IT was never meant to happen this way.

But it happened, so I guess it was meant to happen, and yet, and yet….

We came out here 15 years ago, and we intended to stay here, right here, connecting to lost Jewish sparks and bringing a taste of Torah to the North Pole, up until Mashiach comes. We came to an icy wasteland — not physically; Nuuk is a really charming city, with houses and stores and yes, a hospital — but spiritually, there was zero, zilch, nothing. Reports of an occasional Jew passing through, living here temporarily, that was all.

And yet in the time since we’ve come, we’ve hosted hundreds if not thousands of tourists, and set up a small community with the occasional Jews who have settled here temporarily.

Yes, the community members come and go. Yes, it’s small — scratch that, tiny, less than a handful of families — and we rely on tourists to complete minyanim each Shabbos.

But this land, with a summer that’s almost permanently sunlit and some of the most breathtakingly beautiful ice-capped views in the world; it’s home.

As I lead the way home after preschool closes for the day, pointing out the short distance between the Chabad house and our own home, I brace myself. I’d left this morning in a haze of mess and last-minute instructions; I could expect things to be worse, rather than better, a few hours later.

“Mommy, here you are!” Shternie calls from the kitchen. She sounds tense. “Did you know that the new couple arrived? I sent them to Tatty in the Chabad House—”

I beckon Esther inside with the biggest fake smile I can muster, and call back, “Shternie, everyone, we have a guest!”

And while the girls offer “the guest” something to eat, I escape to my room muttering something about needing to change my shoes, and then I collapse onto my bed and stare at the ceiling and think how it all, how it all — well, how it should never have happened this way.

Moishy is my sixth child, every one of them born on Greenlandic soil. The hospital in Nuuk isn’t large, but it boasts a nice maternity ward, and there was no reason to think that the sixth birth would be any more complicated than any of the others…

…Until it was.

Until it was too early, too complicated. Premature birth and complications, too many. Tiny baby in the small NICU on a ventilator, waiting, waiting until he was old enough, large enough, strong enough to be flown to Denmark for surgery.

Waiting, so much waiting. Problems. Heart problems, breathing issues. Finally, finally, the medical flight and the surgery. It should’ve fixed things, made everything easier, and somehow it didn’t.

I was stuck in Denmark for weeks, me and the still-nameless baby, while Sholom and the kids and the house slowly fell apart.

Not on the outside. They continued the events, the programs, the hosting, the shul. Shternie cooked and Hadassa ran the preschool and Sholom and the boys welcomed guests and proffered tefillin and taught and talked and sang and prayed.

But the cracks were there, in the strain in my husband’s voice when he called to be mechazek me, in the high pitch of Shternie’s hello, in the stoic determination in Hadassa’s tone.

They couldn’t wean him off the oxygen. He needed fluid drained from his brain. Every time we thought it was better, all sorted, now things will proceed smoothly — they didn’t.

We got back home. Eventually. With oxygen. He wasn’t weaning off it, though, and instead of getting stronger things just seemed to get more complicated with each passing month.

Every sneeze, every cough, every cold had us jumping. Fever, virus, pneumonia, hospital, again. The hospital would help him, stabilize him, whatever they could do but we’re in Nuuk, Greenland, the icy end of the world, and we needed specialist treatment, expert pediatric surgeons, and that meant more medical flights, holding breath, gathering nerves, hearts in mouth, please keep breathing please and more minutes and days and weeks and months of camping out on a chair in a hospital in Denmark.

I had support; Chabad of Denmark rallied around us. I had hot meals and an open door whenever I could leave the hospital; every so often, someone would take a shift by Moishy’s bedside so I could rest. There was an outpouring of love and support along with chicken soup and rugelach, and I would gulp it down, guiltily, because who was feeding my family, back at home?

I lived in two countries back then, two worlds. One, with my son, my tiny son who desperately needed me, his frail body spasming with sickness or alternately, heartbreakingly still. And the second, with the rest of my family, phone calls and ideas and lists and whatever something, anything I could do to try hold them all together.

Something wasn’t enough, though. Not when Moishy’s gastro issues meant more surgeries, this time to put in feeding tubes; not when his health and growth issues meant I ended up in the hospital more nights than I was home; not when the entire burden of care for a medically fragile baby, then toddler with special needs, was now on me.

