Since my diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment, I’ve started finding new meaning in the words of each week’s parsha.
Dementia is grim. It’s been grim since that day in October 2022 when the neurologist at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem told me I have MCI: mild cognitive impairment, a stage of dementia. Since then, there has been an ongoing string of grim events—I’ve been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia and Parkinson’s disease—and signs of my ongoing decline. At 70, my hands constantly shake, and I cry frequently. I can barely remember even recent things, and I’m scared to walk on sidewalks because the cracks keep jumping up to trip me.
I’ve come to accept my declining mental health. I’ve even become a poster child for dementia, giving talks and posting videos and writing on the subject.
But while I was in the waiting room at Hadassah Hospital for the MRI that would reveal that I have this horrible condition, an incredible thing happened. When I walked into the waiting room after changing into a blue gown, I saw two women there, also in blue gowns. I asked them to tell me what they knew of that week’s Torah portion, Balak. “I am not familiar with the weekly Torah portion, so I have made it a practice to find out what the name of it is each week,” I told them. “Wherever I happen to be—on the light rail, in a doctor’s waiting room—I ask those around me to tell me what they know about it.” One of the women shared what she knew of Balak, which she called “an especially magical Torah portion.” During this impromptu study session, the connection between us grew so intense that none of us paid any attention to our surroundings. (There is an audio report of the event on “The MCI Journey” (https://www.itsaresonatingworld.com/mcijourney)—in Hebrew with an English translation beside it—because one of the women was so struck by what happened that she reported it to an Israeli broadcaster, who included the report on her radio show, of which this is a recording.)
I had been asking strangers to tell me about the weekly Torah portion for years. But since I was diagnosed with MCI, I have taken this practice in a new direction: not only learning about the weekly parsha, but appreciating how it connects to my own dementia—and to others on the same journey.
I grew up in a small community in Indiana, in a home that was not observant, but we did feel culturally different as Jews: We had a Hanukkah bush instead of a Christmas tree, for instance, and we used the “Essen and Fressen” cookbook my mom and the local Jewish ladies put together. While attending Indiana University, I learned Hebrew during my junior year abroad, which I spent in Jerusalem. When I returned home, I took my turns learning and reading the weekly Torah portion on Saturday mornings in our Conservative synagogue.
That year studying in Israel created a strong connection, and I later moved to Jerusalem for what would turn out to be a 30-year stay. Serving in the army with other new immigrants, I got very emotional when, on Shabbat evenings, our unit would sing a song from the book of Isaiah—“On your walls Jerusalem I have set watchmen all day and all night”—and then after the meal, we would go out and patrol the walls of Jerusalem. I didn’t have to be Orthodox for that to set in deeply.
That’s when I began asking (religious) people I saw in all kinds of places to tell me a sentence or two about the weekly Torah portion. As a clearly nonreligious person, the usual rules were broken when I would walk up to a Hasid and say: “Parshat Vayetze—can you tell me a sentence or two about it?” And as I did that, I found an amazing result: Quite frequently, it felt as if the person had been waiting for me to ask. Their responses were often immediate, beautiful, and they connected us for the moment—just as they did years later in the hospital waiting room.
Why the weekly portion? For me it’s a rhythm of Jewish life that I resonate with. It’s an unspoken and immediate bond between two complete strangers. It’s completely personal—the people I ask respond from within themselves. And I suppose the simplest reason: I felt good doing it.
Although I attend synagogue periodically and am interested in things Jewish, I’m still mostly nonobservant. However, that encounter in the hospital waiting room inspired me to create deMENSCHia.com, a site where each week I write how the week’s Torah portion refers to dementia in some way. I wanted to learn what guidance the Jewish sources and resources could provide to me as a Jew on the dementia path. Unfortunately, I have not found the people and institutions to whichI’ve turned to be responsive. Dementia is part of the Jewish community, and I feel that it’s important that the community develop ways of relating to it for its members.
Learning each week’s parsha allows me to apply the very basic condition of dementia to the holy words of the Torah. Each week it has been surprisingly easy to read the week’s portion and identify a characteristic of dementia in it. For the most part, a “dementia understanding” of what the Torah says jumps out for the reader who is sensitive to it. An example of this is the parsha Ki Tavo. Just as dementia reduces cognitive capabilities and provides a place for more feelings-based awareness, as I wrote on deMENSCHia.com, so we learn in Ki Tavo:
The study of the Bible is generally considered to be a very mind-intense activity, with reading / analyzing / mindful intention being key elements of learning the Bible and serving God. This serves mind-oriented people very well, but not feeling-oriented people or people whose condition has shifted their ability to relate to the world from mind to feeling as described at Feelingfulness.com. This week’s portion of Ki Tavo opens the Bible and its observance to the feelings and the guts. Deuteronomy 26:16 says that for those living the Now—“on this day”—rather than a broad cognitive view of the world, the learning and the doing of the Bible is through the heart and the soul rather than through the mind. “On this day the Lord your God commands you to do the rules and the ordinances, and to observe and to do them fully with your heart and with your soul.” What a beautiful belief does Torah provide that allows each person to understand the Bible and to act on it from the place that the person is at.
Perhaps the most extreme example of Torah seemingly advancing a brain-based approach turns out to be my favorite portion. When the parsha Ki Tetze is read from a dementia perspective, it stunningly describes the dementia experience, as I wrote:
This week’s portion of Ki Tetze lists one law after another law, what must be done or what must not be done in many situations. My mind couldn’t find even one verse in the portion that it could connect with in its own way, so I stopped looking for how to relate to this portion. Then I opened it again to the start at Deuteronomy 21:10 and the words of the first verse were like magic in describing exactly how I feel with my early-stage dementia condition: “When you go out from where you’re used to being, and things that were normal become very difficult for you, and you face very different challenges than you have ever known before, then if you go into your innermost authentic self you will find there how to make them a beautiful part of you.” May we each be blessed in our challenges and in how we take them with us.
Reading the Torah from a dementia perspective is exactly like asking strangers about the weekly portion: It becomes a rhythm and a pattern of regular life; it creates a bond within the Jewish community by bringing people with dementia into Jewish life and raising the sensitivity of others to people with dementia, and it brings a very personal perspective to the Torah by relating the Torah’s words to the condition that people around us have now.
David Talmor was diagnosed with early-stage dementia in 2022.
