Right Time, Right Place

Avi Tenenbaum is the man who shows up.

Forty-year-old Avi is a trauma and addiction expert, EMT, volunteer police sergeant, urban search-and-rescue commander, and crisis intervention trainer based in Jerusalem. He teaches psychological first aid across the globe, with hundreds of students on four continents.

When he isn’t on site at an emergency or responding to calls from struggling clients, you’ll likely find Avi in his office, surrounded by artifacts that tell endless stories of crises: an Iron Dome missile tip, mementos from disaster work in Ukraine and across Israel, an abandoned car part from the Nova site, and a piece of debris from a building in Beer Sheva struck by a missile. On the wall is a plaque from the Mir thanking him for his support after the tragedy in Meron. And then there are seforim — shelves and shelves of them, some less-known, many filled with meticulous handwritten notes and indexes, witness to hours and hours spent learning.

Currently, every spare inch of floor space is covered with rescue gear Avi has imported from abroad, waiting to be distributed to volunteer teams that he set up during the war.

His WhatsApp statuses often read like a running log of wartime alerts, but even those barely capture the emotional weight he carries. If you listen closely, you may hear the echoes of submission from the personal dreams Avi’s shelved, like learning Torah uninterrupted, while the world keeps calling.

And on October 7, the call came louder than ever.

Just days after the massacre, while most of the country was still trying to comprehend what had happened, Avi was already moving.

Ramot, the sprawling Jerusalem neighborhood where Avi lives with his wife and six children, is home to over 75,000 residents. It’s bordered by porous forestland and Arab villages, yet it has no police station, no IDF base, and only one or two police patrol cars per shift — also covering Ramat Shlomo and Givat Ze’ev. That’s two to four police officers for 110,000 people and a 30-minute drive to get from one end to the other.

“I looked around,” Avi says, “and I asked myself, if the invasion on October 7 continued to this area — what assets do we have? If missiles bring down buildings, who pulls people out? This is the climate now. And no one was doing anything.”

People were frightened, especially considering the bordering Arab villages and history of terror attacks here, but there were no good answers to calm them.

So with his background in trauma, policing, and emergency management, the haskamah of Rav Asher Weiss, and approval from both the police and army, Avi got to work.

He set up three unique civilian defense units under the name of his umbrella organization “Betuchim B’Ramot.” First, there’s an urban rescue team trained to locate missing civilians, assist in evacuation, and extract survivors from collapsed buildings after missile strikes. Over the months, Avi managed to secure hundreds of pieces of specialized rescue equipment, coordinated with IDF Homefront Command units, and assembled a trained force capable of responding to attack.

Next, he established a security patrol unit that grew to 100 men, securing the entire neighborhood in overlapping patrols. Today, some 650 days later, the team includes police volunteers, soldiers on leave, businessmen, first responders, engineers, insurance agents, and mechanchim. Though they drive with lights and vests like a typical neighborhood watch, much like Shomrim in the US and Europe, Avi sends his armed volunteers to train for combat-level readiness. The goal is to be reasonably prepared were another invasion to occur, instead of what he considers relying on miracles.

Rounding out the system is Avi’s most discreet operation: a web of 20 observation posts stationed across the borders of the neighborhood. These civilian volunteers, positioned in locations built high up and equipped with surveillance gear including drones, thermal and infrared optics, and high-powered spotting scopes, provide real-time intel at Avi’s request.

“If someone hears a shot in the distance, I can say, ‘Check your scopes — what do you see?’ Within minutes we’ll have a full sweep of the valley,” Avi says. “I can tell if it’s just an Arab wedding or something more suspicious that we need to alert police about.” Avi’s volunteers are regularly helping to apprehend criminals, check suspects, and have even caught a former terrorist released during one of the initial hostage swaps wandering around the Jewish neighborhood without a good explanation.

Avi built the system from scratch and he says the absence of any prior framework points to a more fundamental issue: the buy-in to the “conceptzia,” and the complacency that allowed the travesty of the Hamas invasion. He says that as early as April of 2023 an IDF colonel sent him a report from Dr. Mordechai Kedar, a lecturer at Bar Ilan University specializing in Arab culture, predicting that the war would soon take place.

“The deeper crisis,” he says, “is that people didn’t believe this could happen. We weren’t ready because we didn’t think we had to be. But after October 7, there are no excuses left.”

