We have a neighbor whose husband was adopted. He’s in his sixties now. All his life he’s suffered ailments. One day they went to get him checked by a mekubal. Someone who one can say sees certain things in the soul more clearly than others.
Some believe in these things some don’t. These neighbors do. So they went and the wife asked this mekubal if he thought all her husband’s illnesses over the years were connected to the fact that he was adopted at three days old.
The mekubal said “Yes it is connected but it’s not because he was adopted. It’s because of the words he expressed and carries with him how he believes his birth mother never loved him because she never came looking for him.”
Then the mekubal told them “There is no such thing as a Jewish mother that is not attached to her child and does not love her child.”
I had a close friend who is no longer with us. Before she left This World she and her daughter were in constant disagreement due to the daughter’s rebellious state. The daughter’s skirts and sleeves were always rising in protest against the lifestyle her devoted parents had chosen.
They fought my friend and her daughter. But when she passed on her daughter was devastated.
No one really wants to fight their parents and sometimes we only understand it when they’re far from us.
So the girl went on with her life. About three months later maybe more and still in short skirts and short sleeves she had a dream.
Her mother came to her in the dream and said “My dearest daughter I am suffering here.” In the dream her mother didn’t specify why or from what she was suffering but the girl got the message and started to dress more modestly and keep Shabbos more seriously.
She told me this story during one of my frequent calls to see how she’s managing. And I thought her mother’s pulling strings from Heaven.
It made me think of the invisible strings we hold between us. How we affect our children’s lives and they affect ours even when we’re nowhere near each other. No exchange of word or action. Just because we’re attached.
I have a friend I’ll call Chava.
Her son’s in trouble. She called in tears. “I don’t know what to do with him ” she said.
And I said “Isn’t he 18?”
“Well yeah ” she answered.
“So how many choices do you have ‘to do with him?’ ” I asked thinking how even at 13 I found it hard “to do something” with them.
“I don’t know ” she said “I think I’m just going to have to cut him off.”
Well that’s when we had the “rooster” conversation. About the mashal of the king’s son who thought he was a rooster and at meals the son would sit under the table pecking at crumbs. And how the king didn’t know what to do with his son. He was then advised that to cure him the king himself should get under the table and pretend he was a rooster as well to slowly bring his son back up.
I also told her about an event that had happened to me that very day how in the situation my hands were tied and all I could do was pray. And how sometimes we can actually run things much better when children are older and we can’t take away treats or ground them with our thoughts prayers or actions.
She then recalled Rebbe Nachman’s statement that “prayer is as powerful potent and real as moving a salt shaker from one end of the table to the other.”
I picture it how our inner wishes prayers and love are so attached they cause movement like the strings of the marionette.
And how it really works.
Just like those invisible strings. —