Wavering Soul

As told to Malka Levine

In the yeshivah I attended, nice topics like Hashem, tefillah, and ahavas Yisrael are spoken about plenty. But I, for one, could never find them there.

I’m 14 when I show up in yeshivah in neat, rimless glasses. There’s no rule against wearing them… but the other boys in my class wear the chunky glasses that make me look awful. My maggid shiur, Rav Stein, calls me out of class. He flicks his finger against the small lens of my glasses, making me blink. He frowns. He tells me never to wear the glasses again and fixes me with a critical eye that will follow me forever.

One year later I consider myself a good boy. I learn three sedorim every day and stay out of trouble. I’m not even a hustler, the type who gets up every five minutes or so for a coffee or trip to the bathroom. But my maggid shiur, Rav Rosenblum, is concerned over my glaring spiritual failings — namely, that I take off my gartel as soon as I leave davening.

He corners me as I straggle out of beis medrash in the dark, after a full day of learning. “You make it look like your gartel is a terrible burden,” he tells me, shaking his head. “As if you’re desperate to throw it off.”

I leave him, bewildered, never meeting his gaze, wondering if I am a bum. Maybe if I would have looked into his eyes, I would have realized that the game was long over. I have been branded.

I realize I don’t score many points for being the most ruchniyusdig guy. I use gel to keep my peyos neat; my shoes are always polished. It doesn’t help that I don’t enjoy going to tish. And in my yeshivah, these things are all signposts of a clawing yetzer hara. Quite soon, I have a role to fill. I’m not the “troublemaker,” nor am I “at risk.” But I’m the shallow, uninspired bochur who could never connect with anything more transcendent or meaningful than a fashionable wristwatch.

I glide into my new position rather seamlessly. I do enjoy nice things and I don’t particularly love yeshivah. I know I will never be respected, but being cool, at least, garners envy. So I keep to my end of the deal religiously. I never do anything wrong, but I make sure to exude an uninspired, snobby air. Don’t try to get me passionate about anything.

One day, a maggid shiur delivers an hour-and-a-half long lecture for my classmates, about the crime of using all kinds of special soaps, particularly scented ones. When he finishes, he calls me up in front of the whole class, clutches my wrist too tight, and whispers in my ear, “So you got my point, yes?”

The subtle criticism, snarky comments, disapproving glances never seem to let up. The fire inside me wavers, wanes, slowly, inexorably. I know, I know who I am inside, I know that I care, in a deep, desperate place I cannot touch.

There are things I will never do, even if I feel empty inside. Even when one of my friends, an “ernster” bochur, shows me his Sansa clip, loaded with over 2,000 songs from all the big-name pop stars. He wears the right glasses and davens long and lusty Shemoneh Esrehs, so he is good and I will be bad.

Still, I presume that I’m just not a spiritual person. I believe in Hashem, Yiddishkeit is true and good, but all this passion just feels misplaced. I ride through those first years on the wings of my chilled attitude, admired but never respected, and I resolve not to remain for yeshivah gedolah.

But finding a new yeshivah turns out to be excruciating. My parents and I are shocked. I’m a good bochur who learns well and always toed the line. But rejection slaps me in the face again and again. I wonder if there’s something inherently evil inside me, something hopeless, that makes the yeshivos turn the other way. It’s the rosh yeshivah of the fourth yeshivah we applied to who calls my father to inform him that someone is slandering me. He was told that I’m a problematic bochur. But he knew my uncle, which prompted him to do his own research… and he realized that this was a libel.

In my new yeshivah I first taste Torah with love. I hear less about scented shampoos and more about Hashem and simchah shel mitzvah and ahavas Yisrael. But I still feel unholy at the core. I can’t shake the sense that I am a “leidig-geiyer.”

When I’m 18, the shadchanim start calling… with every girl in my community who is at risk, in one form or another. My mother reels with shame and hurt and frustration. There are finer shidduch suggestions coming my way, though, from people outside of our community. Like my mother’s friends, or neighbors who know me as the regular-looking, nice boy who always helps old Mr. Itzkowitz with his groceries.

When I get engaged to a girl, chassidish but neutral and totally unaffiliated with my community, I am happy… but I don’t yet realize Hashem’s vast goodness. Then I’m married, and my wife is funny and kind and thinks I’m an amazing person, which feels wrong somehow, like I owe it to her to tell her that she may not realize it, but I’m deeply flawed on the inside.

But soon after our wedding, I realize something strange. This young, carefree, happy girl I married… she is spiritual. She davens hard. She talks to Hashem, she talks to me about Hashem, and she loves to have fun and go shopping and take vacations, but she is so serious and committed and passionate. Most of all, she glows with inner peace.

It annoys me. Lighten up, I want to say, but I don’t, because I’m a new husband and new husbands don’t say these kinds of things. Her positivity and simple love don’t stop, and I hardly feel them as they press in and around, and seep into the darkest corners of my soul. I’m still very much a part of the community, though, and when I’m in shul or around my friends, I’m still the same. The married version of the chilled, what-can-you-expect-of-him bochur.

A year later, we are parents. I watch my wife go through the crucible of labor, and suddenly there’s a tiny little weight in my arms, warm against my chest, and I feel… transcendent. Bigger than myself, bigger than all the darkness inside me.

I don’t realize at once that I must leave. It’s a dim sensation, creeping up on me, blacker and more urgent, until one day, I just walk out. I stop going to the community shul, stop attending their functions. I find a new place to daven, a new crowd, and when my son is three years old, we joyfully take him to a very frum and wonderful cheder, one that has no connection to my original community.

