What you see isn’t always what you get.
“When I was born, doctors told my parents the traumatic delivery had caused brain damage from hypoxia and would leave me unable to care for myself,” says Bennett Blum.
Wrong. At 6 months old, he started talking in two-word sentences and hasn’t slowed down since.
Today, Blum is a medical doctor, an ordained rabbi, University of Arizona Phi Beta Kappa and an internationally acclaimed physician specializing in both forensic and geriatric psychiatry. He has worked on policy development for the White House Conference on Aging, testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee and was a technical advisor to the Research Triangle Institute.
He also made legal history while consulting in a precedent- setting United Nations trial. While many clients need to remain confidential because of the nature of his work, one of his most public cases involved Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslavian president and convicted war criminal. Dr. Blum's testimony resulted in the conviction of a Yugoslav Army general who went to jail as a result. As a result of this first competency hearing at an International War Crimes Tribunal since Nuremberg, new international competency guidelines were set.
Now a Tucson resident, Blum is a nationally known consulting forensic psychiatrist and elder abuse expert. He continues to give lectures on psychology and psychiatry; present seminars on forensic psychiatry, and serve as a courtroom expert witness in elder abuse cases.
His life has been spent disproving the notion of others that he was not capable of success. “I was the damaged kid with no expectations that I’d be able to achieve anything. I started wearing glasses at an early age, was overweight, had bad asthma and was clumsy to boot, so I was always the last one picked when teams were selected.”
He compensated for any shortcomings by excelling in intellect and remembering his parental aphorism that ‘everything can be taken away from you except for what you know.’
“In public school, I finished my work before other students and then complained because I didn’t have anything to do. So, at age 10, I became a regular visitor to my parents’ library and began reading my mother’s psychology books – including the complete works of Sigmund Freud. And what I couldn’t understand, I did further research on until I did.”
Living in the Chicago area before moving to Arizona, he grew up in a secular household with a Holocaust-survivor father who spent years in a slave labor camp before being marched into a gas chamber (at age 11) and being miraculously saved at the last moment by the notorious Dr. Mengele. The horrors and atrocities he witnessed as a young man at Starachowice and Auschwitz-Birkenau left him with a shaken faith and an aversion to religion.
“There wasn’t much religious interest on my mother’s side of the family either, although we were proud of our heritage,” Blum remembers. “We celebrated holidays and on Friday nights lit candles, but we were not a religious home, so my announcement as a young boy that I wanted to become a rabbi came as a complete surprise.”
Jewish day school turned into public high school, which morphed into college, and ‘become a rabbi’ got lost in the shuffle. While proud to be Jewish with his family’s collective heritage, he began to challenge ideas. “When I got to college, I moved away from religion and became very proficient at anti-religious arguments and opposition to organized religion. I wanted to learn more, but from a scholarly secular perspective, not the religious aspect.”
Blum graduated with a degree in psychology (1984), spent a couple of years in graduate school and then enrolled in the University of Arizona’s College of Medicine (Class of 1990) before taking his M.D. to UCLA, where he completed his residency and two fellowships in geriatric and forensic psychiatry.
“My parents had that loving and supportive parental approach of ‘don’t tell me I can’t do it’ and had gone out of their way to keep encouraging me that I could achieve whatever I set my mind to, so education, formal or not, became the paramount thing for me.” During this studying/rebelling
period, love entered the picture, and with it, a return to his religious roots. “The way I grew up, the Sabbath was a day filled with prohibitions and limitations – don’t drive a car, don’t turn on the lights, or as a rabbi once remarked, ‘It was a day filled with oys rather than joys.’
“My wife had grown up in an Orthodox home, but had moved toward more liberal forms of Judaism and was able to help me reconceptualize things, showing me a different way of understanding some of the Jewish rituals. Because I loved my wife and wanted to do things to make her happy, I adapted to her desires, and in that process, the universe with its own weird sense of humor pulled me back into my own religious faith. Once I started to see the various rituals in a different context, things became more meaningful to me.”
The pull to reconnect was a strong one, and it allowed the doctor to continue his long-lasting love of learning with his rekindled joy of Judaism.
“As my identification with my faith increased, I started wearing a yarmulke on a regular basis because I was proud to be Jewish. During this period, the U.S. Attorney’s Office contacted me to consult on a case involving a rabbi, saw the yarmulke and said, ‘Oh, you’re Jewish, so you must know all this Jewish stuff.’ The prosecutors wanted to counter a cultural defense, so they paid me to go back and read through classic rabbinical texts, and that meant the Talmud and subsequent writings on the nature of good and evil.
“I spent my days in a premier intellectual exercise involving stimulating debate, not dogma, and for anyone who enjoys studying, there are few things better than that – the pleasure you get learning something difficult and that happens over and over again as you
study Talmud. I threw myself into the project involving not only ancient writings but current opinions, and this went on for six weeks. Ultimately the defense entered a plea agreement and I never testified … but the fire had been lit, and the more I learned became an impetus to learn even more.”
Following that muse, Blum enrolled in the Academy for Jewish Religion, California, in Los Angeles. “I thought I could learn concepts that would be directly applicable to my secular work, my forensic psychiatry profession, and I found that to be true.” For the next five years, Blum flew to LA on Sunday, took classes for two days and then flew home to continue his forensic practice. He was ordained in 2007.
He hopes to use those studies to help others gain the understanding he encountered: “Judaism is a living religion founded on scripture and rabbinic writings that is relevant to today’s real world problems.”
Lee Allen is a Tucson-based freelance writer.