Avi is hands-on with all of the projects, every radio protocol, scheduling system, training drill, and there are nights he barely sleeps. On top of the operations, which he manages together with some senior volunteers, he spends hours fundraising. Avi hopes to finance the projects in a way that will maintain them for years to come and allow him to go back to focusing on other important causes, like helping young people struggling with religious trauma or despair.

“For a year and a half, I have given this project 150 percent of my time, and thousands of dollars in both solicited and personal funds. There is no room to be tired. We need to do what we need to do.”

And he does this even while he still holds his other hats, showing up at crisis scenes to deliver psychological first aid, helping clients grappling with wrenching life dilemmas by offering Torah-aligned professional answers, and responding to trauma teams who need support and schools dealing with panicked students.

Survival First

Avi had seen it before — that gap between danger and preparedness.

It hit him most intensely in Ukraine, when he was called to support communities dealing with war trauma. There, among the bombed-out cities and frozen apartment blocks, Avi came to a sobering realization: You can’t help someone with trauma if they’re not even sure they’ll survive the night.

In Odessa, Kherson, and other eastern cities, entire families were trapped in freezing homes after Putin targeted Ukraine’s power grid. The terror wasn’t only from falling missiles — it was from cold. Parents feared their children would die of hypothermia long before any therapist could arrive.

Avi managed to catch a window of internet access and, alongside a small team, threw together an online event. A German emergency physician taught how to recognize hypothermia, and an American survivalist explained how to safely heat a home without triggering carbon monoxide poisoning or causing a fire. Only afterward did Avi and a colleague talk about fortitude and tenacity. A few hours later, the electricity was hit again, and the recording was lost. But the hundreds of viewers had the tools they needed.

Before trauma work, Avi realized, comes survival. If you want to help someone through a crisis, you first need to help them get through the night.

That experience redefined Avi’s understanding of his own work since October 7. In Israel, in his own neighborhood, it’s not just about reassurance — it’s about readiness. It’s being able to tell a frightened family that there are armed patrols on duty, that the hills are being watched, that someone will come if, lo aleinu, tragedy strikes. In times of panic, these tangible physical measures translate into psychological resilience.

The Kid Who Didn’t Fit

So how does a Chicago-born yeshivah kid wind up as the guy who walks into crises, designs national trauma trainings, builds Israeli civilian defense systems, and become the address for people tangled in unthinkable life struggles who are looking for a Torah-sourced response?

He doesn’t have a simple answer.

While Avi grew up in a litvish family, his father, a talmid chacham and mental health professional, raised him on stories of gedolim across the spectrum — litvish, chassidish, Sephardi — and made sure to bring him to see any tzaddik who came through town. Torah was revered in the Tenenbaum home and Avi’s father modeled for him how going to work and being a Torah scholar aren’t mutually exclusive.

But as a boy, Avi found school more like exile than education. From as early as he can remember, life was a fight; he just couldn’t keep up with the demands on him. School was his daily reminder that he didn’t fit, didn’t measure up, wasn’t valued or important. In middle school, Avi remembers, a rebbi divided the class into groups according to their performance. There were ones, twos, threes, and fours, four being the lowest.

There were only two boys in the last group. One of them was dealing with a dying parent, and the other was Avi.

“That’s how I was seen. I was the kid who couldn’t focus. Couldn’t learn. Always behind.”

He was placed at times in special ed classes alongside children with severe developmental diagnoses and learned with special tutors whose expertise was difficulty with Gemara, but never felt he belonged. He was used to feeling less-than.

The truth was more complicated. Avi wasn’t dumb. In fact, he was a deeply intellectual young man, with an intense and spiritually hungry nature. But there was a lot of covert bullying happening that people around him didn’t latch on to and Avi failed to find language for it. Today, he calls it trauma. The trauma made it impossible to function and brought with it issues of self-esteem, depression, and anxiety. He wasn’t lazy. He wasn’t rebellious. He was just in complete overload trying to survive the angst.

After eighth grade, Avi applied to over a dozen mesivtas, and was rejected by all of them, in one long stretch of slammed doors. Eventually, his father pulled strings and got him in to a school, but he didn’t last long there either.

He wasn’t chutzpahdig — but he had no zitzfleish. “I’d shoot rubber band guns, run around. Eventually I got thrown out.”

It was one of Avi’s lowest times. But the thing that kept him pushing forward was a British guy just a few years older than Avi, Moshe Hershkowitz, who found his way to Chicago and would call Avi every single week, just to see how he was doing. (This went on for years, and the two of them later converged in Eretz Yisrael.)

