If He Becomes a Senator, Let’s Pray Dr. Oz Learns to Respect Others’ Sabbath Observance

“If, let’s say, you landed at the airport after Shabbat started, would you be able to drive home or would you have to walk?”

I assumed Dr. Oz was asking me theoretically, out of genuine curiosity about Jewish observance. We had stopped midway between Tel Aviv and New Jersey to fill the airplane with fuel. Perhaps he was concerned for us in case we got further delayed.

“Technically, we would have to walk,” I responded.

Dr Oz gave a thoughtful nod and walked back to the huddle of his family who all seemed to start talking at once.

We were on a tarmac somewhere in Ireland. The plane had been lent to my father, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, by a prominent Jewish donor for a trip to Israel he had organized for the Oz and Boteach families. It was the summer of 2013. At 19, I had just finished a gap year in seminary in Jerusalem and I had joined trip both as my father’s daughter and as a photographer.

After spending a week traveling through Israel, the plan was that my parents would stay on and that the plane would return me, my siblings, and the Oz’s to our home state of New Jersey. It was a Friday but we were scheduled to land well before the Sabbath began.

I couldn’t have known that Dr. Oz was asking because his family was pushing to extend their vacation on to Maine. And I would never have expected that he would approach the pilot to diverge knowing what it would mean for us as Orthodox Jews, namely, to violate the Sabbath for the first and only time – a time when, after spending the year in Jerusalem studying Torah, I had never been more pious.

To put me and my siblings, the youngest who was 4, in such a precarious situation now seems so thoughtless, so selfish. But back then I was simply shocked. Shocked when the pilot announced we were landing not in New Jersey, but in Maine. Shocked as I watched Dr. Oz and his family shuttle out of the plane excitedly, knowing well that the Sabbath was beginning imminently and that we were stranded, too ashamed to confront them, too paralyzed to make our next move.

Should we get off too? We knew no one in Maine. I scrambled to call synagogues and Rabbis in the area. There were none. “We can’t get off!” my sister Chana, one year older than me, pleaded. “We have no food and nowhere to stay.”

The plane took off again into a multi-colored sky. I remember looking out the window at a blood orange sunset and the sensations of physical pain that it elicited in my body. It was now Shabbat and I was on a plane. This was the first time I had ever violated the Sabbath, even if not by choice. It felt unbearably painful and strange. I could not stop crying from take off until landing.

After sending the little ones home in a car with non-Jewish friends, my sister and I proceeded to walk from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, our original intended destination with Dr. Oz and his family, to our home in Englewood using google maps directions printed for us by the staff. It took us almost 4 hours in the dead of night, two young women completely alone. It was terrifying.

The entire experience saddened and confused me. At the time, Dr. Oz was a good friend. He had joined my family for Shabbat dinner many times. We had visited his family at the Oz home in New Jersey. He had shown tremendous support for Israel with his visit, as I myself had witnessed, snapping photos as he danced with Israeli soldiers in Hebron. His behavior that day on the plane didn’t add up. Why would he have forced observant Jews to desecrate the Sabbath after he had expressly asked us about stopping in Maine? Why would he have forced two women to walk four hours in the middle of the night? And why, after my father and these Jewish donors had been so kind as to provide a private plane to visit Israel for the entire Oz family had they repaid their kindness this way?

My father was deeply disturbed when he heard. He thought about what to do but decided in the end not to bring it up. He felt that it had been an honest mistake. Here was a world-renowned celebrity doctor who had just shown tremendous support for Israel. We would let it slide.

Fast forward to January 2022 and my father has now organized a special night of Holocaust commendation at Carnegie Hall. The Gala was commemorating the Wannsee Conference, which planned the holocaust and and whose 80^th anniversary was January 20th, 2020. Very significant Jewish donors were scheduled to speak live that night but due to a huge Omicron surge that almost canceled the event, most of the major donors spoke by Skype in instead. It was obvious by his behavior that Dr Oz, who was a featured speaker, was furious. He stood disgruntled on the sidelines, eyes scouring the crowd for any sign of the Republican mega-donors he had come to court, and then, too angry to care that we could all see, began harassing my father by the stage, even as speakers like Marion Wiesel, Elie Wiesel’s wife, addressed the audience about the horrors of the holocaust.

Ironically, it was on our trip to Israel that I first heard whispers of Oz’s own political aspirations.

I overheard “Mehmet” and “presidency” between some of the people who accompanied us. I was stunned.

It will be for the people of Pennsylvania to decide on Dr. Oz’s political future. But regardless, two Jewish sisters who had a nightmarish Sabbath will never forget the Dr. Oz who must learn, if he is to become a successful public servant, to respect people’s traditions and observances.

Shterna Sara Glick is a graphic designer and artist who is the mother of three young children. Her husband, from Philadelphia, is currently doing his medical residency at a hospital in New York.