"You're Touching Me. With Love."

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

It’s becoming a strangely special week.

I learned this morning that a new local Jewish acquaintance is nearly certain to die on Thursday morning.

How can you know when she’s going to die? you are likely asking.

I can’t, of course, but I do know that she’s planning to die on Thursday morning, via the medical-aid-in-dying option available to her per Washington State’s Death With Dignity laws.

I’m well-versed in this topic because I assisted one of the women who spearheaded this legislation with her memoir many years ago. Through that work, I came to an unequivocal understanding of what a blessing such a prescription can offer, even if the recipient never chooses to use it.

Judith, for whom my magazine is named — the child survivor of Auschwitz who had a hand in raising me — also availed herself of this law, and after a lifetime studded with staggering hardships, she was at least able to achieve a death that was gentle, painless and entirely on her own terms. (In fact, she considered her own chosen and controlled departure her final fuck you to Dr. Mengele, whose death decree she’d evaded decades earlier.)

Anyway, back to this local woman. Let’s call her D. For years, D was the employee of my friend T. It was T who pinged me around a month ago to tell me that a woman she loved was dying, and the woman was Jewish, and though she was not at all religious, she had asked to speak with a rabbi. Could I get D a rabbi?

I can absolutely get her a rabbi, I said, though I wasn’t sure about the specifics. The closest local rabbi is a member of Chabad, and I knew he would come, but since she was not at all religious, I wasn’t sure he would be the best one for her to speak with. The other nearest rabbi is Reform, but I wasn’t sure she would visit a non-congregant.

Before I could make any inquiries, though, I learned that D had changed her mind and didn’t want a rabbi after all.

That might have been the end of it, but I had just read Sarah Hurwitz’s memoir, As A Jew. The importance of showing up for community members, which she emphasized quite passionately, was fresh in my mind. While D was not religious, she’d clearly had an impulse to bring a Jew into her orbit. I was anxious to know she had Jewish community around her.

What synagogue does she belong to? I asked T.

No synagogue at all, it turned out.

Well, did she at least have the support of her own secular Jewish community?

No, she had no Jewish community. There was, in fact, almost no one in her life besides T and her husband. D’s only remaining family was a disabled brother in California who could not make it to her bedside. She had no partner, no children, and almost no one else in her life.

As I said earlier, I was inspired by Sarah Hurwitz’s book, which was the Never Alone Book Club’s most recent pick, and which I’d finished reading very recently. But I was also inspired by Rabbi Angela Buchdahl’s book, Heart Of A Stranger, which is the Never Alone Book Club’s next pick, and which I was in the midst of reading at that very moment.

Specifically, I’d been very struck by this passage:

Many Jews, when asked if they believe in God, have trouble answering. The better question is: Do you trust that there is a force for good in the world? Will you act upon that trust?

It is often said that Judaism is a religion that cares more about deed than creed, meaning that the Torah is less concerned with telling us what to believe than how to behave. Faith happens after – or as a result of – the action commanded by God. We believe after we do.

This isn’t just a Reform attitude, by the way. Even Chabad, my family’s Orthodox shul, seems bent, above all, on encouraging mitzvot.

“But I don’t know if I believe in God. In fact, I’m pretty sure I don’t believe in God,” I have said to them countless times in countless contexts.

“Never mind about that. Just light the candles on Shabbat,” I have heard countless times (or some variation on that theme) in response.

So I decided I would go and visit D, and be her Jewish community during her remaining time, and assist her as a liaison if she wished to reconnect with her Judaism on any other level.

That first hospital visit was delightful. It was Halloween and a lot of the staff were playfully dressed. D warmed to me very quickly and I enjoyed talking with her a lot.

A blood clot had left her in multiple organ failure and she wasn’t willing to take the aggressive and grueling measures that might or might not extend the time left to her. She was in her mid-70s and in constant pain, her quality of life was already very compromised, she was not expected to get out of bed again, and she did not seem particularly sorrowful about her imminent death. She just wanted it to happen already.

“I want to get out of here,” she said to me. “Can you think of a way to make this happen any faster? I am very, very interested in expediting my death.”

I knew T was looking for others to visit D as well, so that she herself wasn’t D’s sole support system. She asked whether I would be interested in coming three times a week, which her brother would compensate.

I knew I couldn’t do that. I could come once a week, maybe, and I was glad to do that for free, but I knew I definitely could not come three times a week.

Helping her check out earlier, though: that I could do.

Offering her a free Jewish burial through local orgs here – that I could also do.

Invite a friend who serves locally as a cantor, to be bedside with her guitar, so we could sing the Shema with her toward the very end – that, too, I could do.

In the meantime, I’ve visited several more times. The threshold of death can be a very special place. So much is burned away by then, and certainly in D’s case, desire is distilled down to the very simplest of wishes.

She adamantly doesn’t want gifts or flowers. She doesn’t much want to eat and she has no bucket list at all. All she cares about now is human connection and having her wishes respected.

The other day, knowing that she loves foot rubs, I offered to massage her feet. She eagerly agreed. A minute in, she gasped and said, “Where did you learn how to do this?”

I said, “Nowhere. There’s no technique here. I don’t even know if I’m doing it right.”

And then she startled me by crying out, with passionate intensity: You’re touching me. With love.

Because really, that’s all I was doing, but it was also all that mattered.

This morning she was approved for an aid-in-dying prescription. Her plan is to depart on Thursday at 10 am. She will be surrounded by people who care about her and I am grateful I could assist with helping this happen.

Abiding with the dying is an intense spiritual experience. I will likely write more after she leaves us.

I hope it’s not too strange that I’ve departed from the usual political fare to talk about participating in this Jewish life ritual, because it’s hard for me to think about anything else right now, and for me it’s served as a meditation on the kind of instant Jewish community we can forge in extremis, a phenomenon I know to be a feature, not a bug – very much that way by design.

I’ll be back with you soon.

Much love in the meantime.

Am Yisrael Chai.