fbpx

GET HOME DELIVERY! CLICK HERE »

ADVERTISE
pick up locations
HOME DELIVERY
donate

Jewish Journal

Connect. Inform. Inspire.

May 18, 2007

Dig this! Herod’s tomb found after 3-decade hunt

Leave a Comment / Science & Technology /

Ruthlessly lavish in his lifetime and a villain of Jewish and Christian narratives alike, the biblical King Herod has captured the world’s imagination anew with the discovery of his tomb outside Jerusalem.

Hebrew University archeologists on May 8 announced the find of the first century B.C.E. monarch’s grave, sarcophagus and mausoleum at the Herodium ruins in the Judean Desert after more than three decades of digging.

“This is the only site that carries his name, and the site where he chose to be buried and to memorialize himself — all of this with the integration of a huge, unique palace at the fringe of the desert,” said professor Ehud Netzer, team leader. “Therefore, the unearthing of his tomb marks the climax of research at this site.”

No human remains were among the relics, possibly due to grave robbers or what the university described as “nationalist vandalism” in ancient Judea. It said the sarcophagus and mausoleum had suffered extensive damage, apparently by Jewish zealots who waged a revolt against Roman occupiers in 66-72 C.E.

“The rebels were known for their hatred of Herod and all that he stood for as a ‘puppet ruler’ for the Romans,” the university said in a statement.

Herod, a convert to Judaism whom the Romans appointed king of Judea, was considered a great builder and administrator who dramatically expanded and renovated the Second Temple, refurbished the fortress at Masada, rebuilt water supplies for Jerusalem and built the cities of Caesarea and Herodium. He also is remembered as a ruthless ruler who did not hesitate to eliminate potential rivals, including one of his many wives and two of his children.

Herod’s outsized ego has an especially grim resonance for Christians: The New Testament records that upon hearing that a new messiah, or “King of the Jews,” would be born in Bethlehem, Herod ordered the slaughter of the town’s male children. Jesus survived, according to the Christian narrative, because his parents escaped to Egypt.

Herodium, which included a huge palace at the edge of the desert near Bethlehem, is where the king chose to be buried and memorialized.

Netzer, considered a world expert on Herodian architecture, began his search for Herod’s tomb more than three decades ago. After digging in various spots on Mount Herodium, Netzer said the team knew it was close to the tomb when they found the first pieces of a “monumental” sarcophagus made of hard limestone during excavations on the northeastern slope.

“There is only one or two of its kind found so far” in the country, Netzer said. “It’s not that every rich Jew or citizen of this time could afford it. It’s really a royal one.”

Netzer’s team of archeologists, Ya’akov Kalman, Roi Porath and local Bedouins, also unearthed part of a platform of dressed limestone — about 30-by-30 feet — that belonged to the mausoleum. Other “high-quality” artifacts found at the site included decorated urns similar to those found on burial monuments of the Nabatean culture.

No inscriptions have been found, but the team says circumstantial evidence — an account of Herod’s funeral at the site by the historian Josephus Flavius, the lucrative artifacts and remnants found and historical records indicating Herod’s decision to be buried there — points to this being the king’s burial site.

According to the archeologists, Herodium included a prefabricated “tomb estate” for the king, with a mikvah for ritual purification of the corpse. There also was a “monumental” flight of stairs — 20 feet wide — up which the bier was carried.

Josephus’ book, “The Jewish Wars,” describes the funeral at Herodium in detail. Herod’s son, Archelaus, Josephus wrote, “brought forth all the royal ornaments to accompany the procession in honor of the deceased. The bier was of solid gold, studded with precious stones and had a covering of purple, embroidered with various colors; on this lay the body enveloped in purple robe, a diadem encircling the head and surmounted by a crown of gold, the scepter beside his right hand.”

The find is one of the most important discoveries from the Second Temple period, said Oren Gutfeld, professor of classical archeology at the Hebrew University Institute of Archeology.
“Someone so famous, like Herod the Great, Herod the Builder, a dominant person in the history of Israel and who we know about so much from literary sources — from Josephus Flavius — and archaeological finds all over Israel and outside, it’s a diamond in the crown,” said Gutfeld, who had worked with Netzer at Herodium for three years and has seen the tomb remnants.

Stephen Pfann, president of the University of the Holy Land and a specialist in inscription studies and Second Temple historiography, said Netzer should be congratulated for finding sarcophagus fragments, which indicate “a tomb of someone on the ground who was very rich, affluent, perhaps of great honor.”

But “we don’t know whether Archelaus or one of the other sons was buried there with him,” Pfann said. “We don’t know whether the fragments of the sarcophagus might be of someone else. All we know from history is that he is the only one mentioned as being buried there.”

Ze’ev Weiss, also an archeology professor at the Institute of Archeology, said it seems logical that the tomb belonged to Herod, based on the discovery of the podium and pieces of the sarcophagus, combined with accounts of the funeral taking place at Herodium.

However, the archeological team and other experts say much excavation work still remains to be done at the site.

“In my mind, as an archeologist, there is nothing 100 percent,” said Weiss, who worked with Netzer in the 1980s in the Herodium area. “We have to work; we have to prove it, but still, when we take all the details, I would say there is a high percentage that this is Herod’s tomb.”

