Of Hope: A Memoir

By Herzl R. Spiro MD PhD

These memoirs tell my story of hope. in my early years my father was trying to help the Jews of Europe and worked on the establishment of Israel. Later there were wonderful years growing and learning in Vermont.

I describe my personal experiences in the remarkable human rights movement of Martin Luther King. There were years of rising hope for a better community mental health care system as we built programs at Johns Hopkin, Rutgers University, and the Medical College of Wisconsin. The defunding by the Reagan administration and the cruel consequences that occurred are described as I subsequently worked with residents of the inner city of Milwaukee.

In 1982, I started to work on the absorption of immigrants to Israel and became chair as we tried to avoid the mistakes of the black-white relationships in America for the tens of thousands of black immigrants from Ethiopia. We worked to help integrate 1,250,000 immigrants who were penniless strangers from communist lands adapting to a new language and culture in Israel.

The book also describes the hope engendered by my remarriage and my remarkable family. The epilogue describes the current reality of the Covid 19 pandemic and the rising awareness of the need to heal the long unfair relationship with black Americans as well as an increasing deprived underclass. The book suggests bringing hope to those now deprived using some of the methods of absorption we used in Israel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Jul 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781982251444

Herzl R. Spiro MD PhD

Herzl R Spiro MD PhD was educated at Vermont, Harvard, Rutgers, New York Hospital and Johns Hopkins. He helped organize medical care for Rev King’s marches. He served the Jewish Agency Absorption Committee for 20 years. He was faculty at Johns Hopkins, and Rutgers before becoming Professor and Chair of Psychiatry at the Medical College of Wisconsin and Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at The University of Wisconsin-Madison where he is now Emeritus Professor. He published numerous books and research articles. He currently at 85 years still works as a psychiatrist fulltime serving Milwaukee’s inner city.

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Copyright © 2020 Herzl R. Spiro M.d., Ph.d.

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ISBN: 978-1-9822-5146-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-5145-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-5144-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020913458

Balboa Press rev. date: 08/14/2020

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1 Early Years (1935–1945)

Chapter 2 Growing Up a Vermonter (1945–1955)

Chapter 3 My Father’s House: An Education in Service (1945–1955)

Chapter 4 Going into the Family Business (1955–1964)

Chapter 5 Bearing Witness to the Dreams of the 1960s: Civil Rights and the Birth of the Community Mental Health Revolution (1961–1968)

Chapter 6 The Community Mental Health Revolution That Wasn’t: Johns Hopkins (1961–1971)

Chapter 7 The Community Mental Health Revolution That Wasn’t: Rutgers Medical School and the Medical College of Wisconsin (1971–1982)

Chapter 8 A Jewish Life (1961–1976)

Chapter 9 Confusion and Resolution (1976–1985)

Chapter 10 Fulfilling My ather’s Dream: The Jewish Agency and Work for Israel (1983–2002)

Chapter 11 Jewish Participation beyond the Jewish Agency (1983–2020)

Chapter 12 Of Travels and Home (1978–2020)

Chapter 13 Continuing My Work as a Psychiatrist (1982–2020)

Chapter 14 My Family, My House, My Community (2020–the Future)

Epilogue

Despair is the question. Hope is the answer.

—Elie Wiesel

Dum spiro spero.

[While I breathe, I hope.]

—Cicero

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was made possible through the efforts of Diana Holquist and Story Terrace. Diana Holquist taped ten hours of interviews with me and produced an initial draft using her skills as an excellent writer. Although I take sole responsibility for the text I prepared based on her efforts, I am in her debt for getting this book started. Story Terrace then took my final draft and produced the first version of this book.

I am also grateful to my sister, Rena Ziegler, who spent many hours critiquing, editing, and providing photos for the book, as well as my wife, Barbara Kohl-Spiro, who helped me develop the book. I particularly thank those who helped me while I took two months off just to get this book written.

The editing and help I received from Balboa Press in editing and publishing this edition has been wonderful. What a great publishing company they are.

INTRODUCTION

Hope is the answer to despair. It became the anthem of the Jewish people. Into Hebrew, the word hope is translated as hatikvah.

Despair is the question. Hope is the answer. Those words are associated with Elie Wiesel and his response to the Holocaust. There are three threads to this memoir about hope: (1) my professional efforts, failures and hopes about community psychiatry; (2) my personal efforts working in Israel, where I eventually chaired the Jewish Agency Committee on Absorption for 1.25 million immigrants to Israel; (3) my family and my grandchildren who give me the most hope.

As I undertake the task of writing these words and telling my story, I’m reminded of another story that always meant a great deal to me:

When Rebbe Schneur Zalman of Liadi lay dying, his disciples gathered around his bed and said, Rebbe, now that you’re so close to death, you can see. Tell us: What is truth?

