We were there alone, a young couple in our twenties. How would we know how to comfort families in crisis?

Rabbi Lazer Lazaroff, founder and director of Aishel House in Houston, Texas

You might say reaching out to other Jews is my family’s business. I come from a line of Chabad shluchim, and our mission has always been to serve other Jews with ahavas Yisrael.

My father was the very first Chabad shaliach in Houston. I’m the oldest in my family — I was five years old when we made the long drive in 1972 from Oak Park, Michigan, to Houston. In those days there was no frum community in Houston to speak of. In school, I was one of the only boys with a yarmulke.

From the age of five, my parents sent me to summer camp in New York where my uncle was the director, so that I could be nurtured by a more Yiddishe environment. At age 11, I was sent to Brooklyn to live with my grandparents to go to yeshivah. By then, my parents had started the Torah Day School, which continues to provide a Torah education to this day. (There were seven kids in the first class, and five of them were my brothers and sisters.)

After I married my wife, Rochel, a Montreal native, I learned for a year in kollel in Crown Heights, and then we moved to Houston and taught in the day school for a year. After that, we decided to start outreach at Rice University and move near Houston’s Medical Center, which today is the largest medical center in the world. We weren’t sure how we were going to provide support to people with medical issues — we were there alone, a young couple in our twenties. How would we know how to comfort families in crisis?

Then we experienced our own life-altering medical crisis. We’d moved into an apartment above a small shul in 1992, a couple of blocks from the hospital. Just a few weeks later, on a Friday night, my wife went into labor with our second child. The labor seemed to stop around 2 a.m., and they wanted to send us home. I asked for the stairs instead of the elevator, and when the charge nurse realized we’d be walking home alone so late, because of Shabbos, she found us a room to sleep in.

That was a lifesaving offer, since my wife woke up the next morning in a state of emergency. Ten minutes later they whisked her into surgery, and our little baby girl was born. But a few hours later, they still weren’t bringing the baby to my wife. Finally, they broke the news: “Your baby is blind, and has other serious health issues.” The news was devastating. My wife was just out of surgery, and we were all alone there with this terrifying new situation. As soon as Shabbos was over we called our parents, and my in-laws got on a plane the following day.

We spent the next year in and out of the hospital with the baby; she had respiratory issues and gastrointestinal issues, and had to be given a G-tube. One night, when she was 11 months old, I was on my way out to a shiur, and it was as if I had a premonition. I gave the baby a kiss, and when my wife looked at me quizzically, I said, “Just in case I don’t see her again.” In the middle of the shiur, my wife called: The baby’s heart had stopped. The next day we were on a plane to New York to bury her in Old Montefiore cemetery, where many of my family members were buried.

Later, I told my wife, “Now Hashem is teaching us how to provide support to other people.” We realized that although we’d always been taught that everything Hashem does is for the good — be it in a revealed or concealed manner — we were now being put to the test. We’d talked the talk, and now the challenge was to walk the walk.