Chapter 2

IN

the children’s ward, everyone was like a family — and Rivky became everyone’s big sister.

One time she saw a couple with a little boy hesitating just beyond the glass doors of the ward. She walked toward them, bald and beautiful, and said, “I’m here, and it’s not so bad here. They’re gonna help you get better.”

She spoke without guile, one heart feeling another. Her face was calm, her eyes sparkling with verve and eye shadow.

“Look at her,” the boy’s mom said, “she’s still beautiful even with her hair gone. I think you’ll be fine.”

They walked in together.

One round of treatment followed another, and a pattern developed. Rivky would come home briefly post-treatment after regaining her strength, but invariably an infection would set in, and she’d need to be hospitalized again.

We’d planned the pre-Pesach treatment around the chag and were hopeful that Rivky could be home, but a day and a half before Yom Tov, her temperature started raging. She’d contracted one of those ubiquitous infections and would have to be in the hospital over Pesach.

I thought of sending the two older ones; they could pull off a Seder of sorts.

“I don’t want them — or Rivky — to have to just manage,” my husband said. “Let’s do it properly, let’s all go.”

And so, we all piled in on Erev Yom Tov, laden with food and Seder supplies. The hospital let us use the children’s playroom, and we sat there and brought freedom in among rainbow walls and soft, squishy furnishings.

My husband found a throne in the form of a children’s sofa, and he held forth. Rivky was dressed to the nines, and we all sang, laughed, prayed. When it was time for Shefoch Chamascha, there was no door to open because the play room was an open space with no real door.

“What about that?” my husband pointed to a playhouse.

He proceeded to open its yellow door. I didn’t see him, but I know that Eliyahu Hanavi came right through that door, sat down at our makeshift, kiddie-colored Seder, and graced us with his presence on that night of miracles.

Rivky couldn’t go to school that year, but she set up a nighttime chavrusa shaft with one of her teachers, and they kept at it, night after night. They were learning emunah, what else could Rivky learn? She plowed through with a flashlight and a sefer and a cell phone on her hospital pillow, finding faith and fighting for it over and over amid her struggle.

For almost a year, Rivky was princess of the ward. “Angel,” they called her. And it was crazy, because she was a feisty teenager, outgoing and with opinions about everything and anything, at times dramatic and flighty, but she had become touched by something else, something almost angelic.

To see Rivky was to see someone use all she had, every middah, every resource, and channel it to live out her tafkid.

“I have a shlichus here,” she told me.“It’s so clear.”

From time to time, she was so badly immunocompromised, the staff had to keep her in isolation. She hated that. Other times she was so weak, she could speak very little. Sometimes she couldn’t walk and would have to lean on crutches just to go to the bathroom.

But when she was feeling fairly okay, Rivky was on a mission. She just wanted to reach people, the other kids, their families, the staff. She wanted to connect, to hold them, to talk when there were words, and to be with them when there was nothing to say.

In Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, the ward was vastly secular. That didn’t mean anything to Rivky. When she took someone’s hand, they didn’t have to be wearing sleeves. She had an incredible openness and was so deeply okay with herself, so comfortable in her own lovely skin, that she was comfortable with anyone. She saw souls, not trappings.

Rivky broke barriers just like that. She’d do her own thing and never impose.

One Shabbos she was in the hospital, a father of another kid, watching us host our meal there, turned to Rivky and said, “You know, I do Kiddush in my home on Friday nights, but I just unwind and watch TV afterward. Seeing you, I don’t know, I’m thinking maybe I want to have a meal after Kiddush.”

Chapter 3

When Rivky turned 18, the hospital staff rallied together to buy her a gift. They bought her an expensive Pandora bracelet, because Rivky liked the finer things. She adored that bracelet, and with each treatment, she’d add a charm to it. It became greater than a bracelet; she was a soldier, and these were her medals.

A few months later, the bracelet disappeared. The staff turned the ward upside down, but they couldn’t find it. Rivky was very down; that bracelet was their love, her struggles, her wins.

A couple of days later, one of her sisters was visiting.

“Come on, let’s go to the mall,” Rivky said.

They went to the Pandora store and bought the exact same bracelet, as well as all the charms she’d already “earned.”

“So what if it was 3,000 shekel,” she said. “It doesn’t matter, it gives me koach. And Hashem didn’t really take it away if it’s something I can rebuy.”

