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Remembering Ariel Avrech
I met Ariel Avrech four times. I've never forgotten him.
In the Spring of 2001, I studied Pirkei Arvot (Ethics of the Fathers, a part of Judaism's Oral tradition compiled around 200 CE) with him three times for three hours. I didn't get any shattering insights from him on the text I'd traveled through many times. The revelation, however, was Ariel.
I first ran into him at shul. He was easy to spot. Wearing his black suit and black hat, he took the longest time with his prayers. Most interesting to me, he seemed to actually believe what he was saying. If God ever answered my prayers and those of most Jews I know (to have fear of Heaven, love of Torah, reverence for the sages), we'd have to turn our lives upside down.
From the time I told him that I was friendly with his father, Ariel had complete trust in me. He never suspected my questions sprang from cynicism but only from the heart of a sincere searcher.
I was never going to let Ariel's religious garb and his strict observances keep me from cutting to the quick of what most preoccupies single men like us - shiduchim.
Walking home with him from shul, I demanded to know how the matchmaking scene worked at Ner Israel (fervently religious Orthodox yeshiva in Baltimore). Where does a yeshiva bocher go for a hot date? "A restaurant," Ariel told me. Do their rabbeim act as chaperones on these dates? No. After a few more such questions, I coaxed a smile out of the normally serious Talmud scholar.
I never could make him laugh though. Only his father could make him laugh.
Life was deadly serious to Ariel. He didn't treat it or people trivially. He believed that our every act had the possibility of holiness. Therefore, he chose his behaviors with deliberation. He didn't rush his words in casual conversation any more than he rushed his prayers to watch TV.
Our learning sessions would proceed like this: I'd let him go for five-to-ten-minutes with the text. Then I'd throw a challenge out of left field. "What about what Ibn Ezra said...?" I've long collected the best questions to provoke the religious. I let them loose on Ariel.
Most rabbis let me know that they don't have time for this foolishness but Ariel had the gift and curse of only seeing the good in me.
He'd sit there and listen. Then he'd think. Then he'd get up in the yeshiva or in his home library and start pulling down seferim and do battle with my questions. And the more he'd answer, the more I'd ask until our time was up.
When I'd come back for the next session, Ariel would have long notes to deal with everything I'd asked last session.
Ariel was light years ahead of me in Torah learning. It was like a college professor teaching a child. So we learned Pirkei Avot with a simple commentary. I found this frustrating. Even though my Hebrew skills were in kindergarten, I was worldly wise, and hence was not satisfied with the pshat of Pirkei Avot, which I had learned many times previously. So I wasn't seeking what he was ready to give.
I wanted to push him on the issues of interest to me, rather than the ones on the lesson plan. Ariel only likes to teach that which he knows. He didn't want to say anything that wasn't Torah true, and kind, and derech eretz. Those are a lot of demands to place on oneself when you are dealing with someone like me.
I piled on Ariel with fresh questions, most of which were not meaningful to me. I was operating out of my intuition. I wanted to push Ariel beyond what we were studying to try to uncover his essence. And so I kept up an unceasing stream of provocations until finally, exhausted, I realized the kid was a mentch.
Ariel always stayed in control and he took his responsibilities as a teacher seriously. It was as though he felt he was the living embodiment of Torah and his actions were not reflecting on himself as much as on the Torah.
I tried to break Ariel out of his yeshiva bocher persona and bring out the purely human in him. I tried through humor. I tried through intellectual challenge. I tried through camaraderie. I refused to believe that he was only a yeshiva bocher with perfect faith and I would not relate to him as only that. I was seeking the human in him outside of religion and for him there was no such realm. All of him was guided by yiddishkeit. So I was seeking for something in him that did not exist.
Ariel didn't seem to believe he was long for this world. He had only the fuzziest and vaguest answers to questions about his future. He had no idea about what he would do for a living, about getting married, about driving a car, about living outside of the yeshiva and of his family's sheltering presence. I never got any sense of his ego wanting to strut in the world. He just wanted to live amongst the sacred text.
Ariel didn't seem to take pleasure in anything that wasn't endorsed and prescribed by the Torah. He just wanted to do God's will, be with his friends and family and rabbeim, and his yetzer hara (inclination for evil) was for such trivial matters that he just seemed to float from this world to the next as a continuum that is described in shacharis, modeh ani... God gave me a soul today. Tomorrow he might take it from me. God's the True Judge. I'm his servant. It's all in his hands. So be it.
The months went by. Our lives went in different directions. I was running out pf a Sephardic shul one Saturday night in 2002 when I saw a poster with Ariel's picture on it. He needed a lung transplant. I volunteered.
The last two weeks of his life I stayed near my phone in case I got the call to donate. It never came. He was too sick.
I'm sorry I never got to give him a piece of my lung in exchange for what he'd given me years before - a piece of his heart.
Ariel, Luke, March, 2001
An Issue That Can Try Body and Soul
Teresa Watanabe writes for the LA Times in October, 2002:
For Los Angeles screenwriter Robert Avrech, it was a wrenching choice between two of his greatest loves: his Orthodox Jewish faith and the life of his only son.
