The Fifth Sacrifice
| October 28, 2015
For almost a year, Chaim Rothman defied the odds and clung to life. But 49 weeks after confronting a terrorist’s meat cleaver in Har Nof’s Bnei Torah shul, he succumbed to his wounds, closing a cycle of worldwide prayer in the wake of a massacre that left Klal Yisrael stunned and took the lives of another four kedoshim. For his wife Risa, it’s about holding on to G-d’s Hand.
For the past 49 weeks, Jews around the world have been offering up heartfelt tefillos for Chaim Yechiel ben Malka — Chaim (Howie) Rothman — who absorbed lethal blows to his head by a terrorist’s meat cleaver last year in Har Nof’s Kehilas Bnei Torah shul. This past Motzaei Shabbos, a circle of sorts has been closed — one that began last 25 Cheshvan (November 18) with the horrific Shacharis murders of four kedoshim and ended with Chaim Rothman’s final earthly journey accompanied by thousands.
Four other rabbis and Torah pillars of the Har Nof community — Aryeh Kupinsky, Avraham Shmuel Goldberg, Rav Kalman Zev Levine, and Rav Moshe Twersky Hy”d — were slaughtered while wrapped in talleisim; those terrifying images continue to burn in the eyes and hearts of Jews everywhere.
For Reb Chaim’s widow Risa, who for the last year remained a constant presence at the side of her comatose husband while trying to maintain a level of normalcy for her large family, it was a year of pain and anguish, but also a year of uncovering hidden reserves of inner strength and untapped levels of emunah.
At the shivah this week in her home on Rechov Agassi just opposite the Bnei Torah shul, Risa Rothman opened up to Mishpacha about those challenges, and about her own journey of self-discovery within the mind-boggling trauma that she acknowledges was “transformational, but that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”
Before the levayah, she told some of the neighborhood women who had gathered in her home, “This was a hard year.”
“One friend said, ‘Risa, what are you talking about? This was a terrible year.’ But I corrected her. I said, ‘No, it wasn’t terrible. My son got married — although yes, it was hard to go to the chuppah with his father in a coma — and two grandchildren were born. I have much to be makir tov for. Every day was just another embrace of what Hashem had in store for me.’
“And that’s how I looked at the bigger picture,” Risa explains two days into the shivah. “That was the macro level of what the last year was like. Then there was the micro level, where I had — and will have — to keep seder in my life. It meant getting up, taking care of the kids, going to the hospital, trying to squeeze in a little self-care. I couldn’t do anything about my husband’s condition — that was in Hashem’s Hands. But I could do my best to meet my family’s needs.”
But it was much bigger than just the Rothman family. Chaim, she says, was a Korban Tzibbur, connected to so many different types of people whose lives he touched during his 55 years in This World, and especially in the last logic-defying months as he clung to life despite having his brain stem smashed — while Jews from all over continued to perform innumerable good deeds on his behalf.
Never in Limbo
These last weeks of street terror have seen 10 murders, over 120 injured and dozens still fighting for their lives in the country’s medical centers. Yet what was it about Reb Chaim Rothman that rallied the entire Har Nof community on his and his family’s behalf for an entire year? Friends and neighbors say “he was the nicest guy in the world;” “he was extremely humble;” “he was always looking out for chesed;” “he never wasted a minute;” “he didn’t miss a minyan in three decades;” “he always ran to shul, even if he was early.”
When the Arutz 10 channel asked Risa to describe her husband, she put it in clearer terms: “Whatever Chaim did, he did until the very end. He loved Eretz Yisrael so he came on aliyah. He loved Klal Yisrael so he was mechabed every Yid — the street kids, the down-and-out, it didn’t matter. And he loved Hashem so he was stringent in Torah and mitzvos.”
Chaim (Howie) Rothman grew up in Toronto in a traditional, Conservative-affiliated family. He attended the Bialik Hebrew Day School and the Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto (CHAT). Nurturing his spiritual side yet going against the stream, he put on tefillin every day since his bar mitzvah, and was thrilled to be placed on a religious kibbutz with his class after finishing high school. He went back to York University for college, majoring in economics and computer science, and took off his sophomore year to study at Hebrew University; during that year in Israel he became fully Torah-observant.
Risa tells of how one Friday that year, he hung out at the Kosel in order to be “picked up” by Rabbi Meir Schuster and channeled to a religious Shabbos meal, but the counselors ignored him — he looked too frum and actually knew what he was doing. It obviously didn’t deter him. He found his own chavrusas, and after graduating York, came back to Jerusalem to learn in Ohr Somayach. A year later he returned to Toronto, where he worked for Ohr Somayach there and prepared for his aliyah.
