c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) You always know when you meet a living legend. That’s how I felt about Dr. Saul J. Farber, one of America’s greatest physicians and medical educators, who died on Oct. 12 at age 88 in New York.

I first met Saul in 1985 when New York Gov. Mario Cuomo appointed both of us to the state’s newly formed Task Force on Life and the Law. For the next 21 years, he was my mentor and friend. The Task Force, composed of 25 physicians, clergy, lawyers, ethicists, nurses and social workers, was mandated to develop public policy about critical bioethical issues.

Once our group reached a consensus, we presented our recommendations to the New York legislature for adoption. Most of those recommendations were enacted into law, including the legal determination of death, the right of patients to obtain do-not-resuscitate orders in hospitals, health care proxy directives, regulation of organ and tissue transplantations, surrogate parenting and palliative care.

Our debates were always vigorous because our group has both knowledge and passion about today’s life-and-death bioethical issues. I consider membership on the panel one of the highlights of my professional career.

Saul always brought his brilliant medical knowledge to our debates. He was the longtime chairman of the Department of Medicine at New York University’s Medical School, as well as dean and provost.

In addition to teaching several generations of medical students, Saul was a widely respected leader in internal medicine, the president of the American College of Physicians, and chairman of the American Board of Internal Medicine. During his extraordinary career, he received many awards and honors from his fellow physicians. Saul was deeply committed to his students and patients, and he set a personal example by insisting on quality care for the poor. He was both a brilliant researcher and clinician.

That was Saul’s outstanding medical resume.

But he was also something else: a world-class doctor with a superb Jewish education who remained a lifelong student of the Talmud. He was everything a caring compassionate Jewish physician should be.

The link between Jews and medicine began in biblical times and continues to this day. Jewish tradition warns that one should never live in a community that has no doctor, and it also teaches that a physician is God’s human partner in combating disease and illness.

Each time I sat with him at meetings, I had the distinct feeling that Saul was part of the cavalcade of Jewish doctors that includes Moses Maimonides, venereal disease fighters Jacob Wassermann and Paul Ehrlich, and polio conquerors Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin.

At our task force meetings, Saul consistently asked the right questions about a proposed law. Would the public be served? Would the regulation actually improve health care in New York? Has sufficient research been done on the bioethical issue under consideration?

My most vivid memory came when Saul learned I had been an Air Force chaplain in Japan and Korea. He recounted that after graduation from medical school at NYU, he became a Navy physician attached to the Marines in the South Pacific.

There were tears as he spoke because he remained haunted by the decisions he made during the battle of Bougainville Island in 1943. The fierce jungle fighting resulted in many American casualties, and the difficult medical conditions made Saul’s work extremely challenging. For relief and inspiration, he studied Talmud with Julius Kravetz, the Jewish chaplain on Bougainville, who years later became my seminary teacher.

“I was a young doctor, with limited clinical experience, stationed with the Marines in the midst of bitter fighting. As the wounded came in, I had to make instant decisions, what we now call `triage.’ I constantly thought of the High Holiday prayer that asks, `who shall live and who shall die in the coming year.’ And now, I was making those terrible choices. Which Marines were too far gone for treatment, and which Marines should receive whatever medical care I could offer? I can never forget those days on Bougainville.”

That was Saul, a knowledgeable and deeply committed Jew, and an internationally acclaimed physician and teacher. He was always, to use the Yiddish term for a compassionate human being, a “mensch.”

KRE/JL END RUDIN

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the recently published book “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)

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