Episode 63: From intensive care to intensive shlichus | With Sari Lang - special mother, shlucha at the Ziv Medical Center, and doula

00:00 Speaker 1 How did a girl from Kfar Chabad who dreamed of going on shlichus to the ends of the earth end up spending months in intensive care beside her newborn first daughter? What happens when Pesach arrives and you have to hold the Seder in intensive care? And how did all of that lead to a fascinating shlichus in a hospital, and to a profession that is itself a kind of shlichus in a hospital? Confused? Come listen to this episode. A chain of Divine Providence. A story that doesn’t have a happy ending yet, but has a lot of happiness in it. A journey of growth and redefining dreams in the most unconventional way, with Shari Lang, a Chabad shlucha at Ziv Hospital, a doula, and a mother to a special child. A reminder: if you liked this episode, don’t keep it to yourself. Just pass it on—to your sister, your mother, a neighbor or a friend, anyone you care about. To follow me on Instagram, search for Chani Moskowitz. To book workshops and talks on life-changing tools from Chassidus and Chassidus for life, all online, call 050-850-5770. The intro, and then we’ll get right into it. How can we turn our lives into lives of shlichus, full of meaning? I’m Chani Moskowitz, a shlucha in Kharkiv, Ukraine, now continuing my shlichus in Karmei Gat, Israel. In this podcast, we’ll meet different women who will share their shlichus in a variety of fields and, through it, help each of us find and define our own shlichus in the world. Because living the lives we were created to live is the best there is. Shlichus as a way of life. We’re starting right now. Welcome to another episode of Shlichus as a Way of Life. Today we have a guest who traveled three hours to get here.

01:40 Speaker 2 Yes. Hi, Chani.

01:41 Speaker 1 How are you?

01:41 Speaker 2 This is so exciting! How wonderful.

01:42 Speaker 1 Hi, Shari. Now people have to guess whether you came from Tzfas or Eilat.

01:47 Speaker 2 Yes.

01:48 Speaker 1 The holy city.

01:49 Speaker 2 But it turns out it’s much less daunting than it sounds. A three-hour drive—and it’s almost like the days of Moshiach, getting from Tzfas to Kiryat Gat. You take Highway 6, put on one podcast, and you’re already at the end of the—

02:00 Speaker 1 Helicopter.

02:01 Speaker 2 At the end of the road. And it’s such a pleasure to be here. When you told me, “Okay, you’ll need to come to Kiryat Gat for the podcast,” I thought about how important this is. I said, “I’d only make that drive for a birth.” I’m a doula, so I mean to accompany someone giving birth. Once, just once, I drove to Assuta.

02:21 Speaker 1 Wow.

02:22 Speaker 2 And this podcast is a little like accompanying a birth.

02:25 Speaker 1 Who was the brave woman who dragged you from Tzfas to Assuta and was willing to risk giving birth before you arrived?

02:29 Speaker 2 The only reason I agreed was that she told me in advance she wanted to give birth at Laniado. So we drove to Laniado, which is still a drive I’ll do. On the way, she said, “Oh, my mother lives near Assuta.” So she said, “Let’s just keep going to Assuta. It’s only another twenty minutes.”

02:44 Speaker 1 What twenty minutes? From Laniado to Assuta?

02:45 Speaker 2 Oh, yes.

02:46 Speaker 1 No, no.

02:46 Speaker 2 That’s what she said.

02:47 Speaker 1 But okay, it’s at least an hour. Netanya and Ashdod.

02:51 Speaker 2 I said, “Okay, okay, we’ll keep going.” That was the state she was in.

02:54 Speaker 1 Remind me to talk about that later.

02:57 Speaker 2 So that was the one time I made that drive—and with a woman in labor, too.

03:01 Speaker 1 I’m about to ask you what on earth brought you to Tzfas.

03:04 Speaker 2 Wow. Good question.

03:05 Speaker 1 But I suppose we’ll get to that later, right? I hope so.

03:07 Speaker 2 Good question. We’ll get to it pretty soon.

03:09 Speaker 1 Wait, you’re originally from Kfar Chabad.