Dig this! Herod’s tomb found after 3-decade hunt Read More »

The time has come for action on Darfur

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

Will it never end?

The “it” refers to the cruelty, the meanness, the violence that so have characterized our times and do still. While Iraq and Afghanistan continue to leech — blood, treasure, honor — it is other things I have in mind just now.

The haunting question is the disturbing theme of a movie I saw the other evening, a Dutch movie called, “The Black Book,” by film director Paul Verhoeven. Although I found it deeply affecting, I am hesitant to recommend it, since almost all the reviews, most of them quite positive, remark on its vulgarity — an aspect of the film that, I confess, largely escaped me.

The movie tells the story of a Jewish woman in Holland during the war (“the war” meaning World War II) who hides her Jewishness in order to survive, joins the resistance movement and, after a few too many brushes with death both as witness and almost victim (which lead her to ask, plaintively, the “will it never end” question) ends up on a kibbutz in Israel.

The film is almost entirely a flashback; it begins, quite briefly, and ends, even more briefly, on the kibbutz, where she is a teacher of young children and herself a mother, her punishing and too often melodramatic past apparently safely tucked away.

But this is Israel in October of 1956, the year of the Sinai campaign. And so, in the last seconds of the film, Verhoeven answers what we’d imagined was merely a rhetorical question: Suddenly, a swarm of Israeli soldiers races into the kibbutz and takes up defensive positions. No, it does not end. No place is safe; there is no peace; soldiers and guns are everywhere. And death.

On an old cassette tape, I have a Hungarian version of the familiar “Ani Ma’amin,” familiar until part way through, the performing artists switch from the Hebrew to Yiddish and sing directly to God, asking, among other things, “When will there be an end to the punishments of exile?”

Which brings me to Darfur. It is now almost exactly two years since President Bush described what’s happening in Darfur as “a genocide,” almost three years since Congress unanimously adopted a joint resolution declaring the atrocities in Darfur a genocide. The U.N. Genocide Convention, which became international law in 1948 and which the United States finally ratified in 1988, declared genocide a crime that the signatories “undertake to prevent and to punish.”

It is possible that the president believes that our diplomatic interventions fulfill our obligation, since they do, however ineffectively, “undertake to prevent.” Be that as it may, it is certain that many of the 400,000 Darfurians who have perished, often from hunger and disease or simply slaughtered, entered the dismal statistical roll during these last two years. As also many of the some 2.5 million Darfurians who have been displaced, many of the more than 80 percent of Darfur’s villages that have been looted or destroyed and many of the 4 million Darfurians who are now dependent on humanitarian aid.

Seven months ago, the Massachusetts Coalition to Save Darfur learned that the Boston-based mutual fund giant, Fidelity Investments, had more than $1 billion invested in two of the most unscrupulous companies operating in Sudan, PetroChina and Sinopec.

The Sudan Divestment Task Force, a national research and advocacy group, identified these Chinese oil companies (principally owned by the Chinese government) as among the two dozen or so “worst-offending” businesses in the war-torn region. In consequence, a campaign was begun to encourage people with funds at Fidelity to divest, in the hope that such action might lead Fidelity to clean up its act.

I’ve been aware of the effort for a while now, but it was only last week that I finally took action, writing to Fidelity, in which I do indeed have a chunk of my retirement funds. I wrote of my concerns and of my disposition to withdraw from all my Fidelity holdings unless I could be persuaded that Fidelity was acting responsibly.

Fidelity’s response? They “comply fully with all applicable laws.” And, “Were our government to decide to enact new laws or regulations to broaden restrictions on investments, the Fidelity funds, of course, would comply with those laws as well.” After all, Fidelity’s fiduciary responsibility is to maximize investors’ returns.

But note: Fidelity has — gulp — $3 trillion under management. Of this, $1.4 billion or so, barely enough to qualify as a statistical error, is invested in the two Chinese oil companies operating in Sudan. It can scarcely be thought that shifting the $1.4 billion to other companies would impair the bottom line. Obedience to the letter of the law may permit but hardly requires investment in Sudan.

As to those of us who are offended at this by-the-book abdication of responsibility, Fidelity superciliously writes, “We understand that some investors may choose to advance specific causes based upon their personal social or ethical values.”

It was on reading that sentence that I decided to quit Fidelity. Putting an end to genocide is not quite the same as advancing a “personal” cause.

The Verhoeven movie is riddled with moral ambiguity. There is a “good Nazi” and there is an evil resistance fighter. The leader of one resistance cell devoted to rescuing Jews lapses at one point into anti-Semitism. The heroine of the movie is less than a woman of virtue.

We’re told, these days, that the situation in Darfur is not as simple as we supposed a year or two ago. There, too, ambiguity.

But it is not acceptable to be immobilized by ambiguity, not when women are being raped, children starved, people driven from their homes, routinely slaughtered. Much of life is inherently ambiguous.

Yet, if not now, when?

Else it will never end.

Leonard Fein is the author of “Against the Dying of the Light: A Parent’s Story of Love, Loss, and Hope” (Jewish Lights, 2001).

