"Doctor, is it O.K. for our rabbi to visit my father?"
I was an intern on call in one of the internal medicine wards in an Israeli hospital just south of Tel Aviv. The first day of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot had just ended, and the ward was beginning to fill up with visitors who had been unable to drive until after sunset.
Looking up from what I was doing, I saw the son of one of my patients standing at the counter of the nursing station. He and I had already spoken several times that day about his 75-year-old father, who had been admitted the night before because of a stroke.
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