Scandalous, I know. But I hardly care.

I discover that there are various nuschaos of how to be a Jew. I also find a whole bunch of other things: meaning and wonder and just plain joy.

I still use scented shampoos (Head & Shoulders, nothing very exotic). But now I know that at the root of Yiddishkeit is love and chesed, that the truly great among us never thought any Jewish boy could be shallow. I realize what it means to daven, really daven, and the magic that’s there for the taking. I find a new wonder in Shabbos, an ember deep inside me that aches for kedushah. I learn that it’s enjoyable to be a Yid, that it’s okay to ask questions because there are answers, that living with Hashem is a real thing.

I’m now a part of a small and wonderful chassidishe kehillah. Our Rav is a kanoi, passionate and full of fire, a man who learns Torah upward of 18 hours every day. And he is so full of goodness, seeking out the merest shred of potential in everyone he meets. It still boggles me sometimes, the pleasant smile, the easy respect accorded me, as I slip into shul for Maariv or a shiur.

I’m still sometimes caught off guard… like when my boss explained why he allows his children to watch kosher movies… to me, as if I’m an ernster yungerman, a truly serious and good Jew to be reckoned with, not an empty-headed bochur who davens three-minute Shemoneh Esrehs.

I’m grateful that I realized that the fire inside me was wavering. And I am blessed that Hashem gave me the courage to fan my flames with emes, with truly Yiddishe values, before my fire was forever extinguished.

The Fire of Emunah

as told to Esther Ilana Rabi

She couldn’t know it was her first birthday, but she seemed strangely excited. Then she started chewing on nothing, for an hour or more. I called the doctor.

“It may be a seizure,” he said. “Take her to the emergency room.”

The EEG technician’s badge read “Hadassah Feingold,” so I knew she was Jewish, but her neckline and tattoos showed that she didn’t know about halachah. Still, I felt comfortable with her, and she seemed sweet. She was gentle with the baby and I started to schmooze with her as she attached electrodes all over my baby’s scalp. I always try to connect with irreligious Jews.

Ugh, it’s going to be a pain to wash off all the goop that she’s putting on her head, I thought. Aloud, I said, “I hope everything is going to be okay. She looks fine, doesn’t she?” I kept talking, because seeing my baby hooked up to so many wires was getting me scared, and I always talk a lot when I’m nervous.

Hadassah smiled and nodded absentmindedly as she watched the lines squiggling across her screen. When she went bug-eyed and pale, I trailed off. “Are you all right?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, don’t worry about me.”

“Are you sure? Let me get you some water.”

By the time I got back, her color had returned, but I told her, “You really don’t look well.” Because she didn’t. She looked like she felt sick to her stomach.

“You’re so nice,” she said, sipping the water, eyes on the screen. “Why do bad things happen to nice people?”

Well, there was my opening! She wanted to hear about the fundamentals of Yiddishkeit. I knew she wasn’t asking out of idle curiosity, or because she liked the sound of my voice. Tears were welling in her eyes. I figured something pretty intense must be going on in her life.

I was surprised she wanted to take in my explanation of tzaddik v’ra lo while she focused on the monitor, but I went ahead with my spiel. “G-d only does good. Even if something looks bad, it’s just superficially bad. The things that look bad are really for our own good in the long run.”

“Interesting,” she said, but I wasn’t sure if she was talking about Jewish philosophy or the EEG results. “I’m seeing seizure activity.”

“Oh? But she’s not chewing anymore.”

“It’s only on one side of the brain. There must be something in there that’s causing it.”

I was starting to get nervous, and I couldn’t imagine what could be in my baby’s skull, so I laughed. “What could be in there? A pebble?”

Hadassah wasn’t in the mood to laugh. She was in anguish. “How could G-d make a baby suffer?”

“It’s the same principle I was telling you about before,” I explained. “We have to trust that everything G-d does is for the best. The trouble is that we don’t always see the big picture. It’s like, if we woke up from a deep sleep just in time to see a man plunging a knife into another guy’s throat, we’d assume we were witnessing a murder. We wouldn’t know that the guy was choking to death and the man with the knife was a doctor who was opening an airway.”

“But why would G-d make a baby be born with cancer?” Hadassah was crying now. Slowly, it began to dawn on me that she wasn’t upset because of something going on in her life, but because of what was going on in mine.

“Pebbles… can’t get… into the brain, can they?” I asked.

Hadassah had been trying to break the news to me gently, but she couldn’t pussyfoot around anymore. “There’s something growing there.” She started to sob.

My body reacted before my brain. My knees went weak, my arms trembled, and I was freezing. I was falling apart, but all I could think was, I can’t just talk the talk. I have to walk the walk. I told her I believe that everything Hashem does is good and I have to act like I believe it, too. The slow-to-light coals I’d been trying to light in Hadassah’s heart flared inside my own. I DO believe it, I told myself.

Aloud, I said, “It’s going to be okay, Hadassah.” Only later did I realize how absurd it was that I was comforting her. “G-d loves us. Everything He does is for our good.”

And then, because I talk too much when I’m nervous, I said, “My baby needs a bath. That goo you put on for the electrodes is all over her hair. I can’t hold her when she’s so greasy.”

I felt like I was dissociating from my body. I was floating above the room while Hadassah called an aide and told her to arrange for a CT scan right away. A cadre of doctors came in to stare in fascination at my baby’s read-out, and a Lubavitcher walked past, handed me a bag of Bissli, and wished me a refuah sheleimah. “I don’t want to need a refuah sheleimah,” I called after him.