The time has come for action on Darfur Read More »

Weaponized Evangelism

Leave a Comment / Opinion, Rob Eshman /

A force of nature named Michael Weinstein swept into my office and set about trying to convince me this country is in much bigger trouble than I can imagine.

According to Weinstein, the U.S. military “has just been completely infused by premillennial, dispensational, reconstructionist, dominionist, evangelical, fundamentalist Christians who want to spread a weaponized version of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Instead of using the might of the most powerful war machine in the history of the world to defend all Americans, these evangelical Christians seek to spread democracy and the gospel, to be crusaders for Christ, at any cost to America and to treat American military personnel as “the lowest hanging fruit” in their drive to evangelize. “There’s a serious threat out there that we view to be as much a national security threat internally to this country as that presented externally by Al Qaeda,” he said.

Weinstein is 54 years old, with a shaved, round head and the physique of a store vault. He was in Los Angeles speaking and plugging his new book, “With God on Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military” (St Martins Press, 2007), which he co-authored with Davin Seay.

Weinstein is not crazy. He’s an Air Force Academy graduate himself, a Republican who spent 10 years as a judge advocate for the Air Force and served three as legal counsel in the Reagan White House.

He’s the guy, you might have heard, who sued the U.S. Air Force in Federal Court in 2005, demanding a permanent injunction against alleged religious favoritism and proselytizing in the service.

A federal judge threw the lawsuit out, saying Weinstein had no standing — a “technicality,” Weinstein said — but he will be back with an even more sweeping suit, prepared with the pro bono help of the powerful Washington law firm, WilmerHale.

Weinstein founded the nonprofit Military Religious Freedom Foundation to fight what he says is an evangelical Christian mission to co-opt the U.S. military.

And Weinstein likes a good fight.

“The goal of our foundation,” he tells me, “is to litigate and educate, to lay down a withering field of fire, kick ass, take aim and leave sucking chest wounds.”

When Ted Haggard, the now-defrocked pastor of the 14,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs and president of the National Association of Evangelicals, accused Weinstein of denying evangelicals their religious freedoms, Weinstein, a former boxer, offered to go 10 rounds with Haggard in a ring behind the junior high school.

Even Abe Foxman, the taurine head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), doesn’t talk to Weinstein any more. “He said to me, ‘Why do you have to be so nasty? You’ll just make them madder.'”

When Abe Foxman finds you abrasive, imagine what the non-Jews think.

Weinstein’s go-away-from-Jesus started with Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” When the movie was released, cadets at the Air Force Academy marched into the huge dining hall to find flyers promoting a screening: “For three straight days a flyer on every plate said, ‘Do not discard this flyer. Go see this movie.'”

By July, Weinstein’s son, Curtis, then a 22-year-old cadet at the academy, could no longer abide the pressure. He called his dad. “I’m going to beat the s— out of the next guy that calls me ‘a f—- — Jew,'” he told Weinstein.

So Weinstein, son of a Navy captain, who has two sons and a daughter-in-law who are Air Force Academy graduates, began to ask questions.

What he found, he said, was a concerted effort by evangelicals to missionize cadets in the academies and in the field.

“We now have 737 U.S. military installations in 132 countries around the world,” said Weinstein, “and in every one of them there is a presence of the Officers Christian Fellowship for the officers and Christian Military Fellowship for the enlisted. The first goal of these organizations is to see a spiritually transformed U.S. military with ambassadors for Christ in uniform empowered by the holy spirit. My problem is the ‘in uniform’ part.

Those of us outside the military have seen the attitude spill over into the news. In 2005, Brig. Gen. Johnny Weida, the commander of cadets, sent an e-mail in which he told cadets to “ask the Lord to give us the wisdom to discover the right…. He has a plan for each and every one of us.”

The ADL fought against Weida’s promotion, and the Air Force launched an investigation. Brig. Gen. Cecil R. Richardson, the Air Force deputy chief of chaplains, told The New York Times in 2005, “We will not proselytize, but we reserve the right to evangelize the unchurched.”

In February, the Air Force issued interim guidelines governing the free exercise of religion by its personnel and its chaplain corps. Weinstein said they don’t go far enough.

“Up to 70 percent of Air Force chaplains are now evangelical,” he told me. “We’re not at a tipping point; we’ve tipped. The wall separating church and state in the military is nothing but smoke and debris We don’t have a Pentagon anymore. It’s the Pentacostal-gon.”

Evangelicals, of course, see it differently. They accuse Weinstein of censoring them and denying them the right to practice their religion.

While The New York Times found that the number of evangelical chaplains has in some cases grown tenfold, it also found greater religious complexity than ever before in the Air Force. Some 3,500 service personnel “say they are either Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, pagans, druids or shamans.”

But Weinstein is on mission. He’s not against evangelicals practicing their faith, he’s against them practicing their faith on others, on duty.

“If you want to think Anne Frank is burning eternally in hell, I’ll defend your right to my last drop of blood to do so, but I will not do it when my government wants to tell me who are the children of the greater god and who are the children of the lesser god, because we’ve been there, done that.”

