The Greater Good

I walked in the door just as she began to lose consciousness and slip away from us. She was pale, clammy, and cold to the touch. Her pulse was racing and her blood pressure was plummeting. There was blood everywhere.

I received the call while praying in beit knesset: a woman having contractions, ten minutes away. I left my beautiful daughters praying and ran. While en route, another call came in: miscarriage, heavy bleeding, Mobile Intensive Care Unit had been dispatched. The first call was urgent. This one was an emergency and closer. I swung my little Toyota around and headed towards the bleeding.

When I arrived, the team was attempting to establish IV access. I placed a large-bore IV, started fluids, and administered medications. Around me were an anesthesiologist, a gynecologist, medics, and other responders who, like me, had left their beit knesset and their prayers when the call came. We huddled around the bleeding woman, the men in their bright white kittels and me in my long white dress. Together, we gave medications and fluids, and worked to stop the bleeding, and stabilize her. Slowly, she came back to us. By the time she was transferred to the ambulance, she was stable, alert, and talking.

I went back to pray, my white dress now stained forever red.

Around this time of year, we wish one another שנה טובה, a good year. I’ve always wondered about that word: good. Good for whom? What is good for me may not be good for you. One person’s success can be another person’s loss. We can wish each other health, happiness, prosperity, peace, but what exactly do we mean when we wish someone a good year?

As the country shut down for the holiest day of the Jewish year and families gathered in batei knesset, the roads became almost completely empty. Even the traffic lights became redundant, shut off and blinking yellow over deserted intersections. In my tiny car, I could move through the city in a way that is impossible on almost any other day of the year, from one person to another and one call to the next, covering in minutes distances that would ordinarily take far longer.

Over the course of the holiday, I examined women having contractions, delivered a baby, sat beside a daughter as her elderly mother left this world, helped stop a massive bleed, and answered call after call. Lives beginning, lives ending, and lives hanging somewhere in between.

But I was never alone.

At each call throughout the chag, alongside me were Muslims, Christians, and Jews; Haredi, religious, traditional, and secular; dispatchers, doctors, midwives, paramedics, medics, nurses, and volunteers. People from different communities, backgrounds, beliefs, and lives. Yet, when we gathered around a person who needed us, those differences melted away. As one, we rallied around a struggling human being, determined to fight with all we have to keep them on this earth for another moment. Working together in unison and harmony to keep that person alive. Fighting for something so much bigger than ourselves.

A Greater Good.

When we wish each other שנה טובה, perhaps we are wishing for more than a year in which good things happen to us. There is a personal good, what is good for me, for you, for our families, and that will always be subjective. But there is also a Greater Good: the good that exists beyond our own interests, the good we recognize in preserving life, protecting dignity, easing suffering, and caring for another human being simply because they are human.

Maybe שנה טובה is a wish for a year in which we choose that Greater Good more often. A year in which we recognize what we share, before we focus on what sets us apart. A year in which another person’s pain becomes worthy of our attention, another person’s dignity worthy of our protection, and another person’s life worth fighting for. A year in which we listen more deeply, give more freely, and are willing, when the moment demands it, to leave our own comfort, plans, and prayers, to run towards someone else. A year in which people, who may disagree about almost everything, can still kneel together on the same floor, side by side, and fight for a stranger’s life.

So this year, when I say שנה טובה, I will be wishing for more than a year in which good things happen to you. I will be wishing for a year in which we choose to become the good. A year in which, when another human being is hurting, frightened, bleeding, grieving, or alone, we move towards them. A year in which we remember that what binds us is greater than what divides us. A year in which we fight for each other instead of against each other. A year in which we are willing to be called away from ourselves and toward one another.

And when the call comes, whatever that call may be, may we be the people who answer.

שנה טובה.

A year for the Greater Good.