“Why don’t you go outside and call your husband and I’ll give the baby a bath,” Hadassah urged.

And almost right away, I felt Hashem’s love envelop us. On a scale of one to ten, the day had been a minus ten, but then my husband strode in and I felt like a damsel in distress who’s about to be saved by a knight in shining armor. That bumped me up to minus nine.

The doctor told us, “We don’t have a brain surgeon who can deal with this here,” so we phoned the medical-referral askan. He asked, “What’s the diagnosis?” and I realized that I didn’t know, but just then our doctor walked past and I handed him the phone. Minus eight.

We were told that a certain Dr. Michovitz had just developed a technique for excising this kind of tumor. Minus seven. He could see us right away, even though it was Friday afternoon. Minus six.

We went home to grab some clothes, food, a siddur, and a book. The big kids couldn’t stop crying. “What’s wrong with you guys?” I asked. “Don’t you know that Hashem is great and everything is going to be okay?” In talking to Hadassah, I’d convinced myself completely of Hashem’s chesed. “Cancel our Shabbos guests. No! Wait! You like them, and they’re such sensible people. You’ll be glad they came.” Bump — minus five. And I’d made Shabbos the previous night — minus four.

In the taxi to the hospital, I looked at my baby and realized how glad I was she was a baby. The doctor had given her anti-seizure medicine, Hadassah had given her a bath, and she looked as perfect as she always did. If she’d been older, I would have had to explain to her what was going on. That would have been heartbreaking, but she was just a baby, happy in my arms and unaware that anything was wrong. Minus three.

“It looks benign — see how nice and smooth the edges are?” Dr. Michovitz said. Bump — minus two. It wasn’t Shabbos yet and we could call the kids with the good news. Minus one.

I’m not the only one who talks a lot when nervous. The other mothers in the children’s ICU did too. “His bike was completely mangled.” “I told him not to play with the power tools.” But “My baby has a brain tumor” gained us instant sympathy and kindness. The day turned out to be a zero — still the worst day of my life, but I could see that Hashem was keeping it from being more than I could bear.

Shabbos morning, a baby in the ICU coded. His mother was going crazy. “Pray!” I said.

She flung her hands into the air in a gesture of defeat. “I can’t! I’m not religious!”

“Anyone can pray, any time.” I pleaded with her. But she was beyond listening.

I decided to make a serious effort to educate my baby in yiras Shamayim when she was bigger. If she was going to face challenges, she’d need to be prepared. As soon as she was old enough, we began  to look for signs of Hashem’s love every day.

Now she’s seven, and she has stronger emunah than any child I’ve ever met. When we hear of anyone sick, she’s the first to pick up a siddur. She still has to go for regular MRIs, and each trip feels like Yom Kippur. We all daven, and she davens, too. She knows Hashem was there for us then and He’s there for us now, and she feels His closeness.

Playing With Fire

As told to Miriam Klein Adelman

Dressed in a yellow raincoat with bright red hazard strips and her brother’s toy fire hat, three-year-old Kayla trooped downstairs. She held the hose of an old vacuum cleaner, and walked around the room dousing make-believe fires. It was adorable and we laughed.

But as Kayla grew, I wondered if I was raising a psychopath, a pyromaniac, or a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. When she was five and I told her it was time for bed, Kayla would respond, “You can’t tell me when to go to bed because I won’t listen. I’ll sneak out.”

And she did.

One night at 2 a.m. I woke and on the way to the kitchen for a drink, I passed Kayla’s room. Her bed was empty.

Hysterical, I ran to look for her. She was in the backyard, swinging on the rubber tire that hung from our oak tree. She didn’t offer explanations but simply smiled and said, “I needed fresh air.”

I needed fresh air. I’d nearly stopped breathing when I couldn’t find her in the house. I was so relieved she was okay, but furious at her for scaring me like that. But she’d do this kind of thing all the time. She had no fear of authority. She had no fear at all.

When Kayla was seven years old, I found charred matchsticks lying around the house. “Kayla, what’s this all about?”

“I don’t know,” Kayla lied easily. “Maybe Levi was playing with them.”

I didn’t think Levi was playing with them; it was Kayla who had the fascination with fire. But I couldn’t prove it. More significantly, I wasn’t ready to admit there was a problem.

When we went to the park, she threw rocks at the ducks. I remember feeling a choking sensation. “Kayla, you’re hurting the ducks! Stop throwing rocks at them,” I yelled.

She glanced at me and continued throwing rocks until I went over and pulled them out of her hands.

Perhaps most bizarre was that Kayla’s teachers raved about her. Her third grade report card read: It was a pleasure having Kayla this year. She made a fine contribution to our class. Kayla takes keen interest in her work and is always agreeable and responsible. Have nachas. Every morning, before Kayla left for school, she wished me a cheery goodbye, sang out, “I love you,” and planted a big kiss on my cheek.

But at night Kayla refused to eat supper. I said, “Kayla, if you don’t eat supper now, you can’t eat later.”

“I don’t care,” she’d answer. “I’ll just steal your money and buy my own food.”

She did steal my money, lots of times. My denial was in full swing by then. I’d attribute my missing money to my poor memory. Perhaps I had misplaced the cash or had forgotten how much was in my wallet.

Sometimes I acknowledged there was something seriously wrong, but other times I masked my terror by convincing myself she was fine. “The teachers love her, she’s so smiley when she goes off to school and she has friends,” I’d repeat to myself and my husband.

