I’ve spent most of my week thinking about just two words from the Torah, verapo verapei, ‘be sure to heal.’ They’re accompanied in my mind by sentences from Rachel Clarke’s Breathtaking – Inside the NHS in a time of pandemic:

‘There is almost no situation that cannot be made better by someone reaching out, with love and tenderness…’

That’s what she’s seen among nurses, volunteers, doctors, drivers, despite the unrelenting daily pressures they face month upon month:

‘I fear…the public is unaware of how exhausted, stunned – shell-shocked even – many NHS staff and care workers remain.’

One has only to read the papers, pretty much any day, to understand how true both these sentences are. I therefore write with admiration, concern, respect, and also shame at recognising from the side-lines what is being done for us by so many whom we can never adequately appreciate or repay.

The Torah’s words call out in three distinct ways:

First, ‘be sure to heal’ requires anyone who’s injured others to pay for their care. Rabbinic tradition takes this to include medical costs, time off work, loss of future earnings, pain and humiliation. In all but the nastiest of cases no one has deliberately made someone else get Covid. So one could say that no one in particular has the duty to heal.

It’s just this which makes the NHS so profoundly moral, so right. Society, we, collectively take responsibility for our injured and our ill. We aren’t, and can’t all be, nurses or doctors. But we can, and must, enable them to care. Underfunding, (by more than one political party), shortages of personnel, lack of beds, especially in ITU: this is not what the Torah teaches when it says, ‘be sure to heal’. Nor does it mean that so many on whom we are so dependent should remain so badly paid.

Second, verapo verapei is a double verb, ‘heal, heal;’ it’s the most emphatic form Hebrew has. Rabbinic tradition often ascribes to each word of such doublings its own specific meaning. This leads me to almost everything I’m reading and hearing about those on the front line now. They’re striving to heal and heal.

They’re trying to use the best knowledge, subtlest skill, most careful monitoring and the latest almost up-to-the-minute research to save lives, care and, if possible, cure. Yet many are giving something else too: intuition, imagination, love.

Rachel Clarke describes a lady who knits tiny hearts and gives them to the hospital. Mandi, a nurse, knows exactly what to do with them. She puts them in pairs: one she conveys to an anxious family, the other she puts by their loved one’s bed. Since the family can’t visit, she shows them that heart via video:

In this new hospital world of absence and barriers, the hearts speak of love, of kindness and compassion…

This is a double devotion: skill and soul at once.

Third, since they’re written without vowels, the Torah’s words can be pronounced in different ways. Verapo verapei can be (mis-) read as verofei verapei. It’s a sleight of hand Hasidic teachers often practise. Taken this way, the words mean ‘the healer shall be healed.’

A picture in today’s Guardian shows a doctor who’s volunteered to work in ITU. She’s watching the birds, a tiny moment of relief. What will bring restoration to those who’ve struggled so hard to save lives, yet attended on much dying? Who heals the healers?

Some healing is beyond human capacity. The Torah says, ‘I am God, your healer.’ To many, healing may only come slowly, perhaps through nature and music, both sacred and soothing – if only they get time to breathe them in.

But healing must also come from us, at the very least through acknowledgement and appreciation. Rachel Remen, whose life is devoted to caring for carers, writes that ‘medicine is as close to love as it is to science.’ Some of that love needs to come from each of us.

Our older dog, Mitzpah, has aged greatly during lockdown. The puppy, who does her best to provoke him, succeeds in infusing him with a few minutes of daily zest. But often he follows me round, even more than he used to, staring up with that baleful look which one can’t help thinking dogs secretly perfect in the mirror. But he’s saying something different from ‘Give me another biscuit,’ or at least that’s what I hear. He’s asking, ‘Will you still look after me, will you still love me, now I can’t make the long walks, now I’m ninety-four?’

The question of truth is, rightly, at the forefront of public debate: is everything only ‘my truth’ or ‘your truth’? Are so-called ‘facts’ merely subjective, the way we choose, and try to make others choose, to see them? Or is there such a thing as empirically verifiable data which demands our respect?

But there’s another aspect of ‘truth’ which troubles me no less deeply: being true. ‘True’ in this sense translates into Hebrew not as emet, but as ne’eman, ‘faithful’; or, as my grandfather would say in German, not as wahr, but as treu. It’s how Matthew Arnold uses the word in Dover Beach:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain…

Being true to one another, he felt as he listened to the retreating tide symbolising faith’s ‘long, withdrawing roar’, is all we have on this earth.

As I write, a conversation returns to my mind, still filling me ten years later with a residue of the shame I felt at the time. It was only a two-minute exchange in the street about a mutual friend: ‘He thinks you’ve forgotten him now he’s not well.’

Since then, those words have been an ear-worm in my conscience. They’re my measure of what ne’eman means: faithful, trustworthy, present through thick and thin. I meet people who’re like that; I’m aware of more of them since lockdown has brought to the fore the importance of this kind of ‘truth’: people who keep in touch with everyone they know, who try to forget no one, who treat nobody, ever, as second class.

This is what it means to be human. I recently attended a conference about friendship in different faiths. Much of it left me unmoved because in the end all the theology comes down to this: we hold each other’s humanity in trust.

It’s a responsibility and privilege which goes beyond those we know already. I’ve heard the following often this year, and I’m struck every time:

‘I think it’s a medical student, or it might be a nursing assistant, or the intensive care nurse herself: she holds her mobile phone next to my father in the ICU and lets us talk to him. Sometimes we even sing.’

It’s a truism that ‘a patient is a person, not just someone who’s sick.’ But to live that truth when you’re long past exhausted, when your personal safety may be at risk, when your heart is worn bare by witnessing suffering, and yet still to have the love – what words do justice to this?

We hold each other’s humanity in our hearts, and sometimes in our very hands. How we do so defines us. I believe God asks us all the time ‘Are you being faithful?’ These words don’t come from above. They’re not in heaven but in our family, friends, fellow beings, even in the eyes of the dog.

We had a small family dinner on the Friday night of my Bar Mitzvah (as so many families would love to be able to do now!) I remember vividly something my grandfather said about me: ‘Er ist treu’ – he never got used to speaking in English – ‘he’s true.’ What he was really telling me was: ‘Be true, because that’s what matters.’

I still hear him say those words. I paid little attention at the time, but now they fill me with an inseparable mixture of shame, inspiration and love.