Oliver Sacks: Sabbath
MY
mother and her 17 brothers and sisters had an Orthodox upbringing — all
photographs of their father show him wearing a yarmulke, and I was told
that he woke up if it fell off during the night. My father, too, came
from an Orthodox background. Both my parents were very conscious of the
Fourth Commandment (“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy”), and
the Sabbath (Shabbos, as we called it in our Litvak way) was entirely
different from the rest of the week. No work was allowed, no driving, no
use of the telephone; it was forbidden to switch on a light or a stove.
Being physicians, my parents made exceptions. They could not take the
phone off the hook or completely avoid driving; they had to be
available, if necessary, to see patients, or operate, or deliver babies.
We
lived in a fairly Orthodox Jewish community in Cricklewood, in
Northwest London — the butcher, the baker, the grocer, the greengrocer,
the fishmonger, all closed their shops in good time for the Shabbos, and
did not open their shutters till Sunday morning. All of them, and all
our neighbors, we imagined, were celebrating Shabbos in much the same
fashion as we did.
Around
midday on Friday, my mother doffed her surgical identity and attire and
devoted herself to making gefilte fish and other delicacies for
Shabbos. Just before evening fell, she would light the ritual candles,
cupping their flames with her hands, and murmuring a prayer. We would
all put on clean, fresh Shabbos clothes, and gather for the first meal
of the Sabbath, the evening meal. My father would lift his silver wine
cup and chant the blessings and the Kiddush, and after the meal, he
would lead us all in chanting the grace.
On
Saturday mornings, my three brothers and I trailed our parents to
Cricklewood Synagogue on Walm Lane, a huge shul built in the 1930s to
accommodate part of the exodus of Jews from the East End to Cricklewood
at that time. The shul was always full during my boyhood, and we all had
our assigned seats, the men downstairs, the women — my mother, various
aunts and cousins — upstairs; as a little boy, I sometimes waved to them
during the service. Though I could not understand the Hebrew in the
prayer book, I loved its sound and especially hearing the old medieval
prayers sung, led by our wonderfully musical hazan.
All
of us met and mingled outside the synagogue after the service — and we
would usually walk to the house of my Auntie Florrie and her three
children to say a Kiddush, accompanied by sweet red wine and honey
cakes, just enough to stimulate our appetites for lunch. After a cold
lunch at home — gefilte fish, poached salmon, beetroot jelly — Saturday
afternoons, if not interrupted by emergency medical calls for my
parents, would be devoted to family visits. Uncles and aunts and cousins
would visit us for tea, or we them; we all lived within walking
distance of one another.
The
Second World War decimated our Jewish community in Cricklewood, and the
Jewish community in England as a whole was to lose thousands of people
in the postwar years. Many Jews, including cousins of mine, emigrated to
Israel; others went to Australia, Canada or the States; my eldest
brother, Marcus, went to Australia in 1950. Many of those who stayed
assimilated and adopted diluted, attenuated forms of Judaism. Our
synagogue, which would be packed to capacity when I was a child, grew
emptier by the year.
I
chanted my bar mitzvah portion in 1946 to a relatively full synagogue,
including several dozen of my relatives, but this, for me, was the end
of formal Jewish practice. I did not embrace the ritual duties of a
Jewish adult — praying every day, putting on tefillin before prayer each
weekday morning — and I gradually became more indifferent to the
beliefs and habits of my parents, though there was no particular point
of rupture until I was 18. It was then that my father, inquiring into my
sexual feelings, compelled me to admit that I liked boys.
“I haven’t done anything,” I said, “it’s just a feeling — but don’t tell Ma, she won’t be able to take it.”
He did
tell her, and the next morning she came down with a look of horror on
her face, and shrieked at me: “You are an abomination. I wish you had
never been born.” (She was no doubt thinking of the verse in Leviticus
that read, “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman,
both of them have committed an abomination: They shall surely be put to
death; their blood shall be upon them.”)
The matter was never mentioned again, but her harsh words made me hate religion’s capacity for bigotry and cruelty.
After
I qualified as a doctor in 1960, I removed myself abruptly from England
and what family and community I had there, and went to the New World,
where I knew nobody. When I moved to Los Angeles, I found a sort of
community among the weight lifters on Muscle Beach, and with my fellow
neurology residents at U.C.L.A., but I craved some deeper connection —
“meaning” — in my life, and it was the absence of this, I think, that
drew me into near-suicidal addiction to amphetamines in the 1960s.
