultivate stronger care and more of a patient-centered approach among doctors whose training and experiences sometimes lead to diminished compassion in their relationships with patients.

Rabbinic literature is preoccupied with Bikkur Cholim, going so far as to include it in the short list of activities now recited in the daily liturgy that merit reward in this world and the next (Shabbat 127a). Rabbinic laws and narratives about Bikkur Cholim express three broad values that should guide such visits: humility, empathy, and the inherent dignity of those who are ill.

According to the Talmud, visiting the sick has no fixed measure (Nedarim 39b). While the phrase “no fixed measure” is understood by the rabbis in a few different ways, I am particularly compelled by explanations that emphasize the need for humility in the context of visiting the sick. For example, one interpretation is that even the older or greater should visit the younger or lesser, requiring visits to sick people with no regard for age or social status, even when that involves a seeming demotion of one’s or the awkwardness of interacting with those outside one’s natural social circles. It recalls the Midrash of God visiting Abraham after the latter’s circumcision, Sota 14a, and in doing so leaves no question as to the limitlessness of this requirement.

An alternative explanation is that the limitlessness of Bikkur Cholim might require a person to make as many as 100 visits in a day. This not only exemplifies the extreme devotion the rabbis want people to demonstrate to those who are ill, but also demands this devotion at the expense of one’s own comfort and convenience. Visitors must subjugate themselves to sick people.

When Maimonides codifies Bikkur Cholim, he integrates these two explanations and includes the provision that whoever adds to this is to be praised, only that they should not be a burden, highlighting the importance of placing the emotional and physical sensitivities of the patient front and center. Maimonides includes this obligation with other acts of loving kindness, gemilut hasadim, all of which he notes are done with one’s body.

The insistence on physically showing up to do this work and be present is another means of cultivating humility in the visitor. A corollary to the idea of humility is that of empathy or treating the sick as one would want to be treated. Indeed, Maimonides locates the biblical source for Bikkur Cholim, along with the other delineated acts of loving kindness in the verse, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” Leviticus 19:18, which he interprets as, all things that you would like others to do for you, you should do for your fellow.

More pointedly, in a Midrash found in Ecclesiastes Rabbah, the rabbis rewrite a story from the Book of Isaiah to offer a lesson in empathy to none other than God and God’s prophet. In the biblical version, the prophet Isaiah brings the stricken King Hezekiah news of his impending death, along with instructions to get his affairs in order, to which the latter prays and cries in response (Isaiah 38:1-2). In the Midrash, however, Hezekiah retorts. Isaiah, customarily a man who goes to visit the sick, says to him, “‘From heaven should compassion be upon you.’ And a doctor comes to his side and says to him, ‘This thing eat, but that thing do not eat. Drink this, but do not drink that.’ But even if he, the doctor, sees that the patient is near death, he does not say, set your affairs in order, lest this weaken his resolve. And you are telling me, set your affairs in order, for you are dying and will not live.”

If we remember that it was God who sent Isaiah with this message, the Midrash is not only subverting the message of the Bible, but critiquing divine communication, asking God that bad news be delivered more gently. God’s bedside manner, it would seem, leaves something to be desired. And doctors should learn from this episode how not to tell their patients that they are dying.

Finally, the texts of Bikkur Cholim illuminate the inherent dignity of the ill. In Shabbat 12b, Rabbi Elazar is described as sometimes blessing the sick in Hebrew and sometimes blessing them in Aramaic. The latter is surprising as it contravenes the rabbinic dictate not to petition for one’s needs in Aramaic because the ministering angels do not understand the language.

But the Talmud justifies Rabbi Elazar’s practice by noting that the Divine Presence itself dwells with the sick and does understand Aramaic. In the same passage and for the same reason, the Talmud prohibits visitors from sitting on the sickbed, but rather explains they must wrap themselves about and sit in front of the sick person, for the Divine Presence is above an invalid’s pillow, as it is said, “The Lord supports him upon the couch of languishing” (Psalms 41:3).

The notion that the presence of God is with the sick and must shape our interactions with them is remarkable when we consider the relative lack of hygiene or sterility in the ancient world. In Nedarim 41a, the Talmud prohibits visiting people with certain types of infirmities, including those with intestinal diseases who might have to relieve themselves in front of the visitor, which would cause them embarrassment. Not visiting people with such illnesses is thus considered by the rabbis to be more respectful of their dignity than visiting.

