I had no idea why I felt such urgency to visit my mother

IT

all happened so fast.

Just before Rosh Hashanah of 5764 (2003), I started getting regular calls from my two older brothers in America to update me about my mother’s health. Of my parents’ three sons, I am the only observant one, but we three brothers always have kept in close contact with one another. Our mother had been fighting cancer on and off for 40 years, but now things were getting worse — and quickly. In my shul in Bnei Brak, I started to say extra Tehillim for her during the weekday minyanim.

The day after Yom Kippur, I started shopping for arba minim for my two sons and myself, and we began to make a succah off our living room porch. Succos is my favorite Yom Tov, and I planned on spending every possible moment in my succah, just like every year.

But on Erev Succos, I got another call: My mother was now in the hospital. My oldest brother, Charles, and my middle brother, Danny, had flown to Sun City, Arizona, to supervise her care, as our aging father no longer had the cognitive ability to do so.

I went into Succos with a heavy heart. The last time I had seen my parents was when they came to visit us in Israel after the birth of our sixth child — our first son — more than ten years before. As a result of her health problems, that trip had not been easy for my mother, but she had enjoyed herself immensely.

Flitting through my mind on the first night of Succos was a long list of practical and logistical reasons for why I should wait until after Simchas Torah to go visit her. To start, I didn’t even have a passport — neither an Israeli nor an American one. Due to financial constraints, I hadn’t flown back to the States since I’d gotten married 25 years earlier. In addition, it would be nearly impossible to observe Succos in Sun City. Aside from not having a succah, there was no shul within walking distance, so I’d be davening without a minyan.

Still, I felt a pressing, unremitting need to go see my mother, and that night, sitting with my family at our table in our succah, I made an announcement that surprised my wife and children almost as much as it surprised me: “I’m going to America as soon as possible — to see my mother.”