The death of my husband forced me to reexamine the purpose of my existence.

It was 7 am Sunday morning and I had been asleep for a scant hour after being awake for 45 hours. My good friend Menucha leaned down to the hospital couch and tapped me on the shoulder.

It had been 38 hours since I had pulled my husband’s lifeless, 6-foot body out of the jaws of the Tel Aviv ocean one beautiful Friday. After 20 minutes of CPR on the sand, a faint pulse had returned, and he was rushed to the hospital where he lay in critical condition, while doctors checked for brain activity to determine if he had a chance of making it back. A lifetime had passed since then – a living nightmare filled with countless do-or-die moments.

We got the call to come back to the hospital – the signs had become more serious. “The nurses say this is it,” whispered Menucha. “You have to come now.” No more battle-plans, prayers or mitzvah pledges.

Hope for life was over. “It’s a mitzvah to escort the neshama (soul),” she said.

Back in the hospital, I sensed no signs of life at all. The fight to save him was startlingly over. At that moment, the darkest moment – the time when the finality of his life as my husband was apparent – the greatest presence I have ever felt from him came forward. My personal Mount Sinai. The exit was enlightening. I was his midwife to the Next World.

Everyone present was touched. Enveloped in the Shechina (Divine Presence) that came to take him, we were left with a spark of it to take with us – like an embryo to later form into a new being. The end of his life in this world began a new life for us with a glimpse into the Next World. I didn’t want to leave that embrace.

As I sat on my shiva chair, I felt the same connection and light as I did when enthroned on my kallah chair at my wedding years back. It was as if I was just an agent to pass on the messages that were coming through me, to the recipients who arrived to receive them. Then there were the times when I was the recipient.

Hitting Bottom

Three months passed, and my friends and community won the championship for supporting me in every way. Babysitters helped me with the children. Meals were sent in while in my silent protest to stop living, I let the kitchen go. Enlightenment aside, I would accept God’s judgment, but I wasn’t going to truly live and give proactively – a decision made by my subconscious without asking me for my approval.

Each kid had been assigned the right therapist and put on the right schedule. The shock was seemingly wearing off and the havoc of scrambling to see what life was now going to be like had dissipated.

Through living day-by-day the kids and I saw that, to our surprise, we could exist and function and eat and sleep and go to school and have friends – without Abba. The terror of not knowing if we could survive a day without him also disappeared.

It slowly became safer to examine my internal reality. And then, one day, it collapsed altogether. I was leaving a family’s house motzei Shabbos and the woman said to me: “Most people live for one of three things: their children, their husband, or God. You have to find a reason to live.” So I searched. I searched hard internally for what made me tick. I looked past the truth that sits in my head and discerned the driving force of my heart. The force that pushes me to wake up, to change diapers and to cook dinner.

What I realized shocked me.

Almost everything I did in my day – from choosing what clothes to wear to what I cooked for dinner and how to arrange my day was shaped by one thing – what my husband wanted. I chose where I lived because of my husband’s spiritual ambition. We chose where our kids go to school because of my husband’s Torah outlook. Everything was for him.

Now what?

I felt like the thread holding together all of the pieces of me snapped. In an instant, the pieces clattered to the ground. They no longer formed a human being. They were just pieces on the floor. I was left holding all of them at once, clueless what to do with them, if to put them back together and with what.

I hit rock bottom. Where to now?

I sat across a teacher of mine one day to question the traumatic beach image embedded in my psyche.

He looked at me and said, “There is a principle in psychology that one has to hit bottom before they can truly change.” Bottom was a place that wasn’t anywhere. I looked around and didn’t see anything to grab onto. No ropes. No sights. Just the feeling of terror and the absence of form. A black, non-existent quicksand. Nowhere to go to and nowhere to go from. No floodlights. No road.

This Way Up

I started asking questions – what do I do with the pieces of me? Why do I do this?

Kids?

