When I finally saw the neurologist, he told me to schedule a battery of tests to determine the cause of the shaking, which he referred to as seizures. “By the way,” he added, “you’re not allowed to drive anymore. See you in six months.”

Back when I got married, I had been the only person in my Yerushalayim neighborhood who owned a car. As such, I had been the neighborhood’s designated driver, giving people rides to simchahs, to medical appointments, to wherever they needed to go. I never had to get onto an Egged bus or accept a ride from anyone. Yet now, I could never get behind the wheel of a car until my epilepsy was under control — which meant that I’d be dependent on taxis and people’s kindness indefinitely. Ouch.

The morning after my appointment with the neurologist, I was sitting in my study at home waiting for my chavrusa to arrive, when all of a sudden I felt myself being propelled out of my chair and thrown across the room, after which I lost consciousness. My 17-year-old daughter, who was the only other person home at the time, heard the crash of my body hitting the wall, and she hurried to my study to investigate. She immediately called Magen David Adom, and as my unsuspecting chavrusa knocked at the door, an ambulance pulled up and rushed me to the hospital.

I underwent numerous tests in the hospital, first as an admitted patient and then on an outpatient basis, as we tried to figure out what was causing the seizures and how they could be controlled.

In the meantime, we grappled with how to cope with this new reality. The doctor’s ban on driving was unassailable, as the seizures struck without warning, and a seizure while I was at the wheel could have catastrophic consequences.

After we finished a full battery of tests, it was clear that I had some form of drug-resistant focal epilepsy. For a person my age to be diagnosed with this form of epilepsy is relatively rare, as symptoms of the disease more commonly appear in young children and elderly people. And I was in perfect health, so the diagnosis came as quite a shock.

Before I started taking medication, the seizures would cause me to thrash spastically, foam at the mouth, and then lose consciousness. The meds prevented me from losing consciousness and shortened the seizures dramatically. During these shortened seizures, my arm would convulse for ten seconds and I’d be thrown violently to the left, so I quickly learned to grab onto someone or something to avoid falling.

Thankfully, I was able to continue speaking when the seizures occurred. (As I told my students, “Very few things can stop me from talking!”) But although I was taking a large cocktail of medication, the frequency of the seizures kept increasing, to the point that I was experiencing about 30 a day. I spilled and broke numerous coffee mugs and doused countless seforim and tablecloths with coffee. Many times, store owners and random people on the street screamed for Hatzolah to be called when they witnessed my sudden attacks.

Since the seizures happened anywhere — in class, outdoors, while making Kiddush at a Shabbaton — there was no way to keep this quiet, and going from being a private citizen to having the whole world know about our medical issue was quite embarrassing, frightening, and awkward. This was a change not only for me, but for the entire family, and especially for Rachel and me as a couple. From looking forward to being there for each other, I had become a patient, and Rachel my caregiver.

Once, I had a seizure in a seminary classroom that caused me to flip over in my chair. That, for me, was the last straw. “I can’t teach you anymore,” I told the girls. “You don’t have to see this.” I left class and hurried home.

The next day I received a letter signed by all the students in the school asking me to come back and teach them. I appreciated their vote of confidence, but could I really go back to the classroom knowing that I could have a seizure and possibly collapse at any moment? Student petition notwithstanding, did Hashem really expect me to continue teaching in this condition?

It was my rebbi, Rav Moshe Shapira ztz”l, who gave us the chizuk to persevere. Rav Moshe was no stranger to challenges, and at the time when I was diagnosed with epilepsy he was suffering from the brain tumor that would eventually take his life. Rachel and I met with him a few times to discuss my condition, and once she actually ambushed me by getting him to instruct me to listen to my doctors.

Rav Moshe, with whom I had a close kesher for 25 years, once told me that if he had two paths in front of him, one easy and one difficult, he would take the difficult one, because that’s probably the one HaKadosh Baruch Hu wants him to take.

Until now, I hadn’t faced any serious adversity in my chosen work of teaching Torah, and now that I had hit this roadblock, my natural inclination was to retreat into my own daled amos. It would have been easy for me to leave the classroom for good and find something else to do that was more suitable for an epileptic. Perhaps it was time to concentrate on learning and completing the commentary on the Sfas Emes I had begun many years earlier, instead of putting myself in a publicly embarrassing situation. But the image of my rebbi embracing challenges rather than fleeing from them spurred me to resolve that epilepsy would not stop me from continuing to teach Torah.

I did have to cut back somewhat on my chavrusas, and I had to stop teaching in places that were distant or otherwise inaccessible (such as the mountaintop Neve Yerushalayim campus, with its numerous stairs and inclines). But for the most part, I strove to maintain my daily schedule as much as possible, even though it meant experiencing seizures in public several times a day, with all the discomfort that entailed.

In the meantime, I was undergoing test after test to try to determine which part of my brain was misfiring and causing the seizures. Several months after my diagnosis, I was admitted to Ichilov hospital in Tel Aviv, where some very special doctors monitored me for a week, by means of a video and an electroencephalogram (EEG) electrode attached to my head, to determine exactly what happened to me during a seizure. A week of living under constant video surveillance yielded no clues, however, although it did give me a glimpse of what “ayin ro’ah ve’ozen shomaas” means.