No extended family in Greenland, no chesed girls or volunteers or even paid Jewish workers to take some of Moishy’s care off our shoulders. Sholom was losing weight; he barely slept when I wasn’t around, trying valiantly to keep the Chabad House running while tending to our other five children.

And it wasn’t working.

The kids needed me, Sholom needed me, our community needed me… and if I couldn’t be there, it all fell apart. Someone else had to step in.

“This isn’t working,” Sholom had said to me, one night at 4 a.m., when I was pacing the hospital corridor holding a conversation in whispers, and he had finally finished preparing for a lunch-and-learn event the next day, after giving his usual classes, taking care of the kids, and putting together Shabbos all on his own. “Something… something needs to change.”

And then we played the maybe game.

Maybe things will still settle down.

Maybe I can return to America with Moishy, for a year, two years — get Moishy medical care, get him therapy, wait until he’s stronger and less fragile, and come back out to make it work.

Maybe we can take a temporary leave of absence as a family, and come back in a couple of years.

Maybe we can hold out another five years, six — and then Shternie can take over, please G-d, married, and we could keep this beautiful shlichus, this beautiful heart-center we’ve created, in our family. Our children have sacrificed to build this up just like we have; it’s theirs, too.

And then, one by one, each of the maybes fell away.

Moishy didn’t “settle down”; things got worse. He’s two years old now and his hospitalizations — first in Queen Ingrid’s Hospital, then flown to Denmark by air ambulance for specialist treatments — are just as frequent as ever. And Sholom and the kids tried valiantly to maintain the house, the Chabad House, the events, the shul, the guests, the kiruv, the family, without me — but they could barely manage two months.

There was no way they could manage two years.

And Moishy needed treatment now. He needed a good hospital nearby, he needed the best medical treatments out there. He was suffering, he was struggling, and first and foremost, we were his parents.

There was no five years to wait.

So then there were the long-distance calls. To the rav, once, twice, a third time. To my mashpia, many, many times, to talk and to listen, to mourn and to cry.

Because this is what it comes down to, when the facts are lined up and the needs of our beautiful, precious, suffering baby are placed on the opposite side of the scale: We are handing over our home — our home, our Chabad house, our shul and our preschool and our carefully cultivated relationships with the locals, our supplies and our calendars and our program of yearly events — to this couple, this couple who are too eager and too relaxed all at the same time.

This couple who look like they’re barely out of their teens.

I’m not being fair to them, I know I’m not. They’re clearly not immature teens; they’re ready to move away from everything they’ve ever known and start a life in an ice-capped, far-flung country, seeking the Jewish souls who land there.

But I can’t help but feel these stirrings of… resentment. We came to this land when it was utterly desolate; we built it, clinging with our fingernails, struggling to reach every milestone.

And here they came, by simple virtue of the fact that they knew someone who knew someone, landing not just a coveted opportunity to go on shlichus, but a fully built infrastructure, ripe and ready for the taking.

While we… we head back to Crown Heights, where I grew up, where we have the hospitals and insurances and services and care that we need for our son. And we try to settle down for a life devoid of everything that we considered our mission and purpose for the past 15 years.

“Shalom aleichem, malachei hashares…”

The songs, the energy, the peace. I love Shabbos.

It’s a busy one; lots of tourists, and we’ve invited the current community members to join a large Friday night meal in the Chabad house. Being busy felt good; the preparations left little time for conversation with Esther, who spent most of her time on Friday hovering at my shoulder and gushing, while waving around a potato peeler. I wonder how she’s planning to cook for 50 on her own next month.

“Want me to show you the page? It has the words in English, too,” I hear Mendel telling a bewildered-looking young man. I catch his eye and smile too widely. Because it hurts. Look at what we’re going to be leaving behind, the chance for ourselves, for our children, to do this, to make a difference in such a tangible, beautiful way.

“Welcome, everyone, to our Shabbos meal,” Sholom booms, when the singing is over. “In a few moments, Rabbi Menachem will be making Kiddush for all of us….”

And that’s when I notice that Menachem Mendel Schein is sitting up there, head of the table, beside my husband.

Who doesn’t seem to mind at all.