That was no point. As cute and lovely as they may be, I knew that I couldn’t maintain my happiness through my children. How many people live for their kids, only to be sorely disappointed that all didn’t work out as planned? As much as I put in, I cannot control whether my children do the right thing and are happy on any given day. I can only control whether I do the right thing. And, of course, kids move on and get married. The only thing that could energize me is something true. Real.

And real equals God.

But was it realistic for me to live for God? I explored my inner world. I found that the ideal was too big for me. Too impractical to maintain for life. I am not an angel.

I examined some more. How could I live for something that would have no end, in a way that gave me enough of a feeling of pleasure to maintain the drive? Eventually I realized that the goal that really moved me was for me to live and develop myself and become the greatest person I could be.

To be Godly. This was a goal that was upward, not outward. Children change depending on a person’s incarnation – they are a challenge that are assigned to us at different times. God, and our spiritual potential, is always constant on the other hand. We are always given life in order to perfect ourselves.

Children are just one of the ways.

Being Godly was an infinite goal and constant goal, never to be accomplished. Never to end, that truly did give me a tangible feeling of life, self-love and goodness. To just know that I am doing my mission in the world, aligning my will with His will. To become spiritually great. It makes me love God more, humanity more and of course myself more if I am Godly.

Done. I felt lighter. Less fragile. New person, charged from the inside with the infinite force day-to-day.

Same day schedule, give or take. But my motivation is more aligned to the source of it all. When one wants to send a spacecraft to the moon, the angle of the launch has to be exact if it is going straight there. If the angle is off by just half a centimeter, the spacecraft will miss the moon by hundreds, if not thousands, of miles. If we are trying to hit our spiritual target here, we have to come at it from the right angle. Hitting bottom realigned me so I could reach up to my Godly self.

Our Rock Bottom: Tisha B’Av

I see a mirror of my own work in the Jewish calendar. God actually gave us a mitzvah to hit bottom on Tisha B’Av. We are supposed to see and experience the lack, the suffering, the darkness. For three weeks we descend into this ultimate low.

And yet, in the darkest hour, the messiah is born. There, in the unformed blackness lies our salvation. Pain is an energy. When we decide to use this energy to connect back up to the Almighty, we sanctify it. We take emotional energy and transform it into spiritual light through our free will. God doesn’t do that; only we do that. We take the pain and we make ourselves Godly through it.

Our spiritual labor of hitting rock bottom comes just before the month of change, the Jewish month of Elul. One feeds into the other. The pain, the agony: these can be the forces that push us forward, to a Rosh Hashanah of real change and growth. To the newness of our being. To the inner peace of God’s embrace.

May it fill us all.

(reprinted from www.Aish.com)

Shalom WWP family,

There have been so many posts lately – news and especially opinion pieces.
Everyone has one. Everyone agrees with some and disagrees with others.

Someone wrote me hate mail the last couple of days. You see they are not Jewish and anti-Zionist and anti-American and anti-Fox news and wanted me to know that they are boycotting anything to do with Israel. I decided that this must be a socially-conscious human being and so opened the discussion – hoping to show them the error of their ways and the misguided-ness of their genuinely good character trait of compassion.

Not to be.

They hate Israel. Any force or action is justified in the face of being occupied. Ok I thought. This is the world. This is just the reality – just breathe. I walk around Jerusalem with a constant lump in my throat from the uncertainty of the situation – when it will end and we can go back to enjoying life and summer ‘vacation’. A pain in my heart from the knowing how many families are sitting shiva and are are also missing their Abas at their Shabbos tables weekly, either through ending their service or continuing it. And, most evidently, an existential anguish from knowing that there is no real solution here – I can’t convince anyone of true morality. I can’t even be sure that we are being moral – do the Israeli leaders get Torah psak on their every move and so know they are doing Hashem’s will at every moment? I don’t know if eliminating Hamas will lead to more problems, I don’t know if ending the war will lead to more deaths. I know nothing and it is not clear what is a win except for peace on earth and Mashiach…

Here we go again – that frustration and anguish over the “unfairness of life”. No different test than my husband tragically dying in a beautiful moment. We all know that nothing is fair according to what we think of fair. We get what we need spiritually – in order to overcome and achieve our spiritual potential. Same story, different station.