We made an effort to speak to the teachers but they were unhelpful. I don’t think they ever quite believed me when I tried to explain Kayla’s behaviors. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely open with them as I didn’t want to risk having the additional problem of Kayla being kicked out of school.

One day a new neighbor drove up and knocked on my door. After I opened it, he pulled out his cell phone, scrolled down to a picture and asked, “Do you know who this girl is?”

I looked. “Yes, it’s my daughter.”

“She was lighting a fire in my backyard.”

I gulped out an apology and hid the matches.

Kayla found them.

The following week, my husband looked out the window to our backyard to see her staring fixedly at the blazing leaves. We ran out, my husband dousing the flames, and me shaking her (yes, shaking her). “Kayla, you can’t light fires. It’s dangerous!”

She simply shrugged. “I like to,” she said.

What was wrong with Kayla? What gave her so much anguish that she felt pleasure in starting fires? Why could she express no emotion other than anger and glee at hurting innocent creatures? She was nine years old and setting fires, I finally admitted to myself. Was I going to wait until there was a tragedy?

When we met with the therapist, she asked us if we had any reason to suspect abuse in Kayla’s past or anything that would cause her to act out. “No,” we answered.

The therapist met with Kayla. “Why don’t you draw me a picture?”

“Of anything?” Kayla asked.

“Of anything.”

Kayla drew a fire. It consumed everything: houses, family, trees, but left one lone stick figure with long brown hair. Many sessions later, there were more drawings of the same, and in every picture, there was a fire. However, perhaps the most telling sign was that a mother was never present in the family she drew.

“Where’s the mother?” the therapist would ask.

“She went away.”

“How does that make you feel?”

Kayla would shrug.

The therapist requested an appointment with me. “What’s your schedule like?” she asked almost nonchalantly. “Did you work when Kayla was a baby?”

“No, but now I work full-time. I’m a little overwhelmed,” I confessed. “My husband is busy with his mother who’s been sick for years, so he’s not around much.”

“How about when Kayla was younger?” the therapist pressed. “Any out-of-the-ordinary things happen?”

“Well, there was the year when she was two-and-a-half years old that I had acute bronchitis that morphed into pneumonia and I was hospitalized a few times.”

“How long were you hospitalized and what did you do with the children?”

“We had a babysitter come to the house. I’d say that I was in and out of the hospital for about a year. Yeah, it was terrible.”

I was still in denial.

Then I recalled something else that had occurred at that time. “My husband came home from work one day,” I said, “and Kayla was throwing blocks at the babysitter. At that point she was a docile child, so he was surprised. When this scenario was repeated daily, he mentioned it to me. He also noticed that the babysitter was cooing over Kayla’s baby brother a lot and ignoring her.  I said, ‘Get rid of the babysitter.’ With the new babysitter, the block throwing stopped. Other than that,” I reported, “nothing unusual happened.”

But I’d given the therapist most of the information needed. “One more thing,” she said. “Did you ever sit down with Kayla and explain your absences?”

“She was a baby,” I responded indignantly. “What was there to explain?”

“Only that Mommy loves you, that she’s going away now and it’s very scary, but she’ll come home as soon as she can. Also trying to phone when you were feeling up to it would have gone a long way.”

The therapist explained to me that to a small child, a mother leaving even for a short while translates into mommy is never coming back. A mother leaving for a few weeks is like death. A mommy leaving every few months for a week or two teaches the child that the world is not a safe place.

“She’ll likely have trust issues for the rest of her life if we don’t do anything right now to help her,” the therapist asserted. “The fire setting and other aggressive behaviors became a way to cope with her stress and a call for help.” The more she talked, the more I felt myself shrinking into my skin. What had we done to our child?

In addition to Kayla’s therapy, I started my own therapy to obtain tools to help Kayla with her aberrant behavior. I learned to be loving, yet hold boundaries. It wasn’t easy. It was actually downright painful as I stifled my horror at witnessing Kayla pouring salt on snails and pulling legs off bugs.

Kayla was 14 years old and on her way to sleepaway camp for the first time. She was excited and I was anxious. I hugged her before she left and said, “I can’t wait to hear all about it.” Although Kayla had stopped setting fires years before, and her other aggressive behaviors had abated, I prayed there would be no report of a bunkhouse aflame.

Kayla excitedly e-mailed me pictures of roaring campfires with flames climbing to the stars. Every week, the campers built a campfire, and Kayla was the first to collect twigs and the last to stamp out the charred remains. I knew it was in a controlled, positive setting. I found myself beginning to breathe again, deep abdominal, life-expanding breaths that I realized I hadn’t taken in more than ten years.

When Kayla was 18 years old, she was a counselor for teens at risk. Because she had practiced risky behavior as a way of dealing with her childhood terrors, she felt a kinship to these troubled girls. And perhaps the surest sign of her growth were the campfires she taught the girls to construct. Then she’d sit together with them, arms linked around the blazing campfire, and they’d watch the flames leap skyward.

Adjusting  the Flames

Elana Rothberg

i sit across from a stern-faced man and a woman with a grin playing on her lips. I focus on the woman, directing my responses toward her; it’s easier to deal with this interview if I experience immediate positive feedback. Getting this job is important to me. I don’t want to mess it up because of my nerves.

We discuss my credentials, experience, and degrees. As the potential employers launch into their descriptions of their expectations and the responsibilities of the position, the boss pauses, catches my eye. “What I’m trying to say is that we need someone who can be a go-getter, perhaps even a bit aggressive.”

Aggressive? Can I do that? I mull the question over.

