Spiritual care
The spiritual care of Haverut provides various sources of spiritual care, according to the needs of the patient, the family and the medical staff, whether in an individual meeting or in a group meeting.
The spiritual cares help patients and their families connect to the sources of power, to the meaning of life and to renewal through the use of wind resources. The connection to the spirit is done in a variety of tools, such as breathing and relaxation techniques, personal prayer, music, creativity and joint study, with a direct and gentle view of the fear of extinction and the challenging coping with weakness, old age and disease.
The spiritual cares are also a support resource for the department’s staff, providing inspiration, guidance and assistance in coping with the constant erosion. This is in accordance with the needs and wishes of the staff, by connecting sources of inspiration, meaningful dialogue and joint action.
The spiritual cares of Haverut hold regular meetings with patients in the departments:
• Ziv Hospital in Safed – dialysis and Hematology
• Hadassah Hospital, Mount Scopus – Internal Day Hospitalization and Hematology Day Hospitalization
Healing music
Music is a universal nonverbal language that allows each person to connect to sources of power, creating a space of quiet and relaxation. In the course of coping with suffering, difficulty and illness, there is a need to create this space that enables the family members, the staff of the therapist and the patients to be in contact and meaningful contact with each other.
In Haverut, we develop the healing melody and deepen the knowledge about the connection between music, spirit and medicine. This creates the healing musician – who constantly trains in the development of attention, in the tuning of the heart and the spirit, and in the expression and playing. Professional musicians meet through singing with patients and healers who are in challenging and painful times in their lives.
For the past five years, Haverut has been running the “Nigun Haverut” project in hospitals throughout the country. The musicians receive guidance from a spiritual care and thus develop great sensitivity to the patient and the medical environment to which they enter. The music has a wide repertoire of genres that suit everyone – Jews, Arabs, religious and secular – Arabic songs, Hasidic melodies, foreign rock songs and Israeli songs.
The healing musicians are a significant resource for all participants in the healing process – patients, family members and medical staff. The melody is sometimes performed individually and sometimes in a group form (for example, for a medical staff in a particular department).
The healing musicians of Haverut operate in the hospitals:
Hadassah Ein Karem – Sharett Institute
• Hadassah Mount Scopus – CF department, rehabilitation and hospice
• Ziv Hospital in Tzfat – in the dialysis, hematology, oncology and pediatric departments
Connect and create
Bringing the spirit of the arts into the medical center creates a space of inspiration, creativity and strength. When a sick person encounters himself as a creator, he gets an opportunity to connect with his internal healing powers and use them as a resource in dealing with his illness. Empowering the patient strengthens his coping with illness and hospitalization. For the staff, this is an opportunity to meet the patient as a whole person, unique and creative, and not as a faceless medical story and a personal name.
In the past 10 years, Haverut has been running an annual program in which medical, nursing and art students are chosen from among the many who apply for the program. The students hold regular two-to-four-hour weekly sessions with patients in the various departments of the hospitals, and receive guidance from educational coordinator who directs them. They create a meaningful and long-term relationship with the patients through conversation and joint creation of art, and together express their skills, connect to the sources of power within them and receive spiritual, social and emotional reinforcement.
The meetings are usually held in the common public space that exists in the department and according to the instructions of the medical staff in the department. In some cases, depending on the patient’s condition, the activity takes place at his bedside.
The program’s students come from all sectors, religions and nationalities, as well as the patients and their families. Through the joint work, a respectful connection and dialogue is created between people from all the groups that make up Israeli society. The program strengthens the ties between the medical center and the community that surrounds it, and enables the creation of a broad base of creative and meaningful social work.
The students in the program are art students from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, medical students from the Hebrew University and Bar-Ilan University’s Faculty of Medicine in Safed, students from Safed College, and the Oman College -Visual art studies center for the ultra-Orthodox public.
The project takes place in hospitals:
• Hadassah Ein Karem – pediatric wards, pediatric surgery, pediatric hemato-oncology, complications of pregnancy, dialysis, oncology day hospitalization, hematology day hospitalization
• Hadassah Mount Scopus – Rehabilitation, CF, hematology, pregnancy complications, internal medicine and children
• Ziv Hospital in Safed – oncology, dialysis, children, neuro-geriatrics, pregnancy complications, hematology.
• The Jerusalem Center for Mental Health – Kfar Shaul.
Prescriptions for life
A unique project aimed at providing creative tools for patients and their families during hospitalization and discharge from a hospital and returning to normal life at home.
As part of the project, the patients receive, during their hospitalization, a creative and training kit that provides tools for connecting to the healthy source of each person, and to continue the healing process even after discharge from the hospital.
The main idea behind the project is to provide tools of creativity and inspiration that patients can use even when there are no ‘agents’ of Haverut- such as students, musicians, etc.
Through the kit, the patients and their families learn to find the sources of the work themselves and thus can use them both during long hospitalization and at home after discharge from the hospital.
Workshops for medical staff
Nursing and medical teams escorting people coping with life-threatening chronic diseases are exposed to very high levels of distress. The daily suffering with which they meet affects their mental well-being and may lead many to severe grinding conditions, also called “Fatigue of compassion.” A condition that causes numbness, apathy, lack of meaning, depression and more.
The field of treatment, accompanying patients and providing medical and nursing services is a very challenging and debilitating field. The therapists invest daily attention, creativity, professionalism and compassion for the patient and his or her family.
In recent years, awareness of this problem has increased and senior officials are trying to find solutions to the problem. haverut believes in the deep egalitarian concept that embodies the spirit of man as present in all being and the fact that man is part of a great picture as a deep concept that allows for personal transformation and work out of pleasantness and quiet.
Haverut offers unique workshops for the medical teams, providing strength and support to the staff through the spiritual world – learning, music and art. These workshops are based on a unique model that includes in-depth work on meaning and compassion, empathy, attentiveness and high self-awareness, connection to the sublime, testimony to the story of human life and the ability to connect prayer and blessing.
Learning is an experiential workshop and is done through the resources of art, music, personal writing, movement, breathing, reflective conversation, reading and learning. In workshops the participants experience the use of language that empowers each person to himself and his spirit. Use tools from the spiritual world to understand the life of the therapist, and practice group spiritual training.
Haverut has extensive experience and long-term success of working with professional teams dealing with stress and stress in the medical system. Past workshops – workshops for the Palliative Unit staff at Sheba Medical Center, the school staff of the pediatric departments in Hadassah, the team of nurses in the Hematology Day Department at Hadassah Ein Kerem, etc.
