J effrey Weiss a longtime religion reporter in Texas is also a fellow Jew in desperate need of a refuah sheleimah. He has a form of a cancer called glioblastoma (GBM) which has a median survival rate of about 15 months.
After being diagnosed last December he began writing a series of short monthly essays for the Religion News Service entitled “My Way to the Egress.” Egress means exit and I assume his title is meant to evoke the joke about the sign in the zoo that read “This way to the egress ” which got throngs of visitors looking for what they assumed was an exotic creature called an “egress.” But the path on which Jeffrey Weiss has embarked is no joke.
His essays are quite poignant and in several of them he touches upon his Jewishness. In one for example he writes that he is “wearing hats most of the time these days. Some cap wearers link their choices to faith or fashion. For me it’s mostly about my brain cancer.” Every two days he has to shave his head in order to place on it a set of electrodes that produce an electric field in his brain that some researchers say will make it hard for cancer cells to divide and the hats cover up these odd-looking electrodes from view.
He notes the irony:
The Jewish tradition of keeping heads covered goes back a couple of thousand years…. Orthodox Jews wear some kind of cap pretty much any time they’re not in the shower….