She took her emotional health seriously; yes, she’d gotten the illness from Hashem, but there was so much agency she had to still enjoy her life, to keep her spirits up — so much was up to her.

Rivky underwent continuous treatments for almost a year, and then in Elul time, she had a pivotal scan to see if the disease had spread to her lungs.

It had.

She was scheduled for major surgery on her lungs, and lying on the stretcher as she was wheeled to the operating room, vulnerable, pale, and exquisitely beautiful, she looked around at the pictures of faraway vistas, waterfalls, and mountain ranges covering the corridor walls.

“What’s this? Where’s that?” she whispered to the orderlies and to me, pointing at the pictures.

Even then, facing a life-and-death surgery, she was present. Inquisitive and curious and indomitably her.

After the operation, after Rivky came to and got up, she wandered around and found some medical technicians. She engaged them in conversation.

“Oh, you do the surgical planning. Cool. Can I see the plan for my surgery?”

Nothing could break her. This was excruciating stuff. They showed her the plan, a desperate attempt to save her life, and she was here to chat, to ask about it like a student in university. She loved to learn and know — why not this?

Rivky was still in the post-op ward when Shabbos started, and two brothers came to be with her.

So much hung in the balance. She’d just had a massive operation. Yes, it had worked for now, but there was no knowing if the cancer was all gone, if it wouldn’t spread again. But for now, she was in recovery, for now, it was Shabbos, and the three of them held on to Shabbos; a meal, singing, talking.

For post-op recovery, Rivky had been placed with adults, and an old woman in another bed turned to them.

“Your Shabbos table, it’s so holy, it’s giving me strength to feel better,” she said. “I can feel the holiness.”

They smiled at her, but then Rivky asked her brothers, “Can we, though? Can we feel what she’s feeling? Because we should….”

She inspired, and she was inspired. She could get just as much as she could give.

And then on Erev Succos, several weeks after the operation, another small kindness — a happy, happening time to cushion the blow — the phone call came. The biopsy results were in, and they weren’t good.

Rivky had undergone a year of regular treatments followed by a huge lung operation, and still, still, the illness couldn’t be kept at bay.

The flurry of activity stopped. We started crying, sadness pervading the room.

“That’s it, I can’t, I need to do something to make me happy,” Rivky said. “I think I’ll go to England.”

One of my daughters lives in England, and Rivky, who wanted to make herself feel happy, thought it would be good to go visit.

Dazed, we got on with Yom Tov prep, and Rivky got busy organizing a ticket.

Right before she left, on Chol Hamoed Succos, she went to the Kosel. She fell upon the stones and started crying uncontrollably.

Then she slowly stilled.

“Wait a minute,” she said to her sister who accompanied her. “I don’t need crutches anymore. I’m sick inside, but right now I don’t feel anything. I’m not weak, I can stand on my own two feet, I can travel to England.” Through tears and leaking mascara, she said, “I have to thank Hashem for that.”

A light turned on inside her.

“Let’s thank Hashem,” said this desperately sick girl, “let’s get everyone to thank Hashem.”

Between us, our family and our huge circle of friends and acquaintances, we got 2,000 women to begin thanking Hashem for several things every day.

That’s how Rivky got on a plane, after setting a gratitude chain in motion.

And right there she was tested; could she remain grateful? The short plane ride from Tel Aviv to Manchester was interrupted; they had to make an emergency landing in Munich. It wasn’t clear when they would be able to travel on, and the airline put everyone up in a hotel. In the morning, instead of milling about and getting swept up in everyone’s anxiety, Rivky and another person she’d met on the plane went off to explore the city. They found a beautiful botanical garden where they sat and enjoyed until the hullabaloo blew over, and they could continue traveling.

Rivky sent us a picture of herself in that park. Right there, on foreign soil, she internalized something deep: Hashem could take her here and there. Yes, He was taking her on a ride; even now, she’d been dropped off in Munich instead of Manchester. But hey, wherever He put her, she was meant to be, and she was just going to have a good life wherever she was. The best life.

Rivky had always had the ability to live in the moment, but in Munich, she’d felt the rightness of that deep in her core. She started to embrace the present, all the world and all the people and all the opportunities.

