I was sitting in the Radiation Oncology waiting room at Memorial Sloan Kettering before my first radiation treatment. Half a dozen masked patients sat socially spaced, drinking water to make their bladders more photogenic, when a woman was rolled in on a wheelchair. She was talking vocally on her cellphone, about her husband’s death and plans for the funeral. I wanted to offer a word of comfort, but had the feeling that any comment would come off as eavesdropping, although her voice could be easily heard throughout all the sections of the room. Then I noticed that the mask on her face covered her mouth but not her nose, and I stiffened. In a room full of people at high risk for COVID, how do you tell a woman who was discussing whether to cremate her husband that she should cover her nose? Rather than answer that question, I took a walk, and settled back in the farthest corner, where I could still hear her words but hopefully be beyond the reach of her exhaled breaths.
Forty five minutes—and several phone calls—later, the woman in question was wheeled to the nursing station, where she rose to her feet, reaching for something on the wall. It was a small bell, mounted in a frame above a plaque. She rang the bell, once, twice, thrice. And abruptly the entire room burst into applause. Except for me. I looked around bewildered, until somebody filled me in: “It’s her last treatment, and that’s what you do.” I joined the applause.
Of beginnings and ends. She was having her last treatment; I was having my first. She was looking at a new beginning, but it began with her husband’s end. The hot rays of radiation had given her a new lease on life, even as she argued on the phone that her husband had never wanted to be cremated.
Had God wanted me to see the end at the beginning? Processes can be totally different if you envision their culmination from the outset. In the Friday night song Lecha Dodi, of Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz of 16th century Safed, the Sabbath is described as “Last to be created, but first in God’s thought.” The second of Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is to “Start with the end in mind.”
On Tisha B’Av—next week’s day of Jewish mourning when we commemorate the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem—we often return to the Talmudic story of Rabbi Akiva who foresaw the end of tragedy in its beginning.
When Rabban Gamliel, Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah, Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Akiva arrived at the Temple Mount, they saw a fox running out of the area where the Holy of Holies had been. They began to cry, while Rabbi Akiva laughed.
They said to him, ‘Why are you laughing?’
He responded, ‘Why are you crying?’
“If from the place about which it is written, ‘And the stranger who enters there, shall die,’ we see a fox coming out, should we not cry?”
“For that very reason, I am laughing… Now that I have seen Uriah’s prophecy (Zion will be plowed under like a field) fulfilled in full detail, I know that Zecharya’s prophecy (And the streets of the city will be full of children, playing in her streets) will also be fulfilled.”
Being able to see the end embedded in the beginning is a gift that lightens the burden and makes endurance possible.
I took a picture of the bell and its plaque. It reads:
Ring this bell
Three times well
Its toll to clearly say…
My treatments are done,
The course is run
And, I am on my way.
It turns out that the bells, which are slowly spreading to radiation units around the country, started as a Bat Mitzvah project of a girl by the name of Isabella, who observed how the practice lifted spirits when her mother underwent radiation for a brain tumor. She is now sixteen, and continues to expand what she calls Project Bell.
As I write these words, I have completed one of my 40 radiation treatments, leaving a mere 39 to go. In my cynical moments I connect the number to the 39 lashes given to serious criminals by Biblical law. But when I am honest, I equate them with the 39 melachot of Shabbat—the labors that were forbidden on the Sabbath because they were the steps through which the Tabernacle in the wilderness was built. I am in a wilderness now, kept going by the familiar landmarks of family, friends and writing. These treatments will leave me weak, but I will outlast them. Because I have seen their end.
I know for whom the bell tolls.
Thank you for reading this edition of Ketoret, a newsletter about making meaning in difficult moments. To receive these installments in your inbox, feel free to subscribe: