Christian pastoral care of the sick is rooted in a single New Testament passage instructing that elders be sent for. Other traditions ground the same basic duty differently, and comparing them shows how differently a shared practice can be justified.
Jewish tradition treats visiting the sick, bikkur cholim, as a mitzvah incumbent on the whole community rather than on clergy specifically. Rabbinic sources trace the obligation to God's own visit to Abraham while he recovered from circumcision, read in the Talmud as establishing that even God performs this act and so a person certainly must. Unlike the Christian rite, bikkur cholim carries no sacramental element and requires no ordained office to perform it: a neighbor's visit fulfills the obligation as fully as a rabbi's, and organized bikkur cholim societies, lay associations dedicated to visiting and assisting the sick, have operated in Jewish communities for centuries. Islamic tradition holds a comparable expectation, iyadat al marid, visiting the sick, counted among the recommended practices attributed to hadith and treated as a duty owed by the whole community to any believer who falls ill, again without requiring a religious specialist to carry it out.
Set against the Christian pattern, where a specific pastoral office and, in some traditions, a sacramental rite sit at the center, the Jewish and Islamic versions locate the same basic act of care in the ordinary community rather than in any office at all.