Sha'are Kedushah

By Moideen Moidunny

Sarah and I sat on a hill and watched the magenta line tracing the Himalayan mountaintops collapse under the dark indigo sky. It was at that moment she first grabbed her abdomen after experiencing a sharp current of pain; she dismissed it as a stomach ache. Sarah and I were yoga students in rural Himachal Pradesh. We stayed behind near our academy when our class left for the city that weekend.

The following morning, I found Sarah in her room crying while clutching her stomach. She said that she wanted to go back home to North Carolina and started booking her ticket. I understood then that she would need support getting appropriate medical attention, especially given the serious state of her physical and psychological competence.

In those moments, despite being an ex-Muslim, I retained the positive humanistic values core to Islam, a religion that claimed to be the successor to the great and ancient religion of Judaism. The Islamic equivalent of Leviticus 19:18 is in Chapter 49, verse 13 of the Qur’an, “O mankind! We created you from a single(pair) of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know each other (not that you may despise each other).”

This Judeo-Islamic precept has profoundly impacted my sense of morality and obligation to my fellow human being, those who I should cherish as my own ‘neighbor’. In my case, this ethical Abrahamic perspective traverses beyond the confines of basic dogma and religious conviction.

As she lay in the fetal position on her bed, I epiphanically realized that we were both ‘strangers’ in this land; Sarah and I were one of the only ones who shared an American identity. Having keenly and passionately studied Jewish theology and history in an academic and leisurely capacity since I was a young teenager compelled me to think about the perennial rabbinic injunction to always be mindful that the Israelites were once ‘strangers’ in a foreign land and therefore one ought to be mindful that the stranger among you must be loved as yourself. In retrospect, I think Rashi and Akiva would have encouraged me to see Sarah as an extension of myself (despite having only known her for a week), as per God’s pentateuchal commandment. And I did.

Graphic by Sydney Hilbush

She objected to my defiant request to see a physician at a hospital. Despite her objections, I assumed a supervisory role, hailed a cab and carried Sarah inside to set off through the mountainside for the nearest, though underfunded, government hospital. Sarah moaned as I carried her in my arms while navigating through the dense crowds of sick people. As Sarah was probably the only white person in the hospital, the staff summoned a doctor quickly. I tried to recall all the remedial Hindi from Bollywood movies from childhood to ask the octogenarian doctor what ailed her. He diagnosed her with an 'inflamed gangrenous appendicitis'(which he said in English). He exclaimed, "6 hours!", then gesticulated an explosion.

My feet grew heavy and I gulped when he requested my permission to perform an immediate appendectomy on her. Although our ancestors were not strangers in the land of Egypt, my head swelled with the understanding that this compelling circumstance called for me to love Sarah, my neighbor, as myself and help her in any way I could. Sarah reluctantly relented to my persuasive plea to have the surgery to remove her appendix. I had forgone some of my important yoga training to care for Sarah as she recovered for almost 10 days. Sarah's scars have healed up now, but I dread to guess what would have happened if I had not received in my heart this strong ethical tradition and loved Sarah, a fellow ‘stranger’, as my own ‘neighbor’.