When is a restaurant, not (only) a restaurant? When it becomes one of the holiest places in New York.
To be clear, there are many sacred spaces in New York City, but last night I was privileged / blessed / lucky — you choose, and the choices are not mutually exclusive — to be in one which is at least as good as the best of them. It was just up the stairs and to the right, in Orsay, an upper east side French bistro. And while I take food — even food I cannot eat — very seriously, I am not talking about the sacredness of a meal that makes one cry out “Oh my God,” even though that too is a kind of sacred. I am talking about being in a space animated by the deepest sacred traditions that I celebrate as a Jew, respect in Christian faith, and honor as an American.
Deuteronomy 30:19 invites us to “choose life,” and for thousands of years and in thousands of different ways, Jewish thought and practice have put making that choice at the center of how we Jew. Christian tradition celebrates the triumph of life through the story and promise of the resurrection, insisting that life can win out to the point of conquering death, first for one and then for all. America was founded on the premise that each of us is endowed with the “unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Choosing and celebrating the triumph of life is linked, in all three traditions, with both the quantity and the quality of life. Most obvious is the Constitution’s linking life, which could be thought of as purely quantitative, to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which are clearly qualitative. The linkage is at least as powerful in classical Jewish and Christian teachings, both of which aim not simply for surviving but for thriving.
Pursuing and celebrating both the quantity and the quality of human life are sacred to Jewish, Christian, and American traditions, and that is what transformed a simply furnished space at Orsay into one of the holiest places in New York. About 50 people gathered there for a few hours to learn more about and better support Mount Sinai’s Hertzberg Palliative Care Institute, The Center to Advance Palliative Care, and the Steven S. Elbaum Family Center for Caregiving, which embody the commitment to the triumph of both the quantity and quality of human life.
Palliative care, for those who don’t know, is specialized holistic medical care for people living with serious illness. It is the domain of those whose attention is always on the patient as much as on their disease. Last night’s event widened the circle of care and explored the needs of the 52 million people around the country who shoulder the tremendous responsibility of caring for and advocating on behalf of their loved ones when they are ill.
In that context, the upper room at Orsay (New Testament allusion entirely purposeful) was transformed into a remarkable synagogue / church / Philadelphia meeting space, in which, once again, people gathered to choose life, learn more about how to help it triumph, and find community in doing so. Last night was one of those moments where we got to feel what it is like to be, in the words of Hamilton creator Lin Manuel Miranda, “In the room where it happened.” What it must have been like in the battei midrash (study halls) of the early rabbinic sages. What it felt like to gather in the first house churches in the land of Israel and across the Mediterranean world. It was the sense of responding to the call of life and knowing that we can all be a part of that response.
As it always has, making this happen requires leadership and expertise, and that was as true last night as it was in biblical times and in late 18th-century Philadelphia. There were leaders like my dear friends Saskia and Stephen Siderow, who invited and convened the group, which meant extending themselves as leadership always does. There were master teachers and practitioners — rabbi / priests, dare I say — like Drs. R. Sean Morrison and Allison Applebaum, who inspired us. I am grateful to all of them. And there were the rest of us in that room, who had the opportunity to reconnect with the kind of holiness that is bigger than any one tradition and can be found most any place we dare to make it happen – in this case, just up the stairs and on your right.
Listed for many years in Newsweek as one of America’s “50 Most Influential Rabbis” and recognized as one of our nation’s leading “Preachers and Teachers,” by Beliefnet.com, Rabbi Brad Hirschfield serves as the President of Clal–The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, a training institute, think tank, and resource center nurturing religious and intellectual pluralism within the Jewish community, and the wider world, preparing people to meet the biggest challenges we face in our increasingly polarized world.
An ordained Orthodox rabbi who studied for his PhD and taught at The Jewish Theological Seminary, he has also taught the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs an ongoing seminar, and American Jewish University. Rabbi Brad regularly teaches and consults for the US Army and United States Department of Defense, religious organizations — Jewish and Christian — including United Seminary (Methodist), Yeshivat Chovevei Torah (Modern Orthodox) Luther Seminary (Lutheran), and The Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative) — civic organizations including No Labels, Odyssey Impact, and The Aspen Institute, numerous Jewish Federations, and a variety of communal and family foundations.
Hirschfield is the author and editor of numerous books, including You Don’t Have To Be Wrong For Me To Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism, writes a column for Religion News Service, and appears regularly on TV and radio in outlets ranging from The Washington Post to Fox News Channel. He is also the founder of the Stand and See Fellowship, which brings hundreds of Christian religious leaders to Israel, preparing them to address the increasing polarization around Middle East issues — and really all currently polarizing issues at home and abroad — with six words, “It’s more complicated than we know.”