Tribute from Josh Hillman
If you asked me what a lens is, I would not know how to answer. What type of lens are you asking about? The lens of an old pair of binoculars, the one on your iPhone camera, or of a magnifying glass you used to play detective with when you were little? As a medical student, when I think about the lens I am struck most by the anatomical lens. With her biconcavity, she plays gate keeper to images, exerting her presence as the primary processor of light. She is the first to decide how to refract the incoming image, soon to be delivered as pure sensory afferent signals through the optic nerve (CN II).
When I remove my white coat, my concept of a lens changes with it. The idea of a lens morphs into an abstract entity—a vantage point through which I view the world. A collective consciousness of the people I’ve encountered, the places I’ve seen, of the times I’ve contemplated what it is that I think and why I think it. For me, my mentors contribute most to that consciousness. Mentors play an integral role in shaping perception—the people that I look to as my guiding light to help me make sense of it all. The concept of mentorship and the mentor-student relationship is demonstrated beautifully in the Talmud’s anecdote about the relationship between Rabbi Yochanan and Reish Lakish.
After meeting each other while swimming in the Sea of Galilee, Reish Lakish and Rabbi Yochanan went on to become inseparable friends—the type of friends who understood each others thoughts, who challenged one another and respected what the other had to say for the sake of learning from the discourse. Rabbi Yochanan and Reish Lakish both helped enhance the others’ lens, enabling each to excel in their studies. Stronger together, they helped each other reach acclaim in the tannaitic period following the death of Yehuda Ha-Nasi, otherwise known as Judah the Prince, redactor of the mishna. The Talmud recounts the days after Reish Lakish passed into the world of life everlasting.
When Rabbi Yochanan heard the news of Reish Lakish’s death he was utterly distraught. Unsure how to console him, the local rabbis decided that they should send one rabbi to comfort Rabbi Yochanan. After deliberating, Rabbi Elazar ben Pedat was chosen for the job because “his ideas are very sharp.” So Rabbi Elazar ben Pedat went to console him with his sharpness. He sat before Rabbi Yochanan who was studying a text, and everything that Rabbi Yochanan said to ben Pedat, ben Pedat would respond by saying, “there is scripture that supports you.” No longer able to endure the gut wrenching pain felt by the absence of his dear friend, Rabbi Yochanan screamed:
“You are nothing like Reish Lakish! When I would say something to him, he would challenge me with 24 objections and I would answer him with 24 answers, which led to a fuller understanding of the law. And you say, there is scripture that supports me?”
Unable to contain himself, Rabbi Yochanan unleashed his pent up grief onto ben Pedat for agreeing with everything he said. The Talmud continues, “He (Rabbi Yochanan) went out and tore his clothes and screamed through tears, “Where are you Reish Lakish? Where are you Reish Lakish?”
On September 11, 2016, I experienced the loss of my own Reish Lakish. I was just getting home from a long day studying Neurology. As I turned the key to my door on King Solomon street I felt a buzz in my pocket—I received an email. The message came from Daniel First, and had no body or text, just a screenshot and title line, “Adler z”l.” “To our Brother-in-law, Dr. Norm Adler z”l—a compassionate, brilliant, spiritual, and wonderful human being… we will deeply miss you… funeral will be 7pm (Israel time) at Eretz Chaim Cemetery near Beit Shemesh.” I caught the next bus from Rabin Square.
The enormity of the loss didn’t hit me right away. I couldn’t accept the reality of Adler’s death, so I tried to hold on as long as I could. It has been over two months that I have been mourning my mentor, Dr. Norman Adler z”l, one of the most prodigiously profound lens shapers of my life. Dr. Adler was my professor at Yeshiva University under whom I studied Psychobiology and Neuropsychology, and my faculty advisor for a group of students (he referred to us as “The Boys”) who were interested in learning about Neuroscience. Nicknamed “The Godfather”, Adler was our faculty liaison communicating our interests to the administration—to people like Harry Ballan, Dean Eichler, Dr. Raji Viswanathan, Dean Sugarman, Dr. Carl Feit, Dr. Gabriel Cwillich and Dr. Will Lee et al. Yeshiva wasn’t ready to create a new Neuroscience major at the time, so Dr. Adler helped us in creating Yeshiva’s first Yeshiva College Neuroscience Society (YCNS). Not too dissimilar from The Dead Poets Society, we rallied around Adler like the students of Welton Academy rallied around John Keating (Robin Williams). Adler reveled in our reveling by helping us create the society, and inviting what he referred to as “friends” to give lectures.
As starry-eyed neophytes knowing next to nothing, we had no idea that these friends were actually brilliant scholars in their fields. To get a sense of the list, it included : Dr. Donald Pfaff, Dr. Sam Sacher, Dr. Heather Berlin, Dr. Jonathan Berger, Dr. Stuart Apfel, Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twersky, Rabbi Herschel Schechter, Dr. Concetta Tomaino and David Cesarini.
