Chabad.org Goodbye, Yosef Chai by Chana Jenny Weisberg (excerpted from One Baby Step at a Time) Yemima with her son, Yosef Chai, z"l This past Shabbat, I ran into my friend Yemima walking down the street with Yosef Chai, her year-old son whom we have all been praying for so much over the last year. This Shabbat, Yemima, who is the person I know most likely to be mistaken for a movie star, looked pale, thin and worn by grief and worry. When I asked her how Yosef Chai was, she shot me her classic ironic smile and said, "Now you know better than to ask a question like that on Shabbat." I see that my connection with this holy little boy taught me a great dealAnd then, only two days later, I was taking my daughter to nursery school when I noticed a small black-bordered death notice. When I saw the name "Yosef Chai Mizrachi," I gasped. Hallel asked me what happened, and I could not speak, my throat swollen with held-back tears. Even though I only saw him a handful of times over the course of his thirteen-month life, I felt a real closeness with Yosef Chai, and looking back, I see that my connection with this holy little boy taught me a great deal. After months of praying for him, day after day along with my own children, Hadas, Hallel, Maayan…Yosef Chai, I would often long to see him, almost like a physical urge to see this beautiful little boy, so cute and cuddly. It took Yemima's pointing out to make me notice the blue feet and nose and fingertips that the medical residents would make a special trip to see in real life and not only in their textbooks accompanied by an unpronounceable name. I can't exactly express what was so special about Yosef Chai. Maybe it was that Yosef Chai was a boy who seemed totally magical. A child who doctors said would never regain consciousness after a heart attack six months ago, was laughing and playing with his adoring siblings at home a month later. Anyway, who ever heard of a child born with only two heart chambers who actually lived? And not only lived, but lived with such vigor and joy for life? Yosef Chai never once ate a piece of solid food, he spent his life on a strict diet of mother's milk, sustained by liquid love. And this is how I remember him. Just as G-d rides on the praises of the Jewish people, so too was Yosef Chai sustained solely by Yemima's milk and the constant prayers of the hundreds of people who prayed every day for his wellbeing. I remember Yosef Chai glowing despite his blueness. His life defied reason, medical realities, and despair; he was a little boy who was the physical embodiment of faith and impossible hope. A few months ago this past spring, I went to visit Yemima, and she told me that she was taking Yosef Chai to the hospital to do the second operation in a series to repair his heart. Twice they had set a date for this operation, and both times Yemima and her husband had asked everyone they knew to pray, and then, right before the operation, there was a disaster. Once Yosef Chai even had a heart attack (isn't a heart attack something that you are supposed to have when you are seventy, and not seven months?) His life defied reason, medical realities, and despairSo, as I left that day, Yemima told me that because of the previous failed attempts, this time they had not told a soul they were doing the operation, which was a dangerous one for Yosef Chai. She said, "You are the only person I am telling. When you light candles this Friday night, know that it's all on you." I assumed she was joking, but she repeated this phrase, "Only you." I looked closely at her face, and saw she wasn't smiling when she said it. I've prayed for sick people in the past, and I know just how terribly flaky I can be about it. What, as though my prayers actually make a difference? Why would G-d care one little bit about what I have to say? As though there aren't another thousand people also praying for him? But that Friday night, I stood for a whole twenty minutes by my candles, praying for Yosef Chai, crying and crying to G-d to have mercy on him, to have pity on his mother and father and sisters and brothers who love him so much. And as I stood there, I imagined the impossible. I imagined that one day I would dance at Yosef Chai's wedding, and I would say to Yemima, "Who would have thought twenty years ago that we would be standing here today?" and she would wipe away a tear and nod as we remembered for one brief moment the despair that we had worked ourselves up into so foolishly many years before. After that Shabbat, I spoke with a few women, and it turned out that a bunch of us had actually known about the operation, and had prayed for Yosef Chai when we lit Shabbat candles. But what a lesson! I have never prayed like that in my whole life, really believing that everything depended on me, really believing that G-d was listening solely to me. And ever since that Friday night, prayer feels different. It's not a dramatic or revolutionary shift, but something clicked that night, like a dislocated elbow snapped back into place, or as though I'd been doing needlepoint for years wearing big bulky gloves, and then one day I took them off and realized that I could do the work better if I stripped my hands bare and got to work. Even though it is a bit scarier that way since you can get pricked by the needle and bleed. And now I walk around my neighborhood, and I see the broken women remembering the hours they spent praying for Yosef Chai, or the women who spent days searching the internet for information to save him, or corresponding on Yemima's behalf with doctors in America and Germany, looking for some sort of solution. And