Rabbi Laurence Skopitz z"l
A friend once advised him to "make mountains out of small pleasures and molehills out of suffering."
And Rabbi Laurence Skopitz hopes to do just that, turning a life-threatening blood condition into a molehill and embracing the opportunity it presents for personal and spiritual growth.
"I have to see if I'm able to live the platitudes I've been dispensing for years," he says.
In May, Skopitz, 58, full-time rabbi of Temple Beth David in Irondequoit and a part-time chaplain at the Rochester Psychiatric Center, was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), a rare disorder that prevents his body from making healthy blood cells.
He has been receiving blood transfusions about every three weeks and hopes to have a bone marrow transplant within several weeks.
Skopitz has been rabbi at Temple Beth David for 25 years, a very long time to stay with a single congregation. But he's never had any desire to move on. Beth David is a small - about 250 families - congregation.
"It gives me a chance to track people's lives," he says, "to follow a family through three generations."
"For us, the desire has always been to have a relationship, not a rabbi," says Patrick Kruchten, the temple president who has known Skopitz for 22 of those years. "For all the ups and downs, this congregation wants a rabbi who will be there for them - and if anyone were to ask for the ultimate description of what the congregation wants in a rabbi, he's it."
No surprise then that when they learned of his illness, the families of Beth David wanted to help. The temple's Sisterhood will host a marrow drive on Oct. 29. The Sisterhood has been doing fundraising to help defray the $52 testing cost for donors who want to join the national marrow registry.
The drive may not benefit Skopitz directly, since three potential donors have already been identified through the National Marrow Donor Program Registry (www.marrow.org). But the rabbi hopes the drive can benefit others.
"Even in the face of this terrible illness, it's his way to be concerned for the greater community," says Helen Kashtan, chairwoman of the bone marrow drive.
"To me, it's very meaningful that people register" as donors, he says. The drive is about doing a good thing, doing the right thing, Skopitz says, not about helping one individual.
Skopitz has the soul of an artist. He plays clarinet, saxophone, guitar and piano, and plays in a local Klezmer band. Klezmer is "Jewish ragtime," he says, "a meeting of Eastern and Western forms. It's deceptively simple music. It is hard to listen to it and not get up and dance." It is a celebration of life, which is its appeal to the rabbi.
Skopitz is also a gifted calligrapher, Kashtan says, and often presents newly married couples with an illustrated copy of the Ketubah, or marriage contract.
In a way, his illness is a gift, or at least an opportunity. As we spoke in the chaplains' office at the Psychiatric Center, he recalled a conversation with some patients who wondered how God could let this happen to him.
"It was a chance for them to forget their own suffering for a moment and a chance for me to share with them. I said God gives us the strength to put up with it, the courage to go on. That's what faith is all about - it's not believing that good things happen to good people."
Three other times in his life, Skopitz has found himself dependent on the kindness of others. After an accident he was left blind for several days; an illness left him partially deaf for a time; reaction to medication once left him paralyzed on one side.
Each time, he says, he learned to appreciate what others endure - to empathize, not sympathize. Each time, he learned to be humble. "Sometimes the greatest kindness is to allow people to give to you," he says.
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, began Friday night. "I expect this to be a good year," Skopitz says. "And I hope we can all make mountains of our small pleasures."