Again with the yarmulke . . .

This was my weekend to be on-call. There are a couple of differences in my on-call "look." Weekends on-call are the only time I wear jeans to work, although in the summer my weekend clothes are closer to my weekday work clothes. The big difference is that on Saturday on-call I don't wear a kipah. It's funny - as easy as it is to forget my kipah when it's on, I'm hyper-aware of its absence when I'm not wearing it. I almost feel as though I'm going to work naked; missing a vital part of my "uniform."

I walked into a facility yesterday to do some on-call visits. I said "hello" to a resident I often talk with on my way in and out. She looked at me and said, "You're not wearing your little . . ." and pointed to my head. "Right," I said, "my yarmulke. Well, I don't wear it when I'm working on the Sabbath." I didn't go into a lot of detail, simply explaining that Jews generally don't work on the Jewish Sabbath, so when I'm making on-call visits on the Sabbath I don't wear it.

I didn't want to get into an entire discussion on marat ayin (how things appear; not wanting to mislead a fellow Jew) and why I leave the kipah off. Although I consider myself an observant Jew, I am not a halachically observant Jew. In addition to working on some Shabbatot, there's the car I drive to the nursing home, the pen and paper I'm using to write up my visit notes, the BlackBerry that I use to check patient details, and the myriad of other non-Shabbasdik things involved in patient visits.

I leave the kipah off on Shabbat because I don't want to be a public Jew on that day. I don't want to advertise my religion. On a Shabbat on-call visit I just want to advertise the hospice presence. Of course, it's on my on-call days with no kipah, working in buildings where we have other chaplains during the week, and with staff who aren't familiar with me that I am most often mistaken for the hospice nurse. This weekend was no exception. "Yes, I think it's alright to skip a PPD on a hospice patient," I say, "but I'm not the nurse, I'm the chaplain. Let me call my nurse and get an answer to your question."

After a day on-call, disguised as "just another chaplain," it's a pleasure to put my kipah back on and enter the new work week as the Jewish chaplain.