A Jewish Chaplain at the Santa Fe VA Hospital Serves Veterans of Every Faith
The hallway outside the chapel at the Santa Fe VA Medical Center is rarely quiet. Patients in wheelchairs, family members with coffee cups, and nurses between shifts pass the doorway where a small placard lists the day's quiet hours. On most mornings, the chaplaincy office hosts conversations that have little to do with synagogue attendance or denominational markers. They have everything to do with fear, memory, grief, and the slow rebuilding of hope.
The chaplain walks those corridors with the deliberate calm of someone who has learned that spiritual care rarely follows the neat categories that religious institutions prefer. Veterans include Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, people who left faith communities years ago, and people exploring spirituality for the first time after a brush with mortality. Skills of pastoral listening, ritual, and text prove useful in every one of those encounters.
This is not incidental. It is the work. American healthcare chaplaincy, particularly inside the Veterans Health Administration, has long been built on the premise that spiritual support belongs to everyone who walks through the door, regardless of creed. The fact that the Santa Fe chaplaincy is staffed by a rabbi is, in the daily rhythm of ward rounds and bedside visits, almost beside the point.
The shape of the role inside an American VA
The chaplaincy at a VA hospital sits inside one of the largest integrated healthcare networks in the country. Chaplains are not volunteers who stop by on Sundays; they are credentialed members of the clinical team, present on rounds, listed in patient charts, and consulted when a dying veteran asks about last rites, when a family collapses in the waiting room, or when a combat survivor cannot sleep without speaking to a stranger trained to listen.
At the Santa Fe campus, this work happens against the high desert light and the quiet weight of a state that holds both Los Alamos and ancient Pueblo communities within its borders. The chaplain coordinates with social workers, palliative care nurses, and mental health clinicians, offering care that the medical chart cannot easily capture. Where a nurse measures vital signs, the chaplain measures something harder to name: the spiritual distress that often accompanies physical decline, moral injury, or the long aftermath of war.
Veterans include those who served in Vietnam, the Gulf Wars, Afghanistan, and peacetime postings, alongside older veterans whose memories stretch back to Korea and the Second World War. Each cohort brings its own language of loss and its own hesitations about speaking openly to authority. Building trust across those decades is itself a kind of ministry.
A morning in the life of the chaplain
A typical day begins not with prayer but with a list. The chaplain reviews the names of patients flagged by nursing staff for spiritual or emotional needs, then walks the wards with a notebook and a small bag containing a prayer book, a few candles, and a folded tallit that has travelled between hospital rooms for years.
The first visit might be with a Catholic veteran in his seventies receiving chemotherapy who wants company. The second could be a younger Muslim veteran asking for help finding a quiet space to observe a prayer hour. Later, the chaplain might sit with the family of a patient near the end of life, asking careful questions about which words and rituals would bring comfort, then offering what is possible within the hospital's rhythm and the family's own traditions.
Each visit is short, often just ten or fifteen minutes. The chaplain has been trained to read a room quickly, to notice who wants silence and who wants conversation, who is open to a text and who would prefer a story, who needs to laugh and who needs to weep. The work is humble and exact, asking more of them than of any formal religion they might represent.
Service at the bedside across traditions
What makes the Santa Fe chaplaincy distinctive is its explicit interfaith posture. The role is grounded in Jewish textual and ethical tradition, yet it is offered freely to veterans of every background. This is not a marketing claim. It is visible in the chaplain's calendar, where Friday evening candles might be lit in the chapel for Jewish patients and staff, while the same space hosts an AA meeting, a Bible study, a meditation circle, or a memorial for a veteran with no formal religious affiliation.
Jewish chaplaincy brings particular strengths. The tradition places heavy emphasis on tzedakah, often translated as righteousness or justice, but understood as a responsibility to repair the world in practical ways. It teaches that visiting the sick, bikur cholim, is not optional piety but a moral obligation that outweighs almost every other communal commitment. A chaplain trained in this lineage learns to sit with suffering without rushing to interpret it, offering presence before prescribing belief.
That posture resonates with veterans of many backgrounds. The Buddhist patient facing a terminal diagnosis finds the same calm attention as the Protestant elder who wants to recite the Twenty-Third Psalm. The Indigenous veteran speaking about a homeland ceremony is met with the same willingness to listen. Spiritual care, in this setting, is less about doctrine and more about dignity.