Smile, just smile.

I keep that smile plastered on through Kiddush and hamotzi. Through Sholom’s devar Torah and Menachem Mendel Schein’s story. I even smile, maybe a bit obsessively, when I see my husband put his arm around Schein’s shoulder for a quick, hushed conversation.

I don’t know why it bothers me so much. It shouldn’t. This is going to be their role, they need to be trained in, it’s why they’re here.

I don’t want to think about that.

“Main course,” I say to Shternie, and we head to the kitchen to prepare the platters, Esther Schein following at my heels to help.

After the meal everyone hangs around; Sholom’s doing a parshah class for the men and I lead the women into the lounge for a class-cum-discussion group. The lounge is my place, second only to the preschool room. It’s long and large and filled with comfortable, squishy couches, a few beanbags, lots of bookshelves filled with books.

“We need the kind of place where people will want to sit and hang out,” I’d told Sholom, back when the Chabad house was new, and while he got busy with outfitting the actual shul, I’d gone scouring the local stores for pretty furnishings and finishings for the lounge.

We would need both, I knew; the shul for the main course and the lounge as the appetizer, the cocktails, the dessert. The reason that tourists would not just come, but stay. A place that would make the few Jews found here want to come and come again, sit together, learn a little, socialize, grow.

Now I lean in, wave across the room at Hadar, an Israeli expat nurse who works in the Nuuk hospital while her husband leads walking tours of the city. She’s sitting beside Amalie, originally from Denmark, who moved here with her husband a couple of years ago. Her twins form two-thirds of the preschool — Hadar’s little boy is my third student. Since the community here is so transitory — Jews have never really settled in Greenland — the size of my preschool changes by the year. We’ve had four students some years, none in others… and I’m fine with that; I’m here to give, the numbers don’t matter.

Besides, the main part of our job has always been the tourists; Nuuk’s a popular destination for travelers.

There are plenty of those here this week: a large group of Israelis, a couple of Americans, a young European wife clearly on her honeymoon — she’s sitting on the edge of her seat and keeps glancing over her shoulder to see if the men are finished yet.

“Hi, I’m Esther, what’s your name, and where are you from?” I hear Esther ask, from next to me, all sweet, perky cheer.

She’s taking over while I’m still sitting here, I think, and immediately quell the thought. Stop — she’s doing what she’s supposed to be doing! And she’s the one saving your Chabad House from completely disintegrating when you leave. She didn’t push you out — you decided to go. Be grateful!

Maybe I’m being irrational, maybe I’m being oversensitive, maybe my emotions are clouding my thinking, and maybe I know all of this and I still don’t care.

It might be one of our last Shabbosos leading this beautiful, tiny community we’ve grown, but right now, I’m here. And is it so selfish to want to hold what’s mine for one, two, three weeks more?

“Ladies, it’s such a pleasure to have you all here, let’s hear a little about what brought each of you to Greenland,” I say, raising my voice a little. “I’ll start. I’m Rebbetzin Chana, we’ve lived here for 15 years, and we came out here to Greenland to bring some Jewish warmth and Torah learning to this beautiful country.”

And then, feeling both terrible and victorious, I turn away from Esther, to the woman on my left. “How about you go next?”

Two weeks after the Scheins come, two nights before we leave, Sholom tells me he’s taking me out for the evening. Shternie’s in charge; Esther Schein is more than happy to sit and schmooze with her in the living room, the kids are sleeping. Even Moishy’s had a quiet day or two, believe it or not, making me doubt our decision all over again. But of course, it’s kind of too late for that.

My first reaction to Sholom’s announcement is to laugh out loud. In disbelief. It’s not as if there are kosher restaurants here.

“Where, exactly, are we going?”

Sholom smiles enigmatically and tells me to follow him.

We meet up with some kind of group near a hotel and as I move to walk past them Sholom signals me to wait.

He goes up to the tour guide and shows him something on his phone. Tickets?

“Are we going—?” The question dies on my lips as we begin to walk, following the crowd down to the pier, to the Nuuk fjord where a water taxi awaits, bobbing lightly on the water.

A boat tour.

To see the lights.

“This is supposed to be the best way to see the lights!” gushes a tourist in English.