Several months later, I spent another week in the hospital under video and EEG surveillance, except that this time, the doctors surgically removed a piece of my skull and implanted the EEG electrode inside my head. This enabled them to zero in on the precise part of my brain that was causing the seizures, and they discovered a small lesion in the area of the brain that controlled my right arm — which explained why it was my right arm convulsing. But they told me they couldn’t excise the lesion without affecting the use of my arm.

About a month after my skull was opened for this test, I developed a life-threatening infection at the site of the incision. My wife noticed the infection before it penetrated my brain, baruch Hashem, but it was touch and go for a while. I’m sure my recovery had a lot to do with all the tefillos uttered for me, Zave Chaim ben Chaya Aidel.

What kept us going through this ordeal was the unity of our family and the care and concern of our friends and Klal Yisrael in general. The scope of the chesed and the tefillos was humbling: from convening a minyan at the Kosel while I was having surgery to rearranging their schedule to drive me to work or my wife to the hospital to see me to visiting me in Tel Aviv and being mechazek the family, people were always there for us.

Rachel bore the brunt of the difficulty. I had the option of retreating into the role of patient, but she had to continue to function, while caring for me. Initially, she balked at the idea of accepting meals and other forms of assistance from family and friends, but at a certain point, my illness became so overwhelming that she didn’t even have the time or headspace to pick up milk in the makolet. At that point, a close friend of hers asked her, “If I were going through this, wouldn’t you do whatever you could to help me? So you have to let us help you as well.”

With a piece of my skull missing for nine months, any jolt to the head could be dangerous, so we had to take extreme precautions to ensure that I didn’t hit my head during a seizure. I slept with my bed flush with the wall on one side and pillows surrounding the bed to cushion me in case I fell during a seizure. I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere alone; someone always had to be nearby to catch me.

Now that my skull was open, the doctors recommended that I have a neurostimulator implanted to regulate the brain’s electrical impulses (similar to a pacemaker in the heart). For this surgery, Rachel and I traveled to Los Angeles, where we were enveloped with chesed and concern from the community, the Bikur Cholim, and especially from our many students from former years living there, who helped us in any way possible.

Through all this, I tried to miss as little teaching as I could. Between hospitalizations, I had a driver take me to the handicapped entrance of the school building and escort me in. The day before our departure to Los Angeles I was still in the classroom, holding on to the desk in front of me at all times to ensure I wouldn’t lose my balance if a seizure hit.

In Los Angeles, the neurostimulator was inserted and the hole in my skull was closed up. We spent a very emotional Selichos and Yamim Noraim period with the Los Angeles community, and during Chol Hamoed Succos, we boarded the plane back to Eretz Yisrael with high hopes that I would now be able to resume normal living.

Shabbos Chol Hamoed I was called to the Torah for an aliyah. As I was about to bentsh gomel, before the eyes of my delighted friends and neighbors, my right arm shot out, my body started to shake, and I had to grab hold of the bimah for support.

I waited until the seizure was over. And then I bentshed gomel.

“We thought you were cured!” my friends cried out in disappointment.

I, too, was disappointed. Apparently, the surgery in Los Angeles was not the end of this journey.

Since then, every once in a while I experience a seizure-free day. “Mark this day on your calendar,” I happily informed Rachel the first few times this happened. “In a year from now, I’ll be driving again.” But the next day, as I looked mournfully at yet another broken coffee mug, I’d realize that this was not over.

Rav Moshe Shapira encouraged me to daven that medical advances be developed to ameliorate my condition, noting that we praise Hashem as the “Borei Refuos” Who allows these breakthroughs to happen. Yet even as I hoped and prayed for a cure to be found, I recognized that I was going to have to make peace with this reality. Perhaps one day I would yet find myself behind the wheel of a car, in the more comfortable and familiar position of giving rides to others, but I couldn’t live my life in breathless anticipation of that development. Rather, I would follow my rebbi’s example and persevere in my learning and harbotzas Torah even as I accepted the limitations that came along with my medical condition.

The attitude I’ve adopted toward this challenge is that for the first 56 years of my life, Hashem made it easy for me to devote myself to learning and teaching Torah. At that point, kiveyachol, He fiddled with the part of my brain that controls my right arm and said, “Now let’s see you do it with one hand tied behind your back.”

It’s no longer about me doing Hashem’s work — it’s about Hashem deciding if, when, and how much I’m going to be able to do that work. I’m committed to pushing myself to the limits of my physical and emotional capacity to keep going, but it’s with the knowledge that I’m essentially helpless and dependent.

When writing the story of my experience with epilepsy, I’d love for the story to go like this: Something difficult happened to me, and then I turned to the next page and I understood. The End.

In real life, however, the story goes more like this: Something difficult happened to me, and then I turned to the next page and it was blank. And then after 120, I found out why. The End.

When I was first diagnosed, we were advised to check our mezuzahs, and to have my tefillin checked. We did, and guess what? They were all kosher l’mehadrin.

Nowadays, it’s become very fashionable to tell fairy tales — not the secular, Hansel-and-Gretel variety, but the frum variety, in which a particular challenge is resolved in happily-ever-after fashion thanks to a twist of Divine intervention. While these tales of open Hashgachah are indeed noteworthy and inspiring, they fail to convey a fundamental truth of Yiddishkeit, which is that our trust in Hashem and our love for Him are in no way diminished by the fact that we don’t see an end to the darkness of our collective or individual galus.

For the first 56 years of my life, I did not have the zechus to be a living embodiment of that truth. Now I do.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 697)