Meanwhile, in 1985, 19-year-old Risa — also a Torontonian — spent the summer working in Ohr Somayach’s Jerusalem office, and the one of the rabbis there thought she’d be a perfect shidduch for Howie. She says she wasn’t even thinking about marriage at the time, but you can’t argue with bashert. A year later, they were married and made aliyah, and Chaim (Howie) secured a job as an auditor for the State Comptroller, a position he maintained until he was critically injured last year.
Soon they celebrated the birth of their bechor, Eli — a gift given to them for 17 years. One evening ten years ago Eli, a young masmid who learned in yeshivah in Bayit V’Gan and rode his bike back and forth every day to Har Nof, didn’t come home. Search parties combed the area of the Jerusalem Forest and found his body 24 hours later — with his mangled bike at the bottom of a cliff. During that search, Risa stayed home and waited, tapping into reserves of emunah and bitachon that enabled her to confront that first tragic funeral and its aftermath with anchoring faith. (The Rothmans have ten more children, the youngest of whom just turned five.)
And that excruciating waiting period taught her that, 24 hours or 49 weeks, it’s about living in the moment and feeling Hashem’s presence exactly where He planted you.
“For one of those big hafrashas challah events in advance of the worldwide Shabbos Project, they asked me to be mafrish challah in the merit of Chaim’s recovery,” Risa says, “and afterward I spoke to the women, relating a conversation that took place a few weeks before. With my husband hovering between life and death for so long, someone told me, ‘Risa, poor thing, you’re in limbo.’ That comment didn’t sit well with me, and the next day I realized why. I realized, no, I’m not in limbo. There’s no such thing. This ‘limbo’ place is exactly the place where I’m supposed to do my avodas Hashem, not waiting for the time when it will be better. Someone who’s waiting for a shidduch or a baby or any other yeshuah, this is where you have to do your avodah — in the waiting, not when it gets better. Limbo is now, limbo is here, where I have to develop myself, not this happy picture of where I would like to see myself.”
They Tried Everything
Risa says this entire year was one big miracle, beginning with the miracle that her husband even got to the hospital. He had been brutally attacked, his head hacked three times and the arm with his tefillin nearly severed. When the medics found him, he was lying in a pool of blood with a very weak pulse; they didn’t think he’d make it to the hospital alive. According to eyewitnesses, he was sitting at the front of the shul and could have escaped through the nearby door, but threw objects at the terrorists and tried to fight them instead. Paramedics too said the wounds indicated there was a struggle.
“The Har Nof paramedics called the intensive care ambulance and told them to wait at the Angel bakery in Givat Shaul — there was no time for them to come to Har Nof, so the chovshim ran with him to meet the ambulance,” Risa remembers. He was identified because he had his teudat zehut (ID card) in his pocket. He lost so much blood that they gave him twelve units upon arrival to Hadassah, and another eight units during surgery.
“It was one day of complex surgery where they put his head back together and tried to save his eye. The eye surgeon came to me and said, ‘I’m going to do my best to save the eye, but there are no guarantees.’ They worked on him for two hours and in the end the surgeon came out and so gently told me, ‘I’m so sorry, we couldn’t save it.’ I was overwhelmed — this man worked for two hours to save an eye of a person whose chances of even living were so minute.”
The first week was about whether Reb Chaim would live, but once he was stabilized and then off the respirator, seeming to be getting stronger as his wounds began to heal, the questions became: Would he come out of his coma? Would he regain consciousness? And what would life be like for him if he did?
He was eventually transferred to the Beit Levenstein rehab facility in Ranaana, but Risa admits that although they were initially hopeful that there he might regain some function, his body became riddled with infections and he was transferred back to Hadassah, and then to Herzog Hospital, which has a continuos-care facility for comatose patients.
“There was a short period where he seemed to be coming out of the coma — actually, it was just one day in June, seven months later,” says Risa. “For one day, it seemed like he was able to respond — when I asked him to open his eyes, his eyelids began to flutter. But afterward there was a steady decline.”
Open Doors
Meanwhile, Reb Chaim’s decades-long chavrusa, Rabbi Baruch Tanzer, sat by his bed and learned out loud almost every day. Other men of the community also organized learning shifts, so that even if Chaim couldn’t respond, the holy words might penetrate a deeper level of consciousness.
Does Risa think that on some level he realized they were there? “We really don’t know anything,” she says, “but sometimes a loved-one can sense the presence. I would walk in every morning, say ‘Hi Howie, I’m here,’ and recite Modeh Ani by his bed. Did he hear it? I have no idea. I would like to think he knew we were pulling out all the stops for him.”