The divine presence does not, however, stay away from those who are frail, soiled, or undressed. Rather than divesting the patient of dignity, the fact of illness invites the divine presence itself into the room and onto the bed with a sick person, reinforcing their intrinsic dignity and worth.

In prioritizing Bikkur Cholim, the rabbis recognize that illness brings loneliness and stigma in its wake. It is easy to forget about those who are isolated at home or in hospitals. And it is also easy to pretend that the potential awkwardness of the visit is reason not to undertake it. The detailed guidelines of Bikkur Cholim are tools meant to bring those who are sick from the margins and into the community.

On the day my parents received the news of my father’s diagnosis, one of his friends tracked him down and said, both lovingly and humorously, “This is a fine mess you’ve gotten us into.” With the first person plural pronoun “us,” this friend signaled that he would be physically and emotionally present for my father in his illness, which he was, showing up not only to our house, but to nearly every surgery and chemotherapy appointment until the day my father died.

Two types of caring: Studying the historical development of Jewish teachings about illness offers us a vocabulary to talk about ethics and care in the context of medicine. The language of permission, obligation, and permission for obligation lets us consider the nuances of providing and receiving medical care, even though medicine has changed so much since these texts were written.

I want to close with one last consideration. Can a doctor’s care for a patient itself be an act of Bikkur Cholim? Maimonides draws a line between the obligation to medically heal and the obligation to emotionally support the patient, indicating that they are similar, but not the same. Nachmanides, however, links his idea of permission for obligation to loving one’s neighbor, which is the proof text Maimonides deploys for Bikkur Cholim.

To my mind, this connection creates a model of medical care that more fully integrates the values of Bikkur Cholim in its instantiation. We might say that once we choose to participate in the medical enterprise, doctors are not simply obligated to heal, but must undertake healing with the additional moral and interpersonal dimensions reflected in the texts of Bikkur Cholim.

When healing and Bikkur Cholim are closely linked, the values of humility, empathy, and the dignity of those who are ill become as relevant to the medical providers as they are to the visitors in their interactions with a person who is sick. In this model of healing, medicine must be integrated with social and emotional support for it to be permitted.

My reading of Nachmanides is in line with the writings of contemporary care ethicist, Nel Noddings, who notes in her book, Caring, “It is the recognition of and longing for relatedness that formed the foundation of our ethic and the joy that accompanies fulfillment of our caring enhances our commitment to the ethical ideal that sustains us as the one caring.”

For a doctor to not only discharge their obligation to heal, but to do so with care, they need to establish and acknowledge a relationship with a patient. Nachmanides’ view is also echoed by Dr. Atul Gawande in his book, Being Mortal. If to be human is to be limited, then the role of caring professions and institutions, from surgeons to nursing homes, ought to be aiding people in their struggle with those limits. Sometimes we can offer a cure, sometimes only a salve, sometimes not even that.

But whatever we can offer, our interventions and the risks and sacrifices they entail, are justified only if they serve the larger aims of a person’s life. When we forget that, the suffering we inflict can be barbaric. When we remember it, the good we do can be breathtaking.

I want close by sharing a story from my father’s illness that illustrates the significance of Nachmanides’ view. From the beginning of my father’s diagnosis, Dr. Warren Enker, his surgeon, served as my parents’ through multiple procedures and treatments, both because of his medical expertise and because of the care he consistently manifested.

When my father’s cancer spread to a part of the body, outside Dr. Enker’s area of expertise, he referred my parents to a surgeon friend of his at a different hospital. In the early morning of the ensuing surgery, Dr. Enker unexpectedly strode into the operating room dressed in his scrubs with permission in hand to be present throughout the surgery to literally and proverbially hold my father’s hands.

My father said afterward that he had felt bereft upon arriving at the hospital, knowing that Dr. Enker would not be performing the surgery, and when he then saw Dr. Enker, it almost felt miraculous. Dr. Enker’s presence exemplified Nachmanides’ paradigm of care, a doctor simultaneously engaged in both healing and Bikkur Cholim. May Dr. Enker’s memory inspire us towards deeper care for those who are sick, vulnerable, or lonely. Thank you.