He bounced from yeshivah to yeshivah until finally, in tenth grade, he landed in Denver. It shouldn’t have worked. But it did.

Denver Yeshivah was run by talmidim of Rav Aharon Kotler — Rabbi Yisroel Meir Kagan and Rabbi Yitzchok Wasserman — and the mashgiach at the time, Rabbi Tzvi Feldheim, gave the place its warm, accepting spirit.

It was a different world. The bochurim were complex, high-energy, unconventional. “I could write a book about the mischievous things we got up to back then,” Avi jokes. But the rebbeim contained it. They didn’t shame. They waited. They gave the boys space to come into themselves.

For Avi, the turnaround began with cookies.

“There was a man who’d bring leftover cookies from a kosher bakery on Denver’s east side, for anyone who stayed an extra fifteen minutes to learn after night seder,” he remembers. “I couldn’t sit for five minutes, let alone fifteen. But I wanted those cookies so badly. So I sat anyway.”

Eventually, he stopped counting the minutes — and started learning the seforim.

That was the beginning: an eleventh grader learning Gemara in earnest for the first time. Most kids had started in fifth or sixth grade. But for Avi, the learning finally tasted sweet. He had a lot of catching up to do.

At the end of twelfth grade, he had to figure out his next steps. Most of his friends were staying in Denver. But Avi felt something else pulling him — Eretz Yisrael. He had no siblings there, no family waiting. But his soul told him to go.

He was accepted to Yeshivas Toras Moshe, or ToMo as it’s colloquially known, despite “no sh’eilah that I failed the farher,” because his grandparents were close with the rosh yeshivah, Rav Moshe Meiselman; his maternal zeide was a talmid of Rav Ahron Soloveichik, Rav Meiselman’s uncle.

It was there at age 20 that Avi first began to understand that what he was carrying had a name. He had worked extremely hard, but it felt like an uphill battle that was impossible to win. Rav Meiselman saw he was struggling and sent him to therapy.

The therapy was psychodynamic, with long silences and uncomfortable space. The therapist would sometimes refuse to speak for an hour just to see what Avi would say. It made him furious. But eventually, he talked, and something shifted.

Even so, his system was still overloaded. Turns out, he was actually a high-capacity learner with a low distress tolerance. But ultimately he successfully moved forward, and his own personal experience led him to form his fervent convictions that there’s no one beyond hope, who can’t be helped by the right tools and strategies.

“Everyone around me in yeshivah was a genius, budding talmidei chachamim. Toras Moshe is a world-class yeshivah. I had friends who learned during breakfast and finished all of Ketzos. Some had finished Shas. I felt stupid next to them. But I so badly wanted that sweetness I’d tasted in Denver.”

So Avi pushed himself to learn — recording shiurim, listening again alone, learning before and after seder, during breaks, late at night. He’d walk his rebbeim to the bus, asking questions along the way, and forced himself to keep going, despite almost giving up a few times. Gradually, he started making headway, finishing dozens of seforim cover to cover, paying special interest to Torah sources that capture the psychology of people struggling.

And that might have been Avi Tenenbaum’s trajectory forever, the end of the story. The guy who couldn’t learn, and then could.

What he didn’t realize yet is that the same parts of him that struggled all those years to sit and stay focused were the ones that would allow him to step into the most unthinkable scenes with a measured, steady presence. The wiring that made him hypervigilant as a child and young adolescent would one day become his gift. His struggles gave him unique adaptive skills that allow him to deal with complex situations, whether a complicated addiction case, the scene of a tragic road accident, or an unfolding terror attack.

Lenses of Compassion

Even as a kid still struggling to survive in school, Avi noticed things that shaped his path.

He remembers driving one day with his father when they passed a man rummaging through a dumpster.

His father stopped the car and rolled down the window.

“Hungry?” he asked.

The man nodded.

“Would you like the address and hours of a food pantry nearby?”

The man said yes. His father reached into the glove compartment, jotted it down, and handed him the information.

“It was a sixty-second interaction. We never saw him again. But I never forgot it.”

That moment, Avi says, shaped his worldview. There are people all around us who need us. You just have to notice them and offer help. That attentiveness — the glasses that never come off, as he puts it — would later become the foundation of his work in psychological first aid.

The Second Lebanon War that began in 2006 marked the beginning of his crisis work.

It was the summer bein hazmanim. Many yeshivos had emptied out, and some had opened their doors to families from the north. But in Jerusalem, life seemed unchanged. Teenagers played basketball. Pizza shops were full. People were planning tiyulim as if nothing was happening.