now, the end of hope, the train to salvation derailed. Since I heard of his passing, I still find myself thinking from time to time, "Maybe they could still do a heart transplant." And then I remember with a terrible jolt that we've passed over the line from very, very sick and dying...to dead. "When you light candles this Friday night, know that it's all on you."Yemima was supposed to take Yosef Chai to a diagnostic procedure to look inside his heart a week before he died. The specialist had told her that there was a good chance that Yosef Chai would not survive the procedure, which meant that she and her husband found themselves in an impossible situation; Yosef Chai couldn't survive without the procedure, and he probably wouldn't survive with it either. So she told me that she had pushed off the appointment by a few weeks, and said, "I am supposed to take him tomorrow to this hospital where they are sure that he is going to die on the operating table, but I said to my husband, I don't agree! Anee lo Maskeema! If I can have one more day or one more month with him, then I choose a month!" And Yemima was right. She and her family had exactly one more week with him, a week in which she held Yosef Chai, and prayed for him, and knew more intensely than any other mother on the planet that the baby she held was a total gift from G‑d. A total miracle. The last time I saw Yosef Chai was the day before he left this world. Yemima joked, "It used to be that people looked at me, and now all they look at are Yosef Chai's blue feet." Yosef Chai looked so adorable, so alive, despite his encroaching blueness, that I couldn't imagine that the doctors were actually right, that just over twenty-four hours later his two-chambered heart would simply stop beating as his mother held him in the hospital ICU, and in one moment he looked upwards towards the One who was calling him home, and his soul left his sick little body. And, isn't it supposed to be that when you believe in the eternity of the soul, death is not as sad. Right? But there is no way around the longing, the longing for Yosef Chai, the longing for a baby to nurse and push around in a baby carriage and hold and love. May G-d send comfort to this broken and mourning family, to our Rebbetzin Yemima and her husband Rabbi Chaim Mizrachi and their whole family. May G-d comfort them in the midst of all of the rest of the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem. Amen. Supermom (Excerpted from One Baby Step at a Time) by Chana (Jenny) Weisberg If you live in a place like North America where it snows a lot, then you have definitely never seen anything like the reaction of Israelis to a snowstorm. I spent my first two years in Israel studying at a yeshiva for English-speakers, so the annual day or two of snow in Jerusalem did not attract too much attention from the students. The snow came, and was beautiful for a few hours, and, for me, brought back all sorts of cozy, wonderful childhood memories of waking up in the morning and hearing my mother announce the most fantastic words imaginable, “You can stay in bed, no school today.” Snow days were spent in front of the TV sipping steaming hot chocolate with miniature marshmallows, and sliding down hills with my brother on the big orange slide that spent the rest of the year in the basement- our sled the first to leave a mark in the virgin snow. So, it was not until my third winter in Israel, when I was working in a government office, that I learned that Israelis have a whole different set of associations with snow, not nearly as positive as my own. That winter, with the onset of the annual snow storm, the halls were filled with groups of workers conferring in tense, loud voices about the flakes accumulating on their windowsills. Those with cars locked up their offices and headed for the exit with quick steps as they pulled on their jackets, their car keys ready in hand to turn on the ignition. The rest of the workers lingered a bit longer, peering out the windows with pinched lips, making dire pronouncements like, “They say it’s not going to stop for hours” and “I’m getting out of here before they stop the buses,” and then calling out to no one in particular as they headed for the elevator, “Be careful, it’s dangerous out there! And this winter, a decade later, for the last few weeks there have been rumors flying all over the place that snow is on the way, but all of the promised dates passed like calculated predictions of the Apocalypse, with nothing more than some sweater piercing wind or some skirt drenching rain. And then, this morning, my husband told me that he had heard on the radio that there was a very small chance that there might be some snow tonight. And out of the blue, as I was walking home from Tiferet’s kindergarten in the pouring rain early this morning, I started thinking that the rain looked sort of like sleet. Or maybe very wet snow? And by the time I was half-way home, my heart started dancing when I realized that I was definitely in the middle of an honest-to-goodness blizzard. When I reached Betsalel, a four lane street that is usually packed with traffic, I had a big smile on my face, despite the fact that all the drivers were leaning heavily on their horns and mumbling under their breath on account of this white stuff that was making me so happy. But the snow definitely wasn’t sticking. It melted into nothingness as soon as it hit the ground that was wet from several days of heavy rain. So I walked the rest of the way home, said my prayers, and then, after a few minutes, I looked out of the window again, and saw that the snow had