I flash back to a year before, sitting in the office of my former employer. He had asked me to come in to discuss a few things. I had an intuitive sense of where the conversation was headed.

While I projected a sense of calm, inside was a storm of hurt, anger, resentment, confusion. My boss had looked a bit nervous, uncomfortable even, which confirmed my suspicions: This was going to be a dressing-down. “You’re affecting the entire workplace, people think you’re coming on too strong….”

Too strong?

His words washed over me as I flashed through different scenes that had taken place in the office.

There was that incident when, during a meeting, I had brought up a specific client who was expecting a response from our organization. The boss, a methodical, cross-all-the-Ts-and-dot-all-the-Is individual by nature, was still “thinking things over” three weeks after we we’d promised to get back to said client. This was often the case, and the wait time was the norm rather than the exception.

All the more upsetting, I often had to suffer the repercussions when serving as the buffer between clients and our company, assuaging their frustrations, all the time wishing clients would receive quicker, more definitive answers… which was completely out of my control.

When I pointed out that customer satisfaction should be at the forefront of our minds, and that clients deserve faster response times, I was met with disapproving looks.

“Customer satisfaction means we’re making a thought-out decision,” my boss reprimanded.

I tried to explain that, as a new organization, we were in the process of developing our reputation — one that could either help us or harm us.

His response? “What should be at the forefront of our minds is quality, not quantity.”

It was a subtle criticism. I bit my tongue from saying anything further.

A small thing, perhaps, but a pattern was evolving. Despite the official office policy of equal contribution and encouragement to share, I quickly learned to tone down my passionate opinions. Too often, I was accused of being “emotionally invested” and acting rashly. My ideas were always thrown to the wayside, or worse yet, lauded verbally but never actually implemented. It felt like an elaborate charade.

After a number of subtle criticisms, a picture developed: There were “issues” in the way I expressed my thoughts and operated.

That scene repeated itself numerous times in various permutations when it came to my work ethic, my approach to customer satisfaction, even my personality.

Apparently, I was “overcompensating” and putting unnecessary pressure on my colleagues, explained my boss. By that, I was certain he was referring to the reminder e-mails I’d send out when awaiting specific answers  from coworkers. Because there was generally a lag before decisions were made and phone calls were returned, I’d often follow up a few days later after making a specific request. To me, this was responsible and appropriate; to them, it felt aggressive and unnecessary.

It was clear that these incidents made others uncomfortable.

I nodded in response to my boss, told him I understood, and quickly rose to leave the room. In my own office, I sat, wrote and wrote and wrote to let out all my confusion.

Was I “too much”? It seemed that my efficient nature was offensive in the office. Was I such a “problem”? Was I socially off for expressing myself?

I later spoke things over with a supervisor, who was outsourced and had an objective understanding of the dynamics at play. She felt that my coworkers’ insecurities were being triggered and reminded me there’s nothing wrong with assertiveness.

Her words were reassuring, but I was still left with the sense that I was a problem in the workplace. That at meetings, I’d have to shut my mouth and learn to nod, nod, nod; that expressing myself, my opinions, my personality, was dangerous.

It didn’t feel good.

My internal pendulum swung between knowing I am fine, I am okay, this is their “stuff” and feeling like I need a lobotomy to vastly alter myself.

Later that week, I sat in therapy, focusing on the incident and internal confusion. We engaged in EMDR, and it was like watching a film with visions coming at rapid speed. A theme clearly emerged as the comforting pressure of the therapist’s hands bilaterally tapped my knees. With eyes gently closed, I allowed my mind to wander.

Suddenly, I hunched over, shaking, tears streaming down my face. In my mind’s eye, I was a blazing fire, spreading rapidly through my office, destroying everything and everyone in sight.

“I’m a fire,” I manage to wrangle out between sobs. “I’m consuming everything, everyone. I’m too much, I’m too passionate….”

Her soothing voice encouraged me to take a deep breath, to continue.

I attempted to steer the images, which my therapist discouraged. I couldn’t help it — I desperately wanted to snuff out the flames, to extinguish the all-consuming sparks. I was told by colleagues that I was different; in session, I tried eliminating the fire.

She advised otherwise: “Don’t attempt to control anything, just go with whatever comes up. Allow the images to express what they need to.”

I listened and let my mind go. An image of a swan emerged, symbolizing a friend who is naturally calm, gentle, soft. I yearned to be that beautiful creature; as I morphed myself to that form, it immediately crumpled, a damaged corpse. Again, tears coursed down my face.

I am not a swan. I cannot be the element of water.

I am a fire.

I left the session shaken, none the calmer, still, armed with valuable insights.

The next few weeks passed, and I managed to strike a delicate balance. I stopped pressuring others for responses, reminding myself that clients would have to wait through no fault of my own. Although I’d changed my energetic ringtone after I’d received comments in the office, setting my phone on a quiet sound, I reverted back to my old, funky tune. I worked on controlling my intensity, especially around others who felt threatened by it, while aiming to stay true to myself.

In one of our final sessions of EMDR, an image of an old-fashioned petrol lamp came to mind. Around a small, flickering flame was a beautiful, brass encasing.

I imagined adjusting it, allowing the flame to leap when necessary, while retaining the capacity to modify it. Aflame when there’s something important that needs to be said, when there is a moment when no one is stepping up to the plate and I am confident I can take on the responsibility. Mitigated when I wanted to voice criticism or when dealing with more sensitive individuals.

Through the process, I realized that I didn’t want to snuff out my flame entirely. The world cannot subsist of water, earth, and air alone; it needs the element of fire, as well, to warm, to ignite, to progress the world forward.

