I had a rough week; I could hardly get out of bed this morning. But as I sit here writing, I am a new person. Two unexpected heroes showed up and lifted my spirits. They restored my vitality.
It started like this. My youngest sister, the baby of our family, made aliyah three years ago. She gave birth to a baby boy last Shabbos. I was bursting to go be with her. I had submitted all the required paperwork to get a special entry permit a month earlier and I was waiting. And waiting. The baby was born three weeks early so I e-mailed the consulate to ask if they could expedite an answer in time for me to be there for the bris. Literal crickets. There is zero phone contact to the consulate, no human being picks up a phone. The only correspondence is via e-mail, one a day and usually only one sentence. For the first time in my life, I was at the mercy of the notorious Israeli Bureaucracy. I had heard all the folklore but laughed it off as exaggeration. How wrong I was.
I went in person to the consulate hoping to appeal to flesh and blood. I never made it past the guy at the podium by the bank of elevators. He called upstairs for me; they told him in abrupt Hebrew that I need to go home and wait for an e-mail. I drove home defeated.
Then, a miracle. The next day I received my one liner in the morning. The e-mail said, “I’ll make sure you get the permit today.” I spazzed. I cancelled two weeks’ worth of patients. I scrambled to see crucial patients and tie up loose ends. I booked a midnight flight. 4:00 p.m. came and I saw I got a second e-mail from the consulate. Thinking it was my entry permit, I opened it excitedly. It wasn’t. It was this, “We are sorry, you cannot go. We reread your documents and you don’t fit the criteria.” What? Denial. Devastation. Confusion. Anger. So many emotions and no one to call. All I could do was e-mail and wait for the gods of the most impersonal form of communication to answer me.
I sent seven consecutive pleading e-mails explaining why I was the only family member able to go. That my sister has no immediate family with her. That she misses family terribly. I waited that whole day for a reply, stuck inside checking e-mail hell. I booked another midnight flight just in case. Packed my suitcase just in case. No mercy ever came, just a brief reiteration of rules and regulations. I cancelled my second flight and cried.
I cried to let out the pent up frustration, loss, helplessness, and pain for myself and my sister. She was there and I was here and there was not one thing we could do about it. I know it was a simcha and there is so much to be grateful for but the disappointment felt like a heavy loss in those moments. I crawled into bed that night, hoping to sleep it off.
I woke up the next day with a headache. I reached for some early morning scrolling. Malkie Gordon Hirsch came up on my feed. Her words always make me feel better. So I decided to read her latest. You were my refuah, Malkie, your message came at just the right time and pulled me out of bed that morning. I cannot thank you enough.
Malkie, you have been through unutterable loss and have shown us all what enduring with grace looks like in human form. I know my frustrating situation is absolutely ridiculous compared to the horror you have been through. But because you so freely share your pain and your recovery, you have created a huge cauldron of strength for all of us to draw resilience from. This morning I drew from it. You wouldn’t even notice a drop was missing because you have so much extra to give. After witnessing your gut-wrenching loss, this community stands in awe of you. You had every right to fall apart, but you haven’t. You blossomed, when you could have just as easily withered. You are a butterfly emerging from the cocoon of suffering and your intricate beauty stuns us all. You are a spiritual teacher in the making, showing us all how to look for what’s next, instead of wallow in why me. How to look around and find the beauty in whatever remains.
One specific line at the end of your article opened my soul. “If we can’t know the Divine Why, we can choose to author our own ongoing man-made why.” Whoa. Your words “man-made why” shook me loose. They handed me the literary freedom to rewrite the stubborn story I had been narrating to myself. The story I was holding tight to my heart and did not want to let go of. The story of why G-d would make a miracle for me to get to Israel.
