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“A

re we rich?”

It’s a question asked by almost every child as they gain a burgeoning awareness of society’s strata. The Deren children too asked this question.

“Yes” Mrs. Aviva Deren always answered without hesitation. “We’re baruch Hashem very very rich.” The answer remained true even as the family faced illness and grief. “I always wanted our children to feel that we’re a blessed family” she says. “Among the gifts my parents gave us is that they never apologized for our lives.”

Mrs. Deren tells of her parents Rabbi and Mrs. Zalman Posner. Chabad shluchim in Nashville Tennessee the Posners were the only shomer Shabbosfamily under the age of 70. But this wasn’t viewed as a hardship — they loved the community and loved what they were doing. “Shabbos was special. Mitzvos were special. And they conveyed that.”

The Crucial Ingredient

Young Aviva grew up hearing stories of heroes — those spiritual warriors who learned Torah under the Communists who kept mitzvos in the concentration camps those people who kept Shabbos at tremendous cost when they first arrived in America. She identified a thread that ran through all these stories: The people who kept their Yiddishkeit intact were those who did so b’simchah.

“Some people are blessed with a cheerful disposition but you can’t leave it to the nature you’re born with. Simchah is a crucial ingredient in facing life challenges. We all struggle life is meant to be a struggle. But the struggle is carried by simchah.”

Although her parents had started a day school in Nashville Aviva had to leave home at a young age to pursue a Torah education. “I lived with my grandparents in Brooklyn and spent many hours listening to the Rebbe speak at farbrengens. Before I even understood Yiddish well I could see how on the one hand the Rebbe would cry bitterly about the suffering of galus but at the same time he exuded such simchah and painted such a vivid picture of how things should be. We’d walk out of a farbrengen feeling that we were flying on fire to change the world.”

Aviva married Rav Yisrael Deren in 1972; a few weeks before their wedding they were privileged to have a personal audience with the Rebbe. The Rebbe’s words have been the beacon of their lives: “You will make things warm and bright for others and the Eibeshter will make things warm and bright for you.”

Two years later the couple set off to “make things warm and bright for others” in the spiritual terra incognita of Amherst Massachusetts where they established Chabad of Western and Southern New England. Soon after their arrival their second child was born. Mendel’s low birth weight — four pounds four ounces — garnered concern and puzzled doctors. Although bright-eyed and happy Mendel was tiny. At the age of three and a half he was diagnosed with Bloom syndrome.

Bloom syndrome was only discovered in 1955, so the Derens found themselves educating doctors about their son’s condition. As a child, Mendel was relatively healthy and the Derens devoted their lives to nurturing a fledgling community and building their family.

Their next two children were born healthy, and then in 1981 their fifth child, Blumie, was born with Bloom syndrome. Their next child was born healthy. Then came Rivky in 1987 and Shloimy in 1990. Both Rivky and Shloimy had Bloom syndrome.

But the Derens’ lives were not focused upon illness. By this time, they’d moved to Stamford, Connecticut, where Rabbi Deren established a Chabad community. In addition to caring for her children, Mrs. Deren founded Gan Yeladim Early Childhood Center, where she merges her love for children with her passion for Jewish education.

Search for Sunshine

In March 1994, a few months before the Derens’ youngest child, Shloimy, became sick, Mrs. Deren absorbed a lesson that, she says, “I have lived with every single day.”

Mrs. Deren’s first cousin, Nachum, was returning to yeshivah with a group of bochurim. As their van crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, a Palestinian terrorist opened fire. One of the boys was mortally wounded; others sustained injuries. Nachum was shot in the head.

Miraculously, Nachum remained conscious and was rushed to surgery. As their cousin’s closest relative on American soil, Rabbi and Mrs. Deren rushed to his side. After surgery, they spoke with the doctors. The doctor looked around at the crowd of hopeful faces and said, “I give him between a 5 and 10 percent chance of survival.” Later, they found out that the doctors felt that the chances were far slimmer.

When Nachum’s parents arrived from Israel, they were surrounded by television cameras and microphones. Mrs. Deren recalls the scene. “My aunt was bright-eyed and she had a smile on her face. She said, ‘I’m inviting all of you to his wedding! I’m collecting names.’ She really said that — I have the press clips to prove it!”

Two weeks later, there was a tiny improvement, and Nachum’s mother announced it to the press, thanking everyone for their concern and prayers, and again, inviting them to his wedding.

“When she returned to the hospital, she confided: ‘I didn’t really believe in what I said. It was a mask. My heart wasn’t in it.’

