It’s a brief wait. I don’t even get to finish the story in Kings II, about Elisha causing an ax head to float to the surface of the Jordan River. The nurse calls me into the business end of the suite and the doctor — let’s call him O’Neil — checks me out. Later, as I dress, he spies my Jewish Community T-shirt.

"Oh, you’re Jewish. I’m Irish."

He hesitates. The doctor is a deliberate man, and normally, a quiet man who does not wear his heart on his sleeve. Now, he’s deliberating, wondering if he wants to communicate the thought that’s visible on his face.

I encourage him by using the old psychotherapeutic technique — of neutral repetition — to keep the conversational ball in play.

"Oh, so you’re Irish. That’s nice."

"Yeah," he says. "Ya know, a Rabbi blessed my daddy just before he died. And a Jewish boy who rose to be President of Midwest Grain, came to my Daddy’s wake."

Here comes a story I can tell. A writer with a limited imagination welcomes a talkative doctor. I’m anxious to hear it.

"We lived in a dusty, little town twenty miles from Galveston. My daddy was the head accountant — you might call him the Office Manager — for Midwest Grain Corporation. A good job in the late 30s. Plenty of groceries for the family. 

"Well, seems like most every weekend daddy would go visit the fellow with the beard. Me and my brother and sister, we’d stay in the car and listen to the insect noises that filled the night. He never said what they talked about. Daddy would stay in the house ’bout an hour. One thing I remember is he always came back to the car with a handful of papers.

"In those years, you know, it was hard for Jews to get into the U.S. They had to have a sponsor and a bona fide job waiting for them. My daddy, we found out later, was working with that Jewish rabbi, his name I’ve forgotten, arranging for German Jews to immigrate to America. Jobs were a prerequisite, so my daddy, in his official function of office manager, hired seventeen Jewish office boys. Seventeen!"

In a happier time, this story would have been a comic scene out of a Marx Brothers movie. Seventeen office boys falling all over themselves speaking Yiddish or fractured English. Midwest Grain must have given their Galveston region manager a huge corporate wink. He had more office boys than invoices. He and the old Jew in the outlandish hat worked it out, Doc O’Neil told me. And one of those office boys rose to be President of Midwest Grain. "And that’s why the President of Midwest Grain and a Rabbi who looked like an old testament prophet came to my father’s funeral."

He paused to think again of the wake in south Texas — a room full of Irishmen, and two Jews — as though he still wondered at life’s ironies. "You know," said the doctor, "those Nazis were mean."

The Doc was probably repeating words he’d heard as a child as his dad sat in the big living room chair and read the headlines. Here was a Texas Schindler. His actions were all the more praiseworthy since he was so remote from the catastrophe; totally disconnected from the victims. He never saw the broken lives. He heard no widow’s cries.

All this was rolling around in my head as I buttoned up my shirt. Just goes to show, I thought, how life can occasionally threaten a curve ball and instead put a big, fat, pitch right over the plate. Thirty minutes with a medic and I get: A) a small innocent lump painlessly removed from my neck, B) a good report on the content of that lump, and C) an inspirational jolt that makes me feel a whole lot better on the inside.

In Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s holocaust museum, there is a section dedicated to Righteous Gentiles — heroes who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust. I nominate this south Texas Schindler.

Ted Roberts is a reader of Being Jewish. He calls himself the Scribbler on the Roof. Visit his blog site at www.scribblerontheroof.typepad.com or his website at www.wonderwordworks. com. 

Chandler was the funny, sarcastic guy on the TV sitcom "Friends," but did you know that his name means "candle maker"? Jacob Rodriquez Rivera (1717–1789) certainly was not a famous TV star, but he was the most famous chandler in American Jewish history. He used sperm-whale oil to make candles that were firmer than tallow candles and therefore less likely to melt in the summer.

Until about 150 years ago, Jews tended to use oil lamps rather than candles to celebrate Chanukah, because most candles — like Jacob Rivera’s — were made from the fat of non-kosher animals. Also, oil lamps reminded people of the seven-branched menorah in the Beit Hamikdash (the Holy Temple),which symbolized God’s presence.

Since the invention of paraffin (a waxy substance made from petroleum) in the 1850s, candles have become central to Jewish ritual practice.We light candles to inaugurate and conclude Shabbat and holidays, to search for hametz before Pesach, to memorialize the dead, and some congregations even use candles to accompany the Torah from the aron kodesh to the bimah on Mondays and Thursdays.

We light one additional candle each night of Chanukah in accordance with the principle that holiness should only increase.

Special thanks to Aaron Sassoon and Sarah Grunberger, participants in STAGES, a Jewish art and drama program in Rockville, Maryland.