Judaism’s Mind-Body Connection:  Why are so many hospitals named after Mount Sinai?

Mount Sinai was the place in the desert where the Jewish people received the Torah. But as we all know, that’s not the only Mount Sinai. There is also a Mount Sinai in New York City, and Mount Sinais in Los Angeles, Miami and Toronto—hospitals, presumably named after the original Mount Sinai.

We understand why a hospital would be named after certain individuals, such as a philanthropist or a famous doctor. But why should Mount Sinai, the site where the Torah was given, be the name of a hospital?

I began asking around, but nobody seemed to know, including friends in the medical profession. So I wrote to the hospitals, and received this from the public affairs office of Mount Sinai Hospital of Toronto: As the “site where the Ten Commandments were handed down to Moses, the name ‘Mount Sinai’ signifies the wellspring of moral law and the source of all compassion.”

They weren’t giving away too much, but I got the message. Although “Thou Shalt Heal The Sick” is not inscribed on the Ten Commandments (just as “Thou Shalt Make House Calls” was also never written in stone), there was much more to the revelatory goings-on at Sinai than just the Ten Commandments.

The Midrash relates that for those who stood at Sinai, all their afflictions were healed—the crippled could walk, and the blind could see. With the revelation, the world reached a level of moral and spiritual perfection that manifested itself as the disappearance of all physical blemish. The symbiosis of a healthy mind and body is fundamental to Jewish thought.

So it’s no mystery why Maimonides has medical centers named after him. Besides being one of the greatest Torah scholars of all time, he was also physician to the royal court of Alexandria in the 12th century. And after making the long commute home every day by donkey, with hardly a moment to rest, he would receive his fellow Jews at home, providing answers to all their questions, medical, religious and communal. In his own lifetime, Maimonides was so revered for his wisdom and compassion that the Jews of Yemen included his name in the Kaddish prayer. Read Article