“Her husband replied, ‘Sometimes the mask you choose to put on also shows something.’ ”

Mrs. Deren reflects: “My aunt chose to put on that mask. And in doing so, she created an environment of optimism that empowered the doctors to do everything they could to save him. She thought — what could she do, as his mother? That was the only thing she could do — create an environment of hope — and that’s what she did.”

Seven years later, Mrs. Deren stood behind the surgeon as her cousin walked to the chuppah.

Shloimy, the Derens’ youngest child, was also the first to pass away: At age four he developed the kidney cancer that claimed his life in 1996. He was just six years old.

During his illness, the family searched for a niggun that they could make their own, a slogan and a pickup and a prayer all wrapped into one melody. “We didn’t want to give over a promise that was not ours to give, so we chose a brachah given by a navi.” They hit on the song: “Vaharikosi lachem brachah ad bli dai… And I will pour down upon you brachah until you say, enough! Until your lips are tired from saying, ‘Enough brachah!’ ”

The children would elaborate: Which brachos did they want to see? That Shloimy would be healthy. That he wouldn’t need any medical equipment. Shloimy himself planned the seudas hoda’ah he’d throw when he recovered.

Part of thinking positively is opening yourself up to become a kli that can accept the brachah. “We’re not afraid to want what’s objectively good, though we accept whatever Hashem gives us,” Mrs. Deren says.

She gives the example of Rav Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev who, before Rosh Hashanah, would say, “We want a good year, the kind that the Rebbetzin will say is a good year.” The Rebbetzin wanted a good year in the simplest meaning: good health, livelihood, peace. We need not search for deep meanings to her definition of brachah.

“That’s the kind of brachah for which we prayed, for which we had bitachon — for a tangible blessing.” If Mrs. Deren didn’t feel that level of trust, she played a mind game: If I was sure the outcome would be open brachah — the perfect solution — how would I act and feel now, before it happened? And that became the guide to her behavior.

As Rivky a”h, explains on one of her video clips, there was a teaching of the Rebbe that the family worked hard to incorporate in their lives: “We say, tracht gut vet zein gut, think good, and it will be good. Sometimes, this is on a simple level — starting your day with the attitude that it will be a good day can make that a reality.

“On a deeper level, we’re taught that having this kind of bitachon — trust, security, and confidence in Hashem — can actually help create the space for the good to happen. Even in situations where it’s difficult for human beings, with our limitations, to see good, we can still find small sparks of sunshine because we’re confident that even if not right now, ultimately, Hashem will show us the good so we can see it with our own eyes.

“Another way of saying this is that ‘everything ends up okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.’ ”

The Derens’ optimism was no contradiction to the honesty with which Mrs. Deren answered her children’s questions.

In the last week of Shloimy’s life, lying in the hospital bed, he suddenly turned to his mother, “It’s not fair!”

“You’re right, it’s not fair,” his mother replied. Then she added, “Hashem doesn’t like it either. But we’re in galus, and in galus sometimes things like this happen.”

Shloimy scrunched up his nose and encapsulated the situation as only a six-year-old can: “This galus stinks!”

Reaching In

The Derens’ unspoken mission to live a joy-filled life colored even the most banal situations. The children’s extremely small stature meant they were subjected to stares on routine trips to the grocery store. The Derens developed a stock of family jokes about the thoughtless comments people made.

But the laughter’s roots were deep. “My parents had taught me that if simchah doesn’t come naturally,” said Mrs. Deren, “you create it. Through niggunim. Through learning. Through doing things for other people.”

Always, there was direction from the Rebbe. In a request from Mrs. Deren for guidance, the Rebbe wrote: “Al pi Shulchan Aruch, kollel bitachon b’Hashem v’simchah b’avodaso, According to Shulchan Aruch, including trust in Hashem and joy in serving Him [i.e., trust in Hashem and joy in serving Him is an integral part of living according to Shulchan Aruch].” Mrs. Deren notes that in over 40 years she has not encountered a life situation that is not covered by these words.

The Derens extracted many messages from this concise guidance. “I understood that bitachon and simchah are not just for people on very high madreigos — it’s Shulchan Aruch, which is for everyone. What if you don’t feel like you’re there? Figure out how to get there.

“I like to think of bitachon as a verb. If it’s a noun, then it’s a place, and you’re either there or you’re not. As a verb, it’s a constant journey. I may have been there yesterday, but today I’m not feeling so connected. That’s okay, it’s part of my job to get myself where I need to be. We can choose simchah. We daven that Hashem should make that an easy choice!”

