In one of the most powerful scenes of Max’s new medical drama “The Pitt,” protagonist Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, a larger-than-life ER senior attending physician, sits on the floor of a hospital room, his scrubs stained in blood, his face pale, his eyes tightly shut and one hand shielding his face. Breathlessly, he gasps out ancient Hebrew words set to a familiar tune: “Shema Yisrael, adonai eloheinu, adonai echad.” They mean, in English, “Hear O’ Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”
“Baruch shem malchuto,” he continues, a tearful recitation as his body vibrates with grief. These are the words of the Shema prayer, the prayer Jews traditionally recite every morning and every evening.
Soon he is is interrupted by Gerran Howell’s Dennis Whitaker, a fourth-year medical student who finds Robby in the brightly painted room with animals and trees on its walls, meant for the young ER patients but turned into an impromptu morgue after a mass shooting event that took place at a fictional music festival in Pittsburgh, where the show takes place. As Whitaker comes to sit by him on the floor, surprised to see his ever so resilient boss falling apart, Robby, played by Jewish actor Noah Wyle, grabs a chain underneath his scrubs. It’s a golden magen David, a star of David necklace, and he holds it like prayer beads, hoping to find an anchor in the small pendant.
It’s a heart-wrenching moment, but especially touching for any Jewish viewer who has found themselves seeking shelter in Jewish rituals when they couldn’t see any light through the darkness. The previous 13 episodes of “The Pitt,” each one depicting an hour of Robby and his diverse medical team’s ER shift, are filled with harrowing images — people dying and almost dying, bodies and blood and gore — but also with flashbacks of what Robby experienced during the height of the COVID pandemic, including losing his mentor to the disease and dealing with medical emergencies in that very same room.
The experience is so specific, so realistic, and so real to anyone who has dealt with that kind of onslaught of traumatic images, as many of us have in the past year and a half. And though the words of the prayer in Hebrew are beautiful and resonant, that experience of clinging to religious ritual when we fall apart is a universal one for many.
Viewers first fell in love with Noah Wyle when he was on “ER.” The same team went onto make “The Pitt,” in which co-creators John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill lean into Wyle’s own Jewish roots — his father’s family is Jewish — to make Robby’s character come alive, a rugged but deeply caring Pittsburgh Jew. Some have pointed out that his character’s last name, Robinovitch, feels like an ode to one of the Jewish victims of the Tree of Life shooting — Jerry Rabinowitz was a Pittsburgh doctor killed that day in 2018 when a shooter came into his synagogue, killing 11 congregants, the most deadly mass shooting of Jews in the U.S.
“In the old days for HIV patients in Pittsburgh, Dr. Rabinowitz was the one to go to,” one of his patients recalled last March. “Basically before there was effective treatment for fighting HIV itself, he was known in the community for keeping us alive the longest. He often held our hands (without rubber gloves) and always always hugged us as we left his office.”
Rabinowitz, it seems, had a lot of those same characteristics that we’ve grown to love about Dr. Robby — a deep care for his patients, the belief in the Jewish value of saving a life and the oft-repeated Jewish value of tikkun olam, or fixing the world. Robby is charged with working within the complicated for-profit system of American medicine but stands up for the practitioners under him and for his patients.
Unlike Rabinowitz, who was a president of his congregation Dor Hadash which met at the Tree of Life synagogue that fateful day, Dr. Robby does not seem to be a man who goes to synagogue regularly. He does not wear a kippah, and the first time we see his Jewish star was in that harrowing scene. He does mention his Jewish identity earlier, in the show’s fourth episode. In a conversation with charge nurse Dana Evans, she accidentally attributes a quote that comes from the Book of Luke to Shakespeare. The line, he then corrects her, should be attributed to “Luke, the disciple, who probably heard it from Paul, the apostle, but what do I know? I’m Jewish, it’s not my book.”
“I don’t know if I actually believe in God, especially on days like today,” Robby confesses to Whitaker later in the episode. It’s a very Jewish statement — so many of us have had our faith in God impossibly tested by the horrors of the world, all the while keeping Jewish identity close and ever present. When Whitaker asks Robby about the prayer he was reciting, he says, “It’s a declaration of faith in God. I lived with my grandmother when I was little, and she and I used to recite it every morning.” The lines of the Shema aren’t just a declaration of faith; they’re a declaration of connection to, and love for, our Jewish identity and family. That’s what keeps Robby afloat in that moment, as they have kept many other Jews in many other places and times throughout history.
Whatever his practice, Robby exudes rabbinical wisdom. In that same episode, he comforts Dr. Mel King (the very talented Taylor Dearden) when she gets overwhelmed, saying to her, “Never apologize for feeling something for your patients.”
When Robby confesses to Whitaker that he feels like he’s drowning sometimes, the young student repeats to him words that Robby himself imparted earlier in that shift, when Whitaker was dealing with the horror of losing his first patient.
“A wise man once told me that you learn to live with it, learn to accept it, and to find balance if you can,” Whitaker tells him. Robby looks at Whitaker, eyes a little wet, so very moved by this moment in which his wisdom from the beginning of the shift comes back to comfort him in a moment when he needs it.
The Jewish value of tikkun olam is at the heart of “The Pitt,” too. It’s in its incredible diverse casting (which includes Black Jewish actress Alexandra Metz as the very badass Dr. Garcia, who gets accidentally stabbed by a medical intern earlier in the shift and patches herself up while remaining deeply compassionate), but it’s also at the heart of the show’s very creation. In a recent interview, Wyle talked about how neither he nor the showrunners wanted to come back and make another medical show, but COVID and the deep impact it had on the medical community that they so compassionately portrayed in “ER” changed their mind.
“We recognized that there was another story to tell, and that it was important to us to tell. That this is a community we care a lot about. We believe firmly that the strength of our health care system is proportional to the mental health of its practitioners and the degree to which we support it,” he said.
After last Thursday night’s episode aired, Wyle had a personal conversation with someone very close to him, his mother, who had been a nurse for 20 years. She said that the episode reminded her of all the people that she lost through her career. It was the first time the two really talked about her experience.
COVID changed everything about the way we practice medicine, and since 2020, there are medical professionals all across the country who live with its often invisible trauma. “The Pitt” makes these things visible. Wells, Gemmill and Wyle have said they wanted to create the most realistic medical show ever made, one that not only shows us the real graphic details of working in the ER, but the hearts and souls impacted by that work. And it’s so meaningful that they put Dr. Robby, a vulnerable and deeply human Jewish character, at its center.
The finale of “The Pitt” airs this Thursday at 9 p.m. ET.