03:10 Speaker 2 I am originally from Kfar Chabad. And I have to say, this podcast really feels like another kind of birth accompaniment, like part of... There’s a passion for bringing light into the world, and this podcast is really a platform for that. How wonderful! So it was important enough to come all the way from Tzfas to Kiryat Gat.

03:35 Speaker 1 How wonderful! Lucky me.

03:36 Speaker 2 And it’s a direct drive, and I’m happy to be here. Yes, I grew up in Kfar Chabad. On the way here, I was thinking how funny it is that I’m coming to tell such a wild story, when originally I just grew up in Kfar Chabad. All my life, I remember hearing personal stories at farbrengens and thinking, “Oh, I don’t have a personal story. I’m—”

04:00 Speaker 1 I’m just a little ordinary.

04:01 Speaker 2 I’m ordinary, boring. Kfar Chabad, elementary school, high school. I’ll probably get married in Kfar Chabad too, live in Kfar Chabad, die there. I mean, if only Kfar Chabad had a cemetery, we’d never have to leave.

04:12 Speaker 1 I remember when we’d travel to college—I mean, we’d go to Kiryat Malachi—I’d say, “Come on, girls from Kfar Chabad don’t leave until they get married.” And then—

04:19 Speaker 2 Until the wedding.

04:20 Speaker 1 They built that, yes, the—

04:21 Speaker 2 Hall.

04:22 Speaker 1 At Beis Rivkah, and that was that.

04:23 Speaker 2 Now you can even get married next to the college. It’s all so very, very classic and ordinary. Today I can say, baruch Hashem, baruch Hashem we grew up—and I grew up—in a healthy, nurturing—

04:38 Speaker 1 Hothouse.

04:38 Speaker 2 And classic environment. You know how there are boring pregnancies, and you say, “Baruch Hashem, let it be a boring pregnancy”? So I had a boring childhood. We can skip over that.

04:47 Speaker 1 There isn’t much to tell.

04:48 Speaker 2 What’s interesting is that already in high school, when you start growing up and looking for meaning, I said to myself, “My life is so ordinary. What will make it interesting? What do I want to be when I grow up?” The only answer I held on to was that I’d be a shlucha somewhere exotic in India. We had a counselor who came back from spending a summer at a Chabad House in India or something. She came back and spoke about India with such light in her eyes. She told us they had a guest book at the Chabad House, and you could see what people had written about how it changed their lives. I said, “I’m going to be a shlucha in India.” That was the only thing that... Even when you finish twelfth grade and think, “Should I go to college? What should I study? What will I do for work? I’ll be a teacher”—I said, “That’s not relevant to me. I’m going to be a shlucha abroad.” I mean, even as far as a career went, it wasn’t a question for me. And since college was the standard route, I said, “Even though I don’t want to be a teacher, I’ll go to college because I’m going to be—”

05:52 Speaker 1 What did you study? Which program?

05:53 Speaker 2 I studied special education. I said, “If I’m going to college anyway, I might as well do something more interesting, more meaningful.” I was looking for that sense of purpose.

06:02 Speaker 1 Yes, I can relate. I was there too.

06:04 Speaker 2 It’s interesting, that way of thinking: “If I’m doing this anyway, I’ll make it interesting.”

06:09 Speaker 1 I thought it would be useful knowledge to have, even if I didn’t become a teacher. It’s good to know about, good to be familiar with. Good to—

06:16 Speaker 2 Actually, they told us that. Yes, it’ll help you with your own children too. It’ll help you even with students in regular education. Because these days, come on, everyone’s in special education.

06:22 Speaker 1 Later we’ll compare notes about the program. Yes.

06:26 Speaker 2 So all along I thought, “Okay, I’ll finish college and go on shlichus in India”—even before getting married. I really, really, really wanted to. It was a kind of burning desire, or you could call it a feeling that something was missing. You know, we don’t have that big post-army trip, and we don’t have—

06:41 Speaker 1 Wait, but there’s the college shlichus program. Wasn’t that it? Did you end up going?