Chapter 4

Once she was back in Israel, the doctors gave Rivky an oral treatment with the aim of stopping the spread of the disease. There was no need for her to be hospitalized, although she’d have to be checked regularly.

She had less strength, but somehow more verve. She went up to the Chermon, down to Eilat, traveling around to beautiful places in Israel with people she loved. She flew to Lizhensk to the kever of the Noam Elimelech with a beloved friend and teacher. She traveled and saw and enjoyed what she could, actively working on keeping her mood up.

There were hard days, and weak days, and people questioned her for traveling and pushing herself, but Rivky didn’t give a whit. She cared about herself and did what she needed to do.

Rivky would receive the biological treatment at the outpatient unit in Ichilov Hospital, where she’d spend many hours each time. The hospital tried to make the unit a happy, friendly place with all sorts of activities. Rivky loved painting, so the two of us got busy at an art table. We chose canvases and thought of what we’d each like to paint, and in that sunlit space we painted together for hours each time.

Our pictures took several weeks to complete. Rivky wanted to display her painting at “Points of Light,” the hospital’s upcoming patient art exhibit.

Rivky painted a blue sky and then a sea with sand in the front as the background. A white steed dominated the picture.

“This is me,” she said, “this horse represents me.”

It was solid, steadfast, confident; soft and regal at once.

I nodded; my throat choked.

“Yes, it is you.”

“And this is the illness,” she indicated the sea.

Choppy waves, a storm, but still a sea, something beautiful.

The picture encapsulated everything.

I looked down at my own picture. It was a butterfly, flying free in the wind. That’s how I felt about Rivky, that she was assailed by the winds of Hashem’s plan, but she was no leaf in that wind; she was a butterfly, flying intentionally, still free and beautiful.

On the morning of the exhibition, we turned up at the hospital. The doctor approached us and led us into a room to discuss the X-ray results. His face said it all. The biological treatment wasn’t doing much, and the cancerous bits were still there, unmoved.

“What does that mean?” Rivky asked.

No one could answer for now.

It was a subdued Rivky who attended the art exhibition later on, her picture prominently featured. Many people came — even the mayor of Tel Aviv was there — and they oohed and aahed, but Rivky couldn’t help crying.

One of the patients in the ward came over to her.

“Rivky, calm down, don’t cry. Remember you’re the one who gave us strength — now we’ll give that strength back to you.”

Rivky calmed down. I stood near her and breathed it in, that cycle of chizuk rebounding from one patient to another.

In that second year of the illness, Rivky was home most of the time, leading a normal-ish life. She wasn’t in much pain, except for some side effects and weakness. People thought she was okay, that she was getting better, that she was on the mend. Many of her classmates got married that year, and Rivky was able to show up in her beautiful dresses and heels and dance away. This was part of the miracle, what she was grateful for, that she never lost her dignity, that she had the energy to be herself, look good and feel good, and make others around her feel good.

She’d always wanted to work with children, and Rivky soon got a job working in a gan twice a week. She had more will than energy really, but she kept at it, because she loved her work. At some point her doctor got wind of the fact that she was working with little children, and he was furious.

“How could you do that to yourself? You’re immunocompromised, and little children have so many germs, colds and flus and viruses.”

“I know, but if I stay home all day, I’ll get emotionally sick,” Rivky countered. “Who’s to say what’s worse?”

She prayed to Hashem, and in all the months that she worked in the gan, Rivky never caught one virus.

She kept a diary that year, and on the front, she wrote, “Name: Rivky, Occupation: ganenet.”

Rivky also retained her inquisitiveness, asking the doctors and medical personnel questions.

“One day, you must go to university,” they told her. “You just love to learn.”

“I do,” she said, “and I want to go, one day. But also, I just love working with children. I want to be a wife, a mom, have my own home.”

Chapter 5

Although Rivky’s situation wasn’t looking good and treatments to cure her had essentially failed, the doctors were hopeful that the cancer could be kept at bay for years, and in time other treatments would come up.

Rivky held on to hope. Hers was a journey of acceptance while looking toward the hope. A work of heart, soul, and sinew; the work of a believer.

She received so many gifts over her long stays at the hospital, and she’d put some of them, like a set of stereo speakers, aside, “for when I have my own home.”

One of the things she’d wanted to save was an intricate farmyard adult Lego set; she imagined working on it with her husband one day. Her teenage nephew caught sight of it and couldn’t stop gawking at the box.

