Dr. Shupak, colorful denizen of Sanhedria Murchevet

In this week’s Kosher Living section, the lead story is on a unique reunion — of a neighborhood in Jerusalem.

The reunion  — and the mitzvah of Eretz Yisrael — take center stage in that story, while mention of individuals must be limited. Here is an extended portrait of one of the colorful denizens of that neighborhood — Sandhedria Murchevet — who passed away shortly before the reunion. I interviewed him before he died.

BEFORE 1967, Jerusalem was small-town in population, physical size, turn of mind.

But in 1967 the Six Day War came. Jordan put Jerusalem on the chopping block. Israel obliged, slicing away one chunk of territory after the next: badlands to the north, Old City to the south, surroundings of Bethlehem to the southwest, ridges overlooking the Dead Sea to the east. Barriers separating Arab from Israeli Jerusalem were demolished, Jerusalem reunited, conquered chunks of territory annexed. The upshot was a threefold expansion of city space.

City planners filled the space quickly, deliberately, sometimes beautifully. To the southwest came the new neighborhoods of Gilo and Armon Hanetziv; to the south, the exquisitely rebuilt Jewish quarter within the Old City walls; to the east, Neve Yaakov and French Hill. A checkerboard of lovely gardens and condominiums — Ramat Eshkol — sprang up north of the old boundary at Ammunition Hill. Three miles further north the new minicity of Ramot staked out large tracts of land just below the strategic command point of Nebi Samuel.

Jerusalem became bigger even than Tel Aviv proper — pregnant with cars, tourists, contractors, immigrants, light industry — everything, it seems, except pollution. And uniformity. The new wedged and jostled the old. The new buffeted even the new. Visionaries of post-1967 Jerusalem implanted just below Ramat Eshkol the neighborhood of Sanhedria Murchevet, a round area lacking basic nuclei of civilization.

The neighborhood began with no grocery, telephone, bus line or community center; no synagogue, school, playground or street lights. But the neighborhood was exuberant, honeycombed with young Israelis, Russians, Americans, Swedes, French, South Africans, Argentines, Moroccans, British and others, all snuggled around and inside the main circle-street.

All encountered strange, clashing customs, all witnessed scheming, temerity, and earnestness — a Jerusalem-in-miniature. Sooner or later, all encountered the one accoutrement of civilization with which even pioneers will not dispense: the physician, in this case Dr. Yehuda Leib Shupak. He would enchant and enrage Sanhedria Murchevet, and embody one of two cultural tides endemic to it, to Jerusalem, to Israel.

DR. Shupak contradicted his credentials: B.A. (literature and philosophy), M.D. (specialization in psychiatry), both from the Sorbonne; two-year internship with the French Legion; four-year practice, again at the Sorbonne, with specialization in drug cases, suicides, nervous breakdowns and similar psychological lesions.

Dr. Shupak reminded few immigrants of physicians whom they knew in Israel or elsewhere. He abhorred the panoply of the profession — secretaries, framed diplomas, white gowns, black bags, technical jargon, and gravitas — of all of which he had none.  Was he really a doctor?  Ladies whispered, parents wondered. Why did he laugh and grin, expound mythology and Maimonides? Some used other doctors.

Then came the drug scandal. Overnight, Jerusalem’s drug addicts congregated in Sanhedria Mur-chevet. They hid neither their desire nor their destination. Dr. Shupak, it seemed, was  writing prescriptions for them.

Neighbors gaped, medical authorities lurched, newspapers and television criticized Dr. Shupak unmercifully — until one leading daily asked him to clarify his intentions.

Unpleasant data came to light: Drug addiction in Jerusalem had jumped; not one drug-treatment program existed in the city; drug-related crimes dropped since Dr. Shupak began dispensing powerful tranquilizers. His fee? Three dollars per prescription. His task? Not so much writing the slip as listening to disheveled supplicants in his living room, for hours.

His fate? Ironically, a certain respectability. Although medical authorities suspended his license (later reinstated), and although pockets of rage forced him and his family into hiding for a week, much of the neighborhood accorded him the status of martyr. He was unwise, it was argued, but also imbued with social concern, and clearly not out for the money. He did erase taboos, catalyze the formation of a drug-treatment program and bore no grudge against his detractors.

YEHUDAH Shupak, raised in Vichy France, stood over six feet tall,  spoke Spanish, Hebrew, French, Yiddish, German and English, and was the father of five children. His beard was thick, light red and light grey. His eyes were narrow, further contracted by small, rimless glasses pressed on an oblong head. He liked to read Erich Fromm, Thomas Szasz, Greek mythology, the history of Nazism, above all the Hebrew Bible.

