There are times in your life when you feel that Hashem is speaking directly to you, and this was one of them

I

t was the worst night of my life.

My 12-year-old son, Ephraim, had gone berserk. Ephraim had always been a difficult, volatile child, but this outburst was something else entirely. All night, he was running around the house, yanking open closets and drawers and flinging their contents onto the floor or across the room. I stayed up with Ephraim the entire night, trying desperately to calm him down and mitigate the damage.

That afternoon, I had taken Ephraim to an energy healer, thinking that perhaps an alternative approach would help to relax him. Apparently, however, something in him had snapped as a result of that treatment, and now he was completely out of control. Only after sunrise, when the house was in shambles, did he finally collapse on the couch in exhaustion and fall asleep.

Ephraim was not the only source of anguish in my life at the time. My older brother Shragi was very sick, practically on his deathbed, and my younger sister Liba, with whom I was very close, had just been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness as well.

On top of all that, money was very tight for us. My husband was in kollel, and I was the main breadwinner in the family. While we did manage to cover our basic living expenses, we didn’t have a dollar to spare. If I needed to buy a pair of socks, it was a big deal. To cover the costs of making Pesach, we took a loan that took us until Succos to repay. Once, my husband borrowed $70 to buy me a pair of earrings for Yom Tov. We repaid that loan in $10 monthly installments.

I come from a family of twelve siblings, seven sisters and five brothers. We are all very close, and whenever we need support or encouragement, we turn to each other — not to friends, neighbors, or anyone outside the family. My siblings and I are all very capable, the coping type, and we manage with whatever Hashem sends us. But the morning after Ephraim’s volcanic all-nighter, I felt that I couldn’t cope anymore. Shragi. Liba. Ephraim. The financial strain. It was too much.

“Ribbono shel Olam,” I cried, “what do You want from us?”

Weak with exhaustion and overwrought from the tension of trying to contain Ephraim, I decided to turn to an adam gadol for guidance. I called a rebbetzin in our community whose husband, a world-renowned gadol, is widely sought after for brachos and eitzos, and after describing my family’s situation briefly, I asked her to ask her husband what Hashem wants us to be mesaken.

She told me she would discuss the matter with her husband and get back to me.

I had promised my daughter to take her to buy shoes that morning, so after speaking to the rebbetzin, I pulled myself together and went out to a local shoe store. As my daughter was trying on shoes, an older woman from the community named Mrs. Piltstein entered the store and sat down next to me, waiting for a salesperson. I was in no mood to schmooze, but Mrs. Piltstein decided to strike up a conversation.

“You’re Faigy Appelman’s daughter, right?” she asked. Without waiting for an answer, she plowed on. “I know your mother since she was a young girl. Your mother went through a lot of hardships growing up, and she has tremendous zechusim. But she’s being neglected. You children are not giving her enough kavod, and you need to improve your kibbud eim.”

There are times in your life when you feel that Hashem is speaking directly to you, and this was one of them. I barely knew Mrs. Piltstein. Yet here she was, barely an hour after I had sent a message to a gadol asking what we should be mesaken, telling me clearly what my siblings and I needed to improve.

All of my siblings had busy lives. Besides dealing with Ephraim, which was a full-time job in itself, I had a large family and a demanding job. My parents were in their fifties, fully independent and not in obvious need of any help from their children. But while my father was a busy, accomplished person — he owned a business and learned with several chavrusas every day — my mother’s schedule was hardly full. Placid and easygoing by nature, she had never worked outside the house when we children were growing up, and even after the last of the kids was out of the house, she was content staying home. Unlike my father, who had a large social network and was heavily involved in the community, my mother did not have many friends, and her social life was quite limited.

Her passivity had actually irritated my siblings and me significantly when we were growing up. With 12 children, our house had always been bustling, but my mother did everything slowly, almost as if in a daze. None of us children had inherited her slow-paced, docile nature, and while we loved her dearly, we couldn’t handle her way of doing things. Like our father, we children are all driven, hardworking, and efficient, and when we lived in our parents’ home, we were the ones who did the bulk of the work running the house.

My mother is a warm, loving, and uncomplicated person, and we all had good relationships with her. Over the years, however, she gradually faded into the background of our lives. She wasn’t the type who would make family parties or get-togethers, or even come over to babysit the children. When my sisters and I needed help, we turned to each other. All seven of us live in the same city, and from childhood we had gotten used to working together as a team. Our mother hadn’t been part of that team then, and now that we were all out of the house, the team continued to function without her.

When I went to a simchah, it was always with one of my sisters. We would sit together at any event we attended, schmoozing and having a great time together.

There were never any politics between us, either. If we collaborated to organize a family sheva brachos, for instance, it didn’t matter if one sister made four dishes and another made nothing. We were a team, and we all understood intuitively that sometimes one team member contributes more and another contributes less. No one was trying to shirk responsibility; we each did what we could for each other when we could. If we couldn’t do it, we didn’t. No guilt, no resentment.