As an answer, the rebbe told the following story, which is from ancient Mishnaic literature: When God wanted to create humankind, the angels came to him and said, Truth and humankind cannot live on the same earth. Don’t create humankind.

Well, God flung truth six feet under the soil, and he created humankind. When the Messiah comes, the story continues, humankind and truth will live together on the same planet. But until then, truth is always just slightly out of reach.

I believe in this story’s message—that all who think they know the truth are merely humans doing the best they can. Between despair and hope is a true reality. The history of the Holocaust is true. Our personal accounts of our lives are, of course, subjective.

We cannot know fully what we’ve achieved and what awaits the efforts of others—or perhaps the coming of the Messiah.

Well, I’m not sure. I’ve been studying the tricks of memory all my life. And yet, if we want to live meaningful lives, we have to believe in some truth, and we have to live acting on that truth, even if we could be terribly, woefully wrong. Most of my life, I listened to other people’s stories and helped them find meaning for themselves. Writing my memoir puts me in an unaccustomed role. I have to be the speaker, not the listener. It feels awkward, but still let me try.

I have lived believing with all my heart in one beautiful, guiding truth: that there could be no greater purpose to my life than to return to my father’s house. What this means to me is complicated, but it’s what this book is about. My father’s home was a place of love and a place from which he gave service. He devoted crucial decades of his life trying, and failing, to save the Jews of Europe. He believed, as I also believe, that Israel must exist as a place of safety for the world’s Jews. One way of returning to his house is to further this dream. There is still so much work to be done.

My father also believed in the duty to serve his adopted country, America. He did this as a rabbi, scholar, and educator. I give my service as a doctor, teacher, investigator, and psychiatrist dedicated to building a health system that will deliver humane care to the mentally ill. The community mental health movement in which I played a small part, and in which we all so ardently believed, ultimately failed. But we did what we could, and to this day, I continue to go into my clinic to serve people who are desperately in need of help and compassion. I believe that there is still hope and that we will one day find a way.

And finally, my father believed that all the good we do in the greater world is worthless if we are not good sons, brothers, husbands, fathers, and grandfathers. He never had to say this, because it was evident in his every thoughtful action, kind word, and gentle smile. If I have succeeded in everything else in life except this, then I have profoundly failed to follow the path of my father. If I failed my family, I could not return to his house.

This book, then, is the story of my many attempts and failures to lead a life of deep belief, meaning, and service, despite living in a world full of confusion, despair, temptations, hardship, and doubt. I hope that in some small way, my story helps other people explore their paths.

There are many meaningful and important paths in our tradition in addition to the one I took. One of those paths is creativity, which was a lifelong focus for my wife, Barbara. Creativity also became a goal for my brother during a lifetime of service and education. The music of our people was at the center for my uncle Cantor Pinchas Spiro. For many decades now, music has also been a focus for my sister, Rena, who has led a life of service to her patients and building the community mental health center in Bellingham, Washington. Rena has found service and beauty in music, but there are many ways to live a life of service and commitment.

Perhaps my memories may not be exactly accurate, but I’ve done the best I can in this imperfect world to tell my story. It is the story of an old man looking into the unknown, both backward and forward, and realizing that he knows little and still must go on with a deep and abiding belief. This is what it means to return to my father’s house. This is, in a word, hope.

CHAPTER 1

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EARLY YEARS (1935–1945)

We were just so afraid. We didn’t know the Nazi

hell wouldn’t spread. I had a child’s fear that

it was coming to America, to my city.

My father, Rabbi Saul S. Spiro, came to America in 1929 from Jerusalem. At twenty-three years old, he was a tall, handsome man with curly hair. In pictures of him in his youth, he looks like a movie star. Even when he was old and gray, the lines of his face were beautiful.

Already in his early twenties when he arrived in America, my father was wise, deeply compassionate, heavily involved in Jewish life, and devoted and loving to his family. The circumstances of his leaving Jerusalem and the people whom he loved so dearly are not entirely clear. No one wanted to speak of it, least of all my father. He had a bullet wound in his ankle, so there were whispers of a military past—Palmach, Haganah. Perhaps he even said a word or two to me about this.

Or perhaps that was all fantasy and—more prosaically—he had felt a young man’s need to escape the Orthodox Judaism in which he had been raised. He was a deeply religious and observant Jew, a committed and devout rabbi, and a brilliant Talmudic scholar. But it had been hard for him to reconcile the medievalism that surrounded him in the old Jerusalem with his scholarship and modern knowledge.

My father loved the traditional values and continued them his whole life. At the same time, however, he saw a new Jewish people that was rising. He would say to me, I don’t care what you believe. I care what you do. He taught me that the Jewish concept of God was abstract and vague, so what really mattered was that we knew the Higher existed in us and we acted accordingly.

This rigorous questioning of meaning and purpose was innate in my father. He was descended from generations of people who had dedicated their lives to uncovering what it