Unanswered Prayers

This sounds completely irrational. But I’m still haunted by Rabbi Emily’s refusal to indulge my request. It was twenty years ago this summer that my first husband, Jerry, was diagnosed with a B-cell lymphoma. Not a particularly observant Jew -- yet more superstitious than I’d care to admit -- I overcame any inhibitions about sounding foolish and asked her if she would change Jerry’s name.

American Jews often have two names, the one on their birth certificate and also the Hebrew name they are given at birth. So changing just the Hebrew name seemed like a simple request. No legal ramifications involved. And even if the act might not help, what harm could it do?

Judaism became my port in a storm. According to family lore, my father would have died of a ruptured appendix at age two – were it not for his aunt running to the closest shul and getting the rabbi to change his name.

Though I never knew the rationale behind that action, Rabbi Emily knew all about it: “Of course. So you can fool the Angel of Death. Now does that make sense to you? That’s not real faith.”

I allowed her to divert me with the offer of a special prayer for Jerry – to be said by the handful of people showing up for Saturday morning services in August at a reform synagogue. I was there and I prayed. It now occurs to me that aside from a few really observant people, other congregants were probably there because they too were facing a crisis of one sort or another.

Though I wish I could say that week is now a blur, I still see it in high definition and hear it in stereophonic audio. Jerry had not been feeling well that weekend, and on Monday morning I became alarmed at his jaundiced appearance, and insisted on accompanying him to the Mass General.

The recorded message greeting me on my return from work Tuesday evening still puts knots in my stomach, and elicits tremors. “I’m at the Mass General. They just found a mass the size of a grapefruit inside me.”

It was a time before cell phones, and whatever calls I made to the hospital were greeted with recorded messages about offices being closed for the day or human beings who knew nothing about the whereabouts of my husband. Underscoring my feelings of terror and impotence, I bit into my knuckles hard enough to draw blood.

Jerry walked through the door in his brown and white seersucker suit, button-down shirt, Liberty tie, and wingtips -- his standard uniform for seeing patients in his psychiatry practice. I’d seen the tears in his eyes when his dog had died, and also at his father’s funeral, but I’d never witnessed him breaking down.

Sitting in the velvet, swiveling barrel chairs at the far end of our living room, we both sobbed as Jerry told me what his doctors suspected. Relieved that Daphne still had a week or so left of overnight camp, I also dreaded the prospect of telling her that our happy, carefree lives had suddenly been transformed into a very bad dream.

When I called Rabbi Emily later that week, it was because Jerry wanted her to see her. He’d been admitted for an aggressive course of chemotherapy, and hoped she would visit him at the Mass General. Despite it being 10 p.m. when I called, she could not have been kinder or more gracious, saying she would be there in the morning.

She brought him a modern translation of the Old Testament, and they talked about the Book of Job. Her inscription was full of optimism, hoping the Torah would sustain and guide him in his journey from weakness to strength, from pain to healing, and from sickness to health.

Less than five months later, when she officiated over his funeral, Rabbi Emily made a point of saying that in addition to being an MIT trained scientist and a physician, Jerry Sashin had been a man of faith. Though it’s a cliché of funerals for clergy people to make claims about the faith of the deceased, I think what she said was true.

Rabbi Emily told me he asked her to pray with him. But as far as I know, Jerry never asked that his name be changed.