Jewish values informing the chaplaincy
Behind the bedside manner sits a centuries-old ethical vocabulary. Jewish chaplaincy draws from a deep well of textual tradition, including Talmudic discussions of comforting mourners and Hasidic stories about the spiritual value of ordinary acts. When such a chaplain walks into a veteran's room, they bring a particular set of questions: what does this person need to feel seen, what small ritual might restore a sense of agency, and how can they serve without imposing their own framework.
This does not mean the chaplain proselytises or insists on Jewish practice. They approach every encounter with the seriousness of a tradition that has long reflected on accompanying people through suffering. Jewish ethics, in this sense, is less a system of answers and more a way of asking questions that hold rather than push, and veterans often notice this quality even when they cannot name it.
Jewish chaplaincy in the United States has matured into a credentialed profession with its own training pathways and supervisory structures. Chaplains are expected to show competence in multifaith care, mental health first response, and clinical ethics, alongside their own tradition. The rabbi at Santa Fe is not an exception to that professionalism.
Parallels and lessons for Australian veteran care
Across the Pacific, Australian hospitals have built their own chaplaincy traditions. Major public hospitals in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide maintain chaplaincy services that are explicitly multifaith, and the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists regularly acknowledges spiritual care as part of holistic treatment. The Department of Veterans' Affairs funds pastoral care programs through the RSL and partner organisations, recognising that the spiritual wounds of service rarely heal through medication alone.
Australian readers will recognise familiar patterns. ANZAC Day observances at hospitals in towns like Albany or Bendigo often begin with a chaplain's words before dawn services. Indigenous spiritual care, increasingly recognised as essential in remote and urban settings alike, has reshaped how Australian healthcare providers think about cultural safety. There is a growing conversation in Canberra about whether the multifaith chaplaincy model could be more visible inside the Australian Defence Force itself, especially as the nation marks commemorations like the centenary of the Gallipoli landings.
A Jewish chaplain in Santa Fe sits inside a much wider international conversation. The question is no longer whether a chaplain of one tradition can serve patients of another; it is how to train, credential, and sustain such chaplains well in institutions that are themselves under pressure.
Looking ahead at chaplaincy's next chapter
The Santa Fe VA chaplaincy is small, but it is durable. Across the broader Veterans Health Administration, demand for spiritual care has grown as the institution has grappled more honestly with moral injury, suicide prevention, and end-of-life care. Younger veterans in particular tend to be more religiously unaffiliated than their predecessors, yet they are often more willing to seek out a chaplain when a crisis arrives.
Several developments are worth watching. Training programmes accredited by bodies such as the Association of Clinical Pastoral Education continue to expand, including new interfaith or Jewish cohorts. Tele-chaplaincy is also growing, allowing veterans in rural New Mexico to connect with chaplains across the country. Partnerships with community clergy, including rabbis from Albuquerque and Santa Fe congregations, are strengthening referrals when a patient needs a faith-specific visit, and research on spiritual care and resilience is beginning to shape how VA leadership evaluates the work.
| Aspect of care | Rabbinic Jewish chaplaincy | Generic multifaith chaplaincy | Secular pastoral visitor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Source of language | Hebrew texts and Talmudic ethics | Broad theological literacy | Humanist frameworks |
| Typical rituals | Prayer, candle lighting, blessings | Prayers, meditations, readings | Conversation, mindfulness |
| Hospital strength | Comfort for the dying and grieving | Familiarity across backgrounds | Fit for unaffiliated patients |
| Limits | May need denominational referral | Thinner in any single tradition | May lack ritual vocabulary |
Practices that travel across traditions
- Sustained, unhurried presence when medical staff must move on
- A willingness to sit with questions that have no easy answer
- Small rituals that mark transitions, even very brief ones
- A bridge to family, congregation, or community when isolation sets in
Where chaplaincy tends to grow next
- Listening for what a patient actually wants before offering anything
- Holding one's own tradition lightly enough to honour another's
- Working alongside, rather than above, the clinical team
- Knowing when to refer to a clergy member of the patient's own tradition
A Jewish chaplain at a veterans' hospital in northern New Mexico is, in the end, a reminder rather than an oddity. Spiritual distress does not check the boxes of religious affiliation at the hospital door, and those who respond must be ready to meet veterans exactly where they are. That readiness is learned slowly, through years of training, supervision, and bedside hours. It is, in its quiet way, one of the more generous gifts a religious tradition can offer the wider community, in Santa Fe, in Albuquerque, and in the wards and waiting rooms of any hospital where Australians, Americans, and people of every background find themselves hoping, together, for healing.