started to accumulate on the railing of my neighbor’s stairs. My mind started racing. Dafna was at school, and if the snow continued to gather, within a few hours the steep road leading to her school would be closed to traffic. So, I put on a dry coat, and tried to order a taxi, but none of the companies were even answering, all of the taxis already taken by other nervous mothers. So, I walked to the street, and was fortunate enough to find a taxi that was letting someone off at that moment. I got in, safe from the swirling blizzard in the overheated taxi with the radio playing at ear-numbing volume, and at that moment I was overwhelmed with the sweetest feeling in the world, maybe even happiness in its essential form. This was a bit strange, since a day or even a few hours of lost writing time usually leaves me as grouchy and frustrated as those drivers out there cursing the snow. But, in that taxi, even at 9:45 AM on a weekday, I was infused with the glorious feeling that I was a mother coming to the rescue of my daughter. In the taxi, I imagined walking into Dafna’s class, and how she would get a sheepish smile on her face as she put on her coat and packed up her colored pencils, so incredibly proud that her classmates would see that her mother had come for her- that her mother worried about her, and loved her. I had this same honey-sweet feeling a few months back, when I realized one morning that I had forgotten to pack Dafna’s lunch. After I left off Tiferet at nursery school, I got into a taxi, and brought Dafna a peanut butter and honey sandwich on whole wheat pita along with some apple slices. All in all, it took me an hour to get to her school and back, and it cost sixty shekels or fifteen dollars in taxi fares. When I told my husband what I had done, he laughed, and said, “That was a sixty shekel sandwich! Couldn’t Dafna have borrowed food from her friends?” But I shook my head and told him that he had no idea how much nachas, joy, I got out of that sandwich, that it was worth even more than sixty shekels to see Dafna’s face when I walked into her classroom with that peanut butter and honey sandwich in my hand. It’s true that over the course of the day, I also do countless other unremarkable things for my kids to express my devotion to them. I wake up at dawn to get them ready for school, I fold their laundry in the evening after the long tiring day, and I make sure that they are wearing turtlenecks underneath their sweaters so that they don’t catch the flu that has been going around. And I talk to them, and listen to their troubles, and pray for them, and tell them that I love them, and do love them. But those rare times when I can go that extra mile for them, when in times of trouble and distress I can swoop out of the sky and play Supermom- those are the highest, sweetest moments of my mothering life. And the funny part about it is that, I am not sure who gets more out of this giving, my children or me. Dafna, for example, doesn’t understand the sacrifice involved in the shlepping, the financial cost, and the loss of my precious writing time involved in these rescue missions to Har Nof. But I know, even if she doesn’t, that in these little sacrifices I am expressing that my love for her is infinite, that she is on my mind even when I am doing other things, that I would do anything for her. And I have discovered what a wonderful, almost unparalleled feeling it is to be able to give in this way. Maybe this feeling I get is a hint of the great sweetness and satisfaction parents must feel when they can give their children a college education, or a wedding, or help them buy a house. Now that I am a mother, I understand this kind of giving very differently than when I was blessed enough to have found myself on the receiving end. I see now how it is almost a physical need to give in this way, to let out some of the infinite love we have in our hearts and express it in a limited, tangible form. But it is also no coincidence that all of these Supermom stories I am telling are about my seven-year-old, Dafna. I think this is because now that Dafna is in first grade, and comes home later than her younger sisters, she is simply not around as much as my other children to benefit from the rest of the routine giving I do. She is not there for the daily breakfasts spent joking around with her little sisters and divvying up spoonfuls of my tea into their cups, nor for the long walk to nursery school when we discuss the names of trees and family plans for the upcoming holidays, nor for the meltdowns and giggly reconciliations that often precede lunch. So while I got special satisfaction last week rushing to pick up Tiferet early from nursery school when she had a fever, when I can rush to help out Dafna, I feel especially happy. With these rescue missions I am saying that even though she is growing up, and spending more time with her new friends and new life in school, that she is still on my mind. That even though she is my big girl, she is still my baby. So this morning in the taxi, when I saw the snow turn into rain, I willed it to turn back into snow again, but it didn’t. And the lady on the blasting radio said, “The Municipality has announced that all the nervous parents should not come to pick up their children. The snow will all have melted within the hour,” so I told the taxi driver to turn back around. And I felt disappointed to not be able to play Supermom that day, but still, I didn’t feel frustrated at all by my partially-wasted morning. Even if I hadn’t managed to give a gift to my daughter that day, I had at least given a little one to myself.