Weaponized Evangelism Read More »

Battle of the sexes along the Y-Divide

Leave a Comment / Singles /

“Ladies and gentlemen, Rabbi Aryeh Pamensky holds the secret to your incredible, unbelievable and unparalleled happiness,” announces the emcee in a dimly lit nightspot where hundreds of Jews are gathered, each hoping to attain what half of Americans find unattainable: a happy marriage.”

A happy wife is a happy life,” the rabbi says, and so begins the popular one-man interactive show, “Pamensky Live,” which makes its rounds throughout the United States and Canada.

Pamensky spoke to a reporter in Philadelphia after one of his shows.

Pamensky believes he can eradicate divorce and is on a mission to prove he can make marriage into a heaven on earth for both genders. To that end he has created “Y-Divide Marriage Kit,” which includes a DVD and six CDs.

And he has written two books: “Marrying The Y-Divide: Bridging the Gender Gap” and “Ten Top Amazing Marriage Tips.” He is also on the road throughout the year, garnering rave reviews at scores of comedy clubs and other trendy locales. It is not just the married folks he addresses; the 42-year old South African native raised in Toronto targets single audiences nationwide for comparable dating seminars, though his advice differs pre- and post-marriage.

“Pamensky Live,” known as the Jewish version of “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus,” gives the men in the crowd a job. Recognizing that men are not innately what he terms “relationship beings,” Pamensky offers a job description for men looking to transform their existing relationship into one that fulfills their every dream. In an entertaining presentation, the rabbi assures men that they will not have to go through massive personal and interpersonal changes: “I say, ‘You’re a guy and you don’t have to change. Who you are right now can satisfy your wife,’ and they feel a weight lifted off their shoulders.”

According to Pamensky, their eyes open wide and they are baffled that he is not urging them to become sensitive, communicative beings.

Pamensky responds, “If you become that, your wife won’t be happy anyway. She wants to be married to you as a man. So now, you, as a man, can fulfill her. I have tools to teach you how to make it work where you’re at. Now this is how you do it….”

Pamesky believes women are incredibly complicated, but they all need the three As: attention, affection and appreciation, and once they receive this from their husbands, they channel their energy into creating a loving and adventurous affair with their spouse. On this premise, as a woman grows more content and pleased in her marital relationship, her reservations melt away and she opens herself up to pampering her husband. Pamensky’s presentation humorously depicts just what kind of attention and affection he is referring to.

He advises the men to drop whatever they are doing and give their wives undivided attention.

“Don’t tune out,” he warns, recommending eye contact and attentively listening to everything she is saying. By affection, the rabbi is referring to affectionate tones and nonsexual touch. Appreciation generally speaks for itself.

Addressing the women, Pamensky says, “Take a look at your man now, and you will forever look at him entirely different. He is a huge ego with legs. When he does his job [making you happy], stroke his ego over the top. Men live for this. The greatest way to bolster his ego is letting him know how his gestures made you feel for the good.”

He jokes, “We always hear about it for the bad.”

“The Amazing Marriage Seminar,” portions of which are included in the “Live” performance, is the culmination of many years of rabbinical study of the Torah and other Jewish texts, in conjunction with Pamensky’s work as a marriage counselor and personal coach.

“The self-help business is a gazillion dollar business, and so many people who attend are Jewish, so I always wondered, ‘Why don’t they go to Judaism for this stuff?'” he said. “I always had a dream of taking the wisdom of Judaism and putting it in self-help language that is palatable to people who don’t have access to the texts themselves. There is a tremendous 3,500-year-old tradition that’s been passed down concerning wisdom for understanding marriage.”

According to the Pamensky plan, “make your wife feel that she is the most important person in your life; that nothing going on in your life is more important than her.”

In a tone that implies, “Hey, I’m one of you, just a regular guy,” he cautions, “Gentlemen, you’ve got to appreciate that every time you make your wife feel less important than something else in your life, be it work, children, sports, parents, television or hobbies, that thing becomes a mistress, and your wife will fight you on everything that has to do with that mistress.”

At each performance, Pamensky reminds men that their wives will support them on their every endeavor so long as she feels she is more important than any other person or thing.

For singles, he takes a different approach.

“Dating sets you up for a bad marriage,” Pamensky said at one of his packed singles events, which was sponsored by Discovery Productions, a New York-based nonprofit Jewish outreach organization. The dynamic is all faulty from the get-go, he maintains, since dating is always on a man’s terms. “That’s how you begin the relationship, and women think that once they get married, it is going to switch, but you have already set precedents. The skill set for dating,” he continues, “when applied to marriage causes bad marriages.”

“Most of marriage is about fulfilling the other person’s needs, and this is why dating is not a good training ground for marriage,” Pamensky says. He adds that since there is no alternative, “you just need to learn how to date smart.”

He says one of his most rewarding moments came when a woman ran up to him in gratitude after one of his performances, tearfully exclaiming, “How do I thank the man who saved my life?”

With a chuckle, Pamensky says, “You see, that’s how women speak about relationships!”

For more information, visit Battle of the sexes along the Y-Divide Read More »

Got Shavuot?

