***

My mother had found Torah on her own, some 25 years earlier. Her teshuvah journey began when a Jewish organization, to which she must have donated some money, started mailing her Torah pamphlets.

These pamphlets piqued her interest, and she started buying and reading Jewish books.

She especially loved Rav Aryeh Kaplan’s Torah Anthology. But the rest of the family, including me, wanted nothing to do with her new passion. We kept kosher at home (sort of), and we belonged to a Reform temple. That was about the extent of our Judaism.

I was an American teenager growing up in a predominantly non-Jewish town. My close friends belonged to every race, religion, and creed you can imagine: Irish, Korean, Egyptian, and Indian (Hindu), to name a few. I didn’t know a single shomer Shabbos Jew, and I didn’t even know what it meant to be shomer Shabbos. Once, when we were driving to services on Yom Kippur night, I noticed another worshipper walking in the same direction. “Why is he walking to temple in the dark?” I wondered.

When my mother started wearing hats and skirts, stopped going mixed swimming, and got serious about keeping kosher, I thought she had gone mad. When she tried to share with me an idea she had learned, or to explain the reason behind one of her weird rituals, I was not interested. I was very embarrassed of her “religious thing” and seeing her wash her hands and whisper blessings before eating infuriated me. Still, she tried to keep as many mitzvos as she could, under all of our noses.

No matter how hostile I was about her religious observance, she always responded with kindness. I used to lecture her about how the religious thing bothered me, how it made no sense, how wrong she was about everything she believed in. But she never argued with me, never asserted her opinion. While I was busy trying to show her the folly of her chosen lifestyle, she was busy being there for me in every way: taking me and my friends anywhere we wanted to go, shopping for me, waiting for the second I would come home so that she could shower me with love. She almost never turned down a request I made of her.

She believed in me, no matter how antagonistic I was. Even when I confided to her that my friends were doing bad things, her faith in me wasn’t shaken. “You’re different,” she told me. “You’re good. You’re special.”

When I first began to think seriously about marriage, at age 19, I felt very hopeless about my prospects, because I didn’t feel I fit into any world. I wasn’t observant, but I didn’t want to marry within my own circle of friends. And we lived far away from any established Jewish community, so I couldn’t do much networking.

My mother was a beacon of hope, however. When I shared my fears with her, she took out a pen and paper and said, “I’m going to write and sign on this paper that you will marry an excellent man.” She would infuse me with confidence, in myself and in the future, each and every day. I think that was her greatest chesed to me.

And she always prayed for me. Looking back, I know she must have shaken the heavens for me, because the events that sparked my own teshuvah journey could not have happened by themselves.

In college, I majored in French literature. During my second year of college, I made plans to continue my studies in France, but there was a problem with my passport and my trip was canceled. Sorely disappointed, I signed up instead for a five-week trip to Israel, which included a week of touring, two weeks on a kibbutz, and two weeks at Hebrew University, where I took a course in international terrorism.

Somehow, I made it to a beginners’ class at Aish HaTorah, where I was blown away by the truth of Torah. The Jewish things my mother had said and done over the years had never clicked with me, but now, finally, something did click inside me.

The first resolution I made in my own teshuvah journey, therefore, was that I would no longer oppose my mother’s Yiddishkeit.

The rest followed very naturally. When I returned home, I got involved with the Jewish club at my college, and through that, I met some religious people and started attending shiurim at the campus Chabad. Shortly afterward, I started going to shul on Shabbos.

Two years after my trip to Israel, I became shomer Shabbos, much to my mother’s delight. She was even more delighted when I married my husband, a baal teshuvah who had grown into a ben Torah, and established the type of home she could only dream of.

As a frum married woman, I quickly learned how to look the look and talk the talk of the yeshivish world. No one who met me at that point would have dreamed that I had not grown up religious, or that I had been highly antagonistic toward Judaism as a teenager.

By the time I had a few children, I had perfected the Friday afternoon five-minute shower, makeup, sheitel, and dressing routine — beginning at exactly the time of candlelighting.