Malkie, you helped me not feel stupid for trying so hard and misreading the signs along the way. The hardest part was that my disappointment was tethered to G-d and to one specific outcome. What I perceived to be a hard no from G-d felt so personally devastating. You reminded my eyes to stay alert, to witness that the same G-d who told me no, would also come to show me why. And He already has. During these days that I would have been away in Israel, I have already experienced three different situations that acutely and specifically needed only me. No one could have replaced me in those moments. Two with my kids and one with a patient. The humbling specificity of these instances gave retroactive meaning to my loss. G-d showed me how my life here needed me more and that it was ok to start letting go of that other story and start writing a new one.
Malkie, you gave me perfectly timed permission to keep rewriting meaning into my inner script. That I am absolutely allowed to revise as I go along. I am the one poised, holding the red pencil of my mind. I have unending consent to keep drafting and editing the storyline that most restores my connection with G-d and heals the pain of disappointment. My inner editor is actually the one responsible for any spiritual achievement I earn during suffering.
Suffering is rough, but it also has a purpose. Suffering provides an open arena for hitting spiritual benchmarks. This inner narrator determines how high our pole vault can launch us. Suffering provides a pocket of opportunity to reach new heights of spiritual maturation and connection. The gold medal, the most sublime spiritual accomplishment, is achieved from training your eye to see G-d’s grace written all over your life.
I felt inspired to go back and reread Viktor Frankl over Shabbos, the forefather of finding meaning. Every time I read his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” I understand another layer. The breakthrough I had this time was that meaning is an ever changing feeling. Meaning is fluid, it can come to you from any person, place, or deed that restores you back to the vitality of your life. Meaning changes from day to day and from person to person. What gives me meaning is different than what gives you meaning. What gives you meaning today is different than what gave you meaning last year. Life keeps opening up to new opportunities to experience meaning. Of adding something unique to the world. Making another person’s life a little fuller. Of experiencing beauty. For me, right now, having this opportunity to write about meaning fills me with a tremendous sense of meaning.
The classic example Viktor Frankl gives for finding meaning through ongoing internal revision was a man in terrible pain following the death of his beloved wife. He simply asked the man what would have happened if he had been the one to die first. When the man was able to view his survival through the lens of sparing his wife the exact pain he was feeling, his suffering started to abate. He found tangible meaning through this revised narrative.
Later that afternoon another spiritual leader came along to teach me about another type of revision. He also restored my wounded vitality. My brother in law in Passaic texted me a copy of the letter a local rabbi wrote to his kehilah. I wish I could include his entire four page letter here—it was that good. This rabbi humbled himself in a way I never saw a rabbi do. He retracted and apologized and admitted mistakes he made. He said, “What I wrote a month ago may no longer be my feeling or as medically relevant today.” He reprinted the exact shul notice he had written a month earlier with lines drawn through the parts that he visibly wished to retract. Wow. I’ve never seen that before.
After he witnessed in horror how his original request for his congregants to help monitor fellow congregants’ mask-wearing turned them into what he called, “self-appointed vigilantes and self-made Kapos.” He asked for mechilah from anyone who suffered humiliation at the hand of his original flawed directive. He said that while mask policies are likely to change with time, never shaming a fellow Jew is Unchanging Torah Policy.” He implored, “We must remember to never speak negatively about other Jews, as all sides have their medical and halachic experts.” He stressed that the most important thing right now is to get along.
This rabbi showed himself to be a standout, an anav, and a leader. A rabbi who knows how to revise in real time, as situations change. How to take personal accountability for a disaster he created and take bold steps towards correcting it. He was the heartiest kind of hero, one who takes the vulnerable chance of being Modeh Al Ha’emes in public. This rabbi gave me concrete hope that with Hashem’s help, the tides can turn back to normal. This rabbi restored my faith in the rabbinate and in mankind.
I have noticed the phenomena that corona tends to magnify by ten the innate nature hiding inside each one of us. This rabbi has shown his insides to be absolutely sterling, brimming with authentic relationship to Hashem. His bold and daring letter deserves to go viral, for every person to read it and take in. I pray for it to travel the cloud and land before the throne of Hashem. This holy letter carries the full heft of humility and honesty and has enough weight to tip the scales towards mercy and redeem us all from this bizarre reality. May it happen soon—I really wanna get to Israel.