…and he shall provide for his healing. (Exodus 21:19)

One of the frontiers of medicine getting much attention currently is pain control, with pain being treated as a bodily disfunction in itself. The medical world previously focused on diseases, e.g. something wrong with one of our limbs, an organ, or an attack on the body. Pain was just considered “collateral damage”. I would like to just take a step back and consider pain in general. Hashem created the world giving living organisms senses, of which mankind has five. Of these, the one that has the greatest area of sensation is touch. Smell is confined to the nose; hearing to the ears; taste to the mouth; and sight to the eyes. Whereas the sense of touch is not limited to just one place, but exists throughout the body – inside and out – with some parts having greater sensitivity than others.

In general, we understand that the purpose of the sense of touch is to give us an awareness of what is around us. For instance, if a person could not feel, he could put his hand on a red-hot stove and not realize that his hand was being burned! Similarly, one could remain in the cold too long and not realize that his limbs were suffering from frostbite.

I remember that as a small child I would play in the snow for a long time, and when I would return home my hands and feet would start to tingle. My mother A”H would say to me, “Baruch Hashem, everything is working fine!” It was frustrating because when I was outside, I was completely immersed in my fun and was numb to the pain. But now, when the fun was over, I had to pay the price by experiencing pain.

Yet, pain can also get in the way of doing what we would like to do. For instance, a person would like to have a cavity filled; we ask the dentist to put in what I call “nova-pain”. This enables the dentist to not have to deal with a patient who is thrashing around in the chair, which would not let him do the precise work he needs to do.

When we deal with phantom pain, we are dealing with pain that has no understandable source, such as the case of a person who had his leg amputated, yet still feels pain in his toes.

In this week’s parsha Hashem gives permission for doctors to heal with words “verapo yerapeh”. There is a famous idea on healing which is found in the Chasidishe sefarim. In parshas Beshalach, when we speak about healing, it says, “ani Hashem rophecha” (I am Hashem, your healer). There, the letter pey does not have a dot in the middle, and it has a soft sound of phey. In this week’s parsha, the pey has a dot in it, which signifies a strong sounding pey. The Chassidim tell us that when Hashem is the healer, the process can be done in a very subtle way that does not upset the system – hence the soft-sounding phey. Whereas in this week’s parsha when we discuss using a doctor to heal, though Hashem allows the doctor to heal us, the healing process is much more difficult and hard compared to healing from Hashem – hence the harsh sounding pey.

I would like to make the following suggestion: There is an expression, “A pain in the neck”. I believe that this expression is trying to convey that there is pain for no justifiable reason. Part of the purpose of an illness is that Hashem wants us to be uncomfortable. It may very well be that because of the fact that we are uncomfortable, we will therefore reach out to Hashem for healing (and not to a bottle of painkillers). But, in the spiritual sense, the pain is either part of our punishment, or is there to urge us to strive to be better and repent. (This is not to say that there isn’t a place within the Torah’s view for medicine and painkillers.)

I have heard many people say about today’s Covid situation, “it is only a flu”, and “it has become just a ‘pain in the neck.’” I am not going to address that issue, but I would like to make a statement: Even if it is just “a pain in the neck”, it is there to motivate us to become better people. And if we do so, we could merit to have “I am G-d your healer” instead of having to go to the doctor and enduring the hassle included.