Recovery
started, slowly, as I found meaningful work in New York, in a chronic
care hospital in the Bronx (the “Mount Carmel” I wrote about in
“Awakenings”). I was fascinated by my patients there, cared for them
deeply, and felt something of a mission to tell their stories — stories
of situations virtually unknown, almost unimaginable, to the general
public and, indeed, to many of my colleagues. I had discovered my
vocation, and this I pursued doggedly, single-mindedly, with little
encouragement from my colleagues. Almost unconsciously, I became a
storyteller at a time when medical narrative was almost extinct. This
did not dissuade me, for I felt my roots lay in the great neurological
case histories of the 19th century (and I was encouraged here by the
great Russian neuropsychologist A. R. Luria). It was a lonely but deeply
satisfying, almost monkish existence that I was to lead for many years.
During
the 1990s, I came to know a cousin and contemporary of mine, Robert
John Aumann, a man of remarkable appearance with his robust, athletic
build and long white beard that made him, even at 60, look like an
ancient sage. He is a man of great intellectual power but also of great
human warmth and tenderness, and deep religious commitment —
“commitment,” indeed, is one of his favorite words. Although, in his
work, he stands for rationality in economics and human affairs, there is
no conflict for him between reason and faith.
He
insisted I have a mezuza on my door, and brought me one from Israel. “I
know you don’t believe,” he said, “but you should have one anyhow.” I
didn’t argue.
In
a remarkable 2004 interview, Robert John spoke of his lifelong work in
mathematics and game theory, but also of his family — how he would go
skiing and mountaineering with some of his nearly 30 children and
grandchildren (a kosher cook, carrying saucepans, would accompany them),
and the importance of the Sabbath to him.
“The
observance of the Sabbath is extremely beautiful,” he said, “and is
impossible without being religious. It is not even a question of
improving society — it is about improving one’s own quality of life.”
In
December of 2005, Robert John received a Nobel Prize for his 50 years
of fundamental work in economics. He was not entirely an easy guest for
the Nobel Committee, for he went to Stockholm with his family, including
many of those children and grandchildren, and all had to have special
kosher plates, utensils and food, and special formal clothes, with no
biblically forbidden admixture of wool and linen.
THAT
same month, I was found to have cancer in one eye, and while I was in
the hospital for treatment the following month, Robert John visited. He
was full of entertaining stories about the Nobel Prize and the ceremony
in Stockholm, but made a point of saying that, had he been compelled to
travel to Stockholm on a Saturday, he would have refused the prize. His
commitment to the Sabbath, its utter peacefulness and remoteness from
worldly concerns, would have trumped even a Nobel.
In
1955, as a 22-year-old, I went to Israel for several months to work on a
kibbutz, and though I enjoyed it, I decided not to go again. Even
though so many of my cousins had moved there, the politics of the Middle
East disturbed me, and I suspected I would be out of place in a deeply
religious society. But in the spring of 2014, hearing that my cousin
Marjorie — a physician who had been a protégée of my mother’s and had
worked in the field of medicine till the age of 98 — was nearing death, I
phoned her in Jerusalem to say farewell. Her voice was unexpectedly
strong and resonant, with an accent very much like my mother’s. “I don’t
intend to die now,” she said, “I will be having my 100th birthday on
June 18th. Will you come?”
I
said, “Yes, of course!” When I hung up, I realized that in a few
seconds I had reversed a decision of almost 60 years. It was purely a
family visit. I celebrated Marjorie’s 100th with her and extended
family. I saw two other cousins dear to me in my London days,
innumerable second and removed cousins, and, of course, Robert John. I
felt embraced by my family in a way I had not known since childhood.
I
had felt a little fearful visiting my Orthodox family with my lover,
Billy — my mother’s words still echoed in my mind — but Billy, too, was
warmly received. How profoundly attitudes had changed, even among the
Orthodox, was made clear by Robert John when he invited Billy and me to
join him and his family at their opening Sabbath meal.
The
peace of the Sabbath, of a stopped world, a time outside time, was
palpable, infused everything, and I found myself drenched with a
wistfulness, something akin to nostalgia, wondering what if: What if A and B and C had been different? What sort of person might I have been? What sort of a life might I have lived?
In
December 2014, I completed my memoir, “On the Move,” and gave the
manuscript to my publisher, not dreaming that days later I would learn I
had metastatic cancer, coming from the melanoma I had in my eye nine
years earlier. I am glad I was able to complete my memoir without
knowing this, and that I had been able, for the first time in my life,
to make a full and frank declaration of my sexuality, facing the world
openly, with no more guilty secrets locked up inside me.
In
February, I felt I had to be equally open about my cancer — and facing
death. I was, in fact, in the hospital when my essay on this, “My Own
Life,” was published in this newspaper. In July I wrote another piece
for the paper, “My Periodic Table,” in which the physical cosmos, and
the elements I loved, took on lives of their own.
And
now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer,
I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual,
but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a
sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the
Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the
seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is
done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.
Oliver Sacks was a professor
of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine and the
author, most recently, of the memoir “On the Move.”
A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 16, 2015, on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Sabbath.
