by Woody Weingarten
managing editor of j.
a local voice
“I’m sorry to tell you this, but you have prostate cancer,” my Jewish urologist told me earlier this year.
“Oh, my God,” I said, trembling more than a little in the doctor’s cubicle, my anxiety skyrocketing because my father died from the disease 20 years ago.
The God response was automatic, kind of a verbal knee-jerk reaction. Had I been asked, I probably would have smart-mouthed something about putting my faith in expert physicians rather than a deity. After all, I’d been a practicing agnostic for years. But nobody asked. And I was too busy trying to stay grounded. Dealing with theological notions at the moment was beyond my ability.
That held true for several months, through my immediate enrollment in “cancer college” online, through a series of second opinions, through hormone shots and pills that the docs said would shrink the tumors and cancer cells.
The attitude persisted during 25 daily doses of external radiation. Weekday mornings I lay motionless on a slab at Mount Zion Medical Center, a once-Jewish facility that had been absorbed by the UCSF system, while a multi-million-dollar machine zapped me with rays I feared might be carcinogenic themselves. Each time I forced myself to do a breathing-relaxation exercise while a technician worked the equipment and safely watched through a window from the next room.
Never during my meditations did I invoke God. Nor did I consider davening, as I once did regularly.
I did, however, think about my history with the Jewish religion.
Growing up, I studied at an Orthodox shul in a New York City suburb after school. There I learned Hebrew by rote, standard operating procedure half a century ago. Hebrew? It was Greek to me. I complained fervently that I didn’t understand what I was reading or singing.
Still, I believed in the one Jewish God.
Then, like many modern members of the tribe, I spiritually meandered following my bar mitzvah.
As a young married man, I joined a Conservative congregation. I left because the leaders seemed more interested in money matters than spiritual ones.
Next I tried Reform, in Florida when my daughter and son approached confirmation and bar/bat mitzvah ages. The rabbi played up the social, played down the religious. I left.
After moving to the Bay Area, my wife and I “floated” — that is, we attended services on High Holy Days or simchas, or when friends invited us.
We enjoyed, for example, one Pesach at Greens restaurant in the city where the Traveling Jewish Theater merged ritual and performance art. We enjoyed a Shabbat service at Kol Shofar in Tiburon, with Rabbi Lavey Derby incorporating congregants’ answers to his questions into an “interactive sermon.” And we enjoyed a rainbow holiday service at Sha’ar Zahav, the LGBT-oriented synagogue in San Francisco.
We still light Shabbat candles each Friday night we’re home — a ceremony started because my mother-in-law phoned from Detroit, wanting to light hers simultaneously. The idea, she said, was to connect with us “and with every other Jew in the world.”
Today, the majority of our friends are secular, cultural Jews. Many are happy to discuss the notion of whether God is a He, a She or an It.
So it didn’t really surprise me that the radiation came and went without my entering a synagogue or seeking guidance from a rabbi. Not even with the High Holy Days nearing.
But then came an in-patient surgical procedure a short while ago that ended with my prostate being zapped with high-dose radiation.
I’d been forewarned about the medical modus operandi:, and everything in the hospital happened as advertised. No mistakes. No regrets.
Still, the experience was nerve-wracking. I tend to be a control freak and there I was, having no control whatsoever. God forbid, I had to relinquish control to the medics and their instruments. No one was more surprised than me, therefore, when lo and behold (as they say in biblical circles), I found God again.
My new mantra was simple and to the point. Over and over and over again: “Baruch HaShem, Baruch HaShem, Baruch HaShem.”
The San Francisco operating room had unexpectedly become my foxhole, the clichéd place where there are no atheists or agnostics.
Between the words, between the lines, my own translation: Thank you God, for giving me my life. Thank you God, for healing me. Thank you God, for extending my life.
Thank you God. Thank you.
Baruch HaShem.
Woody Weingarten is the managing editor of j. CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California