Story of the Day 10/9/2011

We were putting up our succah. We being Larry, Aaron and I, and Larry started telling Aaron about the time a patient gave him sefer torah-a torah scroll.
Well, not exactly.

Larry practices medicine on the south side of Indianapolis. The south side has been populated by wave after wave of immigrants. At one time, the wave was Jewish.
When this woman was young, there were still Jews living on the south side. ( More than 2 or 3). And there was a house fire. The family was Jewish, and they left behind a lot of things in the burnt out house, when they left. This woman, and her brother found a scroll that was left behind in a closet.

The woman realized that this was something that shouldn’t just be thrown in the trash, but she wasn’t sure what to do with it. So for 50 or so years, it has been sitting in her closet.

That doesn’t mean that she never tried to do anything with it, though.

Apparently, a few years ago, she thought she could call somewhere and get information about what she should do. She called Shapiro’s.

Shapiro’s is a restaurant on the South side. When all the Jews assimilated enough to be able to afford to move north, and the next wave of immigrants moved in, the restaurant somehow didn’t’ move with et Jews. It stayed, and became a regional fixture.
It is such a regional fixture, as well as being the only thing Jewish in the entire south side other than cemeteries, that it really was the only place this woman knew of.
So she called.

Well, Shapiro’s has a Jewish name, and they serve “Jewish food, like corned beef sandwiches and lox on bagels, real rare ethnic fare on the south side, but they are neither kosher nor very Jewish, at this point, and they had no idea what she should do with the scroll.

So it sat in her closet a while longer.

And then she had arthritis.

Well, actually, I don’t know if she had orhas arthritis. My husband mostly sees patients with arthritis, since that is his specialty, but the only information he gave me about the woman pertained to the torah and how she got it and how she came to mention it to him. For all I know she was seeing him for her diabetes, because he also has patients who do that. Oh, and I can guess that she is at least 60 and probably a good 70 years old, because the Jews have been gone from the southside for 50 or 60 years.

At any rate, she was seeing my husband who is a rheumatologist, for something, and she quickly identified him as being Jewish.

Not from his New York accent.

Not by his nose or his last name, both of which do give a clue.

Not even by his beard, but most likely because he happens to wear a kippah.

There are plenty of people with New York accents, distinctive noses, beards and even possibly Jewish sounding names who were not Jewish. But outside of a friend of the family in synagogue for a Bar Mitzvah, only rarely does one encounter someone who is not Jewish wearing a kippah or yarmulke or skullcap.
…Unless it is crimson and they are a cardinal or white and it is the pope, but they don’t usually have New York accents. Not usually.
And the probability of running into one of them on the southside of Indianapolis is actually even smaller than the probability of running into a real live Jew, although, not by a lot.

So, she brought the problem to him. What should she do with this torah scroll?

In fact, after a couple of visits, she LITERALLY brought the problem to him.
She brought the scroll to his office.

He took a look at it and said, “This isn’t a Torah scroll.”

He carefully opened a bit of it up to read the lettering. I say carefully, because the heat from the fire had damaged the parchment to the point where it was rather like matzah- and liable to start cracking. And he said, “You see, it says here ‘Vayahe bemay ahashverosh…”

She replied, “You know very well I can’t read that!”
Which he did know, but he couldn’t resist the urge to tease her.

He did explain, though, that this wasn’t in fact a torah scroll, it was a scroll of the book of Esther.
And the lady, relieved, gave it to him to deal with.
She wasn’t relieved that it wasn’t a Torah scroll, she was relieved that she could finally had it over to someone and get it out of her closet.

Of course, now it is in my husband’s closet, where it has been for 14 months, waiting for him to do something with it.