And here are some words from his cousin, Noble Laureate R.J. Aumann mentioned in the above article:
"
Jerusalem - Two weeks ago, in the last essay Oliver Sacks ever published entitled “Sabbath,” he ruminated about his tenuous relationship with Judaism and how a serendipitous reunion with a long lost cousin brought the beauty of the day of rest back into his life.
The cousin in question is Nobel Laureate and Hebrew University of Jerusalem Prof. Robert J. Aumann, who won the prize in economics in 2005 for his groundbreaking work in game-theory analysis. The two became close, and Aumann, 85, visited with Sacks a week before he died.
During a Sunday interview in his office at the Hebrew University’s Center for the Study of Rationality in Givat Ram, Aumann said he vividly recalled his first memory of Sacks, who he did not know was his cousin until the early 1990s.
“My son Yonatan read one of his books, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and without knowing he was related to us, he recommended the book to me, and I read it and was very much taken by it,” he said. “Then it dawned on me that he might be related to us.”
Aumann, who holds a visiting professorship at Stony Brook University – where he is one of the founding members of the university’s Center for Game Theory – said he looked Sacks up the next time he was in New York, more than 20 years ago.
In short order, the luminaries determined that they were first cousins, once removed, on Aumann’s maternal side.
“The fact that I didn’t know we were cousins may sound a little strange, but we have a huge family,” Aumann explained.
“My maternal grandfather was the first of 18 children, and Oliver was the son of No. 16, so that’s a lot of people out there.”
“When I went to see him, he was very cordial,” Aumann continued. “And we’ve had a very close relationship ever since.”
Indeed, the two struck up a close friendship, visiting one another annually in New York, as well as in Israel during Sacks’s last visit to the country a year ago to celebrate another cousin’s 100th birthday.
In “Sabbath,” Sacks described Aumann as “...a man of remarkable appearance with his robust, athletic build and long white beard that made him, even at 60, look like an ancient sage. He is a man of great intellectual power, but also of great human warmth and tenderness, and deep religious commitment.”
Knowing that Sacks was nearing the end of his life, Aumann flew to New York last Sunday to visit the renowned neurologist in his Greenwich Village apartment to say a last goodbye.
“He asked me what my concept was of Haolam Haba [the afterlife], and we discussed that a little bit,” Aumann said.
“He was preparing for death.
He was very weak, but he was totally lucid.”
“I think he had a longing for religion,” Aumann added.
Although Sacks was raised modern Orthodox by his physician parents in London, when his mother learned from his father that the teenaged Oliver was gay, she called her son “an abomination,” and said “I wish you had never been born.”
The trauma of the encounter resulted in Sacks’s estrangement with Judaism.
“That outburst really hurt him, and I think remained with him for the rest of his life,” said Aumann. “He even mentioned it in the last essay he wrote.
Until his death, it made a tremendous impression on him.”
“He wasn’t really religious before that, but of course, he could have been,” Aumann explained. “I think it’s a little difficult to be religious and also a homosexual. He never discussed it with me.”
Despite Sacks’s renunciation of religion, Aumann said his cousin still held a deep respect for Judaism.
“I remember once we were sitting in a kosher restaurant in New York having dinner, and after the meal I benched [said the blessing after the meal], and when I was done he said, ‘Robert John, that was really rather fast. You must not race through it; I’m not even sure you said everything,’” he recalled. “So, he was aware of it, and that indicated that he hadn’t abandoned [Judaism] entirely. He still had a reminiscence of it, and I think some kind of longing.
I think that maybe formed part of the attraction, part of the relationship between us.”
If given the chance to eulogize Sacks, Aumann said he would note his cousin’s celebrated empathy and sensitivity.
“He was very sensitive to people and he had an understanding of people – especially people with difficulties,” he said.
“He saw beyond the illnesses – he saw into the souls of his patients. His main activity in life was being a physician and helping his patients.”
Additionally, Aumann said Sacks “had a tremendous knack for writing.”
“He was a writer,” he said.
“He was able to take these cases and to make them live in his books. That was his special ability. There were a lot of physicians around, lots of neurologists around, but none of them knew how to write like Oliver.”
It was Sacks’s ability to connect with his patients on a profound level, and help them through their seemingly insurmountable struggles, that truly made his cousin great, Aumann concluded.
“He related to them like human beings, not like cases,” he said.
While Aumann said he was not comfortable revealing the details of their final conversation, he did discuss the powerful final sentence Sacks wrote in “Sabbath”: “I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.”
Asked if Sacks achieved his goal of finally resting “in good conscience,” Aumann was unequivocal.
