Look up.. Can you see the stars?
Sometimes you just want to grab one. Or two, or three… isn’t it? Our first instinct could be to reach our hand and grab it or at least touch it. We do not naturally realize the incommensurable distance separating us from the stars. We cannot easily grasp the enormous amount of effort and energy necessary to reach any one of them.
It is kind of the same with respect to understanding other people’s lives.
When we just look at their great achievements, we may feel some level of envy. We think to ourselves that we could have or should have achieved some of that. This is natural, easy – just to reach out a hand and at least touch it. Our brain tricks us into seen only the glorious result – that shiny star.
Adi Garfunkel usually said “one observation equals zero observation” citing his beloved immunology professor Harris from Philadelphia. And he was right. It is so easy to get wrong, to imagine something that is not real, to make assumptions.
We can imagine ourselves to have, at the age of 36, a double academic appointment in oral medicine at such great universities like Hadassah and Pennsylvania, to be licensed in anesthesiology, graduating from an immunology fellowship, and serve as senior lecturer both in Israel and the United States. We may imagine having become Chair of Hadassah’s Hospital Oral Medicine Department at 41, and tenured professor at 45. We can even imagine becoming a dean at age of 47. Of course, we can! But can we see the road behind it? Not necessarily at the first glance – I think.
Because we do not know much at first glance. We need to know the man behind Adi Garfunkel’s name. The real Adi, his real life.
“Where I was and who I’ve become” Adi said often about himself.
As if it was a surprise for him, as well. And maybe it was. Born in Bucharest – Romania under the communist regime, he witnesses his father’s deportation to a communist labor camp, he was forced to share with strangers a small apartment, to experience poverty and humiliations – Adi’s start in life looks no longer as a happy story… Then, he left for Israel to encounter a different kind of struggle there. But of course, it was not all bad. It cannot be!
He was seen. He was helped. He was trusted.
He was embraced – so to say – “adopted” by Prof. Inno Sciaki, the first Dean of the Hadassah’s Faculty of Dental Medicine. And he was taught, guided, and loved. Sometimes, all these seems to mean everything. He was sent to Philadelphia for 3 years, where he was pushed to study “over the limits of his own frustration” as his mentors promised – mentors who became his friends for life, like Prof. Irwin Ship or his soul-brother, Prof. D. Walter Cohen.
He worked hard, learned a lot, and lived fully.
As a man of several wars who lived in peace, who understood bone-cold suffering and saw it as an unraveled cloth, that he could sew it back together to make a coat for you, or for you… Because he loved people with childish naivety. And he knew to be amazed by any small achievements of anyone and everyone giving space to recognize them. He always looked behind as a reminder of who he was – he was truly modest not by what he was, but by what he wasn’t. He never measured himself in comparison to others, but he knew when and how to put up a fight for a good cause.
He was also very charismatic. And he knew that. He loved that.
So much that he would step down from the podium during his conferences to meet people at eye level. Not just because he loved to be admired, but because he enjoyed the equal dialogue. He loved to be a one-man-show and in the end to project a ‘well-studied-nonchalant-look’. He even loved to say that he did not know what he did not know, and to appreciate the wonder in the people’s eyes when he said that.
He was a consummate intellectual who could kibitz with the poorest of men, and always in their own language, the universal language of love. A humanitarian who, instead of becoming smaller and meaner with time, and filled with petty regrets, looked ever-outward with the largest of large hearts. A lover of humanity, of his family, of his friends and colleagues, of his patients.
He was always with his patients.
He identified with suffering patients. But he was lucky enough to draw all his energy from the simple smile of his patients. He used to say “you need to feel your patient, to comfort him. There is no gain in drill and fill, if you don’t understand what his real pain is”. Because he truly believed that “as a dental surgeon you should not limit yourselves to just a diseased tooth, but to remember that every tooth-root is attached to a full human being”.
So, he chose to launch a new dental department, and to create a nonprofit organization to treat non-transportable patients in their own homes. All this just after his “so-called” retirement – working more and harder instead of just enjoying his achievements from a comfy chair. This organization became his own heart and soul – as he put it, “my real satisfaction comes from their smile at the end of the treatment, and less from an article that I published”. And just like that, he was the only dentist awarded by the president of Israel for this outstanding humanitarian achievement. Easy as looking at the stars…
So, have you, by now, started to see the road he travelled? We all do, don’t we?
It seems that those stars are even brighter now that they are even further away…
We could continue to say so many things. But the most important reason for us gathering here is to honor him with science. With learning. With sharing. Because above all he was a mentor, an educator. Teaching was part of his soul, as was his need to share everything he knew, everything he discovered. It was his greatest passion to teach others, from students to colleagues, from nurses to patients.
We hope he is out there, a star among so many others. Brighter than others sometimes, as today when we remember him. And maybe if we have the force, the energy, the dedication, patience, kindness, humility, and love, especially love, to reach it, we can hold that star in our hand. And then we will again remember our friend and teacher, and all that he was… a simple but wonderful human being – Adi.
