Home Presentation for Yom Kippur Symposium 5761, October 9, 2000
Good Afternoon.
I want to thank our Rabbis for inviting me to speak this afternoon. When I was first asked on "The Impact of Judaism on my Life", I thought, "That should be an easy task." Actually the challenge has not been so easily met. I have had to select from among the many aspects of my life that Judaism has impacted which I would feel comfortable discussing and to limit myself to just a few minutes on topics which could take much longer to fully share. I was hoping that others this afternoon would address their feelings of Jewish spirituality or of their personal relationship with our Temple, both of which are important to me. I have chosen to address two experiences from my youth that have given me a Jewish identity and to share how being Jewish has impacted two secular aspects of my life, my career and my love of travel.
Being a Jew is central to my being. At a recent social event, conversation turned to a pop-psychology quiz in which you respond to complete the sentence; "I am…." The first few replies were typically "a man/woman", "an American", "a profession-of choice", "a Texan". My friends were surprised when I replied, "First, I would answer that I am a surgeon; second, that I am a Jew." Others either did not feel as strongly about their Jewish identity, or perhaps were reluctant to admit to such feelings to a social setting.
But I feel strongly that being a Jew is central to my being me. Where did I acquire such a sense of Jewish identity and how has it impacted, influenced, or changed my life?
I was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida in the 1940's and 1950's, at that time a small city in the Deep South. My parents were both first generation American born Jews. The 1940's were a time of growing Jewish American identity and pride offset by a sense of deep fear arising from events in World War II Europe. I remember, as a child, reading Jewish children's books with titles like Americans All or They All Were Jews, extolling the successes of Justice Louis Brandies, Emma Lazarus, Hank Greenberg, Max Baer and a lot of since forgotten Jewish American heroes. But the reality was that being Jewish in a small Southern city was mostly about being part of a minority.
I was educated in a Conservative congregation, in a Sunday religious school and week-day Hebrew school, much like we offer today at Temple Beth-El, but I assure you with nowhere near the results of accomplishment we are achieving here today. I can remember my educators, Rabbi Tofield, Cantor Martin, and Mr. Gross. But while they may have given me the knowledge, the tools of Judaism, I found pride and satisfaction in being Jewish and a sense of being part of the Jewish continuum elsewhere.
I think there were two events in my youth that gave me my sense of Jewish identity. The first of these experiences was attending a Jewish summer camp, Camp Blue Star, in western North Carolina. Blue Star was and still remains a well-known Southern Jewish institution. The camp, founded in the mid-40's, offered a mixture of progressive Reconstructionist Judaism, Zionism, post-World War II Internationalism, and plain fun to Jewish youth from the South Eastern United States. Several of our Temple members of my generation, also from the South, shared that experience.
Blue Star was central to my youth. I attended camp there almost every summer from first grade through high school and subsequently worked there in staff positions through my college summers. Blue Star, with its creative observance of Shabbat and its creative religious services, with its quirky interpretation of kashrut, with its spirit of Zionism long before Zionism was part of main stream American Judaism, allowed me to truly live a Jewish experience each summer. It was at summer camp that I gained a sense of comfort in my Jewish identity.
The second experience unique experience that influenced my sense of Jewish identity is more complex. In 1960 or 1961, while attending college, I found in a campus bookstore a novel, The Last of the Just, translated from the French, written by André Schwartz-Bart. The yellowed copy sits on my bookshelf to this day. The author relates the Chasidic legend of the thirty-six just men, the Lamed Vov, mortals who receive and bear the suffering of the Jewish people. As one martyr dies, a new Lamed Vov is born, until the death of the last Lamed Vov, at which time there should be no more suffering. The author takes his story from early medieval to modern Europe relating the lives of each sequential Lamed Vov through the years. It is a novel of centuries of European anti-Semitism, culminating with the last Lamed Vov who dies in a Nazi concentration camp. Through his novel, Schwarz-Bart tries to bring closure and understanding to the Holocaust,
While the book is clearly a saga of Jewish suffering and martyrdom, it was also, for me, a first exposure to medieval history from a Jewish perspective. By tracking back through generations of European Jewry, there was an awakening of a feeling that I, being a Jew, am part of that continuum and have a direct Jewish link to history.
Thus, I have approached and continue to address many of the issues and activities of my Jewish and secular life with both a sense of Jewish pride and sense of Jewish history. Let me provide you with some examples.
