Earlier this month a famous Jewish comedian was on television and made some very inappropriate jokes about Am Yisrael.<\/p>\n
While the media made a big deal regarding his belittling of The Holocaust, other parts of the act received less attention.\u00a0 But the ones which I personally found to be the most obscene got the least press: those that dealt with being embarrassed to be a Jew.<\/p>\n
Why did this upset me?\u00a0 Because The Jews are the most wonderful and celebrated nation in the world!\u00a0 The Jewish people are descendants of the greatest people who ever walked the earth; from Abraham to King David and Albert Einstein…we have what to be proud of!<\/p>\n
And every Jew knows that G-d chose us to bring light onto the nations and subsequently wrote an entire book about it (The Torah). What could be more inspiring?<\/p>\n
In my practice as a clinical psychiatrist working at an Orthodox Jewish treatment facility in Jerusalem, the vast majority of patients that I see in my clinic are religious Jews.\u00a0 Every day I am inspired by the faith of my patients under adverse circumstances.\u00a0 But that story is not the purpose of this article.\u00a0 Rather I’d hope to tell you of a unique case that I saw a few months back.<\/p>\n
It was surprising enough to see a patient with the name Fahima on my patient list.\u00a0 Now of course I remembered the wife of the great Rabbi Yehudah Tzadka had that same name but none the less I was curious.\u00a0 Things got a bit stranger when a religious Arab woman entered my office with her infant child.\u00a0 And while I was surprised to see a woman in a burqa in my clinic for Orthodox Jewish patients, I was happy to provide the same high-quality of care to all.<\/p>\n
Fahima told me an awful story of her husband’s brutal temper. The monster had broken her ribs after she returned from the hospital the previous month having delivered a girl instead of a boy.\u00a0 Now he’d begun drinking alcohol on a daily basis and would threaten her life throughout the night.\u00a0 As we spoke, it became clear to me that making a diagnosis was less important than finding this young woman a safe haven from her increasingly-abusive husband.\u00a0 With her permission, I contacted the local welfare office and was able to schedule her an intake at a domestic violence shelter in the city.<\/p>\n
Within an hour, a social worker from the city had arrived to bring her to a safe place.\u00a0 As the episode neared its closure, I couldn’t help but to wonder what had brought Fahima to our clinic as opposed to any of the other facilities in the area.\u00a0 Luckily Fahima answered my question for me as she walked out the door.<\/p>\n
“G-d bless you Dr. Freedman.\u00a0 I had nowhere to turn in my own village but I knew if I came to the Jews that they would help me.\u00a0 G-d bless you.”<\/p>\n
I thanked her and wished her good luck and health in the future and then sat to think.\u00a0 Beyond being grateful for her blessing, I was proud.\u00a0 Not of myself of course–I had only done the simple and obvious thing of connecting a domestic violence victim with social welfare services–but proud of The Jewish People.\u00a0 Her words echoed in my mind, “I knew if I came to the Jews that they would help me.”<\/p>\n
If that wasn’t a shot in the arm I don’t know what would be!\u00a0 So for every Jew who was ever afraid that the name Goldstein was “too Jewish” or that “wearing a kippah wasn’t cool,” I beg to differ.\u00a0 And for every Jewish comedian that seeks to belittle their heritage for a few cheap laughs, I’d offer a rebuttal: nothing should make a person prouder than being part of a people with a national mission to fix the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Earlier this month a famous Jewish comedian was on television and made some very inappropriate jokes about Am Yisrael. While the media made a big deal regarding his belittling of The Holocaust, other parts of the act received less attention.\u00a0 But the ones which I personally found to be the most obscene got the least<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133383,"featured_media":58056,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_cloudinary_featured_overwrite":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspiration"],"yoast_head":"\n