One thing he believed in more than anything was that neuroscience was not like the rest of the sciences. Not to say that it was superior, but that it was different. It was not like cell biology which looks at the nature of different cell types throughout the body, or like microbiology which looks at the bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites that share in inhabiting the earth with us. Nor was it like biochemistry which looks at the enzymes and molecules responsible for mechanisms of metabolism and cell function that exist in the body. Neuroscience was unique because it was interdisciplinary. A culmination of blood vessels and brain tissue responsible for innervating every aspect of the body, every organ, every fiber, the stomach the heart, sympathetic and parasympathetic, somatic and autonomic, nicotinic and muscarinic. The brain is responsible for balance and memory and hormonal regulation, and temperature and sleep. It is an all encompassing organ and field of pursuit. In Adler’s realm, to be a neuroscientist was not to know the brain, but to know all aspects of the brain—the embryology, physiology, histology, biochemistry, epidemiology, pathology, pharmacology, pathophysiology, organic and inorganic chemistry, physics, and calculus. Looking back on the first time he articulated that thought to me, I now envision the scene in Margaret Edson’s Wit, when Dr. E.M. Ashford, great scholar of John Donne’s holy sonnets criticizes a young Olivia Bearing for failing to use the Gardner Edition of the text—“This is metaphysical poetry, not the modern novel. The standards of scholarship and critical reading… which one would apply to any other text are simply insufficient. The effort must be total for the results to be meaningful.”
Adler’s interdisciplinary pursuits did not stop with neuroscience. He loved Judaism, Indian dance, he had an insatiable thirst for reading, a reverence for rabbis and holocaust survivors and he loved teaching. He loved to ardently discuss anything and everything with Rabbi Ozer Glickman aka “The Dude.” He loved his Rabbi Jonathan Rosenblatt, Furst 535, and freaking out about how the world was coming to an end. He loved trying to get us all do to MD/PhD’s and apply for fellowships. He LOVED Judy Collins and Oliver Sacks. He loved Waiting for Godot, and he loved his students so incredibly much. He had so much love for so many students for so many years. Lighting candles and shaping souls, Adler indelibly changed the course of countless lives. He empowered us to think like Alexander Hamilton in Lin Manuel Miranda’s masterpiece—to stand up and say to ourselves and the world, “I WILL NOT THROW AWAY MY SHOT!”
On a personal note, he taught me what acetylcholine was. How neurons fire and exhibit saltatory conduction from one node of Ranvier to the next. Why auditory and olfactory senses are so highly connected with memory. What comprises the diencephalon. Why sometimes we feel like we have eyes in the back of our head. Most importantly, he taught me to ask better questions, the way Rabbi Yochanan and Reish Lakish would challenge each other—going beyond the “sharpness” of ben Pedat. He taught me Aristotle’s Five Causes. He taught me how to run a film festival. He led by example, and he led with ease—a true catalyst who lowered the activation energy of those around him so that they too could see the light.
Adler always reminded me of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s little prince—perpetually curious and continuously striving. I miss his smirks. I miss his late night email rants. I miss the books he would lend me to read—one of the most impactful of which, As a Driven Leaf by Milton Steinberg. I miss talking to him about Chaim Potok, and of course Moshe Koppel’s timeless essay Yiddishkeit Without Ideology: A Letter to my Son. I miss the way he would always come late, make the most noise, ask the most questions, make the most people laugh, and do a little jig on top of it all—he stole the show in the most adorable way, putting on a ballet of intellectual discourse exposing just how much he knew and understood—all in the humblest of ways. I miss his penetrating ability to touch your soul and make you be the best version of yourself. He showed me how brilliant my own mind was, how incredibly lucky I was to have a mother who raised me with opera and show tunes, a father who raised me with science and math, a brother who challenged me by paving an impressive path, and a grandmother who struggled for me, who fought for her life as a Schindler’s List Survivor, so that my life could be what it is. Adler did this for anyone and everyone. He helped us all see what was right in front of our noses all along—the true lens.
Most of all I miss his wit. Senior year I was taking an ethics course with Linda Brown. Adler and I sat down to discuss ethics for a paper I was writing about Kant’s paradoxical obsessiveness with pure virtue. “Ya, Kant was a little uptight” he said, “he probably just needed to get laid.” We both died of laughter. Never did I ever see even an iota of arrogance in Adler, and it is obvious why. Adler never looked at the world in terms how much he knew or accomplished, but in terms of how much he could know and accomplish. Shifting perspective and adjusting the lens, Adler had a deep appreciation and respect for the universe and the billions of incredibly intricate biological reactions constantly choreographed and completed in chorus.
In my final class with Adler in my Junior year of College, Adler assigned me a special homework assignment—I was to prepare John Keats’ prolific piece Ode on a Grecian Urn (yes, this was for a Neuroscience course). I’ll never forget that day in class how he went line by line through the poem, dissecting its sentences into phrases into words into letters into punctuation. I’ll never forget how he found himself on the verge of joyful tears as he recited the final lines contrasting its similarity with the final verses of Ecclesiastes:
When old age shall this generation waste,
Though shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
And with my own rendition of Whitman I will end:
O Captain! my captain! our fearful trip is done
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
O Captain! my captain! you guided the perplexed
You showed us ways of looking so the lens could be convex