So now, sitting at this interview, I pause.

Aggressive?

I look up at the boss, and with a smile, say, “I think I can do that.”

The Unlikely Savior

Esther Teichtal

I called him Old Man.

He was old then. Today he must be in heaven. And in my memory, all that lives on is a tremulous hand and a walking stick. His face is a blur. His clothes hang on him. He must have shrunk with time. He is alone. That’s why he sits in our dining room on a Friday night, so that he won’t be. Alone.

We are two of a kind. As a five-year-old whose mind floats through a land without time, I always feel somewhat detached. There aren’t many kids in my kindergarten class who can step into my inner world and explore its quirky landscape with me.

Old Man and I — we do our own thing.

He sits on the sofa in the dining room, hunched over a Tehillim, muttering words I cannot hear. He speaks in broken whispers. And I cater to my own devices, wandering the hallways and staring at the walls.

The dining room is gloomy. A small lamp shed its rays over our guest, augmenting the moonlight that streams in through the large windows. But the morning room is bright and alive. That’s where the table is set, adjacent to our kitchen. It calls me with its promise of the Shabbos meal to come. Silver cutlery. Floral china. And Shabbos candles that beckon from the warm brown pinewood breakfront that adorns the left-side wall.

I climb a chair. That’s better. Now I face the flames. Yellow, orange, red, tinted with blue, a whisper of black at their core. They stretch and dip and bow and bend.

This is what heaven must look like. Gleaming candlesticks. Burning flames. Prettier than dancing angels. And there is the picture I’ve brought home from kindergarten earlier today: a thin blue drawing showing the seven days of Bereishis. Mrs. Bowman punched two holes at the top and threaded a thin pink ribbon through them, knotting it into a handle.

In preparation for Shabbos, someone has hung my picture on the small bronze knob attached to the breakfront’s glass upper cabinet. It hides and peeps from behind the play of light and shadow cast by the Shabbos candles.

I gaze at the lively scene.

I wonder… the bewitching thought strikes me. I wonder what would happen, should that cardboard touch the dancing flame….

Pulled toward the wonders of creation, I stretch my hand and gingerly lift a bottom cardboard corner to the nearest flame. I pause. From deep within, a hazy voice cautions me to think again. But childish impulse overtakes reason. What will the fire look like when it grows?! How does it move? How does it eat? How does it breathe? I just had to know.

I edge the paper closer. Closer. It now almost touches the flame. Almost. And then, in a split instant, the flame flickers toward my hand and bridges the void. Caressing the paper, it takes hold and starts inching inward and onward across the page. At first, it moves slowly, and a blackened ridge appears where fire has consumed the blue. But then, the flame shows fury. The page curls in, over itself, and suddenly I feel terribly frightened.

Something tells me: It’s now or never.

I raise a shaking hand and lift the pretty pink ribbon up and over the bronze peg. Clambering off the chair with the living, breathing cardboard thing, I run to the dining room entrance and hold it out, beseechingly, to Old Man.

The flame leaps towards me. I feel a gentle heat warming my face. I freeze. Allowing the picture to fall from my hand, I watch it fall, fall, fall.

Old Man takes one glance at me and puts aside his Tehillim. He moves to rise, but every aching limb and muscle must wait for his deliberate directive.

Now there is no more blue. The sun and the moon, the sky and the sea, the plants and the flowers, the fish and the beasts and my puny stick figures — all devoured by a vibrant flame that is settling fast into our hallway’s faded green carpet. The carpet’s worn fibers merge easily into its eager expansion, and soon the flare becomes a torch. Leaping. Climbing into the stillness.

Old Man reaches for his walking stick. Clutching it beneath his fingers, he walks toward me.

In the silence of the almost empty house, I watch as the flame spreads in a circular fashion. It widens with each deafening tick of the grandfather clock in the hall. An acrid stench fills my nose, and still, I stand transfixed, too shocked to grasp the implications.

But I know. I know something dreadful is happening. Dreadful beyond any dreadful. So, this is what happens when fire comes to life….

Old Man hobbles by me. Reaching the kitchen sink, he steadies himself on his walking stick and fills the negel vasser cup with water. Hobbling back to what is now a flaming pyre, he makes a valiant effort to empty the water over the menacing, dancing flames. His hand shakes, but he doesn’t miss. The fire gasps for breath.

Again, Old Man hobbles by me. Another trip to the kitchen sink. And another. But soon we’re both standing there, wordless as always, staring at the ugly black crater that tells of the battle that was. The fire is choked. Its vigor spent. Where did all that energy go?

I still don’t know where a fire’s energy goes.

That leaping flame just vanished, leaving black cinders and a large unsightly patch in silent testimony to how a tremulous hand, a wobbly stick, and a very determined house guest saved one very silly, very precocious, very frightened little girl and her home.

In my mind, however, and in that place where the spirit continues to burn, I like to think of Old Man as eternally on guard, still muttering his Tehillim.

Flickers of Life

Esty Heller

I’m blinded by flashes and my cheeks are charley horse from nonstop smiling, when the little party approaches. My chassan’s aunt, arm linked with an elderly woman’s, makes the introductions. “Babi Heller,” she says, smiling. And to the elderly woman, “Mommy, the kallah. Say mazel tov to the kallah.”

I spread my arms to embrace her, but she doesn’t reciprocate. She just stands there, gaze floating aimlessly, while her daughter positions her at my side for a picture.

“Smile, Grandma!” The photographer coos. But before he has a chance to snap, she wanders off.