My mother, on the other hand, was punctilious about lighting exactly at candlelighting time, and never wanted to be off by even a minute (this was before she knew about the concept of lighting early). At times, she would get my father’s okay to spend Shabbos with me and my family. Those weeks, she was elated because she could keep Shabbos fully, which wasn’t possible for her at home. Only one thing about Shabbos at my house pained her. She would come to light candles looking regal in her Shabbos dress and matching hat, and would be utterly shocked and dismayed to discover that I wasn’t even close to ready.

She would never, ever shout at me, but at those times a touch of disdain did creep into her voice and she pleaded with me to light candles on time. “What can you possibly be doing at candlelighting time?” she would cry.

“Oh, this happens every week,” my housekeeper calmly informed her.

On the outside, my mother — who discovered Torah later in life than I did and never merited living in an observant home — looked less frum than I did. Once, when I was visiting her in the hospital, I met the daughters of a well-known rav, who were there to visit their ill father. When I took those women to see my mother, I realized that to them, it probably looked as though I was the more devout one.

How far from the truth that was! To paraphrase Rabi Akiva’s words to his students, all that is mine, is hers! I owed her not only my biological birth, but my spiritual birth as well, since I firmly believed it was her prayers and subtle influence that had catalyzed my religious transformation. I hadn’t just been off the derech — I had never been on it, and I had seen no reason to be on it. But no matter how resistant or hostile I was, my mother was always kind and loving to me in return. Without consulting any experts, she knew intuitively how to deal with a child whose outlook and attitudes were worlds apart from her own. And eventually, her yearnings, her prayers, and her kindness bore fruit.

As an adult, I had learned to appreciate my mother’s greatness — which is part of the reason why it was so difficult for me to come to terms with the fact that this holy person was deathly ill.

Even after my mother was diagnosed, her focus remained others-centered. When she overheard someone telling her sister that she (my mother) had a month to live, her response was, “How can they tell her such a thing and upset her like that?”

She was extremely careful never to hurt the feelings of any human being. Once, when I was with my mother in the hospital, a senior doctor approached her, flanked by two residents. The doctor told her that the black discharge in her tube did not look good, and that they would not be removing the tube that day.

“But I was told that the tube would be removed today!” she protested.

The doctor would not hear of removing it, however.

When they left, my mother turned to me and said, “Just this morning the younger doctor on the right told me that they would remove the tube.”

“So why didn’t you mention that?” I asked.

“What?” my mother exclaimed. “And embarrass her in front of her superior?”

***

Now, here I was in the hospital, a short time before candlelighting, my weak, starving mother glowing in anticipation of lighting the candles I had brought. But now the question was, where could we light?

Hooked up as my mother was to all those machines and tubes, the only place we could light was right there in the room. It was against hospital protocol, I knew. But I also knew that I had to do it.

I took out the tea lights and metal tray I had brought, and lit the candles. The room was transformed. As we davened together, I sensed a palpable kedushah, the likes of which I had never experienced. I was still worried we would be caught, though.

A social worker entered the room and began asking my mother questions. My mother was calm and serene. The social worker looked at the flowers and at the candles and smiled at me. Then she left.

More people came in — cleaners, nurses. Each time, I was certain they would put out the candles and reprimand me. But my mother wasn’t worried. The candles burned until their fire went out. Hashem had made a miracle for us.

My mother passed away a few weeks later. That was 13 years ago. Since then, each year as her yahrtzeit approaches and we mark the anniversary of that last Shabbos I spent with her, the memories flood my heart.

One night, a few years after my mother had left This World, she came to me in a dream. I could see that she had come to chastise me. What had I done to deserve that? A few nights earlier I had cried bitterly over something trivial. She appeared to me and said, in a serious tone, “Only Torah and mitzvos.” She had come to tell me that that’s all a Jew should worry about.

Several years ago, a good friend of my mother’s confided to me that she needed a yeshuah. Inspired by my mother, I took upon myself then to try to light at least ten minutes before the zeman.

As I light the candles each week, I can feel my mother smiling down at me from Gan Eden, and I pray to Hashem that I, and my children, can follow in her ways.

L’illui nishmas Elisheva Dina bas Yitzchak

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 746)