Avi had stayed in Jerusalem that summer, and he couldn’t believe what he was seeing — or rather, what he wasn’t. There was a war up north, “and you pashut couldn’t tell.” The disconnect deeply unsettled him, the jarring mismatch between one person’s suffering and another’s comfort.

He decided to go up north just to see things for himself. But first, he approached one of his rebbeim to ask whether traveling into an active war zone was halachically permitted. The rebbi pointed him to a teshuvah that said that if people are still traveling to a place for work, it’s technically not considered a halachic makom sakanah.

That was enough for Avi. Tnuva was still delivering milk to the north, he reasoned. “So m’meilah, I could go, too.”

There was the question of where to sleep. Through a string of connections, he got the number of a man living in Tzfas and asked if he could stay there. The man thought he was crazy. There are rockets falling every few minutes, he warned. But Avi was insistent. “I have to come,” he said.

“B’seder,” his potential host conceded. “If you so badly want to come, come.”

Tzfas was a literal war zone, he remembers. There were sirens going off constantly. Rockets were falling. There were no advanced tracking systems then, no Iron Dome in those days, just howitzers — large, motorized artillery vehicles — positioned throughout the city, using radar to locate rocket launch sites as best they could and fire back. It was utter chaos.

There were still families who hadn’t evacuated, and Avi followed the soldiers from the Home Front Command as they trekked from shelter to shelter handing out food and toys. On Tishah B’Av, he went to shul there. It was a large building, with room for close to two hundred people. There were only eleven men there.

At night, he could see the Israeli Air Force bombing Lebanon from the windows of his room. The highways along Tzfas were filled with military convoys — clean tanks and supply vehicles heading north, soot-covered ones making their way back. Avi looked on, fascinated, and nurtured a growing determination to get involved.

Returning to Jerusalem, he discovered Ohr Meir & Bracha, an organization based near his yeshivah that supports victims of terror. They had taken in a group of refugees and were housing them in an American yeshivah. With his then-broken Hebrew, Avi started spending Shabbos with the families, helping with meals, playing with the children, trying to offer support. In hindsight, he realizes he didn’t really understand what they needed.

“They had food. They had beds. I didn’t understand what else could possibly be missing.” It would take years before he fully grasped it. They had left behind their homes, communities, schools, businesses. They were uncomfortable being recipients. They felt displaced, disoriented, undignified.

“Today I can tell what a person needs. I can triage and prioritize. I worked with several refugees from the north during the Iron Swords war. But back then, I just didn’t get it.”

Still, that was when the seeds were planted. He’d never thought of becoming a psychotherapist or disaster management specialist. He wasn’t thinking about getting credentials. But he wanted to understand what people go through in crisis, what helps and what doesn’t, what to say and what not to say, what it takes to shift from being a bystander to being a partner.

Years later, when he entered the professional world, Avi discovered the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN),  a group of American crisis experts, and building off their protocol, began to gradually build his own framework for what would eventually become his signature approach to psychological first aid. He would go on to form ties with renowned crisis professionals like Ayelet Shmuel of Sderot’s International Resilience Center, Rabbi Dr. David Fox of Chai Lifeline, and US-Army-based Colonel Dave Grossman. But the roots of it all — the instinct to show up, the question of how — started back in 2006, in the middle of another Lebanon war.

The Fight for Self

By the end of his sixth year at ToMo, Avi got married to Tehila Subar from Yerushalayim and joined a newly formed kollel, Nesivos Aharon, as one of its founding yungeleit.

Fascinated by the world of kedushah and tzaddikim, he found himself drawn to Kabbalah. A rebbi invited him to study some lighter texts under the supervision of several tzaddikim in Yerushalayim.

But Avi, with his ubiquitous thirst for knowledge, for connection, for more, didn’t stay basic for long. What began as a quiet curiosity deepened over time as he moved between shiurim and texts, gradually immersing himself in more complex material.

Eventually, he collapsed. The weight of it all caught up with him. The many months of thinking about special intentions and holy names made his head race.

He went back to one of Yerushalayim’s accomplished mekubalim. “Should I fight to get back these high madreigos?” he asked.

“I’ve seen people push too hard and never make it back,” the rav told him. “And I’ve seen people take it slow — and sometimes they make it. So take it slow. Whatever happens, happens.”

In the wake of that collapse, Avi turned to Breslov.

“My brain was mush. My thoughts were racing. My anxiety was through the roof. What I needed wasn’t fire — it was calm.”