A week after the vort, when I get the prints, I stare at the photo. My aunt joined the shot in the end, sandwiching Babi between the two of us, so my chassan’s grandmother stays put. Even in the picture, I feel her looking through me, not at me. Her hollow pupils make me shudder.

I know this isn’t really her. Alzheimer’s is a malicious disease, sucking cognition out of people and cloaking them in confusion. It’s a miserable plight — and it freaks me out.

Dementia messes with me in a terrible way. Could this really happen? For years, a person accumulates wisdom and knowledge, constantly learning and exploring. And then a fate like this? Being robbed of one’s mental capacities and becoming dependent like a baby? It rattles. I’m a cerebral person. I can’t help thinking what would remain of me if I’m stripped of this, my essence. My me.

After our wedding, visits to Babi become routine. We’d hop onto a bus on long summer Fridays or join family members for informal Melaveh Malkah gatherings throughout the winter months. Babi sits in her glider all the time. She sits for hours on end, unraveling pieces of fabric, flipping through pages of photo albums and catalogs. The same ones, over and over again.

I try to converse with her, but there’s only so much conversation you can make with yourself. Visits become somewhat of a duty.

The family tells me what a special woman Babi always was. A wizard in the kitchen; nobody could roll a kindl dough as papery thin as she could. Nobody could follow her recipe instructions either, because she measured ingredients “mit de oigen, viffel s’nemt — with the eyes, as much as it takes.”

Of course I believe them. But what good is any of that now? What would that vibrant old self say to the amorphous person she’s become?

I don’t know Babi. I’ll never know her. And I can’t help thinking… All my accomplishments, all the goals I invest so much heart and time into… Could they one day become… irrelevant?

Al tashlicheni l’eis ziknah….

One year Rosh Hashanah, we stay at our aunt’s house, so my husband can daven in his Rebbe’s shul nearby. My aunt, model hostess that she is, doesn’t let me into the kitchen. “You’re my guest,” she insists. “Sit.”

So I sit at the dining room table, right across from Babi, while my aunt serves the soup. Babi gets her portion, and I notice she isn’t eating. “Are you feeling okay, Babi?” I ask her. “Why aren’t you eating?”

She looks at me with those muddled eyes and says, “You didn’t get your soup yet. I’ll eat when you eat.”

I gulp. This woman has no idea who I am. She doesn’t know where she is. She doesn’t even know her own name. The light of her spirit was snuffed out years ago. But right now, this moment, there’s a flicker of lucidity, and… to eat before a guest? Never.

That’s when I get to know Babi. A moment later, she’s back in her cloudy world. But for me, everything changed. From an unfortunate senile woman, she becomes a star, a luminary. True, her memory has atrophied. But Babi is not gone. She’ll never be gone. Her soul remains eternally pure and intact.

Mesmerized by this person I just got to know, I press my aunt to tell me about her mother.

“Babi?” My aunt laughs. “There’s nobody like her. You know that I never heard her complain? Never, not once?”

She’s right. Babi is sick often, and I’ve seen her struggling through difficult coughs many times. But I can’t remember hearing her complain, ever.

“One night,” my aunt recounts, “Babi fell. She was in the bathroom and lost her balance. This happened several years ago, before she had a full-time aide. We were prepared for situations like these. Babi wore a panic button necklace and with one press, I’d be alerted. But she didn’t press, didn’t call. She didn’t want to wake me. Instead she stayed on the floor all night, in excruciating pain, and waited.”

I stare at Babi. I’m so used to pitying her, this woman who doesn’t know in which direction to hold a siddur. Suddenly, I envy her. I, gifted soul, who can cook and bake and write and design and juggle a million responsibilities — could I tolerate hours of physical anguish to avoid disturbing another person’s sleep?

I start observing my grandmother when we visit. She sits in that same glider, morning to night, shredding fabrics and flipping through the same album pages again and again. But she’s doing more. She’s pulling down her skirt to cover her knees. She’s covering her mouth every time she coughs.

I’ve seen senile people. I’ve heard them scream and whine. But reduced to instinct, Babi is modest and polite and selfless. To her, those come as naturally as yawns or sneezes. There are no more fronts. Babi is real.

The family reminisces about Babi’s days in her prime. The way she plied everyone with food, deriving such pleasure in feeding people. Every day, she would slice peppers and tomatoes for the einiklech who learned in a kollel in her neighborhood. She would hover over them as they ate, basking in the privilege of serving lunch to her nachas, her dear talmidei chachamim. And on the way out, “Here, Tattele, take this home.”

This was a ready-to-bake tray of chicken, with famous Hungarian flavor.

But now, I marvel over my grandmother’s incredible self-control. I see it on so many occasions, the many times she winces but doesn’t as much as sigh in pain. The waiting for the guest to eat first.

“Self-control?” my husband muses. “Self-control is in her blood.”

And he tells me the story he grew up on, how Babi never once ate treifos throughout her years in the concentration camps. Babi hailed from a very chashuve, Torahdig home. “I couldn’t eat treifos,” she would explain. “What would I tell my father?”

Her father perished in the war, but Babi’s control never wavered.

That’s how she bites back complaints today. She spent a lifetime exercising the skill, until it became an instinct.

It’s unnerving to think of the petty things I complain about. Old age may seem far off, but observing Babi, I can’t help thinking, when I age, will I be like her?

A flicker of life reveals the true woman inside. And this woman with Alzheimer’s disease has become my role model.

Embers

As Told to Leah Gebber

“I’ll be buried in a churchyard,” Joe always told us.