That choice, according to Rabbi Deren, can be achieved through a paradigm shift. We can choose to be in a different space, to inhabit a different place of consciousness. “Blumie, our fifth child, achieved this,” he reflects.

Six months after Shloimy was niftar, 15-year-old Blumie, a.k.a. Little Red, for her beautiful thick red hair, seemed lethargic. Assuming that her lassitude was depression after losing her beloved younger brother — she and Shloimy had been particularly close — the Derens were shocked to discover that she was suffering from liver cancer.

Soon after, they were scheduled to join a shabbaton run by Chai Lifeline for bereaved families. By then, Blumie was on TPN (total parenteral nutrition, receiving food intravenously) and she felt uncomfortable attending. “These people lost children who most likely were on TPN. They’ll see me and be reminded of what they went through,” she told her parents. The Derens called Camp Simcha and were told that they must attend.

“The doctors had said that, with the type of chemo she was on, there was only a small chance of losing her hair,” Rabbi Deren recounts. “We knew that for a teenager, that meant she would definitely lose her hair. And we were worried about it.”

After a magical Shabbos, the Derens set off back home. Blumie ran her hand through her hair and a clump came away into her hand. She started to cry.

“Do something!” Mrs. Deren begged her husband.

He stopped the car. “It was a particularly scenic spot, overlooking the Delaware river,” Rabbi Deren recalls. Mrs. Deren and rest of the kids piled out, and Rabbi Deren climbed into the backseat, next to Blumie.

This is what Rabbi Deren told his daughter: “Blumeleh, I just read a letter from the Rebbe, written to a family who had lost a child. He writes that a neshamah after it passes away remains attached to those it loved. It rejoices with their joy and mourns with their sadness. When you’re happy, you cause your brother’s neshamah to be happy.

“Blumele, imagine that right now Shloimy is sitting on the roof of the car, swinging his feet into the window like he used to do. He’s saying, ‘Blumie, don’t be sad, because then I’ll be sad.’ ”

“Just like that, as if a light was suddenly switched on, she stopped crying. Not another tear. She put herself into a different place.”

We can all do this, Rabbi Deren says. “There’s a different place for each of us, and we can all go there. I’m not talking about fantasy or imagination. I’m talking reality.”

Blumie took the love she had for her brother and turned it into a powerful tool to keep up her spirits. Mrs. Deren recalls a trip to the mall with Blumie, where they saw a girl wearing a sweater with the missive: “I’m having a bad hair day.”

“Ha,” Blumie said, “I should have one of those. But mine would say, ‘I’m having a no hair day.’ ”

Blumie passed away just a few months later, two weeks before Shloimy’s first yahrtzeit. “There were some very rough bumps in the road,” Mrs. Deren admits. “Our son’s bar mitzvah fell out during the shivah.”

Reaching Out

Mrs. Deren has always been candid about coping. “Someone asked me: How is it that you don’t fall down?

“I said, it’s simple, I’m surrounded by so much love and caring. There are so many people who show up in my life that I couldn’t fall down if I wanted to. There’s just no space to fall! That’s the gift of community — you just have to show up. Call or e-mail or just smile.”

Early on, Mrs. Deren’s mother developed a nuanced definition of community. In the 1930s, she was among the crowd welcoming the previous Lubavitcher Rebbe when his ship docked on American shores. As the Rebbe stepped onto land, she heard the chassidim break out into a niggun she had only ever heard sung at home, by her father. It was a moment of revelation: Even without geographical proximity, a community can be created. Perhaps it was this sense of a wider Chabad community that sustained her in 1950s Nashville.

One of the most poignant examples of the power of community occurred on the very first night of Shloimy’s shivah. The Derens returned from the levayah to a packed living room. Little Shloimy was the only Deren child born in Stamford, and for the two years of his illness, the entire community had been praying and doing mitzvos for his recovery. “I will never forget the sight of all those people, stricken with grief. Waiting,” Mrs. Deren says. “My husband is their teacher. So he started talking and that set the tone for everyone.”

One visitor quietly asked Mrs. Deren if she found the crowd an intrusion. “Isn’t this crazy? You just want some time alone with your grief and the whole community turns up?”

Mrs. Deren shakes her head. “The community’s need was my lifeline. If I hadn’t had to find those words, they wouldn’t have been the first thing I said. But those messages we told others were the words I needed to hear.”