Rebbe Nachman taught temimus, simplicity. “No special kavanos. No secrets. Just a relationship with Hashem. To talk. To sing. To be simple.” And that’s exactly what Avi needed — a shift from sophisticated avodah to simple, heartfelt connection.

“Through Breslov,” Avi quips, “I actually ended up becoming more of a Litvak. The tools Rebbe Nachman gave in his Sichos HaRan and other seforim helped me return to many seforim from the yeshivah world that I had religious trauma from, and plow right through them. Rav Yisrael Salanter, the Alter of Novardok, and the Chazon Ish came right back to me, making me feel like a millionaire. I told Rav Asher Weiss how Breslov made me more litvish and he appreciated that.”

It was around this time that the Tenenbaums spent Shabbos with relatives, and a cousin of Avi’s wife’s made a passing comment that would change his life.

“Avi would be a really good psychotherapist,” said Dr. Moshe Weiler of Givat Shmuel. Avi wasn’t impressed. “That’s a terrible idea,” he told his wife. “I’m in kollel. I’m learning.”

But his wife thought it was a good idea. When he confided in his chavrusa at the time, singer Ari Goldwag, Ari suggested he speak to Rav Noach Orlowek, a renowned mechanech and talmid chacham. He did, and after a short conversation, Rav Orlowek called Avi’s wife in front of him.

“Your husband should become a psychotherapist,” he told her. “The best possible, even if he has to go to a secular university — if that’s where the best training is, he should go. The frum world needs someone with his values.”

Avi took his advice, but it wasn’t easy. For at least five to seven years after he started seeing clients, he lived with a steady inner conflict. Yeah, you’re helping people, he told himself, but you should be sitting and learning. You could be writing seforim. You could be giving shiurim.

Every Rosh Hashanah, the question would come back. “I would go to big rabbanim — just recently I consulted with Rav Yitzchak Cohen, one of the Sephardi gedolim and an ish kadosh in Yerushalayim — and I’d ask the same big question: Am I doing the right thing?” And every time, the answer was the same: You are. Stay here, doing all you do.

Avi also consults regularly with Rav Asher Weiss, who provides invaluable insight to the most complex community problems as well as guidance for Avi’s personal path.

Still, it took years for the doubts to settle. For a long time, he felt like he was constantly the subject of an internal reckoning he couldn’t escape. But over time, he learned to integrate the different parts of himself in a more harmonious way. He metamorphosed from a troubled child to Torah student, mental health professional, and first responder in a way that blends it all together to help those in need.

Now, some fifteen years after that initial struggle, the dissonance is gone. He no longer questions the path he’s taken.

He still dreams sometimes of building an infrastructure with unique resources for the complicated boys. The ones like him, who couldn’t sit in fifth grade and didn’t get into mesivta. The ones who are burning with shame, with pain. He’d teach them Torah and self-regulation. Hold space for their fire without being afraid of it. Show them their nekudah tovah and mean it.

“But as of right now,” he says, “Klal Yisrael needs trauma support, crisis response, and someone to build the infrastructure for community resilience. The work since October 7 hasn’t ended yet.”

Looking Out for You

Even after working through his ambivalence and deciding to become a psychotherapist, the obstacles didn’t disappear. The actual path was fraught with difficulty, too. While originally he’d planned to go the classic route — bachelor’s, then master’s — he got stuck, of all things, on the math credits he needed to finish his bachelor’s. He tried everything, from tutors to retakes to online courses, without success.

“It was that old trauma creeping up again,” he says. “I had a deep-wired belief that I just couldn’t do math. Even today, I can barely handle basic calculations.” Eventually, Avi found an elderly tutor who patiently helped him through. He completed the prerequisites and continued toward his degrees.

“It was never easy,” Avi says. “Not one step. Nothing in my life came naturally. If I ever am successful at anything, people should know — it wasn’t handed to me. I had to fight for every inch.”

He became good at working with others — really good. Early in his career he founded the Jewish Network of Addiction Recovery Supports, a global connection point for nearly 200 Jewish rehabs, sober homes, and treatment centers. He published Torah-based articles on recovery. He even received a haskamah from Rabbi Dr. Avraham J. Twerski on a kuntress he wrote (that hasn’t yet been published).

After successfully graduating as a trained mental health professional, Avi wondered what niche he could enter that would use his unique skill set and experience.

“My baseline is crisis,” he says, “because I grew up with crisis. I didn’t want to just come in after the dust settled — I wanted to be there while the action was still happening.”

