“I’m running back to have someone call Magen David Adom,” Aron Dovid said.

“If you throw me a rope,” I offered, “I can use my arms to pull myself up.”

Aron Dovid laughed. “You moron!” he said.

When Aron Dovid reached the rest of the group and told the leaders of the group that I had fallen, the first question they asked was: “On a scale of one to ten, how bad is it?”

“Ten!” he shouted.

My friends hurried to the mountainside above where I had fallen and began calling down to me, to make sure I didn’t lose consciousness and to distract me from the pain. Oddly, though, I felt no pain out there on the mountain — not during the impact, and not while I was lying there waiting to be rescued.

Not having anything else on my agenda right then, I started cracking jokes. “Didn’t your mother ever ask you, ‘If your friend jumps off a cliff, would you jump off after him’?” I yelled up to them.

It took about 20 minutes for a Magen David Adom ambulance to reach the site, after which the medics hiked down the rocky cliff to rescue me. First they checked for spinal cord injury, and then they strapped me to a backboard and hooked me up to IV.

After about an hour an army helicopter arrived. Four medics rappelled down to me and lifted me into the helicopter, which carried me to Haifa’s Rambam hospital.

I spent two and a half weeks in the hospital and underwent three surgeries. One surgery was on my femur, which was broken in two places and had pierced right through the skin of my leg. The other two surgeries were on my right knee and left ankle. My left knee was also broken, as was my pelvis and one rib. But other than broken bones, I had no serious injuries. I hadn’t even lost consciousness at any point.

“A person who suffers a compound femur fracture like this has a 95-percent chance of cutting a major artery and bleeding to death,” one of the doctors told me. “You were lucky enough that the fractured bone missed the femoral artery and all the surrounding arteries when it broke through your leg.”

In general, the medical staff was astonished that I had survived. “Most people who fall 60 feet don’t live to tell the tale,” they said. “And you landed on rocks!”

During my hospital stay, I learned that I was not the first person to fall from that spot on the mountain above the Keshet cave. But I was the first person to survive that fall.

Aron Dovid, who was the only person with me when I fell, spent a lot of time with me in the hospital. “I watched you die,” he said. “But then you were alive.”

Hearing all this, I understood that my survival had been nothing short of a miracle. G-d must have cushioned me and stopped my fall.

But why had He pushed me off the mountain in the first place?

Stuck in a hospital bed unable to move, I had plenty of time to ponder that question.

I was released from the hospital on December 6, after which my parents brought me home to Baltimore. The Jet911 organization arranged medical transport for me in the first-class cabin of an El Al flight, and my father’s friends from the Baltimore Hatzolah transported me on a stretcher from Newark airport to my home in Baltimore.

With the help of intensive physical therapy, I began walking again before Pesach, and right after Pesach, my family made a seudas hodaah. By then, I was back to keeping Shabbos and kosher. Somehow, falling off a mountain makes a lot of theological questions disappear.

The night before the seudah, while I was writing my speech, I went through every detail of the accident in my mind. It was the first time since my fall that I found myself reliving the ordeal — except that now, remembering it, I actually felt the pain of my body hitting the rocks and my leg being shattered. At the time of the impact, my brain had shut out all pain and fear, but in reliving the fall, I experienced the pain and fear retroactively.

That whole night was one long panic attack, as I processed, on an emotional level, what had happened to me — and considered how it could have ended.

That post-traumatic flashback five months after the accident was a one-time deal, though. At no point did I experience any nightmares, baruch Hashem, nor did I develop any fear of hiking, falling, or heights.

After the seudas hodaah, I flew back to Eretz Yisrael to rejoin the Gesher program. Although I still limped a bit and carried a folding cane with me as a backup, I pushed myself to go along with my friends on every trip they took, and I made sure to do a lot of walking every day.

From the time of my accident, Ariel, the person in charge of the rappelling company in Israel, had stayed in touch with me, checking in with me after every major doctor appointment to find out how I was doing.

After Shavuos, I told Ariel that I was ready to visit the Keshet cave again. He accompanied me there and did the whole hike with me — this time without any detours. (By this time, safety features had been installed along the rocky ledge on the mountain, including a railing and a wooden step at the edge of the mountain to block people from slipping.)

I rappelled down into the cave, enjoying the stunning view once again, and when I reached the narrow mountain pass I had fallen from, I stopped to recite the brachah of “She’Asah li neis bamakom hazeh.” When we reached a wider area where I could sit down and rest a little, Ariel went ahead to give me some time alone. I used those moments to speak to Hashem and thank Him for saving my life — and also for throwing me down the mountain.

Falling off the mountain was by far the worst thing that ever happened to me. But it was also the best thing that ever happened to me, because that brush with death woke me up to reality: the reality that Hashem cares about me and wants a connection with me.

He cares so much about me, in fact, that He was ready to throw me off a cliff rather than allow me to carry on with my spiritually dead existence, choked off the oxygen of Torah and mitzvos. Just as a loving father would pound his son’s still chest to get him to start breathing again, Hashem shocked me back into reality by dropping me 60 feet off a mountain.

When I started climbing that mountain, I had a lot of questions. When I was airlifted off the mountain, I still had questions — but they weren’t the same questions as before. I wasn’t asking if G-d exists, or if Torah is true, or why I had to keep Shabbos. I was asking why it was wrong to use a phone on Shabbos, and under what circumstances I would be allowed to put the cholent back on the blech.

Before the accident, I may have been alive, but I wasn’t really living. Since the accident, I wake up every morning feeling overjoyed to be alive and thanking Hashem that I’m still here. I daven three times a day, I learn Torah and keep mitzvos, and I try to make every day count.

When I tell people that I fell 60 feet off a mountain, their typical response is, “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

My answer to that is, “Why are you sorry? I’m alive!”

I’m not sorry I fell off the cliff. In general, I try to live my life without regrets. The way I see it, if you wallow in what you’ve done wrong, or dwell on what went wrong for you in your life, you’ll never move beyond it.

In the past, I didn’t keep Shabbos. If I can’t put that behind me, I’ll never be able to keep Shabbos properly, because in my mind, I’ll always see myself as a mechallel Shabbos.

Will I feel regret this Yom Kippur when I say Vidui for my transgressions? Absolutely. Will I feel like a terrible person afterward? Absolutely not.

Even without holding on to regrets, going into Yom Kippur this year I feel terrified. My experience has taught me how fragile life is, that a person can lose his footing at any moment. I’m really hoping Hashem doesn’t push me off another cliff this year, and I’m going to daven my heart out that it shouldn’t be necessary.

But I also feel happy going into Yom Kippur — happy to be alive, happy to be living in reality, and happy that Hashem cares enough about me to make sure I don’t stagger through life blindly.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha Issue 679)