ISIS destroyed the prophet Yonah’s tomb the other day in Iraq. I thought it was strange, since they already did it by hand a week or two ago but they felt the need to drive the point home again by also bombing it to bits and then videotaping and posting it. It was a bit extreme. I decided perhaps Hashem wanted us to pay attention to it for a reason. So I popped open the book of Yonah – journey of the soul – based on the Vilna Gaon’s Kabbalistic teachings of the story of Yonah – as a parable of the soul’s journey in this world. According to the Gaon, the story is a metaphor for the soul who doesn’t want to come into the world, but is forced to do its job anyway.

The first two pages I read said the following:

A Jewish soul sits blissfully in the next world and does not want to go down. In the world in which it must be sent, it may be confused by the temptations of the body and pleasures that will make it lose its beautiful neshama essence. But, also, and more specifically pointed to my current struggles – it must face the test of challenges and of the antagonism of the nations. Built into this world in which a Jewish soul travels is the hate of the nations surrounding it. A Jewish soul is here to keep the mitzvos and bond with Hashem through it all the while enduring the challenges from within and from without – like a sailor navigating a ship against great waves trying to swallow it.

This sea -that is currently making me sea-sick by the way, is exactly the way it was designed in order for this soul, and your soul, to accomplish its purpose. Just ride the wave Batya, I say. Ride the wave – it is meant to be this way. You are fighting the stage – get back to your character and improve your mitzvot – it will make the reward only that much greater. No need to feel pain over the absurdity of world opinion and dislike – it is perfectly instrumented and purposeful to Hashem’s plan. You mind your business and Hashem will mind His business.

With love from the holy land and with immense prayers for victory and peace,
Batya

Life’s difficult challenges aren’t interruptions. They’re what we need to compose our unique song.

It is no coincidence that Shavuot, the anniversary of the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, is the yahrzeit of King David. On Shavuot, the Jewish people received their national mission to be a light onto the nations. King David teaches us about our unique mission in the world as an individual.

I have always admired King David. I even named a son after him, who was born on Shavuot. King David inspires me.

The youngest son of Yishai, from an early age David was sent out to tend the sheep and forced to eat at a separate table because of his family’s embarrassment of his seemingly questionable lineage. After being secretly anointed as the new King of Israel by the prophet Samuel, David revealed himself as more than a harp-playing shepherd and poet when he courageously stood up to the 9-foot giant Goliath, slaying him with a few rocks and sling. After marrying King Saul’s daughter Michal, he spent years being chased by his father-law who out of jealousy attempted to kill him several times. David responded with compassion and love, trust and devotion to His Creator who he knew orchestrated the ways of His world. He lost a baby at birth, one of his sons raped his daughter, and another son attempted to kill him and oust him from his throne.

Through it all he remained our hero, fought and won many battles on behalf of Israel and had his son Solomon build the Temple of Jerusalem. But the depth and heart of David remains most revealed in his poetry-turned-prayers called Psalms.

In the Psalms, King David moves me because of the intensity of his experience of life, because of his honesty, candidness, rawness and courage to expose his frailties and fears. Because of his humility and yearning to be closer to His maker in the light and in the dark times. He was not embarrassed to be him. He was not shy about his feelings. He exposed himself and then gave it all back to God. Nothing he felt or experienced was wasted. All was used to connect back. All was sanctified through his actions.

I also love that he was a singer. It is written that the highest gate of prophecy is through song, sung with pure intentions.

Each one of us has a unique song that lies deep in our soul. It is the most pure type of music that stems from who we truly are, in all of our splendor and beauty, the one that reveals us completely, imperfections and all.