“Oh yeah, oh yeah,” he said. “He definitely did. He was a tremendously influential figure.”
http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/He-saw-beyond-the-illnesses-into-the-souls-of-his-patients-413757
And here are some words from his cousin, Noble Laureate R.J. Aumann mentioned in the above article:
"
Jerusalem - Two weeks ago, in the last essay Oliver Sacks ever published entitled “Sabbath,” he ruminated about his tenuous relationship with Judaism and how a serendipitous reunion with a long lost cousin brought the beauty of the day of rest back into his life.
The cousin in question is Nobel Laureate and Hebrew University of Jerusalem Prof. Robert J. Aumann, who won the prize in economics in 2005 for his groundbreaking work in game-theory analysis. The two became close, and Aumann, 85, visited with Sacks a week before he died.
During a Sunday interview in his office at the Hebrew University’s Center for the Study of Rationality in Givat Ram, Aumann said he vividly recalled his first memory of Sacks, who he did not know was his cousin until the early 1990s.
“My son Yonatan read one of his books, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and without knowing he was related to us, he recommended the book to me, and I read it and was very much taken by it,” he said. “Then it dawned on me that he might be related to us.”
Aumann, who holds a visiting professorship at Stony Brook University – where he is one of the founding members of the university’s Center for Game Theory – said he looked Sacks up the next time he was in New York, more than 20 years ago.
In short order, the luminaries determined that they were first cousins, once removed, on Aumann’s maternal side.
“The fact that I didn’t know we were cousins may sound a little strange, but we have a huge family,” Aumann explained.
“My maternal grandfather was the first of 18 children, and Oliver was the son of No. 16, so that’s a lot of people out there.”
“When I went to see him, he was very cordial,” Aumann continued. “And we’ve had a very close relationship ever since.”
Indeed, the two struck up a close friendship, visiting one another annually in New York, as well as in Israel during Sacks’s last visit to the country a year ago to celebrate another cousin’s 100th birthday.
In “Sabbath,” Sacks described Aumann as “...a man of remarkable appearance with his robust, athletic build and long white beard that made him, even at 60, look like an ancient sage. He is a man of great intellectual power, but also of great human warmth and tenderness, and deep religious commitment.”
Knowing that Sacks was nearing the end of his life, Aumann flew to New York last Sunday to visit the renowned neurologist in his Greenwich Village apartment to say a last goodbye.
“He asked me what my concept was of Haolam Haba [the afterlife], and we discussed that a little bit,” Aumann said.
“He was preparing for death.
He was very weak, but he was totally lucid.”
“I think he had a longing for religion,” Aumann added.
Although Sacks was raised modern Orthodox by his physician parents in London, when his mother learned from his father that the teenaged Oliver was gay, she called her son “an abomination,” and said “I wish you had never been born.”
The trauma of the encounter resulted in Sacks’s estrangement with Judaism.
“That outburst really hurt him, and I think remained with him for the rest of his life,” said Aumann. “He even mentioned it in the last essay he wrote.
Until his death, it made a tremendous impression on him.”
“He wasn’t really religious before that, but of course, he could have been,” Aumann explained. “I think it’s a little difficult to be religious and also a homosexual. He never discussed it with me.”
Despite Sacks’s renunciation of religion, Aumann said his cousin still held a deep respect for Judaism.
“I remember once we were sitting in a kosher restaurant in New York having dinner, and after the meal I benched [said the blessing after the meal], and when I was done he said, ‘Robert John, that was really rather fast. You must not race through it; I’m not even sure you said everything,’” he recalled. “So, he was aware of it, and that indicated that he hadn’t abandoned [Judaism] entirely. He still had a reminiscence of it, and I think some kind of longing.
I think that maybe formed part of the attraction, part of the relationship between us.”
If given the chance to eulogize Sacks, Aumann said he would note his cousin’s celebrated empathy and sensitivity.
“He was very sensitive to people and he had an understanding of people – especially people with difficulties,” he said.
“He saw beyond the illnesses – he saw into the souls of his patients. His main activity in life was being a physician and helping his patients.”
Additionally, Aumann said Sacks “had a tremendous knack for writing.”
“He was a writer,” he said.
“He was able to take these cases and to make them live in his books. That was his special ability. There were a lot of physicians around, lots of neurologists around, but none of them knew how to write like Oliver.”
It was Sacks’s ability to connect with his patients on a profound level, and help them through their seemingly insurmountable struggles, that truly made his cousin great, Aumann concluded.
“He related to them like human beings, not like cases,” he said.
While Aumann said he was not comfortable revealing the details of their final conversation, he did discuss the powerful final sentence Sacks wrote in “Sabbath”: “I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.”
Asked if Sacks achieved his goal of finally resting “in good conscience,” Aumann was unequivocal.
“Oh yeah, oh yeah,” he said. “He definitely did. He was a tremendously influential figure.”
http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/He-saw-beyond-the-illnesses-into-the-souls-of-his-patients-413757
