Rabbi,
Perhaps this will help. In early 2018, i had what one doctor characterized as a "mild" heart attack. The angiogram nevertheless convinced the doctors that I required immediate emergency quintuple bypass surgery, including for my left anterior descending coronary artery, and that if I instead left the hospital, I wouldn't make it back alive. I was 67 years old at the time, in very good physical condition from walking, lifting weights and calisthenics.
When I awoke from the surgery, it was two weeks later. Apparently the doctors wanted to keep me sedated a little longer to reduce some heart swelling, but I wound up contracting ventilator pneumonia that required two different rounds of antibiotics gifted me with a c diff infection. When I did wake up, I did also learn that the heart surgery itself was a complete success. I remained in the hospital for another week (now three weeks), and then transferred to an inpatient rehab facility for an additional three weeks, where I learned to feed myself, go to the bathroom and walk again, as well as begin cardiac rehab.
When I awoke, all I felt was an enormous sense of gratitude and love. I felt it to all the doctors, nurses and orderlies that saved my life, which is understandable to most people, but it was so much more than that. I felt this enormous gratitude to the entire universe. I was at total peace. As someone who has been a serious spiritual seeker all my life, first through Judaism and, for decades, Zen Buddhism, I had never before felt this profound sense of peace, gratitude and even joy. These feelings have remained with me to this day, 7 1/2 years later.
I think my experience was related to the fact that, years earlier, I had lost all fear of death over the course of my meditation practice and honing the ability to live in the present moment. I had learned that all fear is based on a projection of what we believe, in the present moment, will be our future and how we believe we will react to those imagined events. But that's just the point. We have no idea what the future will bring nor how we will react to it. It's all illusion. It's a movie that we invent for ourselves and then erroneously assume is reality. And worry is nothing more than ruminating about our fears.
For example, years earlier, I severely pulled a back muscle weighlifting that resulted in sciatica. It put me out of commission for two weeks, during which time I was in intense pain whenever I moved, yet it was one of the most emotionally and spiritually freeing experiences of my life as I read the newly published writings of a former teacher of mine. Yet if you had told me, before the injury, that I would be in intense pain for two weeks, I never would have believed that my experience would have been so positive during that time. Again, the point is that fear is based on a fiction about the future that we create. Even if the event we fear actually does occur, we really have no idea how we will react.
So the lesson here is that you are not condemned to experience the worry, concern, fear or negative emotions you are feeling. That goes for everybody. Heart attacks and heart surgery do not cause negative emotions. Neither does cancer or dying or any other event that we perceive to be negative. They all arise out of our beliefs about these things. This being the case puts you in control. You can examine your beliefs as to why certain things are bad or something to fear. You can begin to live your life again. The borrowed time we're all living is a gift.
All the best,
Ira
Original Message:
Sent: 7/22/2025 2:34:00 PM
From: Jeremy Kridel
Subject: New here
Hi -
Hopefully I'm posting in the right place
I'm Jeremy. I'm 48 and am a rabbi in the Washington, DC area. A case of COVID in 2022 precipitated a STEMI in my left anterior descending artery that I survived through sheer luck. Stent in 2022, open-heart surgery for triple bypass plus maze procedure and arterial ligation in 2023. (I tried to negotiate laparoscopic surgery instead. Turns out science isn't always negotiable, and a whole bunch of the members of my synagogue refused to let me do anything less than the whole-nine-yards open-heart surgery!) Post-surgery depression ever since. I already had a depression diagnosis, so it's been a not-quite-fun few years for my family and me!
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Jeremy Kridel
Rabbi
Machar: The Washington Congregation for Secular Humanistic Judaism
Ellicott City MD
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