When we have a difficult challenge in life and experience some suffering, some of us view it as an interruption to life, a blip. But those troubles aren’t distractions – they’re precisely what create us. The pains and the uncomfortable parts of our story help craft our unique personality and character. The moments of distress create the peaks, dips and special viewpoints we have; they create the flats, the sharps and the octaves of our song. Every experience of anguish is a note that we weave together to make a song that no one else can sing. And when we sing that song back to God through prayer, just as King David did, we fulfill the spiritual purpose for the suffering we were given.

This was part of King David’s greatness and the lesson he teaches to every one of us.

Suffering, pain and turmoil are not intermission times in our lives; they create our intricacies, depletions, accents and twists for a reason. When we are honest with our pain and lacks, and allow ourselves to laugh or cry or scream as a vehicle to come closer to our Maker, that’s part of our chorus. That’s part of our song that no one can sing but us. We can transform the darkness into sparks of light. When we turn pain into a vehicle for connection with the Almighty, we invest meaning into the suffering and make it holy. God doesn’t do that; that choice is in our domain.

King David became King David not despite his difficult life, but because of it. Can you imagine if he had a normal, steady and balanced life full of everything he wanted and no struggles? He would not have become King David. We would not have written the psalms to open up the Heavenly gates. He would not have become the spiritual hero that we aspire to be.

The world is our classroom. We face the tests that are given to us, to overcome a weakness and write new stanzas to our life’s song. And we can rely on God for His help and guidance. My kids recently lost their father. At the shiva I continuously heard from friends who lost parents at an early age that a hole remained with them for life. But they also gained a special connection to God that none of their friends seemingly felt. A double dose of God’s help and closeness in place of that parent, just as King David writes in his Psalms.

Would my kids have chosen that combination if asked? I don’t think so. But who chooses anything? When we stop fighting against why we have a certain life circumstance and accept the Divine plan, embracing what we do have and are here to do. That’s when we can finally make use of all the beautiful, awkward-like and seemingly off key notes we possess to compose the special song only our soul can sing.

Easier said than done. Trust me, I know. But time is so precious, and so are you.

(reprinted from www.Aish.com)

B”SD

Shalom friends and extended Western Wall Prayers Family,

It has been over 8 months since Gershon zt”l passed away. From before Pesach until now feels like 5 months in and of itself. Passover is truly the chag of transformation. I feel like our family and especially me personally, have traveled many oceans and lands since then and have arrived on a temporary island called ‘here’. It is quiet. Serene. Uncomplicated. Focused. Different plants grow here and the waters are a strange but pleasant color. We are getting used to the closeness yet alien feeling of being ‘here’.

As I look back I remember some of the things that got me ‘here’. Before this all happened, I had the need to go in search of myself this summer. I realized that I needed to come closer to who I really was. In order to do that I needed to start writing and talking. I had no idea about what; I just realized that my higher purpose was to inspire people. I started a blog, I had plans to start an online radio advice line and I started putting the word out that I was available for speaking engagements. I had no idea what I was going to talk about I just knew that I felt alive when I helped others to reach higher places.

And then ‘IT’ happened. The IT that pummeled my world as I knew it. The IT that couldn’t have thrown me farther off guard.

And I started speaking. I spoke at the shiva for hours and hours on end. There was barely anyone else sitting, so I had the stage ironically. And I kept speaking. I spoke until 3 am the last day of shiva and asked for more time. Then I started writing. The blog was right here in front of me waiting. The stage had been set, the mike already prepped, the audience just waiting for a word.

The bitter irony. I found out what I was going to be speaking about.

Someone special told me that I was Gershon’s midwife to Olam HaBa. I was there for his neshama to be born into the world of souls. Likewise, he too helped me to be born into my new world ahead – whatever that may be.
So far it is a world where I have fallen deeper in love with my kids, where I have expanded far beyond my comfort and imagined-possible zones to take up the emptied space, and where I have learned that the act of giving especially applies to oneself.

