Every Friday for years now my daughter and I have visited Jewish hospital patients.
The majority of those we visit are Jewish in name only. Most arrived in America before the war and are assimilated Jews. Most have at most one or two children. These men and women are indicative of Jewish America. Many leave This World without a single Jewish descendant.
We listen to their tales of the daughter who’s married only to her work. We hear of the intermarried son whose Yiddishe nachas gift to the mother who survived Auschwitz is two non-Jewish grandchildren. We are pained as we observe Jewish men and women who sacrificed so much to arrive at these shores and are now making the “ultimate sacrifice” — losing their own Jewish legacy as their children have become assimilated Americans.
And then there’s Tilly Brownstein. Tilly is a proud Jewess and although her actual age is a state secret my daughter and I were able to piece together that she’s at least 86 years old as she’s often boasted of how she voted for Truman in the 1948 election.
Tilly carries herself regally and with an air of majesty.
She always makes sure the hospital hairdresser is by her side within days of her arrival and she insists that the hospital manicurist arrive twice a week.
Tilly is the matriarch of the hospital. Sporting a full-length fur coat and a long necklace of pearls she is the essence of elegance and refinement.
One day she arrived at the hospital sporting a new chapeau. “So Rabbi what do you think of my new headpiece?” I looked at the hat perilously pivoted on her head and thought to myself Why can’t a woman accept the fact that she is elderly and no longer 35? That hat is horrendous. It really befits a woman no older than 40. The large headgear looked more like a helmet than a hat and I was about to tell Tilly as much; after all she did say “Rabbi please be honest with me!”
However as if on cue and as if she could read my mind my daughter very deftly and with an intuitiveness indicative of the feminine faculty for finesse and refinement as opposed to my inelegance and gracelessness simply stated “Tilly the hat is beautiful; it is so perfect for you. Ta don’t you think Tilly’s hat is just lovely and chic?” I nodded in agreement finally realizing that this was the proper and considerate answer to give.
As we left Tilly’s room my daughter said “Ta Tilly didn’t really care if you liked her hat or not; she just wanted you to tell her how nice it looks! She was never asking what you really thought about it! The hat is here to stay; she just wanted to hear from you how nice it is!”
I kept nodding my head while silently thanking Hashem for blessing me with a daughter who instinctively knows how to perform the mitzvah of bikur cholim more effectively than her father and all of his pages of Gemara.—