Jewishness is unquestionably broader than Judaism. The twentieth century has known a whole pleiad of scholarly Jewish atheists, but they were taken to the gas chambers along with their religious brothers. Accordingly, for the outside world blood was the conclusive argument. No matter how Jews attempt to define themselves, they are effectively defined by outsiders. A Jew is somebody non-Jews consider Jewish. That is why christianized Jews were given no quarter. They, too, were to be exterminated. My involvement in the Nuremberg trials was more onerous than living in the ghetto or being a partisan. The reels of film I had to watch, taken by Germans in the concentration camps and by the Allies after liberation, shattered my European outlook. I lost the wish to be Middle European and we emigrated to Palestine in order to be Jews, but I was insufficiently driven to bring that off.
The 1948 war left no time for reflecting, but when it was, temporarily, over I found myself plunged into depression by all the bullet and shrapnel wounds, the amputations and post-burn plastic surgery. What had become of gastric resection, removal of gallstones, the banal appendectomy, and removal of intestinal obstruction, the peaceful illnesses of peaceful times? I took up heart surgery.
Palestine was in paroxysms, the Zionist state became a religious symbol, Jews became Israelis and, in one sense, the Arabs became Jews. I was nauseated to see nationalism in any of its guises being adopted as an ideal.
What is the main constituent of the Jewish sense of identity? A purposeful intellectualism directed inward at itself. An agnostic and atheist, when I came to Israel I embraced what I had fled from when I rejected my family traditions in early youth. Back then my refusal brought about a break with my family. My father never forgave me, cursing me and my medicine, and then the whole family perished in the gas chambers.
He would be very pleased to know that in my mature years I decided to study what for two millennia Jewish boys have been studying from the age of five. The Torah. What had bored me as a child and been rejected I now found extremely interesting.
Almost as soon as I arrived in Palestine I started going to Professor Neuhaus’s Jewish history seminars at Jerusalem University. I found them engrossing. Neuhaus was a brilliant scholar and viewed Jewish history not as a fragment of world history but as a model of the entire historical process of the world. Although that approach was alien to me, his lecturing provided much food for thought.
I discovered that the intellectual nimbleness of his students was of no less importance to the professor than the subject he was teaching. He was interested in their ability to pose, turn inside out, or even nullify the question itself. That was when I realized that the core of the Jewish sense of identity was seeing the burnishing of one’s brain as the meaning of life, constantly working to develop one’s thinking. This is what ultimately gave us the Marxes, Freuds, and Einsteins. Freed from the religious subsoil, their brains functioned even more intensely and brilliantly.
We really can regard contemporary (by which I mean Christian) history as a logical (Neuhaus suggests metaphysical) extension of the ideas of Judaism in the European world. It is extremely interesting to see the ideas of Christian and Jewish sages converging at this point, and there is no doubt that a surgeon needs a sharply honed brain no less than skilful hands.
It was at this point, partly because of my studies over these two years, that I took the major career decision to specialize in thoracic surgery, which had interested me since before the war. I should mention that the heart intrigued me not only from a medical point of view. I saw a mystery in what Leonardo da Vinci called this “miraculous tool created by the Supreme Artist,” a completely unfathomable mystery, like the origins of the world and of life. It truly is difficult to imagine how this organ of modest dimensions, formed from fairly resilient muscular tissue that is nevertheless delicate and vulnerable flesh, copes with its demanding task. In the course of many years it pumps millions of liters of blood, imbuing it with the energy essential to support life in all the minute cells of the human body. For me that paradox contained the metaphysical essence of the heart’s activity. It indicated that the heart was not a pump, or not just a mechanical pump, but that it functioned in accordance with something higher than purely mechanical laws. This vague surmise seemed to be confirmed by a golden proportion I saw clearly in the way cardiac structures related to the rules underlying how a heart functions. For me cardiac surgery was largely an attempt to understand and explain that mystery. Observing a diseased heart yielded invaluable information for understanding how infringing upon these divine proportions leads to impairment of cardiac activity and ultimately to death. I concluded that surgical intervention in the structure and functioning of the heart should aim to restore this proportion, to re-create the “divine curvature” so characteristic of healthy cardiac structures. This curvature is found in all of nature’s creations without exception, from the whorls of sea shells and ancient fossilized molluscs to the spiral construction of the galaxies. You see it in the work of architects and artists, in the curving of old Italian squares, and the composition of famous paintings. Admittedly, Leonardo also said, “The more you talk about it (the heart), the more you will confuse your listener.”
We found our feet in Israel immediately. I became head of the department of cardiac surgery at an excellent clinic and Esther set up in private practice as a dentist. Business was good. We bought a house in the marvelous village of Ein Karem, which had been abandoned by its Arab inhabitants in 1948. The view of the Judaean hills was a great joy.
One time a young Arab was brought in with a knife wound near his heart. We managed to save him. A doctor loves hopeless patients he has dragged back from the next world no less than they love him. The boy and I became friends. He told me his family had fled from Ein Karem, abandoning their home and an old orchard immediately after the War of Independence began. I did not tell him I lived there. I couldn’t, and what would have been the point?
Esther and I climbed up one day to the Convent of the Sisters of Zion in Ein Karem. The hills of Judaea lay before us like a herd of sleeping camels. The 90-year-old prioress was still alive in those days. She remembered the convent’s founder, Father Marie-Alphonse Ratisbonne, a christianized Jew from France. She came over to us and invited us to take supper with her. It was a modest affair with vegetables from the convent’s garden. She asked which house we were living in and she said she remembered its old owners. Many other people too. She had no recollection of the young man who had ended up on my operating table, but remembered his grandfather well. He had helped to establish the convent’s vegetable garden. By this time we had remodeled the old house. It was the first house we had had in our lives and we loved it greatly. We went back home that evening and Esther wept. My wife is not usually given to tears.
When I was young I wanted to be not a Jew but a European, and later I wanted, on the contrary, to be not a European but a Jew. At that moment I suddenly wanted to be neither, and so, after living 10 years in Israel, when I received an offer from America, I made an effort to break, if not with being a Jew then with Jewish soil, and moved to Boston. In 1956 open heart surgery was just beginning. I was tremendously interested in it, and had a few ideas.