The very choice of my profession provides an example of my reflecting on Jewish history. Certainly, my choice to be a physician was a career acceptable and encouraged by the American Jewish experience. While, in the 1960's there were still some remaining restrictions on Jewish admissions to medical schools, most of these limitations had fallen. But after acceptance to medical school, I frequently found myself wondering what it must have been like for my older Jewish physician mentors who had had to face those restrictions in the 1930's and 40's. When in my fourth year of medical school, I made my decision to apply for a residency in General Surgery, I can still remember my parents' reaction, "Jews can't do that!" Surgery had developed as a specialty in the late 1800's, early 1900's in Germany. The early history of surgery, in all areas, began in Germany. As surgical specialties became increasingly recognized in the 1920's and 1930's, most surgical programs, especially in Europe, were either restricted or closed to Jewish physicians. With my sense of Jewish history, I marvel at the American Jewish communities where Jewish hospitals were built in this era, primarily to train Jewish specialty physicians. I could only admire the dedication of that generation of Jewish physicians, who persevered in an environment totally unlike my own. Tulane, where I did my surgical residency in the mid-60's, had opened the doors and from my graduating class at Tulane, two Jewish students were accepted into the General Surgery training program, the third and fourth Jews to have been accepted into such. Today we are accepted without question in all areas of medicine without restriction, but my Jewish identity gives special meaning to this acceptance.
Within the ongoing daily practice of medicine, Judaism provides a central point for ethical decision making. It is not my point, nor is there time here today, to discuss Judaism's positions concerning the ethical dilemmas of our day; abortion, genetic research, or end-of-life issues. It is important to me, however, to understand that these issues can be approached from a Halachic and Talmudic perspective and that there is a distinctively Jewish position on these issues.
As for travel, for Luann and I, foreign travel is a favorite vacation activity. We both are avid, though amateur and untrained, archeologists and sociologists. Most of our recent vacations have been trips spent with guides, learning the history of and understanding the culture of the area visited. But no matter where we are, we can find sites of Jewish significance and I can find a personal Jewish historical connection.
On a recent business trip to New York, Luann and I took a Sunday afternoon and went to the Ellis Island Museum. As we stood in the halls where so many of our personal ancestors entered, I gained not only a greater understanding of the hardships they endured, but also gained a greater personal respect for my grandparents who endured the immigration process.
Trips to the great cathedrals of Europe have made me reflect on the era of their construction and wonder at their architectural grandeur. But I also find myself reflecting about the Jewish community of that era, and question whether there were medieval anti-Semitic atrocities committed in the site being visited. In European sites of more recent historical significance, that is in the last 150 – 200 years, I find myself trying to figure out just how many generations back in my own family it would have been, who in my family would have been living at that time, and trying to understand how European history would have been impacting them.
When visiting Turkey, we found a vibrant Jewish community. We were able to visit both Sephardic and Askenazic synagogues. We visited the synagogue in Istanbul that had been the focus of a terrorist attack on Rosh Hashanah some years ago. By coincidence, we happened to be there on the same secular date (not the Jewish date) of the attack. In the lobby, there is a grandfather clock dedicated to those who died that day. It is stopped with the hands set to the time of the attack. In an unbelievable coincidence, as we left, we noted that we had been visiting also at the exact time of the attack. In Izmir, a Turkish port city, I found myself fascinated with the fact that there is an architectural style the Turks call the "German style". The word German in this instance refers to the German Jewish community that immigrated to Turkey in the 1930's which included several prominent architects, who brought their design style of the era with them.
In Cairo, as do almost all tourists, we visited the Egyptian Museum. But from a Jewish perspective, I was fascinated when our guide took us and read the hieroglyphics from a stia, in which the Pharaoh declares among his accomplishments, is the fact that he rid the land of the Hebrews. Not exactly the Exodus story from our perspective! But what a feeling…to know that the Exodus, recorded in our Torah, was also noted, from a different point of view, by the ruling Pharaoh of the time. There is another off-the-beaten-path exhibit in the museum of a statue of a wealthy official and his wife from an earlier time. Egyptian archeologists now suspect this may be Joseph, at the height of his grandeur in Egypt. The feeling that these three-dimensional blocks of stone validate the accuracy of the stories from our Torah is overwhelming.
Even in East Africa, where there has not been much of a Jewish experience, in Nairobi, we found a synagogue. It is a classic English synagogue, obviously Orthodox, with a relationship to the Chief Rabbinate of London, much as we relate to the UAHC. But what a feeling, to know that in this outpost of the British empire, Jews, like ourselves had come together to create a house of worship.
I feel I am blessed to be Jewish. Though I am a Jew-by Birth, with a sense of pride, I am also a Jew-by Choice. Beyond its spirituality, Judaism provides me an interesting, an ethical, and a historical perspective on life. For this I am grateful.
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