"The observance of the
Sabbath is extremely
beautiful," he said, and is
impossible without being
religious. It is not even a
question of improving society
- it is about improving one's
own quality of life."
Our synagogue, which would be
packed to capacity when I was a
child, grew emptier by the year.
I chanted my bar mitzvah por-
tion in 1946 to a relatively full
synagogue, including several dozen
of my relatives, but this, for me,
was the end of formal Jewish prac-
tice. I did not embrace the ritual
duties of a Jewish adult — praying
every day, putting on tefillin before
prayer each weekday morning
— and I gradually became more
indifferent to the beliefs and habits
of my parents, though there was no
particular point of rupture until I
was 18. It was then that my father,
inquiring into my sexual feelings,
compelled me to admit that I liked
boys.
"I haven't done anything" I said,
"it's just a feeling — but don't tell
Ma, she won't be able to take it"
He did tell her, and the next
morning she came down with a
look of horror on her face, and
shrieked at me: "You are an abomi-
nation. I wish you had never been
born:' (She was no doubt thinking
of the verse in Leviticus that read,
"If a man also lie with mankind,
as he lieth with a woman, both of
them have committed an abomina-
tion: They shall surely be put to
death; their blood shall be upon
them")
The matter was never men-
tioned again, but her harsh words
made me hate religion's capacity for
bigotry and cruelty.
After I qualified as a doctor in
1960, I removed myself abruptly
from England and what family
and community I had there, and
went to the New World, where I
knew nobody. When I moved to
Los Angeles, I found a sort of com-
munity among the weight lifters on
Muscle Beach, and with my fellow
neurology residents at U.C.L.A., but
I craved some deeper connection
— "meaning" — in my life, and
it was the absence of this, I think,
that drew me into near-suicidal
addiction to amphetamines in the
1960s.
Recovery started, slowly, as I
found meaningful work in New
York, in a chronic care hospital in
the Bronx (the "Mount Carmel" I
wrote about in Awakenings). I was
fascinated by my patients there,
cared for them deeply, and felt
something of a mission to tell their
stories — stories of situations vir-
tually unknown, almost unimagi-
nable, to the general public and,
indeed, to many of my colleagues.
I had discovered my vocation, and
this I pursued doggedly, single-
mindedly, with little encourage-
ment from my colleagues.
Almost unconsciously, I became
a storyteller at a time when medi-
cal narrative was almost extinct.
This did not dissuade me, for I felt
my roots lay in the great neurologi-
cal case histories of the 19th cen-
tury (and I was encouraged here by
the great Russian neuropsycholo-
gist A. R. Luria). It was a lonely but
deeply satisfying, almost monkish
existence that I was to lead for
many years.
During the 1990s, I came to
know a cousin and contemporary
of mine, Robert John Aumann,
a man of remarkable appearance
with his robust, athletic build and
long white beard that made him,
even at 60, look like an ancient
sage. He is a man of great intellec-
tual power but also of great human
warmth and tenderness, and deep
religious commitment — "commit-
ment" indeed, is one of his favorite
words. Although, in his work, he
stands for rationality in econom-
ics and human affairs, there is no
conflict for him between reason
and faith.
He insisted I have a mezuzah on
my door, and brought me one from
Israel. "I know you don't believe
he said, "but you should have one
anyhow" I didn't argue.
In a remarkable 2004 interview,
Robert John spoke of his lifelong
work in mathematics and game
theory, but also of his family —
how he would go skiing and moun-
taineering with some of his nearly
30 children and grandchildren (a
kosher cook, carrying saucepans,
would accompany them), and the
importance of the Sabbath to him.
"The observance of the Sabbath
is extremely beautiful" he said,
"and is impossible without being
religious. It is not even a question
of improving society — it is about
improving one's own quality of life"
In December of 2005, Robert
John received a Nobel Prize for
his 50 years of fundamental
work in economics. He was not
entirely an easy guest for the
Nobel Committee, for he went to
Stockholm with his family, includ-
ing many of those children and
grandchildren, and all had to have
special kosher plates, utensils and
food, and special formal clothes,
with no biblically forbidden admix-
ture of wool and linen.
That same month, I was found
to have cancer in one eye, and
while I was in the hospital for
treatment the following month,
Robert John visited. He was full
of entertaining stories about the
Nobel Prize and the ceremony
in Stockholm, but made a point
of saying that, had he been com-
pelled to travel to Stockholm on a
Saturday, he would have refused
the prize. His commitment to the
Sabbath, its utter peacefulness and
remoteness from worldly concerns,
would have trumped even a Nobel.
In 1955, as a 22-year-old, I went
to Israel for several months to work
on a kibbutz, and though I enjoyed
it, I decided not to go again. Even
though so many of my cousins had
moved there, the politics of the
Middle East disturbed me, and I
suspected I would be out of place
in a deeply religious society. But
in the spring of 2014, hearing that
my cousin Marjorie — a physi-
cian who had been a protegee of
my mother's and had worked in
the field of medicine till the age of
98 — was nearing death, I phoned
her in Jerusalem to say farewell.
Her voice was unexpectedly strong
and resonant, with an accent very
much like my mother's. "I don't
intend to die now" she said, "I will
be having my 100th birthday on
June 18th. Will you come?"
I said, "Yes, of course!" When
I hung up, I realized that in a few
seconds I had reversed a decision
of almost 60 years. It was purely a
family visit. I celebrated Marjorie's
100th with her and extended fam-
ily. I saw two other cousins dear to
me in my London days, innumer-
able second and removed cousins,
and, of course, Robert John. I felt
embraced by my family in a way I
had not known since childhood.
I had felt a little fearful visiting
my Orthodox family with my lover,
Billy — my mother's words still
echoed in my mind — but Billy,
too, was warmly received. How
profoundly attitudes had changed,
even among the Orthodox, was
made clear by Robert John when
he invited Billy and me to join him
and his family at their opening
Sabbath meal.
The peace of the Sabbath, of a
stopped world, a time outside time,
was palpable, infused everything,
and I found myself drenched with
a wistfulness, something akin to
nostalgia, wondering what if. What
if A and B and C had been differ-
ent? What sort of person might
I have been? What sort of a life
might I have lived?
In December 2014, I completed
my memoir, On the Move, and gave
the manuscript to my publisher,
not dreaming that days later I
would learn I had metastatic can-
cer, coming from the melanoma I
had in my eye nine years earlier. I
am glad I was able to complete my
memoir without knowing this, and
that I had been able, for the first
time in my life, to make a full and
frank declaration of my sexual-
ity, facing the world openly, with
no more guilty secrets locked up
inside me.
In February, I felt I had to be
equally open about my cancer —
and facing death. I was, in fact, in
the hospital when my essay on this,
"My Own Life was published in
the New York Times. In July I wrote
another piece for the paper, "My
Periodic Table in which the physi-
cal cosmos, and the elements I
loved, took on lives of their own.
And now, weak, short of breath,
my once-firm muscles melted
away by cancer, I find my thoughts,
increasingly, not on the super-
natural or spiritual, but on what is
meant by living a good and worth-
while life — achieving a sense of
peace within oneself. I find my
thoughts drifting to the Sabbath,
the day of rest, the seventh day of
the week, and perhaps the seventh
day of one's life as well, when one
can feel that one's work is done,
and one may, in good conscience,
rest
❑
Oliver Sacks was a pro-
fessor of neurology at
the New York University
School of Medicine. A
bestselling author, most
recently of the memoir On
the Move, his work touched
Hollywood, theater and
opera. Dr. Sacks died on
Aug. 30, at the age of 82.
September 10• 2015
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