While pursing his degree, he’d learned about things like disaster behavioral health, grief leadership, and crisis communication, and over the last decade, Avi started canvassing internationally: Who actually teaches how to approach a crisis? What exactly are they teaching? He gathered everything he could find, unearthed contacts from around the globe, and built a comprehensive curriculum from the ground up.

Back then, a handful of people around the world each had their own homespun approach. In most places, the “training” amounted to a random therapist standing up after a tragedy to share anecdotal thoughts, but there was no proper structure, no global training.

Avi Tenenbaum set out to change that.

Using a synthesis of ten or twelve different models, Avi began training schools, therapists, rabbanim, police departments, chesed organizations, and community volunteers — hundreds of them across the US, UK, Europe, and Israel. It was during this time that Avi donned his police hat and also trained to become an EMT; he figured if he was going to help police officers and ambulance crews, then he wanted to understand their unique experiences by becoming one of them. A therapist can’t understand what it’s like for a police officer to drive in the opposite direction of traffic to stop a terrorist, negotiate with a psychotic person about to do something dangerous, or put handcuffs and leg cuffs on a suspect, but a therapist who also becomes a police officer could.

After the Meron tragedy, he trained dozens of volunteers from across the country. During Covid, he helped set up hotlines around the world to assist people in crisis in quarantine.

After Simchas Torah of 2023, he trained hundreds of therapists en masse, as well as several government agencies and even first response teams who fought for their lives on October 7.

One man struggled with survivor’s guilt, his friends having perished in the battle on that Simchas Torah. Another shared his guilt eliminating Hamas terrorists, feeling uncomfortable with having taken a life, even though he knew it was the right thing to do.

Not long ago Avi was at a scene where a bus struck a young yeshivah boy. Avi helped him stay grounded as first responders worked on his injuries and transport.

In another case, a pyromaniac set a building full of young frum families ablaze at three in the morning. Miraculously nobody was seriously injured, but for over a week, Avi worked with sixty people who were deeply traumatized from the event.

During the week after the Meron disaster, Avi spoke in group formats to several thousand people, until he finally had to stop and allow a colleague to address his own trauma after hearing the difficult stories.

After the Karlin bleacher disaster on Shavuos of 2021, Avi was on site even days later, making sure everybody got a chance to ask what was in their hearts and minds and receive practical tools for the weeks to come.

Today, Avi’s curriculum includes four modules and is the most robust psychological first aid (PFA) training in the world.

PFA isn’t about removing the risk of PTSD or eliminating the need for therapy down the line. It’s not about analyzing. It’s about noticing who’s in pain. It’s about showing up. Helping someone find their shoes. Get a drink of water. Locate their kids. Make one decision. Take one breath. Let the nervous system register: You’re not alone, you’re not helpless. That’s the intervention. That’s what stops people from falling into the abyss.

But what does success actually look like in the middle of a crisis, when the pain is so huge?

“Imagine you saw a sign on a shivah house,” Avi says. “And it read: ‘Dear neighbors, please don’t come to the shivah. Don’t knock. Don’t bring food. Don’t check on how I’m doing. Because we can’t guarantee that this will remove my PTSD.’

“When you work in tragedy and crisis, we’re trying to take something absolutely devastating and make it 0.1 percent easier — to put someone on a path where maybe five, or ten, or twenty years from now, they’ll recover. Or maybe you just give them the sense that recovery is possible. To me, that’s success. That’s chesed.”

That’s PFA. It’s the art of being there.

In Ramot, that looks like an armed patrol rotation. In Ukraine, it looked like heating up a freezing home. In the office it looks like validation and empathic guidance to somebody who just shared something they thought nobody could ever understand. In a Torah conversation it’s sharing amazing sources that make room even for the people in despair who feel religious trauma.

Wherever he is, Avi brings the same thing: presence, preparedness, and the knowledge that we are doing our utmost to look out for you.

Sometimes, that’s all you can do.

But sometimes, that’s everything.

These days, Avi’s phone rarely stops buzzing. Sirens go off, statuses go up, a kid is missing, or a suspicious car is spotted. A request comes in for a trauma debrief, advice for a therapist on how to handle a complex case, or there’s a talmid chacham seeking an obscure Torah source about mental health. It’s always something.

The hours never end. Klal Yisrael’s requests for help aren’t finished. And so Avi isn’t done. He plans to keep showing up, as long as he’s needed.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1073)