Season 2 of ‘The Pitt’ Is Even More Jewish Than the Last

The following contains spoilers for “The Pitt” season 2.

In the final scene of season two of “The Pitt,” HBO Max’s dark and realistic hit medical drama, Noah Wyle’s Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch looks like a tortured saint, holding a baby, a yellow sun halo painted on the wall behind him. That baby (whom they call “Jane Doe”) was abandoned by her parents — just like Robby himself, who we find out this season was raised by his Jewish grandparents after his parents let him go.

He’s in the same room where, in the first season, Dr. Robby pulled out his Jewish star necklace and recited the Shema prayer in the midst of a harrowing shift in which the pediatric wing of the emergency department was turned into an impromptu morgue. The prayer was Wyle’s idea, a way for Robby, who is established early in season one as Jewish but not practicing, to return to something he would’ve said “daily with his grandmother, a base level of comfort food, nourishment,” he shared with Awards Buzz.

In a recent interview with the Jewish Chronicle, Wyle revealed just how intimately connected he is to some aspects of his character — the first Jewish character he’s ever played in his long and storied career. “Robinavitch was my great-grandmother’s father’s name, so that’s at least four generations. The other family name was Ravinsky and they were from roughly the same area,” he said, and shared that the Star of David necklace his character wears at all times “belongs to a very significant person in my life, who’s a very devout Jew. I asked him to procure it for me so that it would be a talisman from him.”

In the first season, we knew that Dr. Robby was Jewish, but this latest season gets a lot more granular.

Does he go to synagogue? Only on the High Holidays, he tells his patient Yana Kovalenko, a Tree of Life shooting survivor. That synagogue is Rodeph Sholom, a real synagogue in Pittsburgh where the show takes place, which Robby attended with his grandparents. Yana is there as a surrogate parental figure, helping paint in the little details of Robby’s childhood and adolescence. When Robby tells her his plan to take a much-needed vacation in the form of a sabbatical motorcycle journey, she responds how likely his own grandmother would: “Fifty-ish-year-old man on a motorcycle, very sad.”

We get so much more intimate with Robby this season. The mental health crisis he experiences in season one has become only more pressing, as Robby works intense shifts without dealing with his own ailing psyche. He blows up at the younger people on shift, and says things that have his colleagues alarmed — most of them can now clearly see that he is a man on the edge, and worry that his upcoming trip may be a secret suicide mission.

And while this season, Robby doesn’t recite any Jewish prayers, when mourning a beloved lost patient with the rest of the team on shift, he says, “May his memory be a blessing,” the ubiquitous Jewish line to mourn the dead and honor their memory, reminding us that he sees loss, too, through a Jewish lens.

There are other little Jewish moments that evoke Jewish Pittsburgh. Multiple patients have the last name Cohen — including a sweet Jewish family from Squirrel Hill who refuses to admit that they are aging. Comedian Moshe Kasher, whose brother is a rabbi and whose father was a Hasidic Jew, plays an ASL interpreter (Kasher is a CODA, a child of deaf adults, and a former professional interpreter).

If season one painted Dr. Robby as a tzadik, a Jewish sage full of wise words and compassion, biting back and holding down his own trauma, this season, he is more complicated than that — a man not exactly in control. He lashes out, barely keeping it together amid the years of pain and loss and being overworked. Jews may not have saints, but he is a Jewish medical saint for our time — too tortured to be the kind of medical professional he wants and needs to be. His heart is still just as big, but fraying.