Leave a Comment / David Suissa /

The hottest word in marketing today is “interactive.” After decades of treating consumers like passive targets, marketers have learned that the best way to get people excited about your product is to create some kind of interaction — to make consumers feel and experience the uniqueness of your product.

It’s also called “high-touch” or “relationship” marketing. I’ve seen this evolution with all kinds of clients, from baby food to luxury cars. But what I find fascinating is that based on this new trend, Judaism is bursting with marketing potential.

Look at some of our holidays. In the middle of winter, while most of the world sits around a little tree lit with electricity, we go old school and harness the iconic power of candles — beautiful, flickering, magical candles. We don’t just look at light, we create it.

At springtime, God comes to us with one of life’s most satisfying experiences: He instructs us to clean up every little corner of our homes. Not only do we end up finding loose change in the sofas, but we feel like we’re back in control of our messy lives. And when our homes are nice and orderly, what do we do? We have an elaborate meal full of interactive rituals to celebrate that most valuable of consumer products — human freedom.

To make sure we take none of our comforts for granted, Judaism doesn’t settle for charismatic preaching or simple prayer. Like they say in marketing, that would be “me too-ish,” and certainly not very interactive. So come fall, Judaism instructs us to build a frail, little hut in our backyards — and eat there for eight days.

This instinct for high-touch marketing never ends. We are the People of the Book, so what do we do at the very end of our religious year, when we’ve just finished reading that Book? We take it out, raise it high, dance, drink and have a huge party around it. Talk about interactive.

Marketers know the importance of kids, and so does Judaism. You could fill a 24-hour cable channel with news of interactive games and art projects for kids that flow out of Jewish holidays.

You wonder sometimes if God and his helpers hired an ad agency to help them come up with all these super-creative, interactive holidays. I guess when you have 613 commandments, it’s not like you can’t use a little marketing help.

One of my favorite high-touch holidays on the Jewish calendar is the one that tells us to chill for one day a week — no cell phones, no “Grey’s Anatomy,” no Beverly Center — so that we can recharge our batteries for the coming week. That’s some foresight they must have had at Sinai, to anticipate that 3,300 years later, we’d all be sleeping with our BlackBerries — desperate for a weekly dose of unplugged bliss.

And just when you think you’ve hit a lull in the Jewish holiday calendar, you get hit with a happening like a bonfire on the beach to celebrate a great mystic, or the planting of trees to celebrate the biblical imperative to renew and protect the earth. This is interactive marketing at its finest: high consumer involvement, with hardly ever a dull moment.

Which brings me to what may arguably be the dullest moment in the Jewish calendar: the holiday of Shavuot, which is now upon us.

It pains me to think that God’s ad agency might have taken the day off on this one. What a blunder! On the one holiday that the People of the Book celebrate the receipt of that very book, what do they come up with? Cheese blintzes? A dairy festival? Didn’t they anticipate all those news reports of the mucus-inducing properties of milk and other dairy products?

It’s not fair. More attention must be paid to this holiday. Of course, here in the hood, as in all observant communities, the two days of Shavuot are as important as the two days of Rosh Hashanah — the kids are off school and everybody’s in shul. It’s holiday business as usual.

But unlike Rosh Hashanah — which has the irresistible attraction of a new year and a new beginning — and other holidays that have their own attractions, Shavuot seems to miss that special sizzle that could engage mainstream Judaism.

We can change that. The truth is, some of our most creative customs and ideas have evolved over the centuries. So why not find creative ways to get more Jews to “interact” with Shavuot?

If Judaism were my client, here’s what I would recommend: Make Shavuot the coolest holiday of the year by playing up the little-known Shavuot custom of staying up all night — just like the ancient mystics.

Think about the times in your life — except for final exams — when you’ve stayed up all night. Isn’t there something a little rebellious and bohemian about this idea of the night that never ends? OK, you won’t be in a jazz bar or partying on a beach in Bali, but you’ll be breaking the boundaries of your everyday routine, and isn’t that worth something?

The observant Jews who stay up all night on Shavuot usually do a lot of learning, with some Sephardic Jews doing certain prayers of rectification. But get creative. Bring out your favorite Jewish books, read Jewish poetry, tell Jewish stories, sing a few songs, meditate — in other words, create your own all-night Shavuot salon, and make sure you have plenty of Turkish coffee.

That’s my idea. Now get interactive and e-mail me your own ideas. Winning entry gets a free cheesecake.

David Suissa, an advertising executive, is founder of OLAM magazine and Meals4Israel.com. He can be reached at dsuissa@olam.org.

Got Shavuot? Read More »

A physician examines his profession’s blind spots

Leave a Comment / Science & Technology /

Jerome Groopman is a physician and clinical scientist at Harvard University, a specialist in AIDS and cancer. He’s also a writer for The New Yorker, with a successful and thought-provoking series of books on such topics as the intersection of spirituality and medicine and the importance of a physician’s intuition. His new book, “How Doctors Think,” asks the question: Why do doctors make mistakes and how can we keep them from happening?

Zachary Sholem Berger: How can patient and doctor better understand each other?