“It’s for Rivky, stop it already,” his mother said.

But Rivky looked him in the eye and said, “It’s okay, I see you really want it, you can have it.”

She told her sister later, “Look, whatever I give, that stays mine.”

On the day of a good friend’s wedding, Rivky had to get some bloodwork done at the hospital. She waited a while, but they’d forgotten to order the necessary forms, and it ended up taking far longer than anticipated. Afternoon turned into evening, and it became clear that Rivky would miss the wedding.

She didn’t shout at the nurse who made the mistake. She didn’t so much as complain. She understood it was from Hashem, and that right now, Hashem wanted her in the hospital, not at the wedding.

“You know how in Israel everyone says ‘chaval’ all the time? I can’t remember Rivky ever saying ‘chaval,’ ” one of my daughters mused to me.

She just didn’t burn energy thinking of what could have been; after that Munich-garden awakening, there truly was no “could have” for Rivky. There was only the present.

And there were big things she had to forgo. Zichron Menachem had arranged a mega-trip to Paris, and it was all Rivky could talk about. But then, at the last moment, the doctors determined she wouldn’t be able to make it. She was sad, she was — for a bit. But she was able to change tracks quickly, to focus on being happy about where she was in the moment.

On Taanis Esther, Rivky caught an infection and ended up in the hospital.

She was uncharacteristically withdrawn.

“I just didn’t want to be here,” she said.

Her sister, Peri, who was with her, was thrown.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said to Rivky. “I understand how you feel, but what can I say to change things?”

“You don’t get it, Peri,” Rivky said, “Purim is a holy day, and the hospital is really not the place for Purim. Yes, I love parties, but I don’t want to be in the hospital on Purim.”

And then suddenly, something shifted. The two sisters started saying some Tehillim, perek 22, the kapitel of Esther Hamalkah. Nurses came into the room and Rivky said to them, “It’s Taanis Esther, have you said perek 22?”

She’d found a shlichus, there was a reason for her to be there.

And they were out within record time; by Purim afternoon, Rivky and Peri were home.

Months passed. Rivky was living life, even loving life; her prognosis wasn’t great, but there seemed to be good time.

And then someone suggested a shidduch for her, a young cancer survivor who’d just gotten the all clear.

We laughed when that suggestion came, from bewilderment, from the ludicrousness of it all.

“Sorry, sweetie, you’re not ready for shidduchim,” we told her.

“But Ma, can we at least look into it?”

We grudgingly agreed. In many ways, Rivky was more than ready for a serious relationship; she was wise beyond her years, and she had so much to give.

We found out wonderful things about Shmuel, and when Rivky begged to meet him, we said, “Okay, but just to see if it could be a possibility in the future.”

The two of them met, and Rivky came even more alive.

“He’s my bashert,” she kept saying. “We’re made for each other. He knows where I’m at medically, and he still wants to go ahead.”

We couldn’t do this. We couldn’t support her in this, much as it was breaking my heart, much as I wanted her happiness.

Rivky went to rebbes in Yerushalayim. She armed herself with brachos. One rebbe told her that perhaps if she were to change her name and become “eishes Reb Shmuel,” it would change her mazel. Another rebbe told her that she would build a binyan adei ad.

None of it was conclusive. The brachos were wonderful but open-ended, open to interpretation. We saw that, but not Rivky; she was already in a place beyond nature.

“I’m closing my eyes, and I’m going with Hashem,” she said. “So is Shmuel.”

Shmuel wanted to go ahead. He was aware of Rivky’s prognosis, but her confidence, her personality, her vitality, it was stronger than anything — and he wanted that. He was ready to go into this knowing everything full well.

We closed our own eyes, and we leaned into a miracle.

Chapter 6

Through sheer force of emunah, Rivky and Shmuel got engaged.

Oh, what a kallah she was. We shopped for kitchenware and towels and linen and everything a young wife would need. Each item we bought, the saltshaker, the napkin holder, a throw pillow, was a pronouncement of faith.

The doctors said she had years ahead of her and in those years — please G-d — they’d find a treatment that would work. Rivky would get better. She would yet use these items for many healthy years.

On the day of the wedding, Rivky stepped out of the house, ravishing in white, pure and delicate like the angel she was.

