Rabbi Naftali Katz is available 24/7 to help families navigate end-of-life dilemmas

When Naftali and Sharona Katz left Lakewood to spend Shavuos of 2011 with her parents in Toronto, they never imagined it would be almost a year before they’d go home again.

Their first child, a baby girl, began to decline during their visit, to the point where she had to be hospitalized at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto. When she wasn’t getting better and the doctors there had no more recourse, the Katzes sought the advice of Rabbi Shuki Berman of Refuah, who told them to move her to Boston Children’s Hospital. There they stayed at a Rofeh apartment, courtesy of the Bostoner Rebbe, until their daughter was finally deemed well enough to go home.

The unique circumstances of hospital life, a veritable world of its own, presented a new reality. “People think you can sit in a hospital room with a sefer and learn the whole day,” Rabbi Katz says. “They don’t realize that a hospital has a life of its own.  Someone is always coming in — nurses, therapists, tests, food, doctors — it’s physically and emotionally draining.”

He and his wife had to learn how to live “normal” life within those constraints. His parents and in-laws would frequently visit, taking a bus from Brooklyn or flights from Canada every few weeks, bearing a stock of homemade food, together with love and support. The hospital gave them a room for Shabbos meals, and a family from Bnei Brak would share their cholent.

“So many Israelis go there for treatment, and once I’d learned my way around, I helped them when possible,  showing them how to handle Shabbos in the hospital and get what they needed,” Rabbi Katz relates of those long months. “There were times the regular translators weren’t available and doctors had to explain life and death situations to them. I think I spoke more Hebrew during that period than when I lived in Eretz Yisrael.”

Rabbi Katz had become close to Rav Mattisyahu Salomon while learning in Lakewood, and during the roller-coaster ride of his daughter’s illness found himself listening to the Mashgiach’s vaadim on emunah and bitachon. Rabbi Naftali Beer and Rabbi Zalman Leff of the Kollel of Greater Boston were also great sources of support — “like father figures”— and the Katzes learned, through their nisayon, that in life you sometimes have to be a taker as well as a giver.

Over a year later, the Katzes’ daughter made a full recovery, and she is today a healthy elementary school student. While they were in the middle of that harrowing experience, it didn’t occur to them that perhaps Hashem had put them there with long-term plans in mind. But the experience of spending months in a hospital and speaking daily to doctors about their daughter’s condition left Rabbi Katz and his wife with a firsthand, profoundly expanded acquaintance with medicine and dealing with illness in the family. As a Yerushalmi Yid once told Rabbi Katz: “If Hashem puts you into His class, just take notes.”

And so he did. Today Rabbi Katz is one of half a dozen rabbis who are on call 24/7 to guide families through the complexities and pitfalls of the modern medical system and end-of-life care, to ensure that halachah is followed properly, and to serve as a resource for family rabbanim who find themselves fielding sh’eilos that require more sophisticated levels of medical expertise.  It’s a job that requires dedication, detailed knowledge of halachah, and no small amount of fortitude.