When I arrived at the emergency room with mysterious abdominal pain, the first thing they did was hand me a pen.
As I stood at the registration desk, the pain was getting worse still — I knew I had to puke again. But there were forms to fill and information to provide. I jotted down my name and address, and I obliged as they told me to pose for quite possibly the worst photograph of my entire life.
The pain was hard to bear — I distinctly felt like there was a cinder block in my lower abdomen but, unable to recall eating any bricks or concrete, I ruled that out.
But I was taken aback by what happened next.
Once I was officially admitted to the hospital, I was led to a different, painfully fluorescent room, where they needed more information about me. They clipped a pulse oximeter onto my finger, took my blood pressure and then took some actual blood. I stood on a scale. They asked for my height and I said, “five-nine” — the searing pain, which was expanding to my lower back, eclipsed my urge to say “five-nine-and-a-half.”
Finally, I was led to a bed. Lying in it brought no pain relief — but a woman in scrubs holding an iPad approached. I thought: Could this be my savior? Does her iPad have the answers? Does she know what’s wrong with me?
No. There were no answers, just more questions, though these ones were of the optional variety. She asked for my marital status; “Single,” I said awkwardly as my girlfriend looked on. The nurse tapped silently on the iPad.
And then she asked: “Religion?”
I thought maybe my abdominal pain had somehow disrupted my hearing. I didn’t answer right away as questions raced through my brain: What should I do? Am I supposed to tell her I’m Jewish? Maybe she’s Jewish? What if I told her? What if I didn’t?
“Why?” I asked, maybe a bit defensively.
I felt distinctly uncomfortable — a discomfort that was separate from the one caused by what I’d later learn was a millimeters-wide kidney stone straining its way through my ureter.
Since I was very young, I’ve had this notion that it’s good to be suspicious if I’m ever asked to identify my religion. In addition to my familiarity with Jewish history — i.e, millennia of Jewish persecution — I’d also heard horror stories from childhood friends. People like my former classmates at a Jewish day school in Toronto: Legend has it that a man on the street had asked if they were Jewish, then offered them cash after they lied and said “no.” (Scared, they ran off into, of all places, a falafel shop.)
NYU Langone hospital is one of several NYC hospitals, photographed here on May 7, 2020. (GHI/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
On an intellectual level, I knew my suspicion about revealing my Jewish identity was at least somewhat ridiculous. Here I was on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in a city home to one million Jews, inside a hospital named after a Jewish guy. (That’s right: Financier Sanford Weill, of NY Presbyterian-Weill Cornell Medical Center fame, was once a Jewish kid in Brooklyn.)
My misgivings were even a bit out of character: I’m more than happy to identify myself as a Jew — I am literally a staff writer for the New York Jewish Week. It’s on my LinkedIn and everything.
But lying in a hospital bed, being asked by someone I’ve never met holding a mysterious tablet synced up to a whole network of information invisible to me — well, I didn’t want to answer. Why? Well, famously, not everybody likes Jews! Even here in New York City, there were 345 anti-Jewish hate crimes last year, making up more than half of the city’s total hate crimes.
I tried to reason with myself — after all, I was in the hospital, a place of health and safety. But in a world transformed by the October 7 attack and the global rise in antisemitism, hospitals have horror stories, too: I thought about the Australian nurse who was charged after a viral video showed her threatening to kill her Israeli patients and boasting about refusing to treat them. (I’m not Israeli, I reminded myself, but still.) And I remembered how, recently, American Jewish leaders have raised concerns about antisemitism in the health care sector in the United States.
Maybe I wasn’t being unreasonable, I figured. So I opted not to answer. My thoughts kept racing as the nurse tapped some more on the iPad, then moved on. And after about 10 hours of tests — and eventually passing the stone — so did I.
In the following days and weeks, though, as I replayed my emergency room visit in my head, I realized I was still curious: Why did they ask me for my religion? And should I have answered?
Friends had different theories. Some said it was to know which type of religious official to summon in case I died (how comforting!). Others posited that it was purely for tracking demographics.
So I asked around at a bunch of NYC hospitals; some of them didn’t have a response. But according to a spokesperson for NYU Langone: “Hospitals like ours typically ask about religion so that we can be attentive to a patient’s cultural and spiritual needs, such as dietary preferences, traditions (such as offering candles for the Sabbath), or if they ask for a member of the clergy to assist in counseling or prayer.”
Aha! This was comforting. In other words, they weren’t inputting my name on a secret database called “PATIENTS TO TARGET.”
As a New York-Presbyterian Hospital spokesperson told me via email: “During the registration process we offer our patients the option of sharing their religious affiliation to help us provide the best, most personalized patient experience, including access to specialized resources and considerations, including a variety of chaplaincy services,” they wrote, specifying that sharing religious affiliation “is completely voluntary.”
Nonetheless, the spokesperson’s mention of chaplaincy services piqued my interest — after all, I associated hospital chaplains with reading last rites to patients on their deathbed. And according to Rabbi Ben Varon, a chaplain at NYU Langone Hospital Brooklyn, that’s not an unusual association to make.
“Here and there, I walk in and introduce myself and [people are] like, ‘Oh no, what’s wrong?’” Varon told me. “And I reassure them right away, ‘There’s nothing wrong. This is one of my units, I make rounds. And I’m just here to provide emotional support and see how you guys are doing today.’”
In his role as a chaplain, Varon said that giving patients “any amount of peace or comfort that I can is a win.” Sometimes he sees patients during his rounds, while other times a medical professional refers patients for him to see. While many hospital staffers aim to provide physical healing, Varon said that chaplains are there to help on an emotional and spiritual level, which “are very integral aspects of people’s lives, of their healing journeys.”
When I told Varon about my recent reluctance to disclose my Jewish identity at the hospital, he responded that I’m not the only one. “Whether that’s like, deep-seated trauma or fear, or whatever the reason might be — it’s hard to say exactly, but I think there’s something there,” he said.
He noted that Russian Jews seem especially reluctant to identify their religion (NYU Langone Brooklyn is located in South Brooklyn, near neighborhoods with large Russian populations). “I think Russian Jews have a very wide spectrum of their relationship to their faith,” he said. “What it meant for them to be Jewish in the Soviet Union, and how that comes out for them now, living in America — I think there’s definitely something there.”
Looking at the census of patients in units he’s covering, Varon noted that the religion on many of their files is listed as “none” — the same thing that’s written on mine, presumably.
But Varon pointed out that his support, like helping patients reflect on their experiences or talking through a diagnosis, is equally applicable to secular or non-religious patients — or even non-Jewish ones. Many times, he said, his work involves simply being a presence beside a patient who is suffering or lonely. “Sitting with someone is a holy thing, in my opinion,” he said.
Ultimately, in the ER, I didn’t feel the need for a chaplain’s presence: I had my girlfriend by my side and my parents on FaceTime. But suppose I’d been alone and could’ve used the comfort — would they have sent a chaplain if I’d identified my religion? I wouldn’t have known to ask. (“A lot of Jewish patients have said to me, ‘Oh, I didn’t even know something like this existed,”’ said Varon.)
Now that I understand why hospitals ask patients about their religion, I don’t think I’ll hesitate to answer the question the next time I’m in the hospital.
Unfortunately, another hospital visit is likely in my future: A CT scan taken during that long and painful night indicated that I have yet another kidney stone that needs passing. It could be tomorrow, or three years from now — it’s anyone’s guess. But when that day comes and I’m back in a hospital bed, my words being typed into an iPad as I face question after question, I’ll look forward to telling them I’m a five-nine-and-a-half Jew.
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