And the following, which is my personal favorite of the group:
The patient refused an autopsy.
I have had the opportunity to visit a number of emergency rooms. Most of the time, I was there as a rabbi, comforting a family or supporting a congregant. A few times I was there as a patient.
There is something about that place, no matter the hospital, that is unique. The
bright lights; the scurrying of different people around you and in and out of the room in which you are lying; the clipped and rapid actions of the nurses and doctors; the sterile smell; the sounds echoing on the hard surfaces of walls, floors, ceilings, countertops; cries, screams, calls, anxiety, relief.
It is as if entering the emergency room, you leave life for a time, hoping, sometimes desperately, to return home safe and whole again.
All patients are visitors there, in that bright, 24-hour place. All who enter in need, leave, often after a short stay. We go on to other places: home, hospit al rooms, therapy, work.
For some reason, while I was lying on my back in just such a place this summer, my thoughts projected to the High Holy Days. I know that should not surprise you. Why wouldn't a rabbi's mind, approaching those Days of Awe and sermons, be drawn to that intense time and place? However, I was surprised that I found myself comparing the two environments: emergency room and synagogue on the High Holy Days.
For many in our congregation, the High Holy Days are a somewhat rare time. How many of us spend hours during a brief period, sitting in this place among so many others, with no BlackBerries (hopefully) and no TVs or Ipods or computers to distract us? How many of us hear the melodies of our tradition, the
prayers, the voices of our congregation any other time during the year? Who among us has so much time to just be and think and hear and imagine as we have in our seats on Rosh HaShanah or Yom Kippur?
Is the gathering of this time of year not a place of hopes and dreams and cries and pain and anxiety and celebration? Is not this when we can look back on our lives well-lived or make plans to change what we know we regret?
As a rabbi, I am privileged to enter the lives of hundreds of individuals each year at the most intense and tense times of their lives. I look out at the congregation during the High Holy Days and I see those mourning, those healing, those dying, those celebrating, those rejoicing, those facing crises, and those, who over the past year, have encountered all or some of these emotions.
Like the emergency room, we are open all hours. People call and enter our lives with joys and oys all times of day and year. We listen to the emergencies and we respond. We are not physical healers, but we are emotional, spiritual and kind responders who aid in the process of healing.
OK, maybe I am pushing this analogy too far. But we do chant the verses during this season: "Who shall live and who shall die?" We say them because they are true. We come to the Temple this time of year for many reasons. But we come hoping to leave a little happier , healthier, hopeful and even uplifted. We may not enter the season of the New Year in the way we enter the emergency room, but we can leave our seat s on Yom Kippur with a stronger, more optimistic outlook and a resolve we lacked when we showed up once again for our appearance before the clergy, the congregation, and even God.
The choice is ours. This year, choose well.
