That made no sense. This daughter has always been a total pleasure and has never given us or her teachers an ounce of trouble. She doesn’t even have a cell phone!

I called the camp again and asked about these claims against my daughter, and the woman on the other end of the line told me very matter-of-factly that my daughter did not meet the camp’s standards.

Then she went on the offensive. “Are you going to tell me that you’ve never been called into school to discuss your daughter?”

This caught me completely off-guard. I was forced to admit that the school had called me in to discuss my daughter — but only because she had been struggling academically. I quickly added that we had agreed on an education plan, and my daughter had improved.

“But if the camp had some sort of problem with my daughter,” I asked, “why didn’t you call me then? Why am I hearing about it only now?”

She said this came to their attention after camp ended. She tried ending our call on a conciliatory note: “We would consider taking her back if we determine she’s changed her behavior. We’d have a meeting to lay out our expectations.”

I was reeling when I hung up the phone. Obviously someone had made a mistake — but I didn’t see how I could get to the bottom of the whole thing and clear her name. I was so angry and hurt, I didn’t even want to send her to the camp anymore, but I knew all the other camps were full.

I asked my daughter about it, but she told me she had never gotten into trouble . She started getting hysterical.

“My reputation is ruined!” she cried. “I’ll never get a shidduch!”

I started feeling pretty sorry for myself, but I suddenly remembered learning that saying something isn’t fair amounts to kefirah — it’s like saying Hashem doesn’t know what He’s doing.

And then I remembered my friend Chana Raizel, whose married daughter Sara had suffered several miscarriages and was told she could never support a pregnancy.

At that moment, I pulled myself together.

“Hashem, I don’t understand what’s going on here,” I said. “I know the camp is wrong, and they’ve shamed us. But I humbly accept that everything happening to us is for the best. And in the zechus of accepting this very difficult nisayon, I beg You to please bless Sara bas Chana Raizel with a full-term healthy baby.”

That night I texted Chana Raizel about my kabbalah.

L

ater I found that Chana Raizel and her daughter had also been up that night, crying to Hashem and saying Tehillim. Unbeknownst to me, Sara was in the early stages of a pregnancy, but according to the doctors, she could not maintain it. That night she started feeling contractions and was sure she losing yet another pregnancy.

The next day, Sara went to the doctor. The contractions, she learned, were a figment of her imagination; everything was fine. At full term, she gave birth to a healthy baby boy.

In the end, my daughter got accepted to the camp. She was beautifully behaved — as she had always been. And with the arrival of that delicious little baby into the world, we both had to agree that the difficult nisayon had been totally worth it.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1072)