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Heart to Heart

Some not-so-light summer reading

San Diego Jewish Times, July 28, 2006                                                       .

By Gert Thaler

People who commit themselves to continually being in the process of reading a book will most likely comment that summertime is a good time to turn to lighter literary fare. I’ll buy that. But somehow I got caught up in another direction, and from the need for spiritual comfort I found myself involved in the pages of books of inspiration, as well as one concerned with the connections between Christian and Jew and a little story about a very ordinary man and the effect of his death on readers.

Most readers are aware of a recent serious illness that struck me while on a trip to Israel and a lengthy hospital stay there where the treatment by doctors and nurses surpassed anything I have ever known in this country. Every day, about five or six times, it was necessary that a “flushing out” procedure be performed in order to keep passages open to the tracheotomy tubing. The first such flushing came unexpectedly, causing the first of many tears to flow, despite handholding by nurses and their soothing words.

At a loss in dealing with such incidents I devised a plan where I would concentrate on some sort of poem I knew by heart, or lyrics from a song, or counting to 100 or higher. The length of each was too short to cover the painful period. Suddenly I hit upon the perfect solution. I had brought Rabbi Harold Kushner’s work of 2003, The Lord is My Shepherd, the subhead of which reads “healing wisdom of the 23^rd Psalm.” Having memorized the prayer early in life, the words came easily, and were just the right length. Subsequently, six times a day, its recitation in silence turned my mind away from the discomfort and reduced the tears. “In silence” because I was unable to speak for two weeks.

So I re-read that 175-page book by this prolific author (When Bad Things Happen to Good People”) as my first book of summer, 2006. You can well imagine how pleased I am to learn that, with the publication of a new book, he has been invited as one of the “stars” of San Diego’s Jewish Book Fair next November.

Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven captured my heart as I read the story of the life and death of “Eddie” and how dying made him realize a purpose to his uneventful life. Albom (Tuesdays with Morrie) is able to still hold a place on the New York Times’ bestseller list years after he brought Morrie’s story to the world. Detroiters knew him well as a popular newspaper columnist and his phenomenal success of relating his weekly visits with a former college professor zoomed him to great heights.

I first met Rabbi Hillel Silverman when my husband was an executive with Fed-Mart and he was sent to Dallas for the opening of a new store by “Big Boss” Sol Price. A bonus award was given to some wives and we spent a week in “Big D.” While there, Dallas friends toured me around the city, with a special stop at the city’s prominent Conservative synagogue, Shearith Israel, where Silverman presided and we met. From then to now I have followed his career, which eventually took him to Beverly Hills’ Temple Sinai, then to Temple Sholom in Greenwich, CT, where he is the emeritus rabbi. He and his wife, Bobby, share their residences between Greenwich and La Jolla and during San Diego’s fall season he serves Congregation B’nai Sholom in Vista. In 1987 he published a hardcover book of 59 pages titled The Jewish-Christian Connection, An Interfaith Experience in which he describes a remarkable interfaith weekend shared by two congregations of differing religious perspectives, Temple Sholom and Christ Episcopal Church in Greenwich.

 Both institutions existed side by side, and while each separate congregation remained cordial to the other, their spiritual leaders as well as lay leaders decided to promote brotherhood and a warmer understanding among themselves and members of each congregation.

And so they designed a weekend together and titled it “When Neighbors Get Together — The Jewish-Christian Connection and the Passover-Easter Connection.” At Friday evening services the temple was filled with a mixture of Jews and Christians and the sermon was delivered by the Episcopal minister. On Sunday morning members of Temple Sholom attended services where Rabbi Silverman gave the sermon on the topic of Passover. Following the Sunday service everyone gathered to hear a noted author speak.

One church member stated: “What a meaningful experience. Ever since I was a little girl I have yearned to know more about the Jewish faith and customs. I was never taught prejudice, but I never had a chance to share faith with a Jewish friend. I am grateful for the experience.”

Turning to a book of 185 pages filled with pathos that caused my tears to flow easily, Rabbi Wayne Dosick, an old friend, has filled these warm days with a book he wrote in 1998, When Life Hurts, A Book of Hope, which relates the harrowing story of returning from a holiday to find the family home in ashes from what newspapers called “The Harmony Grove Fire.”

As I started Dosick’s story I tried to remember where I was at the time of the disaster, because I knew I had been on a trip. Until such time as I opened the cover of this book I did not know of the nightmare experienced by Wayne and his wife, Ellen.

Following the initial shock and in the days that followed, the outpouring of friends and strangers overwhelmed them. Dosick is most complimentary about the immediate help the Red Cross offered. “They truly cared,” he writes. The entire neighborhood was grateful for the assistance given by the organization’s volunteers.

 “A hundred times, a thousand times, we heard the words, ‘I want to help,’” he wrote. They found it difficult to accept the kindnesses that were bestowed on them for their lives had always been channeled, as a rabbi and a spiritual psychotherapist, to give to others.

I was deeply touched when Wayne and Ellen came to realize their sense of individual loss and then their coping with how best to carry on. Each grieved over different things, whole categories of things. He was in great pain over the loss of the one-of-a-kind items: his sermons, books, his worn baseball mitt, his grandfather’s pocket watch and a Bible saved from the Holocaust.

Ellen longed for those kind of historical items as well, but her hurt was greater for the aesthetically beautiful things that so enhanced their home: a cut-glass vase, art, a Tiffany stained-glass lamp shade, her flower garden.

 They have rebuilt their lives, and their home, but this saga takes the reader from that horror-filled night through the immediate hours and days in which the phrase “I can’t believe this happened to us.”

Today Rabbi Dosick continues as spiritual guide of the Elijah Minyan, as an adjunct professor of Jewish studies at the University of San Diego and in a number of other community roles. Ellen has resumed her career role.

Small books for summer reading, but each with a message of great proportion and, for me personally, an opportunity for learning.