The northern lights! I’ve seen them, of course; it’s kind of impossible not to when you live where we’ve lived for 15 years. But we’ve never taken a real tour like this, us and the tourists, two hours of nothing but following the lights, capturing the magic.

We cruise into the darkness and I feel some of the tension drain, drain, drain out of me. Because this big wide world is so dark and vast and… glorious, somehow, that everything else seems to fade away.

Sholom is snapping pictures of the boat, the water, the coastline behind us. I just want to sit, drink in the moment. Freeze time.

And then the boat slows to a stop, and the crowds grow silent.

Ahead of us, rising as if from the water to the sky, a column of green, faint light.

It brightens, turns yellow, almost blue. The boat moves on and we see more: slow pirouetting of lights, like drifting clouds aflame with colored fire. The lights weave in and out of each other like living things and my breath catches, stills.

“The northern lights, or to give them their official name, the aurora borealis, show up best during the night hours…” the guide is saying, giving commentary in a low voice against the backdrop of the wondrous night sky.

I look up at the light and it blurs against my eyes, or maybe my eyes are what’s blurring them, because here, right where we are in Nuuk, Greenland, we are the lights, blazing a path to connection, to the past and the future, for every Jewish neshamah that finds itself on this icy, beautiful land.

But in two days’ time we’ll be boarding a plane, and in three days’ time we’ll be arriving to a place where the sun is strong and the skies are bright and the lights are everywhere and the colors are nowhere to be seen.

“The lights are formed when particles from the sun collide with Earth’s atmosphere and are drawn into the magnetic field, and the molecules in Earth’s atmosphere heats them up and creates these lights,” the guide continues.

The magnetic field. I picture fragments of light escaping the sun, hurtling through space, and suddenly, inexplicably, being drawn in by a tiny planet’s atmosphere. Drawn in, warmed, and reframed into magical lights.

Like the shards of ruchniyus, like the klipos scattering the earth, like every neshamah freefalling… waiting to be drawn out, drawn home.

For years we’ve been the magnet, the energy force, the light and the focal point in this snow-filled spiritual desert.

And now we are going to be… nothing.

IT feels like I’m missing a part of myself, or maybe that a part of myself is hanging uselessly at the edges. That part of the brain that used to buzz with plans, calculate quantities and shopping lists at the speed of lightning and then recalculate all over again when six tourists showed up on Friday afternoon. The part of me that could stir four pots and keep a rotation of trays in the oven, all while setting the table and commandeering the Shabbos prep of the house and the shul.

I am missing a part of myself and I feel it in the emptiness of the three solitary bags I’m carrying back from the grocery, in the empty spaces in my brain, in my heart.

My new neighbor, an old seminary classmate, sent over a cake and offered to send Shabbos food as well.

“Moving in on a Thursday, now that’s hard,” she’d clucked.

And I’d laughed even though it wasn’t funny at all.

I’m a shluchah. I’ve cooked for 70 right after giving birth. I don’t need Shabbos food for eight.

I don’t need it, I know I don’t, and yet somehow the act of cooking six pieces of chicken and grating a bag of potatoes for kugel, throwing fish in a pot and chopping veggies for a chicken soup — it feels harder than it ever felt when I cooked for a crowd.

Shternie hates school and Hadassa doesn’t have friends and Mendel’s rebbi is worried about his lack of ability to sit still through the morning; he suggests we get him evaluated for ADHD.

ADHD, my foot. Mendel used to sit in shul from beginning to end on Shabbos, Yom Tov. He attended my husband’s adult Torah classes and learned b’chavrusa with three Israeli tourists every night of their stay. He also never had a problem with his online classes, just saying.

But he’s never had to sit in a classroom in his life, never been told what to do and where to go for eight hours a day. He’s always been the teacher; he was born into shlichus. And when he learned — online, with my husband, from shiurim he enjoyed listening to on his headphones — it was because he was going to give it over, today, tomorrow, someday.

He doesn’t need Ritalin. He needs his old life back.

We all do.

Even the younger ones, who are getting by in school, young enough to adjust easily… they miss Greenland. Dovid said so the other day, plaintively asking when he can go back to Tatty’s shul on Shabbos. And Shaina complained that she hates not having guests for Shabbos meals every week.