With love from Jerusalem,
Batya

Shalom people in my world. I am getting used to my new identity as an almana (widow) which I formerly just identified with a black spider.

But in Jewish tefila (prayer) terms, they say it makes me closer to G-d than Rav Kanievsky. The other day I got a call to daven for someone who was in an accident. I said sure I will get someone to the Kotel quick. They said no, the person wants you to daven for them. ‘Oh yeah’ I thought, ‘I’m the almana‘.

I guess it’s G-d’s funny way of making me think I won the lottery in this crisis.

People generally would like to know how I am, but thankfully don’t want to pry. So, I decided to update you via the blog today.

Basically, I am on fast-forward. Fast-forward challenges, fast-forward efforts, fast-forward emotions. Fast-forward period.

The amount of changes I have made internally in the last two months are definitely equal to the last few years. Feels like a chiropractor visiting my psyche and making adjustments.

A few weeks ago a friend who knew I was going through after-shock crisis called up and asked me how I am. I said, “Well it depends. If you are asking me how are things in my life, then terrible. Absolutely terrible. But, if you are asking me how I am handling them. Great!”

Of course we know that the only thing we own here is who we are and what we do. So the great is what’s forever, and the terrible just passes along with everything else…

A friend asked me what it looks like to pass a test from Above. My answer is that she accept it and use it to grow. A basis tenet of that acceptance is to know it comes from a loving and good G-d who created perfection in the world. That the suffering is part of the perfection in the world. Of course this is a process. But at least acceptance, trust and the use of it to grow – a plus from the master of the Universe. Spiritual and physical worlds repaired as a result! Look at that – we can all do it with whatever is on our plate. We really can. Or we can die trying…

I had heard through all of shiva that we say ‘Hamakom’ (the Place) when comforting a mourner because it refers to G-d. That only G-d can truly comfort. That we work and work and work and then finally G-d grants the nechama (comfort). The other day I felt a small aspect of this. I was reading the highly recommended book on suffering “Longing for the Dawn”, and I read the famous quote about when Rebbe Akiva was being tortured to death. Voices cried out “is this the reward for Torah?”. The response from G-d was “Quiet, or I will turn the world back to water”. This always bothered me. Doesn’t it sound like a macho way of saying, “this is my world and I will do what I want”? How is that supposed to make us feel better?

I finally got clarity that soothed a bitterness in my soul. What G-d was saying is that after the flood of Noah, He brought a rainbow and made a promise that He will never destroy/flood the world again – even if the world deserved it. So in our days, when the world has gone so astray that it really does deserve, or does need to be flooded at times according to the divine formula, G-d has to “find” a way in which He can keep His promise and not destroy the world. One way to do this is to take tzaddikim (righteous people) so that the rest of us can remain. Isn’t it unbelievably apropos that Gershon zt”l was taken through water on his 40th birthday and also on the parsha (Torah portion of the week) of the flood itself that lasted for 40 days. Isn’t it such an incredible way to show us what he was? How can one complain when he was used to save a multitude? When one has clarity that they or a loved one are a korbon for Hashem on behalf of Am Yisroel, the intentions can change to noble and pure ones.

………………………………………………………………………………………….

On a lighter note, I received an email from a family member today letting me know that she went to see her dental hygienist the other day. This lovely Latino lady read the Aish article about Gershon zt”l and was so inspired that she decided to offer free dental work for the poor, free meals for homeless people and other. I was moved beyond words.

What can you do?

With love from Jerusalem,
Batya

Welcome to our new blog! We hope through this blog to keep you informed of what’s happening in the Old City and at the Wall and also to create more of a community. We want you to know what is happening in the lives of our prayer agents and see just what a difference your donations are making in the personal and communal lives of the Torah community here. We can all have a share in the building of the palace of the King.

Batya