Baruch Rofeh Cholim. Blessed is the Healer of the sick. This is of course a reference to God the true Healer. But I would use the same phrase about a man to whom God has entrusted this gift. God bless this healer of the sick.I don’t know Dr. Yashar Hirshaut. But I am told he is an Orthodox Jew. Not that it makes any difference. His contributions to humanity would be the same whether he is a religious Jew or a Buddhist monk.
But it still makes me proud that there are people like this in the world. People who are observant Jews and dedicate their lives to finding cures for deadly diseases. In the case of Dr. Hirshaut, the disease he is fighting is cancer. What he has done is described in an article in the New York Daily News. And it is truly amazing. Here are some excerpts from the article:
“When I first came to Sloan-Kettering, a small glass cabinet held all the cancer drugs that were known,” says Dr. Yashar Hirshaut.
"So I've seen the transition from a very primitive time till now, where people have chances they didn't have before."
His efforts have included treating patients, writing and raising funds to support research. He does the latter as chairman of the board of the Israel Cancer Research Fund (ICRF), a nonprofit that supports cancer researchers in Israel.
They started small: raising $25,000 to make grants of $5,000 each. They were scrupulous from the start to assemble some of the best researchers, including the late Dr. Henry Kaplan, a pioneer in radiation therapy for Hodgkin's disease, and the late Dr. Charlotte Friend, who discovered the Friend leukemia virus, to decide which researchers to fund.
One of the early projects they helped fund, research by Israeli scientist Yair Reisner, yielded advances in transplantation of bone marrow.
This subject is obviously very near and dear to me. My grandson, Reuven is the beneficiary of people like him. The new chemotherapy treatment program he has begun will require a life saving bone marrow transplant.
Thank God there are people like him whom God has entrusted with the skill, dedication and determination to search and find cures for cancer.
This is the best argument I can think of for providing a secular education to all children in the Torah world, no matter what their Hashkafos… and giving bright people choices.
Dr. Hirshaut is probably quite brilliant. Certainly enough so that had he been indoctrinated to stay in learning full time and not given any secular education in high school, he would not have become a doctor. He may have become a much greater Talmid Chacham than he is now. That is certainly possible… maybe not a Rav Moshe… but a fine Talmid Chacham none the less.
But think of the loss this would have meant to my grandson, Reuven. He is on the left side of the above family picture taken just before he started his new chemotherapy treatment. Of course he no longer looks like that. He has lost his hair again. But not his spirit.
And think of the many other patients who owe their lives to people like him! Instead of staying in learning full time, he followed his passion and he has become a ‘Rav Moshe’ of medicine. God bless this man. He is a shining example of what a Jew can become when given the freedom to choose. Because only choice will give us ‘Rav Moshes’ in all fields.