It never occurred to us to include our mother, nor did she ever give off the slightest hint that she’d want us to pay her more attention.

But when I heard Mrs. Piltstein’s out-of-the-blue drashah, I realized with a jolt that my mother was being left out. Not intentionally, and certainly not maliciously, but undeniably left out.

Having received what I felt was a direct communication from the Ribbono shel Olam, I hurried to call each one of my siblings and share my epiphany with them. “We’re all so busy with our own lives and with each other that we never stop to think what we can do for Mommy,” I explained heatedly. “We’ve been totally oblivious to her.”

Not one of my siblings argued with me. All good people, they just needed to have their eyes opened in order for them to recognize the truth of Mrs. Piltstein’s mussar. With two of our siblings dangerously ill, everyone agreed that this was an area that could use serious improvement.

Shortly afterward, the rebbetzin called me with an answer to my query. “The Rav says you should strengthen yourselves in emunah, bitachon, and simchah,” she reported. But by then, I already had my answer. Surely, it was a good idea to strengthen our emunah, bitachon, and simchah as well, but that was a general, all-purpose formula, while the directive from Mrs. Piltstein was a laser-guided precision missile.

The missile hit its target. From then on, each of my siblings and I made a conscious effort to involve our mother in what was going on in our lives. Whereas before, my relationship with her was limited to random phone calls and an occasional visit, I now began to visit her every week and invite her to my house frequently. When I’d go out to a simchah or event that I thought she might like to attend, I’d call her to ask if she’d like to come with me. My brothers and sisters did the same, and suddenly, my mother’s life became a lot fuller, with many more social events on her agenda.

At these events, she was no longer left to fend for herself. We sisters would make a point of sitting with her, instead of clustering in our own little clique and leaving her to find her place among members of the older generation. We included her in our conversation, asking her opinions and advice, and fussed over her by bringing her drinks, fruits, cakes, and other goodies. Surrounded by her daughters, my mother positively glowed.

In addition, my sisters and I began taking my mother shopping before every Yom Tov and family simchah, making sure not only that she had what to wear, but also that the experience of buying clothing, shoes, or a new sheitel would be enjoyable for her.

When I baked something, I started putting away a portion of it for my mother and sending it over to her with one of my children. I also started calling my mother more often, making it my business to take an active interest in her life. Before Shabbos, I would send my kids to do her grocery shopping or run errands for her. My siblings did similar things, as well.

I’m embarrassed to say this, but none of us had ever done these things for my mother beforehand. She didn’t actually need any of this, nor had she ever asked us, so we hadn’t thought of doing it for her. Besides, she wasn’t the type to do these things for us. When I made a simchah, it was my sisters who baked for me, not my mother. So I had baked for my sisters as well, never thinking that perhaps my mother would enjoy some fresh homemade kokosh or challah, even though she herself never made them.

Our family’s decision to improve our kibbud eim was not merely for the purpose of meriting yeshuos. Therefore, when my brother Shragi passed away and our family sat shivah several months after the incident with Mrs. Piltstein, none of us siblings thought to question why our efforts to honor our mother hadn’t brought about a miraculous recovery for Shragi. And when my sister Liba did have a full recovery, none of us attributed it to our improved kibbud eim. Nor did I pat myself on the back for enhancing my kibbud eim when my son Ephraim settled down and began succeeding in cheder, even though that was nothing short of a miracle.

Honoring our mother was not some fashionable 40-day segulah I was taking on while looking over my shoulder to see when the salvation would arrive. On the contrary, rather than wait breathlessly for a yeshuah, I focused on making up for the many years in which my mother had been an afterthought in my life.

Looking back, however, I can definitely say that overall, my family’s mazel had a marked upswing from the time we began to consciously honor our mother. The morning after Ephraim’s all-night explosion was the lowest point of my life, and since then I’ve never experienced anything close to that hopeless feeling of being abandoned by Hashem and pummeled with nisyonos. Instead, I see tremendous blessing on all fronts.

Even my finances have ceased to be a source of strain. While we haven’t received any significant windfalls, the structure of my job changed in ways that made it a lot easier for us to manage on our income. Even with my husband still in kollel, we somehow always find the cash we need.

My mother has never mentioned anything about the increased attention she’s receiving from her children, and I’m not sure that she, with her go-with-the-flow nature, even noticed this striking change. Although she certainly appreciates and enjoys our increased involvement in her life, she has never expressed to us that she had felt left out in the past. She’s an easy person to please: She was happy then, and I’m sure she’s even happier now.

The greatest beneficiary of this change, actually, isn’t my mother. It’s my siblings and me. In fact, I consider Mrs. Piltstein’s reproof one of the greatest gifts I have ever received, because it gave me back something I had all but lost: the mitzvah of being mechabed my mother and the blessings that come along with it.

To have your story retold by C. Saphir, e-mail a brief synopsis to lifelines@mishpacha.com or call +1.718.686.9339 extension 87204 and leave a message. Details will be changed to assure confidentiality.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 696)