At the chuppah, a summer chuppah under a setting sun, there were hundreds of well-wishers, all the people who made up Rivky’s life, all the people whose lives Rivky had made. There were dozens of representatives from Ichilov and Tel Hashomer. These people had seen her at her hardest, and even then, she never broke. They wanted to be here now, part of her dream coming true. Everyone wanted to be swept along by Rivky’s pure faith.

There wasn’t a dry eye among the crowd. They stormed the heavens, begging for health, for long years, for Rivky.

Rivky herself was radiant. She looked at Shmuel and she was whole.

A beautiful week of sheva brachos followed. We laughed, we danced, we reveled in the family time together, Rivky was married, and hope for the future seemed real enough to touch.

And then, one week after her wedding, Rivky suddenly felt breathless.

Shmuel accompanied her to the hospital where she was put on oxygen right away. They did an X-ray, and what the doctors saw on the screen sucked the air from the room. In a matter of weeks, the cancer had metastasized. Rivky’s lungs were so full of cancer, it was impeding her ability to breathe.

Her whole glorious new world came crashing down.

She’d achieved the impossible, she’d found the partner of her dreams, she had everything she needed for a life of joy together, but for a pinprick in a balloon, a hole they wouldn’t be able to close fast enough.

“You can either stay in the hospital, or you can go into hospice care, or you can go home,” the doctor told Rivky softly, so sadly.

She could barely hear through her cascading tears. That night she felt she could drown in grief.

Later the doctor said to her, “Look, you’ve done more in the last two years than other people do in a lifetime. You traveled the world, you got married, you impacted so many lives in the hospital and out of it. It so happens that we’re producing a hospital movie for children on how to approach serious illness, and we wanted you to be part of that. You were the inspiration for that.”

At that, Rivky smiled.

“I’m going home,” she said, in reference to his three options.

Before she did, she went around the ward to all the nurses, all the medical personnel whom she’d gotten to know over the last couple of years. She thanked them, gave them messages of hope.

“Be good people,” she told them. “Believe in good things. Even in gray clouds there are silver linings.”

Her eyes flashed toward Shmuel and her voice broke and caught, but she repeated those messages again and again.

That was the last time Rivky was in the hospital. Then she was home, with her Shmuel. She could stay in the comfort and dignity of her home, because Shmuel had dealt with these medical regimens himself. He knew how to administer the oxygen, how to give her the injections she needed. He could be her medical aide and her nurse; he could hold her until the end.

While Rivky struggled with her breathing, she felt fine overall. She could still get around the house, she could even still go out.

After that excruciating day at the hospital, Rivky gathered herself together and set a beautiful table for a meal for Shmuel and herself. They posed at the set table and Rivky sent that picture around with the caption, “Life is good.”

“I know I’m going,” she said to me, “but I’m not going to bury myself before my time.”

Her sisters came over and they chose a picture for the wall together, a wedding gift from all the siblings.

In the same conversation as they discussed where to hang the picture, Rivky was giving messages, final messages for life.

“Make lemonade out of lemons,” she told her sister.

She wrote furiously in her diary. It became a will of sorts; a combination of prayer and hope.

We wanted to be there for Rivky all the time, and she wanted to be with everyone, but she was still aware of who she was as a newly married woman, still made us laugh when she said, “Hey, let me know when you’re coming. Don’t barge in on a just-wed couple.”

One Sunday, a couple of weeks later, I was on the phone with Rivky giving her a recipe for healthy muffins. Someone had told her that they’d been cured from cancer through a strict nutritional program, and Rivky was considering it for herself.

And in the middle of talking oats and flour, she disarmed me.

“But Ma, even if… I feel like I fulfilled my tafkid by getting married.”

Chapter 7

ON

Tuesday morning, Rivky called me to say she wasn’t feeling well. I started praying with her on the phone, and then I went over to her apartment. My husband came, my children came; Shmuel was there beside her.

Rivky’s mental health counselor from the hospital came in as well. She handed her a pad of papers and some crayons. Rivky drew a black mark on the paper, a big black fleck. She tore it out.

“Can you throw this out of the window?” she said to the counselor.

She was in a lot of pain, shaking softly, murmuring things, talking as if to someone beyond the room.

Then she looked at us, fully there, and asked, “If we believe that Heaven is a good place, why are you crying that I’m going there? Please keep calm, help me to keep calm, sing, say Tehillim.”