His son, Ariel, is in critical need of a lung transplant. Avrech knew of a man who had just collapsed on a softball field and was in a coma. But Avrech, guided by his religious and moral compass, would not approach the family about a possible organ donation.
It seemed "ghoulish," he said. He saw a slippery slope that would turn the desire for healing and life into a morbid wish for death to harvest organs. Wouldn't that make him no better than a Nazi?
Even after the man eventually died, Avrech still declined to approach the family, for he says his Jewish values, particularly the need to show reverence to the body and respect for mourning, overrode even his own desperate desire to save his son's life.
"It's a difficult situation for me, because I want to save Ariel's life," Avrech said slowly, his voice weighted with emotion he does not try to hide. "But there are worse things than death, like leading an immoral life."
Michael Aushenker writes in the Jewish Journal 7/25/03:
Ariel Avrech died of complications from severe pulmonary fibrosis on July 1. He was 22.
"He was incredibly learned," said Avrech’s father, Emmy-winning screenwriter Robert Avrech ("The Devil’s Arithmetic"). "I always learned from him. Our roles were reversed. He was also very funny and had a very dry, ironic sense of humor."
A Pico-Robertson resident, Avrech was in dire need of a living lobar lung transplant. Unfortunately, a worldwide organ search, facilitated by Jewish Healthcare Foundation Avraham Moshe & Yehudis Bikur Cholim, was unsuccessful.
Avrech’s first brush with a life-threatening disease came at age 14, when he endured massive chemotherapy to eradicate a brain tumor. In early 2002, the Yeshiva Gedolah of Los Angeles graduate was walking up a hill at Baltimore’s Ner Yisroel campus, where he was continuing his studies, when he experienced difficulty breathing. By May 2002, doctors learned that the chemotherapy that conquered his cancer left him with severe pulmonary fibrosis.
Avrech’s condition worsened in the last year. In recent months, he could only breathe with the assistance of an oxygen tank. He also took steroids to stabilize his condition, which deteriorated drastically by April, when he was not emitting enough carbon dioxide.
Avrech spent his last three months hospitalized on a respirator in intensive care. "He was never confronted with the fact that there was no hope," said Avrech’s mother, Karen Avrech. "He lapsed into unconsciousness."
"He really suffered horribly in the last few months," she continued, "but he never complained. He always maintained that he would make the best of what had happened to him. He was very hopeful and very grateful to his parents and to his doctors."
Michael Aushenker writes in the Jewish Journal 11/15/02:
On a cool November evening, the Avrech family — Robert, Karen, and Ariel — sit within the cozy confines of their Pico-Robertson home.... But this is not your typical family scene.
Ariel, Robert and Karen’s 21-year-old son, breathes with the assistance of an oxygen tank. "There are good days and there are bad days," Ariel said of his lung condition, which, while stabilized via steroids, produces emotional and physical highs and lows.
Now Ariel is in dire need of a living lobar lung transplant. With his family disqualified as suitable donors, a worldwide search for two willing, healthy males is underway. "We’re reaching out to all communities, not just the Jewish communities," said Rabbi Heshey Ten, director of Jewish Healthcare Foundation Avraham Moshe & Yehudis Bikur Cholim, which is facilitating the search. "We need to find two people to donate one of their five lobes to Ariel. The best intervention would be a living lobe transplant or a cadaveric transplant" (the latter option, for which Ariel is on a national donor list, is not being handled through Bikur Cholim).
According to the Lung Transplant Program at USC, lobar lung transplantation is an alternative for those patients who are too critically ill to survive the waiting list for cadaveric donors.
"I have a rabbi at YULA [Yeshiva University of Los Angeles] who has a list of people he would like to be cadaveric candidates," joked Robert, screenwriter of "A Stranger Among Us."
Humor is only one way that the Avrech family — including Ariel’s sisters, Leda, 17, and Aliza, 14 — is coping.
The Avrechs have also relied on faith, one another and community to get through these trying years. As members of the Young Israel of Century City, they have received much support from the Orthodox community.
Talkshow host Larry Elder writes 10/2/03:
Several months ago, I received an e-mail from Ariel Avrech's father, Robert. He told me that his 22-year-old son, at Cedars Sinai, lay awaiting a lung transplant. Ariel and his father, while in the hospital, often listened to my show, and discussed and debated many of the issues I brought up. Robert told me that, through the radio, I became something of a -- I don't know the right word -- influence, inspiration, a hero to his son. Would I, asked Robert, take time from my busy schedule to visit his son?
Ariel and I talked approximately 45 minutes. Ariel could respond only intermittently, so I did most of the talking. Robert earlier warned me of Ariel's continuously weakened condition, that he and I could spend little time together, and that any response from Ariel would cause a further deterioration of Ariel's condition.
After my visit, Robert said that Ariel spoke often and cheerfully of our conversation, and how special it made him feel.