I cast a guilty glance into the other room. Moishy is on the floor with his therapist; he has therapy now every day, in our own home. He also has respite workers who take him out, play with him, do exercises, help me feed and care for him so the house can function.

Even as I watch, he turns, catches my eye, and opens his mouth wide into the kind of smile that could melt a Greenlandic glacier.

I know that if Moishy could talk, he wouldn’t choose to go back to Greenland.

And I know that if I had the choice, I wouldn’t give this up, either, because nothing is worth the cost of Moishy’s health.

Still, it hurts to spend my morning convincing my kids to go to school, and then convincing their teachers to keep them there. It hurts that my days are so empty and yet so full of problems that would never have existed otherwise.

Moishy’s first infection on US soil crops up three months after we land. There’s a fever and cough and because I know the Moishy protocol, I take him to see a doctor within the day.

We leave with a prescription for antibiotics and reassurance that it will settle within a few days.

Spoiler alert: It doesn’t.

On Shabbos, Moishy turns blue. Of course it’s on Shabbos that it gets worse; it always is. But this time, instead of debating whether we need the emergency room, we call Hatzalah.

It feels guiltily luxurious when  Hatzalah members show up at our door in seconds. They check Moishy’s vitals, monitor his oxygen sats. I wait for things to stabilize, for the attack or whatever it is to pass, for them to clear up their equipment and get going with good Shabbos wishes and a l’chayim.

But they don’t.

And Moishy, instead of starting to recover, isn’t responding well. And his fever… I feel his forehead and it’s blazing hot. He’s flushed and laboring to breathe and the Hatzalah guys are murmuring between themselves and the next thing I know, I’m in the back of the Hatzalah ambulance with them and Moishy, pot of cholent congealing in the middle of the table.

In the hospital they are calm and reassuring as they prick and assess and hook Moishy up to a bunch of machines.

“IV antibiotics, he’ll be fine,” one of the nurses tells me, and I nod, BTDT, it’ll be okay. He’ll be fine, he always is.

Except that his sats keep dropping and the doctors are rushing in and their voices are too hushed and too fast and the next thing I know it’s Motzaei Shabbos, Sholom is here, too, and the hospital is a blur around me as Moishy is sedated and intubated and hooked up to an ECMO machine because systems failing and our best bet and lucky you’re here, right here where we have the machine available….

The words echo in my brain.

Lucky. Lucky you brought him here.

Where we have the machine available…

…you saved his life.

We saved his life.

By moving back, leaving our home and our hearts and our dreams behind, we had saved Moishy’s life.

And then I am sobbing, right there in the middle of the ward, with a sweet round-eyed nurse patting my arm sympathetically and the people on my right and left politely averting their eyes.

Moishy wakes up slowly and suddenly all at the same time.

It’s been a week, and his recovery process has been good — as good as can be expected. He’s been weaned off the ECMO, and his starting to wake up is a good sign.

I hold my breath.

First he’s shifting and I’m instantly on the alert, watching for wires, listening for beeps, is everything still where it’s supposed to be?

Moishy’s mouth opens and close and he turns his head from side to side to side. I reach for the call button but don’t press it; I can handle this one myself.

And then all at once Moishy is fully awake, awake and confused. His eyes open wide and they are confused and scared until they fix on mine, and then they calm and close.

My heart breaks just a little to see this.

“Moishy,” I whisper. I don’t know why, I just know that he is here and I am here, right here where I’m meant to be, and if I’m here then it means I’ve been sent here….

Sent here. For a reason.

Moishy’s eyes flutter again, then open. They are green brown black fading shining and when they move upward to meet mine they look like streaks of light in a vividly black sky.

I take his hand and draw a breath.

“Moishy,” I whisper. “Let’s sing.”

For a moment I picture rustic homes and snow-carpeted streets, eclectic, electric Shabbos seudos and innocent, cherubic faces in a preschool built with love and not much else; I see mountains and glaciers and night skies filled with colored, magical light.

And then I am back here, in a stark-white lit hospital room that smells of antiseptic and sweetened rubber but maybe, just maybe, the dreams are not as lost as I’ve feared.

I lean over Moishy, and my heart fills as I chant, “Alef-beis-veis….”

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 875)