Her words drew calmness into the room. Somehow, we were able to stay composed; no one freaked out that she was talking like this.

A nurse had been summoned, and seeing Rivky in so much pain, she popped a morphine pill out.

Rivky didn’t want to take it at first.

“I want to be here,” she whispered, but then she took the pill and fell asleep.

Then there was a knock on the door. A man was there, the singer who’d been at her mitzvah tantz just a few weeks ago, the one who sang Eishes Chayil while Rivky danced with Shmuel. He lived in a different city but somehow, he turned up now — we don’t know if he happened to be in the area or if someone summoned him. He sat down and started singing Eishes Chayil again. The contrast in circumstances was heartbreaking, but we couldn’t focus on that now, we could only take it in, as Shmuel’s voice joined in with his, singing Eishes Chayil to his wife of one month.

Shabbos songs followed, Kah echsof noam Shabbos….

Rivky’s soul was taken there in her bed, b’neshikas Hashem. She fell asleep among her loved ones, among song, and she never woke up. We covered her face. Her spirit hovered in the room.

My daughter Peri accompanied her body to the beis halevayos on Shamgar Street in Jerusalem.

“How could I go along?” Peri mused. “I felt I wasn’t with Rivky, I felt that she was somewhere else and that I was with her body, that I was giving respect to the body that had housed Rivky, the body Rivky was so respectful to.”

Exactly 30 days after Rivky’s wedding, we held her funeral.

The community showed up, shock rippling through the crowd. The last time most of them had seen her she’d been shining in a white gown. Now she was gone.

My husband spoke about the pure korban that had gone up to Shamayim. “L’Torah l’chuppah ul’maasim tovim,” he said. And with Rivky, we’d done it all. As parents we’d come full circle, painful as it was, short as it was. And there was also the clarity of tikkun, that for some Divine reason Rivky had come down here to be mekudeshes.

Shmuel spoke, and his voice didn’t shake when he said that he could never have anticipated this, but he would do it all over again.

“I don’t regret a moment of the time I had with Rivky,” he said. “It’s but a puzzle, and we only see a small piece.”

I was touched to the core by his emunah, this young man who’d looked his own death in the face, who watched death claim his beautiful new wife.

Shivah was surreal. So many people came — from the community and from the hospitals.

One day a woman walked in and sat down.

“I was standing outside the ward on the day my son had to be admitted, and we just couldn’t walk in,” she said. “Then Rivky showed up, looking so beautiful even without any hair.”

It was that woman Rivky had accompanied in. And not only that initial time, but many times afterward. Her son had gotten better, they’d left the hospital, and Rivky had left an impression. This woman became stronger in tzniyus, not because Rivky had said anything, but because of who she was.

Toward the end, Rivky had said to me, “Why do we have kids? What are our children to us? Our children give us zechusim. I won’t have children, so please, please give me zechusim.”

At the end, she could only see things with real eyes.

And so we’re trying to do that for her. We’re writing a sefer Torah in her memory. And we’re trying to live a little more like she did. To listen to the heart, to live life from our truth, on our own path, without comparison, without worrying so much about judgments and calculations. To know that we’re all on an individual path designed by Hashem.

Shmuel lives in their apartment now, and he’s trying to pick up the pieces. He’s part of our family, joins us for meals, learns with our sons in memory of Rivky.

We hold the shared grief together. For me, that grief doesn’t feel like a crushing stone, but like little pebbles of pain.

I know about grief from when my mother passed on, and now, almost two years since her passing, her message has had time to crystalize. Don’t mourn, celebrate.

I try that when I think of Rivky. She was the kind of person who celebrated life as much as she could. In illness, she saw herself as a white steed. She was a light to so many people, and most importantly, to herself.

During the shivah, we went through Rivky’s stuff and found a gratitude notebook she’d written when she was 14, a list of things to be grateful for each day. It was heartening to read, and I realized that she’d had what my mother had, an unbelievable ayin tovah.

And we can only try today to have that, too, to hold on to the good, even as we accept His Will. It’s the dichotomy of being a Yid. My mother had internalized it; Rivky had lived it; and we — I, my husband, our children — find ourselves in this interplay between acceptance and recovery, sadness and hope, and we try to hold it all. —

In memory of Rivka Gittel bas Reb Pesach

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 997)