THE LOVING TOUCH

Last Shabbos we attended Hannah’s Bat Mitzvah. What a beautiful child. Eight years ago, it was love at first sight.

Only one episode of reticence ever stood between us. Hannah was all of five when she rushed onto my lap and cuddled for a hug. Instinct prompted me to return the innocent affection. But the specter of untoward intimacy might, in the wrong eyes, come back to haunt me. So, defying every holy impulse, I removed her from my lap, benignly patted her head and wished her a good Shabbos.

Similar episodes vexed me throughout my ministry. Children would charge the bimah, jump up on me, hug my legs. Maybe it was because of my Santa-esque beard and girth. My joyful response was always bridled by knowing that the loving touch of even a teacher or rabbi can, in the mind of some bloodthirsty congregant, smack of suspicion of pedophilia, not healthy intimacy.

Would only that I have the blood test for discerning between the loving touch and one that portends abuse. This I do know: Woe unto us, because the loving touch confirms a child’s angelic affection. Likewise as adults, a spark of unrequited childhood still begs for touch to soothe, validate, connect, allay loneliness, convey love and even heal.

Nearly any rabbi will tell you that lightly stroking a patient’s forehead or holding his hand during the bedside Mi-She-Berach will bring tears of reassurance even to the eyes of the most calloused, hardhearted business magnate.

Not too long ago, I visited in the ICU an “atheist” dying of meningitis, barely conscious. I squeezed his hand and whispered a prayer. The next morning, his wife called to say that he had had a miraculous turnaround. To what did she attribute it? Not to my prayer, but to my touch. I tried to explain to her the Jewish theology of healing in God’s realm, so as not to impute to my hands any miraculous gifts. But, all she knew was my touch, my touch.

I am likely in this world today, chasing my grandchildren around the house, because of the gift of touch:

I spent a random – but nothing being random – Shabbos in Brooklyn, in 1990. I was to have a brief meeting with the Lubavitcher Rebbe. His skin and beard were immaculate ivory, meticulous, belying any notion that he was in his ninetieth year. He spoke briefly to me in Yiddish. They were soothing, comforting words, prophetic in his discernment that this had been the most depressing, disconnected, isolated year of my life – watching reruns of Rhoda at 2:00 every afternoon and Benny Hill at 3:00.

I could barely attend to the words, because all the while he stroked my hand with his pristine hand. Intimates of the Rebbe told me with astonishment that rare are the instances that he reached forth and stroked a petitioner’s hand. There had to be some special significance.

Fifteen years later, thinking back to Hannah cuddling on my lap, I finally awoke to the import of the event. The Rebbe’s words, however empathic and tender, paled in their significance to his prescient understanding that touch alone conveyed what I needed most: connectedness, a loving father and son reunited, a reassurance of no more abandonment, the healing that re-enlivened my synapses with the message that everything would be for the best. Not the end of, but the beginning of, my restitution to wholeness.

Look and see the unimaginable restoration through the gentle stroking of a hand or a tender hug. So much banishment of isolation and validation of presence, even love. A child receiving them from parents alone leaves no room for the legitimate affection he craves from the other “parents” in his life. He needs and deserves more.

And what of the rest of us for whom the still scared, still lonely, still isolated child within yet cries out? Where is our healing touch?