Reaching Forward

Even before any diagnosis entered the Derens’ lives, when Mendel was still a baby, Mrs. Deren was afraid for her little boy. She turned to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, expressing her concerns. “He’s so small,” she wrote.

The Rebbe, in his customary fashion, returned the letter with annotations. “And may it be fulfilled in him: Zeh hakatan gadol yiheyeh, this small one will be great.”

The Derens expected the brachah to be fulfilled physically. But although Mendel married, living a full life of giving with his wife Sara, first in Israel and then in New York, he only lived until 36. Sara survived him by almost five years, passing away last year. During the shivah for Mendel, the Derens’ eyes were opened to just what a gadol their son had become. “We thought we knew him. But then we started to hear about people’s lives he’d changed.”

One man in his fifties described how after witnessing 9/11 he became so anxious and withdrawn that he reached a place of despair. Mendel with his listening ear, well-chosen words of encouragement, and deep understanding of human nature, turned the man’s life around.

Mendel, his parents discovered, had taken the Rebbe’s brachah and turned it into the driving force of his life. “Mendel told one of his brothers that there were times he found it hard to get up in the morning. He’d haul himself out of bed, look in the mirror, and say, ‘The Rebbe gave you a brachah. Now go out there and make it happen.’ ”

To this day, nearly six years after Mendel’s passing, young people come up to Rabbi Deren to tell him of the impact Mendel had on their lives. “A young baal teshuvah described how he had spent several years in yeshivah and had come to the conclusion that it just wasn’t for him. Mendel must have sensed something, and sat down to talk with him. At the end of the evening he was back on track. Today this fellow is a successful shaliach on campus, and has brought many others back to Yiddishkeit.”

Reaching Up

Children love hearing about the day they were born, and Rivky Deren was no exception. Mrs. Deren deliberated over what to tell her daughter. Most of her birth was a disaster. She was three pounds, nine ounces, and had to be rushed to the NICU where they began with a battery of tests. “I wasn’t going to tell her that. There was a snowstorm that day, but there’s only so much you can get out of a snowstorm. There was one thing I told her over and over. Before they took her to the NICU, they let me see her. She had this bright-eyed look. It was like she was saying, ‘Hello, world! I’m here!’ That’s what I tried to focus on for her.”

As a child, Rivky’s health was relatively stable. But by 2011, Rivky was dependent on oxygen and she was accepted into a lung transplant program. After her recovery in 2012, she married Shmulie Berman and together they were Chabad shluchim of Campus Chabad North Carolina. After fighting post-transplant cancer, she recovered, only to pass away in June 2016.

“Rivky and Shmulie’s wedding was, for us, the most spectacular seudas hoda’ah,” says Mrs. Deren. “The joy of the family and the guests was intense and palpable. The dancing just went on and on. For me, the standout Rivky touch was her request that ‘Ani Maamin’ be sung at the end of the chuppah, before the chassan broke the glass,” says her mother. “Sadly, that niggun was sung again at her levayah. But the hope that was expressed at the chasunah continues to inspire us even now.”

“I have an incredible life,” Rivky said on a blog post in 2015, when she had already undergone a double lung transplant and conquered post-transplant lymphoma. Rivky and Shmulie Berman were intensely involved in community. Their work on campus fueled Rivky with a sense of purpose that transcended even the most debilitating physical trials. Shabbos meals were filled with guests, even if Rivky had to slip away every few minutes to fill up on oxygen.

Rivky planned a huge event for the students for Purim: color scheme, menu, funky centerpieces — the works. A few days before, she was admitted to the hospital and it soon became clear that she’d be spending Purim in the ICU. “I’m missing my own party,” she lamented. But she rallied her spirits. She spoke with her husband, who was on campus setting up the banquet, and directed him on every detail. “It’s probably the first-ever Purim party directed from the ICU,” Mrs. Deren comments.

There was an additional community Rivky was part of: She was closely connected with others who suffered illness or physical challenges. She enthusiastically attended Camp Simcha Special, and was then active in Kids of Courage. Mrs. Deren tells of how Rivky later attended a Kids of Courage event and infused the room with strength and hope. “She was there in the middle of the room and she said, ‘Look at me! I got married! You can, too, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.’ ”

By the time Rivky was fighting desperately for her health, she’d already forged a tremendous inner determination. “She would collect whatever sparks of sunshine that she could find, gather them together, and use them to go forward.” When Mrs. Deren talks about Rivky, she uses the image of a trapeze artist. “She’s up there, and it looks so natural and easy, but there were days she worked really hard to pull herself up that way.”