Where politicians wax eloquent with righteous indignation, he would laugh, for, he would say, only forbearance begets progress. Where physicians are crushed by defeat or propelled by success, he found solace in the absurd, for, he says, everybody lives it. And where certain physicians are preoccupied, he made house calls, took would be suicides under his wing, answered inquiries in the middle of the night, charging three dollars per visit. Like an old country doctor he dispensed empathy together with pills, sometimes instead of pills. His laughing, sometimes unappreciated, preserved his credibility with the laughed at. His simple, sweeping certitude preserved his authority over the unstable. From Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem an assortment of students, young mothers, chasidim and parents of the mentally handicapped and mentally disturbed sought his help.

Treatment of the unbalanced claimed Dr. Shupak’s deepest loyalties. What is the right approach —  right medically, right morally? In France, he dropped his residency in psychiatry when a talented fellow student threw himself out the window.

“The point was clear,” he said, grinning broadly as if the point were obvious, “psychiatry is falsehood. And today, I am still with the problem — to find the real critique of psychiatry.”

Curiously at odds with his sensitivity as a practitioner, Dr. Shupak’s speech is strident, his thinking riven with dichotomies.

“Psychiatry is falsehood,” he would insist, “and so is Western culture. As an undergraduate, this was my book” — he would pull a sleek bound copy of Plato from the shelf — “the book of books, their book of books.  When I went into medicine I began to change books — to our book. In Africa, in the Foreign Legion, I was the only Jew in uniform. I had to cope with former Nazi officers — to define myself.  I returned to France much closer to Judaism.

“With the riots — the French Revolution of 1968 — I lost all my patients; everyone was in the streets. They rampaged and destroyed, but did not build. Their culture — Western culture, French culture, the psychiatry, the psychology, the social relations —it was all nonsense. What was the Jewish way?

“I came to Israel to find out. But here it is either Labor or Likud, socialism or capitalism, also Gentile nonsense. What is the Jewish way? Look at mythology. Western culture reaches back to the Oedipus story, the son who tried to kill his mother. Greeks took it from the Biblical story of Abraham’s binding Isaac for human sacrifice. Why, then, should Jews follow the West?

“In Western medicine, psychiatrists are addicted to treatment by drugs, but they do not listen. Psychotherapists are addicted to listening, but they do not answer. We need what I call social medicine — treating physical, psychological, and social needs together. To integrate them: this, said Maimonides, is Jewish medicine.

“We need to listen and answer, until we uncover the real burden. It might not be internal, as therapists would have it. It might be caused by an employer or spouse.  If so, physicians must call in the employer or the spouse. Physicians need to do more than prescribe, listen, or answer — or all of them.  They must transfigure all conditions of life — the whole way of living.”

THE end point in Dr. Shupak’s return to Jerusalem: transfiguration of life. It is more than liberal cliche or rhetorical flourish. In the Jewish context — Dr. Shupak’s context — it is also dangerous. Jewish history is rich with advocates of total change who, within Judaism, generated ruinous false messiahs (such as Sabbatei Zvi), and who, without Judaism, imposed martyrdom (such as the Inquisition). Jews fell to the internal travail when they were stripped of spiritual strength. They fell to the Inquisitors when they were stripped of both will and weapons for defense.

Today Jews possess both will and weapons. Twin strengths of soldier and sword sliced from Jordan the territory of Dr. Shupak’s neighborhood and sustain it now.

Jews like Dr. Shupak have enfevered themselves with climactic in-turning to Judaism, the Bible and the self, alongside imitative out-turning to Gentiles, guns, and force.

It is a fresh polarity in Jewish history. Over the millennia it was Jewish powerlessness that bolstered the search for Judaism, and Jewish power that battered the search, rather than drew strength from it.

There are other new polarities in Jerusalem. Affirmative contact with Western and Arab culture animated such Zionists as Abba Eban, no less than selective rejection of Gentile culture animated such Zionists as Dr. Shupak. The secular Zionist’s drive, too, is new, for affirmative contact with Gentiles always thrived without, not within, boundaries of a Jewish state. It thrived in ancient Alexandria, medieval Spain, Weimar Berlin — but not in Jerusalem.

How will it all resolve itself?

History supplies no clue because both searches — for affirmation and negation of interplay between Jew and Gentile — never flourished cheek by jowl, as they do in Jerusalem today.

Copyright © 2011 by the Intermountain Jewish News