Signing a will during a personal and global crisis

There’s nothing like a cancer diagnosis to focus your mind on updating your will. A draft had been sitting sitting on the corner of my desk for some months before my doctor called to tell me the biopsy showed a rare form of gynecological cancer. What was an “I’ll get around to it one of these days” attitude now became high on my To Do list.

My estate is relatively straightforward. Most of my bequests are directed to Jewish organizations in the United States and Israel that matter deeply to me. But I’m not only a Jew, nor am only an American Jew. Indeed, my experiences with the self-proclaimed “vibrant and increasingly diverse American Jewish community” have not all be happy ones and I often feel like an outsider even within my own community. Equally important, I’m also an American—no modifier included—and I wanted to make a meaningful gift in support of an American institution, specifically the School of Nursing at the large state university from which I graduated many years ago.

I’m not a nurse, but my family has had its share of medical crises and I’ve seen a lot of nurses in action, both for good and occasionally, unfortunately, for ill. Over the years, I’ve come to believe nursing is one of the most important professions in our society today. Deployed properly, nurses can reach out to medically-underserved communities, bringing quality care to men, women and children of every race, religion, age, sexual orientation, and economic status. Nursing also provides an entry into a respected profession for women and men of all backgrounds who are often first-generation college graduates.

In addition, nursing plays a unique role in fighting racism: if your life, or your child’s or grandchild’s life, is saved by a someone of an entirely different background—someone from an ethnicity or orientation that you may have previously scorned—suddenly the differences between you are not as significant as they once were. Suddenly, the nurse who seemed so unlike you when you first met is no longer the Other, but the fellow human being who saved your loved one’s life.

So the School of Nursing at my undergraduate university it is. But we all know what’s going on at American universities today: the protests, the encampments, the vicious anti-Zionism and Jew-hatred directed against Jewish students by fellow students and sometimes faculty. The tepid actions of administrators who issue conciliatory, sometimes contradictory, statements that are too often documents of appeasement rather than statements calling out anti-Zionism for the antisemitism that it is.

My attorney told me to hurry up and sign the will. I said I wasn’t planning on dying anytime soon and continued to wrestle with my decision: do I reject support of an American university that on some level tolerates antisemitism or do I support the aspects of its mission that will help save lives?

Soon I was reliving my undergraduate years. I was at college many years ago, just as the 1960s were turning into The Sixties. During my first years on campus, protests were quiet and infrequent, but by my senior year, my campus took on a strong anti-war atmosphere. I did not support the war, but neither could join the protestors in reviling the young men who did military service. They were the boys I went to elementary and junior high school with, the ones from my working- and lower-middle-class neighborhoods, who didn’t go to college and followed the orders of their government. Some died. Some returned mentally or physically incapacitated. But instead of honoring their service, too many anti-war protestors spit on them and called them child killers, as though they were not foot soldiers but the generals who made military decisions hundreds of miles from the front. The Vietnamese people did not deserve what happened to them, but neither did the young men I’d grown up with.

And now students and professors are once again are holding marches, setting up encampments and condemning people who had nothing to do with the issue they are protesting. Only this time, it’s the Jewish students and pro-Israel faculty who are being reviled. And, like too many of the students and professors who condemned the young men who served in Vietnam with the same intensity as they protested against the generals who commanded them, the sense of moral superiority among too many of today’s protestors replaces their moral outrage. Once again I faced my conundrum. On the one hand, should I support a university that defends immature students who took their right to protest to inappropriate degrees? On the other hand, I received an excellent, reasonably priced, undergraduate education there and want to help other first-generation college students like me get a college education and prepare for a career.

In the end, I included my university in my will. The majority of my bequests are still to Jewish organizations, but I am an American and it is important to me to support my country, the country that gave hope and safety to my grandparents, where my parents were able to live fulfilling middle-class lives, where I have grown and thrived. If there is one lesson I could share with our rising generation, it is this: protesting against issues is moral. Reviling people who support a different perspective is not. As my oncologist tells me, we cannot predict the future. And as I met with my attorney to sign my will, I said a silent prayer that, in some small way, whether alive or dead, I can help to heal the world.