Jerome Groopman: Language is still the bedrock of medicine, despite all the great technology we have. I have a great doctor who listens very carefully, lets me tell my story; sometimes he interrupts to guide me. He is an active listener, explaining how he understood what I said and then explaining his thinking to me.

I’ve tried to make myself a better doctor. Like most medical students, I was not educated in thinking about thinking. At least I’ve become much more self-aware. Hopefully through the process of writing this book, I’ll think better for my patients.

ZSB: How can a doctor retrain himself or herself in order to listen more, be open to more diagnostic possibilities?

JG: By and large, we do a good job as doctors. We’re right about 80 percent of the time — our misdiagnosis rate is 15 percent to 20 percent, which is remarkable. But in about half of misdiagnoses, there is serious harm to the patient. My hope is that people in charge of medical education will seriously look at this and ask how can we do better in terms of educating doctors to think about their thinking and avoiding pitfalls.

This concern comes out of the experience of the patient. Because we doctors see so many people, thinking in the moment, we have to use shortcuts. If lay people become educated about how we think, with a few appropriate and directed questions, they could help us think better.

They should ask, “Could this be anything else?” or “I’m worried this is something serious.”

That is the genuine partnership.

ZSB: Could it be that the issue is not only thinking, but that doctor and patient need to understand how the other feels?

JG: There’s an integration of thinking and feeling; our emotions color our thought processes. In the real world, pitfalls in thinking are also influenced by our emotions. So you have to recognize feelings — to be self-aware and know there are going to be patients that you adore. That can impair your judgment, as well. The flip side is there are patients we don’t like, that we find irritating or provocative.

ZSB: Do patients have to recognize feelings, as well?

JG: It’s much harder to be a patient than a doctor. Research I mention in the book shows that patients pick up accurately if doctors like them or don’t like them. Patients need to defuse such a situation or open it up. There are patients who have said to me, “I can feel how devoted you are to me. I don’t want you to hold back.” If [on the other hand] you feel like the doctor’s irritating you, as I experienced myself as a patient, that’s a red flag.

ZSB: What does the Jewish tradition mean to you?

JG: I feel its importance very deeply. There is room in it for doubt and skepticism and questioning, not a sense of infallibility. There’s also extraordinary psychological insight with regard to motivation and character. For example, Maimonides talks about magical thinking, and the Torah talks about not believing in sorcery — often patients do have magical thinking, believing that they will be saved.

ZSB: Doctors, too — magical thinking guards us against admitting our ignorance.

JG: That’s right! So we should be challenging ourselves. Judaism impels you to challenge yourself. In the greatest debates in Talmud, you are able to challenge the greatest authorities.

ZSB: Do you feel recourse to spirituality, to God?

JG: As much as I wish there were miracles — boom, my hand’s fixed — those are fantasies. What Judaism teaches us is the knowledge that we’re created with reservoirs of resilience. We are created with the capacity of wisdom, which means judgment — not just knowledge, but the ability to assess and weigh that knowledge to make choices. Very integral in Judaism is the sense of hope. There is capacity to improve. What it takes is drawing on gifts of science with mobilization of the spirit.

ZSB: How do you mobilize the patient’s spirit?

JG: I try to draw from them wellsprings of their resilience, to lift them up as best I can. The diseases I deal with are serious ones. The confrontation with those kinds of realities requires energy and commitment and determination on the part of a patient.

ZSB: Is the spirituality you’ve talked about just a fancy name for trying to inject religion?

JG: I don’t think you need to be religious to have a sense of awe or to look within yourself or around you for nonreligious sources of strength, whether they be family, friends or therapists. I care for many people who are atheist and agnostic, and I certainly don’t have the hubris of imposing any religious sensibility on them. My job as a physician is to help them find that core of strength and focus.

Zackary Sholem Berger, a frequent Forward contributor, is a medical resident in the primary care program at New York University.

A physician examines his profession’s blind spots Read More »

No WiFi? WiPeer software says ‘no problem’

Leave a Comment / Science & Technology /

Whenever Technion computer science professor Roi Friedman visited conferences and lectures with his students, he found himself growing increasingly frustrated.

In an age of supposedly instant communications, he felt impatient that in locations without access to the Internet or a cellular network, there was no way to communicate or share files with fellow researchers, even though they all carried laptops and were often in the same hall or building.

The answer, he realized, was to develop a new solution.

One and a half years later, a team of doctoral students under Friedman’s guidance has developed WiPeer. The new software enables mobile and desktop computers to communicate directly with one another in a local area without any mediating factor, such as an Internet server. The software, which is available free on the Net, enables users to send messages, pictures, files, movies and games to one another wirelessly within a 100- to 300-meter radius.

Direct communication via computers has been technically possible for years. Any laptop or desktop computer with wireless connection capabilities should be able to communicate directly with another. The only problem is that this form of wireless ad-hoc communication is highly complex and requires a long configuration process. Even professionals in the field have shied away from tackling this problem.

“We always knew the possibility existed but it was just too complicated,” Friedman said. “When we wanted to share files, pictures or games it was much easier to just use a USB or disk on key.”