Uncle Joe had the florid complexion of a man who drinks more for comfort than companionship. He had a heart that welcomed strangers from the street into his home, and a hollow inside that couldn’t be muffled, no matter how much beer or whisky he consumed.

How to define him? Amateur historian. Down and out. Devoted son, who cared for his mother until her passing. Nature lover. Alcoholic. A man who could passionately argue the intricacies of politics. A man who, numerous frum relatives notwithstanding, would never go to shul and spurned religion. A man we could never quite place or understand.

Five years ago, Joe decided that nature would be a calming influence on him, and he moved to the Emerald Isle, the green vistas of Ireland. Somehow, he scraped together enough money to buy himself a house. But the house was derelict, already declared uninhabitable. There was no heating or electricity. He had to charge his phone at the village shop, a five-mile walk.

We were in touch occasionally, and we noted that his abysmal living conditions were affecting his health: He began having medical problems, which culminated in a major surgery. Relatives went out to visit him, a social worker was appointed to his case. Joe was forbidden from returning home, and instead placed in a shelter. He was unhappy, and as the months went on, he withdrew more from society.

But still, when Joe failed to turn up at the pub on Friday night, his friends were worried. When Saturday lunch time came without a word, they called the police.

It was a cold, windy Monday when the police found him. He was in his old house, the place slated for demolition. He died alone.

Later that day, we were informed of Joe’s passing, and asked to make arrangements for his burial. Of course. We called other members of the family, but they were still reeling from the news; it was up to us to locate a Jewish community and a chevra kaddisha.

A flurry of phone calls across Dublin introduced us to the chevra kaddisha. There were calls to a travel agent — Uncle Joe had two sisters — my mother-in-law from Netanya and an aunt who lives in Switzerland. By the next morning, we were on a flight to Dublin. Uncle Joe may have said he would be buried in a churchyard, but we would ensure he would have a kosher Jewish burial.

We all converged in the airport, tired after flights and connecting flights. From there, it was a 40-minute taxi ride to the beis olam, and on the way the taxi driver treated us to a treatise on Celtic disease — a genetic illness relatively common in Ireland, which finds its roots in the Vikings.

And here we were introduced to a small but stalwart Jewish community. As they like to declare: a heritage like no other, a community built on strength. The head of the chevra kaddisha, Eli Segal, met us at the beis olam; he’d been in touch with us all the time, dealing with every detail, from obtaining the death certificate and releasing the body from the hospital, to asking us whether we ate only pas Yisrael, so that they could prepare a seudas havarah for us.

The beis olam was hidden by a huge fence. We walked through and caught sight of two low stone buildings: one the prayer hall and the other the place where the taharah was performed. The first building was covered in stone plaques. They could have been small gravestones, but each one had not been erected in someone’s memory, but in honor of.

I stood and read some of the monuments. In honor of the president of the shul, the heads of various community organizations. The names repeated themselves, a son named after a grandfather, father after great-grandfather, the same family names, until the stones were no longer stones but together formed a web, soft as gossamer, strong as stone. A web of Jewish brotherhood, from the moment of birth until the last clods of earth fill a man’s grave.

I’d been instructed to tear kriah on behalf of my mother-in-law and aunt. We went into a side room and I was handed a small kitchen knife. I held the knife to the fabric, nicked it, tore. The building was quiet, and it carried a chill that went through to my bones.

When we returned, the rabbi had arrived along with a minyan. I do not know who they were, many had typical Irish names, but they had taken a chunk of time out of their schedules and traveled to give an unknown man a Jewish burial.

When the tefillos were over, we walked out to the graveside. I’d never seen such a place: There were just a few graves in one corner, and a large expanse of beautiful green. When the men formed a shurah, and my relatives walked through, we saw a backdrop of gray, but a foreground of verdant green.

“HaMakom yenachem eschem…” the men said. They did not simply mumble the words. The words of comfort rumbled through them, and the wish became a proclamation. They raised their voices: You will be comforted.

And something of their words lodged inside me. It was as if Uncle Joe, through the gritty tragedy of his life, had led me to this place where Judaism may not be sophisticated, but is real and genuine. As stone is stone and grass is grass, kindness is kindness.

Members of the community kindly drove us back to the shul hall, where they had prepared food for us. There was regular milk and soy milk, bagels and sandwiches, all labeled so we could eat according to our kashrus preferences. There were no fancy napkins. Nothing elaborate. It was just simple, thoughtful fare. You’re hungry, they told us. Please eat.

And so we did. We sat in a circle and we were able to remember and talk about the life Joe lived, beyond the facelessness of his death. We learned about the family of immigrants he had met and taken into his house — because they had nowhere else to live, he said when people objected. When they broke the front door, he fixed it with cardboard, and said philosophically: There’s so many people who need a key, it’s easier this way. They had taken care of him in return, making sure that he ate and slept, and providing him with company. We spoke of the way he had taken care of his mother.

And we couldn’t help but ponder the irony. The man who had declared he’d be buried in a churchyard had received a full Jewish burial.

What does it take to fan an ember into a flame?

A gust of wind?

A breath of prayer?

The stalwart support of a community that, without fanfare or flourish, worked tirelessly to bestow the ultimate kindness on a stranger?

The unspoken brotherhood of all Jews, whether in Ireland or England or Israel or Switzerland?

All I know is that when I look into my memory, that sorrowful day in Dublin stands out, bright like a flame.

With grateful thanks to the Dublin Chevra Kaddisha and l’ilui nishmas Uncle Joe.