In 2014, Rivky spent a protracted time in the hospital, including the chagim. “A pretty miserable place to be. I flew down for Chol Hamoed and I had just gotten a new app on my phone, called the Living Torah. It shows clips of the Rebbe teaching at farbrengens, and of the chassidim singing.” Afraid it would be an intrusion to encourage her daughter to get it, Mrs. Deren mentioned it casually.

“That night, I woke up at about 3 a.m. Rivky had borrowed my phone and she was singing along with the niggunim. She was crying and singing, crying and singing.” Rivky had to walk laps around the ward for her health, but it took a herculean effort. That Hoshana Rabbah and Shemini Atzeres and Simchas Torah, Rivky didn’t just do laps — together with her husband, they walked seven hakafos, singing quietly as they went.

Rabbi Deren recalls the moment at Rivky’s shivah when all the visitors left. “Four of our teenage grandchildren remained, all of them devastated. The pain is so great that it’s physical. We talked. Two of them said, ‘The only thing that works is chocolate.’

“When we’re hurting, we want it to stop. So the first thing we do is to reach to a lower place and use it to try and mask the pain — we reach for the bar of chocolate. The drink. But then we realize that it’s just a temporary relief, and often only brings more pain. We’re not animals, we’re human beings, so reaching for pleasure doesn’t work. Then we start using our brains. We try to understand intellectually what happened and how we can get beyond it. There are many techniques, all of them difficult, and some of them do work.

“But as Jews, we have another path. We call it faith.”

That night, sitting with his grandchildren, trying to articulate a way through the crushing grief, Rabbi Deren perked up at the words of his grandson who said, “No, it’s not chocolate. The only thing that works is learning a maamar chassidus.”

“It always does,” Rabbi Deren adds. “It’s the only thing that works. Learning Torah. Doing a mitzvah.”

Reaching Through

When Mrs. Deren told her children that they were a rich family, a blessed family, her words contained the seed of her future consolation. “I used to think that nechamah cancels out the grief. But that’s not true. It may not cancel the pain, but nechamah does provide a cushion.” She pauses. “And we have been blessed with many, many cushions.” She lists them, topped by the birth of their eldest grandchild, born before Blumie passed away. She loved being an aunt.

“If my children had been exposed to the concept of Mashiach as a response to the suffering they saw,” says Mrs. Deren, “it might have been meaningless. But from day one, they were brought up asking the question: how can I make This World a place where Mashiach could be welcome?” That attitude was proactive and energizing.”

Mrs. Deren is quick to remind me that illness, tragedy, and suffering, while undeniably present, were interwoven with other aspects of life. Along with the challenges, there were the myriad demands of the Chabad community that the Derens built up from scratch. The preschool, Mrs. Deren tells me, is a portal into Jewish living. Parents might enroll their child into the preschool because of its warm and loving atmosphere, thinking that its Jewish nature is irrelevant. But they’re exposed to Jewish values, and their child often graduates and continues in a Jewish day school.

“More than one family came to Gan, and despite a completely secular background chose to transform their lives, in some cases moving to more established Jewish communities, some even making aliyah. There are many beautiful Jewish homes that got started right here in the Gan!”

After Shloimy’s and Blumie’s passing, the Derens dedicated a sefer Torah in their memory. Addressing the crowd, Rabbi Deren articulated their path forward: ‘“We have no explanation for why it is that G-d did the things He did. But the effect on myself and the rest of my family is to understand that if there are those among us in pain and lonely, it’s our responsibility to do everything we can to alleviate that hurt. For that reason we resolve to write a sefer Torah. The Torah is a living symbol of what unites us.”

In 2011, before Rivky’s transplant, she was required to spend some time in a rehab center in North Carolina, to improve her health in preparation for surgery. “Everywhere we went, we looked for an opportunity to be mekarev Yidden. But there were no Yidden in the program.” Mrs. Deren and Rivky decided that the only thing they could do was to spread an awareness of the Creator. “We were very careful to say ‘Thank G-d’ at every opportunity.”

People noticed. “Why do you always say thank G-d?” they asked. Their answer encapsulates the Derens’ lifework: “Because there’s always a reason to thank G-d.”

“That is why we daven that Hashem should grant us good that is open and revealed to us — tov hanireh v’hanigleh lonu,” Mrs. Deren adds. “So that we can thank Him with a full and happy heart”.

L’illui neshamos Menachem Mendel HaKohein, Bluma, Rivka, and Shlomo Aharon HaKohein bnei HaRav Yisrael HaKohein shlita.