Rachel Naomi Remen attributes her book My Grandfather's Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging to the origin of her quest for wholeness -- childhood interactions with her grandfather. He was a scholar of the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical texts. Although she was seven when he died, Remen remembers how profoundly he challenged her thinking. He taught her to look for some element of the divine in every situation. By looking continuously, Remen has never come up short.
When she was fifteen, Remen was diagnosed with Chrone's Disease. Her life has been largely comprised of struggling with physical suffering and helping other people cope with theirs. She became a doctor, working in a cancer ward for years. Even in this sterile environment of statistics and measurements, Remen kept looking for the divine and found it. In this book she offers a record of realizations and encounters with love which have transformed her own relationship to suffering and to herself.
Remen tells story after story of people she has witnessed walk through difficult times, some large and some seemingly insignificant. For example, there's a kid who is persuaded to give away many of his toys and realizes that he's much happier with a few prized possessions for which to care. Then there's a woman who received a double mastectomy and learns, through her husband, what is beautiful about her. Throughout all these tales, Remen is able to deftly elicit the communal element of healing. She doesn't focus upon physical healing because often that's not possible. She looks to how people's experience changes based upon their acceptance of self and others, with a constant undercurrent of the transformative power of community engagement.