Over the summer, Chaim had been transferred to Shaare Zedek medical center, but when they felt there was nothing more to be done for him there, he was transferred back to Herzog.
Risa praises the care he received in every facility, attributing it to a special attitude in Eretz Yisrael where life is priceless and “quality of life” is not quantified. “They spent two months trying to stabilize him, did everything to make him more comfortable even though he was in a coma, on a respirator, with a feeding tube. Who here would have even remotely considered pulling the plug?”
Reb Chaim, in his comatose state, had a very strong reflexive reaction to touch, and one day at Herzog, Risa was with a visiting friend when she accidentally bumped his foot and he involuntarily moved. “He moved!” her friend screamed. “That’s fantastic!” Risa explained that he’d been doing that for eight months and it was just a reflex, but the friend would not be dissuaded. She went on and on about how Chaim would recover, and how Risa should think more positively.
“At this point, it wasn’t about thinking positively,” says Risa. “It was about thinking realistically. Shaare Zedek couldn’t help him anymore, and he was back on a respirator. I strengthened myself every day with the faith that whatever Hashem sends my way is for the best, and at that point ‘thinking positively’ was just not helpful.
“I actually started preparing an article about mistakes that well-meaning people make,” Risa continues. “It was really hard for me when people would practically force me to believe that things were going to get better, that he would be cured.”
So what was she thinking, hoping for? Chaim’s external wounds were healing, as his outward appearance went from frightening to somewhere in the normal range. But what kind of relationship could she reasonably expect, even in the best-case scenario?
“All the doors were open,” she admits. “Would I be an agunah for the next 30 years? Would I bring my husband home in a wheelchair, brain-damaged with garbled speech, and be frustrated because he couldn’t be the person he was? Or would he just not make it? All the options were there, but I didn’t feel it was my job to hope for some specific reality. I had to internalize that anything is possible, and I couldn’t see that any scenario was necessarily so much better than the other scenarios. So I just concentrated on whatever scenario Hashem put me in; that’s what He wants and that’s my starting point. My avodah was every day to take care of my kids, to forge onward and be mekabel anything that would happen that day.”
That was a tall order, especially in the last weeks after Rosh Hashanah, when there was a sharp decline. “The whole year I was in touch with the other almanos — my good friends — but I was still on the train. Yet in the last weeks I began to come to grips with the fact that he could go, that yes, I would also be a ‘Har Nof almanah.’ And then I found myself crying uncontrollably, finally letting go of all the buildup from so many months of forging ahead. So when they called me and said his blood pressure is falling, yes I had tears coursing down my face and yes, I was envisioning a levayah, but I knew this was where Hashem put me.”
Still, did she have a hope, a fantasy as unrealistic as it may have been? “I guess my hope was that he would hang on, even in this very weakened state, and that Mashiach would come.”
Finding Resources
Risa Rothman is no stranger to tragedy; after the loss of her son, and then her husband, both in such heartbreaking ways, does she ever feel that Hashem singled her out? “Well, Hashem gave these to me. Did He do it to make me stronger? To make me able to help other people? So I have to examine what I’m doing with my pain, and what I’m doing with the resources I’ve discovered to deal with the blows. Lately I’ve been speaking in some of the seminaries, and I talk about emunah and trust when it gets hard, and being able to be grateful for all the good along the way. And what I’ve spoken about — and my own biggest nisayon — is not to be bitter. So when it gets really hard, I daven, ‘Hashem, please don’t let me become bitter! I don’t want to be a bitter person.’
“Those are my constant messages, so I guess you could say I’m using these difficult events in a good way. You know, around the time when Eli died, I used to write quite a bit and was occasionally published, but I stopped because I didn’t want to promote myself through the tragedy. And also now, I don’t want to promote myself through the tragedy. But on the other hand if I have a message that can help people, then it’s not fair to keep it all to myself.”
Even, she says, if it’s packaged in a distasteful way. After the pigua, Risa was interviewed (for seven hours) for a BBC documentary about the socioeconomic divisions in Jerusalem between the downtrodden, opportunity-less Palestinians versus their affluent Jewish cousins. Perhaps, the reporter implied, they have no recourse but to maim and murder? “My only consolation for ending up in that horrendous program was that maybe someone in England heard my story and was touched. Maybe that made it worthwhile.”
For now, Risa is trying to tap into the goodness of Hashem’s gentle Hand: that her husband is no longer suffering; that she has emerged stronger, in ways she would never have imagined; and that she’s been the recipient of many brachos regarding her family — blessings she notes have been bestowed on the families of the other kedoshim as well. “Like I told my friends before the levayah — this was a hard year, but it wasn’t a terrible year.”
(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 582)
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