A rabbi, a priest and a psychiatrist walk into a room - but there isn’t a punchline. Instead,
the trio ponder the commodification of happiness, how the absence of Deliveroo during the
Middle Ages helped form reaction to the Black Death, how to help people feel fulfilled - and
being slapped in the face with a wet fish in a Mikvah.
The protagonists in question are Miriam Berger, principal rabbi of Finchley Reform Synagogue;
Mark Berelowitz, consultant child psychiatrist at the Royal Free Hospital, and Patrick Moriarty,
outgoing headteacher of JCoSS Jewish secondary school and a Church of England priest.
Their professions mean all three are frequently witnesses to, and sources of comfort at,
moments of transition in people’s lives: divorces, bereavements, disappointments, traumas.
That’s what has brought them together to work on Wellspring, a new wellbeing centre with
talking and complementary therapies alongside pools for the Jewish ritual of mikveh, which will
help people to mark and move on from tough periods.
Berger, Berelowitz and Moriarty - (it sounds like a bolshy US law-firm, but the three
professional powerhouses are almost competitively humble about their own achievements)
separately began wondering how they could help people who had been through difficulty.
“Hard, momentous events in people’s lives can become part of who they are, and how they
define themselves,” Berger explains. “I started to wonder, how can we help an angry, cheated-
on partner to become open to all the opportunities that the next chapter can afford, rather than
be eternally defined by one traumatic event? How can a resentful couple, who feel like the only
people in the world without children, stop feeling constantly weighed down by anger, guilt, and
destructive emotions?”
Berelowitz, meanwhile, was grappling “with the way my profession has commercialised and
branded various therapies - things like CBT, psychotherapy. It has downgraded the other
myriad important things that go on in a community that help people to feel fulfilled. Spirituality
is one of them - it’s never mentioned at a psychology conference - perhaps as it's not amenable
to the 'evidenced based discussions' that people like to have. But spirituality helps a lot of people; how could that be recognised and formalised?”
Thinking about one of the most effective healing experiences he had been through, Moriarty
realised it had come from an insistence on looking forward. “It hadn’t involved digging in the
past, looking back via a ‘retrospectoscope’ - or dwelling on how I had got to that situation; the
emphasis was thinking about meaning: what sense do I make of the situation I’m now in? What
can we take from the challenges I’ve been through, to inform the next chapter, and not repeat
what was painful? A way to find new self-understanding and sources of meaning.”
These were some of their sources of inspiration behind Wellspring: a place to help people to
move on to the next chapter in their lives. A place, Moriarty adds, “where you can find a
compassionate, pastoral response, but also a sense of the bigger perspective - that your problem may be one that many people have, a feeling of spirituality in that this is part of something larger.” The emphasis is on pragmatism - a place to move onwards, rather than mull.
The trio celebrate society’s (fairly recent) shedding of stigma around some mental health issues
and neurodiversity, and consider how far it has swung. “When we had the Black Death,”
Berelowitz muses, “there were no options. People were dying around you, but you had to get
on with it. There was no Getir, no Deliveroo: if you mourned for too long, you'd die of
starvation. You had to carry on to stay safe.”
This isn’t, all three quickly elaborate, to say the the Middle Ages should be a touchstone to
mental health provision today - but “there is a point where we have to accept reality,” Moriarty
adds, “and not blame someone else, or ask someone else to ‘fix it’ - a time to say, ‘we are where
we are’, how can we move on?”
Social media’s culture of campaigns like #metoo and #everyonesinvited have provided a
plethora of opportunities "for people to be open about the hurt that they are carrying,” says
Berger. “Wellspring will be a place to say, and now what? I hold this brokenness, how can I
move to a place where I can say, this happened; this is part of my experience and who I am -
and yet... I’m more than that. I'm hoping for a place where we can build that 'and yet' - that
person’s next chapter in life, without suppressing anything they have been through.”
A cornerstone of Wellspring, alongside its plethora of treatments, therapies and sense of
community, will be the offering of the ritual of immersion in a mikvah. “The three parts of the
mikvah involve looking to the past, to the future, and living with the present,” Berger adds.
“We hope Wellspring will be able to help people prepare for what they are hoping for in the
next part of their lives, rather than always being about how something in the past defines you.
Locating a mikvah within the context of support we hope it will help people get to a place where
they are ready to embrace a ritual to move forward.”
- Rabbi Miriam Berger