Long before Nancy Epstein '06 began studies at RRC, she had accumulated a wealth of Jewish experience, but had built her career in health policy. She had grown up in the Reform movement and had lived in Israel for almost three years. She had studied at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and lived on a kibbutz. And she had worked as a counselor for the National Federation of Temple Youth and in the prime minister's office.
But then, backed by a master's degree in public health, Epstein spent the next 25 years working in public-health education, policy and advocacy. She was staff director of the Texas Senate Committee on Hunger and Nutrition, coordinated statewide indigent health-care efforts, lobbied for the disability community and directed health policy and programs in Washington, DC. Her expansive, original concept of what it means to achieve health led Epstein to rabbinical study.
"I wanted to deepen my understanding of what it was to be whole and healthy in the world, in communities, in families, individually," she says. "We talk in public health about social determinants of health. Often that inquiry focuses on socioeconomic status, on the availability of housing and transportation. I'd like to focus more on the availability of love, compassion, caring, respect and dignity, and on how those affect one's ability to be shleymah-to be complete and fulfilled-and to live with a sense of well-being."
In fact, Epstein hasn't left the public health field. After graduating from RRC, she continued to teach at Drexel University, and is actively involved in community health issues. At RRC she specialized in geriatric chaplaincy, and she found it a perfect complement to her work in policy. "Working in policy, I rarely got to meet the people who benefited from changes in the law, administrative policies, new appropriations and programs. I was really missing the human connection."
Chaplaincy also brought home for Epstein an essential question: "Recognizing that each of us is mortal, how do we live the holiest lives we can while we're here?"
Some of her most formative experiences have related directly to the issue of mortality. At about 2 a.m. one night in the acute-care hospital where she trained early on while at RRC, she was called to the room of an elderly Jewish man who was, she recalls, clearly at the end of his life. She began to recite the vidui, the confession, on his behalf. "I had my hand on his shoulder and the text in my other hand, and then came his final breath, a small shifting, as if he really were hearing the prayer. We talk about the shma being the last words on your lips, as you're dying. As I was speaking, I said the shma during his last breath. That felt extraordinary.
"For me, rabbinical school was not about having another job, another career; it was about exploring myself, studying and tapping into the tremendous depths of our texts and our traditions, and being part of the wonderful community at RRC. All of that is in the hope that I can contribute to the world, to do my part to raise us all up."
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