Dr. Rabinovitch Recited the Shema
I should start by saying the writers had me at Dr. Rabinovitch. It’s not exactly my last name, but it’s essentially my last name. The only other example of it in pop culture that ever comes to mind is a throwaway line from another medical show near and dear to my heart, Scrubs. Zach Braff’s J.D., tasked with providing care to an insurance-less friend of Chief of Medicine Dr. Kelso, needs to find a recently deceased patient’s bed to provide cover. “Cool, Mr. Rabinowitz kicked it!” he shouts before sheepishly qualifying his excitement: “Oh, don’t worry, he put his peep in an electrical socket. You can’t do that.” There’s another joke later in the episode about giving Kelso’s friend a Kosher meal. The name was a punchline (albeit a very funny one).
Jewish people are not underrepresented in American pop culture, but it took until a very specific scene in the most recent episode of The Pitt to cement for me that we’ve long been misrepresented, or at least not depicted with the sort of honesty and complexity imbued in Dr. “Robby.”
Think about Jewish characters in television and film. Who comes to mind? A nebbishy but winning Seth Rogen or Andy Samberg type; an unseemly but impossibly magnetic curmudgeon like Larry David; if it’s a woman, she’s probably a nagging wife or domineering matron played by Tovah Feldshuh if she’s ill-intentioned, or Barbara Streisand if she’s good of heart; or a harried neurotic professional, the kind of role that gave careers to Debra Messing and Courtney Cox. Lawyers, business managers, and yes, doctors, have long since become shorthand for “Jewish” in TV and film.
These character archetypes aren’t inherently bad, or harmful for the Jewish people beyond a superficial perpetuation of dumb stereotypes. It’s nice that for being such a small sliver of humanity, stories about us continue to be told through American popular culture. But who is the most nuanced Jewish character you can think of? Where is the protagonist whose Jewishness exists as a personality undercurrent that isn’t played for laughs or somber moralism, but is simply there as a character shade? If you haven’t been watching The Pitt, you may have to think for a while. If you have been watching The Pitt (spoilers ahead!), you finally have an answer.
The penultimate episode of the first season starts with a depleted Dr. Robby mid-panic attack, fully shattered under the weight of this day from hell. He could not keep his surrogate son Jake’s girlfriend alive — one of many casualties of a mass shooting event that turned the emergency room into a war zone — and finally cracked when Jake pinned her death on him. Robby is found curled up against the wall of the pediatric-unit-turned-morgue by jittery Doctor(ish) Whitaker, appearing to cover his eyes in the shame of being found by a med student in such a vulnerable state. But this is not a physical tic. Dr. Robby is covering his eyes because he is reciting the Shema, a Hebrew prayer that is essentially source code for Judaism: a pledge of faith to the one God. Later in the episode Robby explains the Shema to Whitaker and divulges that these brutal days in the ER have made him more of an agnostic, but the prayer is something he used to recite daily with his grandmother.
Like I wrote at the top of this piece, The Pitt had me in the bag once it revealed the superhero attending’s name to be Dr. Rabinovitch back in the first episode. The show could have never mined his faith and dayenu, it would have been enough. I shared a name with the main character of the most popular show on TV this side of The White Lotus, and that was special because no one on TV ever had my name. But it became something more meaningful when they had that character recite the Shema, and something even deeper than that when he revealed that it wasn’t exactly a declaration of faith in his Jewish God, but a renewal of faith in the grounding power of childhood rituals with his grandmother.
Judaism has never been depicted like this from a character who isn’t a rabbi, at least the pop culture I’ve consumed. “Cultural Judaism” has become this catch-all to describe the non-religious parts of the religion that modern secular-tilted Jews keep with them in everyday life. In pop culture that typically manifests in Larry Davids and Mrs. Maisels, where Cultural Judaism is just a perpetuation of perceived surface-level monolithic Jewish personality traits. What it really means though, to me, is exactly what Dr. Robby endured. Cultural Judaism is pulling from rhythmic religious rituals and traditions that gave you comfort as a kid, to give your secular life meaning and direction as an adult regardless of your belief in God. It’s making space for the things our people have been doing for thousands of years in a hectic modern life that can’t accommodate fulfilling all 613 commandments as intended.
Cultural Judaism is having a nervous breakdown on the job and reciting the Shema not because you believe it to the letter, but because your grandma did, and honoring her in this way is a meditative force.
What the writers understood so fundamentally about Dr. Robby, and what connected with me so deeply, is that his Jewish faith is his belief in other people. And it’s just there in the background, informing every choice he makes. It’s what makes him such an empathic doctor and effective mentor. He may or may not believe in God, but he believes in humans. He knows that no one processes trauma alone, so after he banishes Jake and before he’s found by Whitaker, he calls on his grandmother, whose unwavering belief in God likely helped her through serious trauma of her own. We all need each other to survive. It doesn’t get more Jewish than that.
There are many more Jews who aren’t rabbis or rich stand-up comedians than pop culture would have you believe. Our Judaism shows up in an endless variety of ways that doesn’t end with overbearing mothers and self-deprecating humor. I’ve never seen such a clear, nuanced reflection of it as Dr. Rabinovitch reciting the Shema. I’m not just saying that because we basically have the same name, but it doesn’t hurt.