Work on WiPeer began in January 2006. It was undertaken as a doctoral dissertation by three of Friedman’s graduate students, Vadim Drabkin, Gabi Kliyot and Alon Kama. Their goal was to devise a solution that would not only solve their own communication problems, but which could also be put to use by the general public. As a result, the team focused on building software that looks attractive and professional.

“Typically when you build software in academia it is very rough and not always easy to use,” Friedman said. “Right from the start we made sure that WiPeer would have an attractive GUI [graphic user interface], could be easily installed and was simple and appealing to use.”

The user-friendly application platform enables simple communication between computers in close proximity — 100 yards inside a building and up to 300 yards in the open air. Users can transfer dozens of pictures from one computer to another in less than a minute, and even a 700 megabyte file can be transferred in up to 15 minutes. It is also possible to carry on chats without disturbing anyone in the vicinity or to play collaborative games like chess.

WiPeer is only available for systems that run Windows XP or Vista.

“It’s very fast and extremely simple,” said Friedman, adding that in addition to students and researchers, the software will also appeal to businesspeople, particularly those that travel frequently for their work.

“Employees who go abroad on company business may be seated separately from one another in the airplane,” Friedman said. “With this software, they can work together on their presentation during their flight.”

The software was completed earlier this year. Since it was published, several thousand people have No WiFi? WiPeer software says ‘no problem’ Read More »

Science of floral scents and colors blooming in Israel

Leave a Comment / Science & Technology /

Professor Alexander Vainstein is proud of his greenhouses.

Located at the Hebrew University’s Robert H. Smith Institute of Plant Sciences and Genetics in Agriculture in Rehovot, these greenhouses offer visitors both a delight to the senses and a trip to a futuristic world, where flowers emerge in different colors, with different scents and a whole new genetic makeup designed to enhance and improve the flower stock.

“You’ll see types of flowers in our greenhouses that do not exist anywhere else in the world,” said Vainstein, head of the institute. “People are stunned at what we are doing here. We have petunias, which traditionally don’t have a smell, giving off such a strong perfume that it overpowers you as you walk through the greenhouse doors.”

The greenhouses are only a small part of Vainstein’s work, however. Back in the lab, he and other researchers on the agricultural, food and environmental quality sciences faculty have discovered how to insert the scent of flowers into different foods, how to intensify the smell of perfumes and creams and how to create a natural scent with nothing more than a petri dish.

The developments, which use the same genetic engineering techniques developed in the human genome project to enhance the shape, color and smell of flowers, have generated a great deal of interest from the chemical, food and flower industries, which are not only following developments but often actively funding the work.

Vainstein, a molecular biologist, began studying the molecular mechanism of scent compounds in flowers out of curiosity.

“Smell is a very volatile thing. he said. “Flowers smell differently at different times of the day, it depends if it’s hot or cold, or whether the flower is young and old. Some plants give off strong scents, while others you have to crush before you can smell them.”

Once the team isolated and deciphered the composition of genes and proteins operating in the petals of roses and carnations, they began to genetically engineer the plants to alter scent production. Roses, for example, give off a strong and lovely scent and have major volatile scent compounds, such as germacrene D. Vainstein took the gene responsible for this compound in roses and inserted it into different plant species, such as petunias and carnations.

“It’s not that the petunias now smell of roses, but they do give off a much stronger scent than before,” Vainstein said.

In another successful project, the researchers took a gene from a small aromatic plant that grows in California and introduced it to the carnation plant, which now produces the same aromatic compound as the California plant.

They’ve also discovered how to mute scent in flowers, such as gypsophlia (baby’s breath) — a flower often favored by florists in bouquets — that have an unpleasant odor.

The possibilities for the plant breeding industry are exciting. The flower industry was worth $20.8 billion in 2006 in the United States alone, and more than $100 billion worldwide. Many flowers sold by florists today have lost their smell.

Vainstein’s research promises to be able to not only regenerate the smell in flowers like roses but also to create entirely new scents in other flowers.

What interests the chemical and food industries, however, is that the researchers have also discovered a way to introduce these volatile scent compounds into other organisms, such as yeast — which has many similarities to plants — to create a bioreactor to product these natural compounds.

“In Bulgaria, the economy is built heavily on rose oil, which they produce from roses grown over large areas, but it’s a very long and complicated process to create this oil,” Vainstein said. “We can produce the same scent compounds using a yeast bioreactor, and we do it in a petri dish.”

“We use a tiny amount of space,” he continued. “A few shelves can hold row after row of petri dishes, and there is no disease, no worries about weather or pests and a drastic reduction in manpower costs. The value for the perfume industry is immense.”

Using yeast bioreactors, flower scent compounds can also be introduced to foods, such as bread, or added to wine as it is prepared. Rose-flavored bread, perhaps, or a white wine with a hint of carnation could be possible.

Today food manufacturers often resort to using synthetic scent compounds in foods, but Vainstein’s work, which has been patented, will enable them to create and use natural compounds.

“The food industry is very interested in the potential of this,” Vainstein said. “Smell is not only what you smell with your nose but also what you taste. Through eating foods you also smell them. The aroma comes from inside your mouth to your nose passage.”

Vainstein is working with a number of international companies based in the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel and has carried out commercial trials. He declines to give details, however, because of the competitive nature of the industries he works with.

“There are a number of experiments and pilot trials going on, and we are talking to many companies about many different possibilities, but much of this work is unpublished, and we are not allowed to talk about it,” he stressed, adding that contracts are likely in the future.

Aside from scent, Vainstein’s team of 14 professors and students is also making progress in color enhancement, introducing new colors to flowers that were traditionally white. The university has already developed a number of strains of carnations in colors such as cream and pale green, and work is progressing on color enhancement of roses and gypsophila.

These transgenic flowers are being developed in only three or four locations around the world, and the Hebrew University is the only research lab in the world that focuses on both scent and color. “Most labs work with only color or scent; we work with both,” Vainstein said.

Science of floral scents and colors blooming in Israel Read More »

Biometric sensor makes the Web safer for children

Leave a Comment / Science & Technology /

The statistics are enough to alarm any parent.

According to a recent survey, one in five children online have been approached by a pedophile and received unwanted sexual solicitations. At the same time, the San Diego Police Department reports that two in five abductions of children ages 15 to 17 are Internet-related. The U.S. government estimates that at any given moment there are 50,000 pedophiles prowling Internet chat rooms looking for children to befriend and meet.

And if that’s not worrying enough, more than 20,000 new images of child pornography are posted on the Internet every week, and that pornography, disturbingly available and often sent unsolicited to young children, is becoming increasingly graphic and violent, according to child protection agencies.

In the March trial of a pedophile, Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein told the court: “Every parent’s worst nightmare is just one mouse-click away. Parents who let their children use the Internet without supervision might just as well drop them off alone on the most dangerous street in the world.”

Scared? It’s the natural response, as is the impossible instinct to hover constantly behind your child as he surfs. But now, an Biometric sensor makes the Web safer for children Read More »

Sympathy for the suffering goes to the dogs

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

Americans would care more about the genocide in Darfur if the victims were puppies, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof claimed in a provocative May 10 op-ed.

Is he right?

“Time and again, we’ve seen that the human conscience isn’t pricked by mass suffering, while an individual child (or puppy) in distress causes our hearts to flutter,” Kristof wrote.

He cited psychological studies that have found that people who are given a choice between helping one suffering person or helping a large number will overwhelmingly choose to help just that one.

Thirty-thousand children around the world die each day as a result of the consequences of poverty, but the American public hardly notices, according to Kristof. What really moves people is an ordeal like that of the toddler Jessica McClure, who fell into a Texas well in 1987, or Hok Get, a terrier stranded on a burned-out oil tanker in the Pacific in 2002. The public contributed some $45,000 to try to rescue the dog.

The eviction of a red-tailed hawk from its nest on a Manhattan apartment building sparked an international outcry, with actress Mary Tyler Moore and others rising up in passionate defense of the bird’s rights. Kristof’s comment: “A single homeless hawk aroused more indignation than 2 million homeless Sudanese.”

For the last several years, Kristof has done more than any other journalist to expose the Sudanese Arab militias’ massacres of blacks in Darfur. He has also been a courageous — and often lonely — voice against the failure of the United States and other governments to actively intervene against the killings.

Kristof knows that one way to change government policy is through an outraged public, but getting the American public to care about millions of nameless genocide victims in faraway Africa is no easy task. “What we need,” he proposes, “is more troubled consciences — pricked, perhaps, by a Darfur puppy with big eyes and floppy ears.”

Sadly, there is a historical precedent for Kristof’s disturbing scenario.

The Wagner-Rogers bill, which was introduced in Congress in early 1939, proposed to admit 20,000 refugee children from Nazi Germany. A number of prominent Americans, including former First Lady Grace Coolidge and New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, backed the bill. But their support could not overcome the tide of public opinion, which was strongly against increasing immigration, despite the recent Kristallnacht pogrom.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt refused to support the bill.

FDR’s cousin, Laura Delano Houghteling, who was the wife of the U.S. commissioner of immigration, articulated the sentiment of many opponents of Wagner-Rogers when she remarked at a dinner party that “20,000 charming children would all too soon grow up into 20,000 ugly adults.”

Such hateful attitudes were all too common in those days.

The following year Pets Magazine published a sympathetic photo of a British puppy, accompanied by an appeal to rescue purebreds that were endangered by the German bombing raids on England. This time, the American public’s response was swift and generous:

Several-thousand readers offered to shelter the puppies.

Our generation looks back at the defeat of Wagner-Rogers and the remark by Houghteling with shock and disapproval. We like to think that we have learned the lessons from that experience and would never again ignore mass murder.

But how will future generations judge our response to Darfur?

Los Angeles Events for Darfur

May 18

Light of HOPE (Helping Other People Everywhere) Art Exhibit and Silent Auction. Opening reception for community Darfur Observance Day, featuring artwork incorporating Brian Steidle photo of young Darfurian siblings. 7 p.m. $20. Bradley Tower, City Hall, 200 N. Spring St., Los Angeles. ” target=”_blank”>www.ladarfurobservance.org.

Dr. Rafael Medoff is director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, Sympathy for the suffering goes to the dogs Read More »