06:44 Speaker 2 When it came time for the college shlichus program, I really wanted to do something like Thailand. But just before we finalized it, I got a call from the Beis Chana dormitory in Tzfas, and that’s where my journey with Tzfas began. “We’d like you to come and be a counselor,” and one thing led to another. I wrote to the Rebbe, and I went to be a counselor. I said, “Okay, the shlichus in India is postponed for a year. It hasn’t—”

07:07 Speaker 1 How about that.

07:08 Speaker 2 Yes. Then it would be after the wedding.

07:10 Speaker 1 Look, they did take you fairly far away, but...

07:12 Speaker 2 Exactly. And there’s something about Tzfas that’s a little like India in Israel.

07:16 Speaker 1 Yes, yes, yes. It’s—oh, it’s—

07:17 Speaker 2 No, the atmosphere.

07:18 Speaker 1 How do you put it? It’s like it’s one heaven higher.

07:22 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, absolutely.

07:23 Speaker 1 It’s spiritual there, spiritual.

07:24 Speaker 2 You have to understand, on the drive here you really go from north to south, and the scenery changes too. You see the north, then the center, then the south. It’s interesting. And I found myself thinking, “Give me Tzfas. Not the center, not the south.”

07:38 Speaker 1 Yes, yes, yes. There’s something magical about it.

07:39 Speaker 2 Something magical, and something that really is a little reminiscent of India. In—in—

07:45 Speaker 1 No, it’s also a little removed from everything.

07:47 Speaker 2 Yes.

07:48 Speaker 1 You climb the mountain, and there you are. It’s...

07:50 Speaker 2 Right. But why didn’t we actually end up going on shlichus to India? Because when I met my husband and we got married, he had been on shlichus in India before the wedding.

08:02 Speaker 1 Well, well!

08:03 Speaker 2 Look how India kept coming up.

08:04 Speaker 1 You went for it.

08:04 Speaker 2 When people made inquiries for the shidduch, they told me he’d spent six months on shlichus in India. I said, “Send him my way.”

08:09 Speaker 1 He’s suited to—

08:12 Speaker 2 Yes, because there had been a few suggestions before that, and we actually met, and he spoke so passionately about shlichus and about India and, um... So regardless of the timing, that was also a consideration, and we really, really wanted to go. We said that after the wedding, with Hashem’s help, there would be a first pregnancy, and then after the pregnancy, after the birth, we’d go on shlichus. We started asking around. We really started looking into places. There was a place in Sri Lanka that was very much on the table. And then we got to the birth of our first child, and it was an amazing, normal birth, everything by the book, right up until two hours afterward. Suddenly something very, very, very rare happened to our daughter. Chani, she’s such a sweet, sweet girl. Spoiler: she’s four years old now. This was four years ago. Two hours after she was born, she suddenly stopped breathing. She actually turned blue, and they rushed her away for resuscitation, to intensive care. First of all, it’s a complete shock, and you’re sure it’s nothing. That it’s really nothing. I mean, I didn’t even—

09:30 Speaker 1 There’s so much medical care here.

09:31 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, yes, it’s like everything’s fine here. You know, it’s like when a child coughs at home and you say, “There, he’s fine,” but no. They came back to us and said, “Listen, what happened is extremely rare, but your daughter needed resuscitation.” It was serious. They couldn’t say whether it was something like cardiac arrest or some kind of respiratory choking episode. Most likely something respiratory. We won’t go into the medical details, but all at once we were thrown into this whirlwind of intensive care and resuscitation. They put her on a ventilator and sedated her, and suddenly you have a child... It wasn’t even that yet. It wasn’t even a sick child yet. It was really just that initial shock—

10:16 Speaker 1 After your first birth.

10:17 Speaker 2 And I’d just given birth, and I was euphoric because the birth had gone so well. So it really was shock and panic, and I think a great deal of denial. Like, no, nothing happened. Nothing. Then the doctor came over and said, “Listen, we had to resuscitate her for a very, very long time. We’re not... we’re not optimistic. It’s important that you know she’s still in danger of losing her life.” By then night had come, and they told us, “We want to see her make it through the night.” That was the level of it. It was so sudden and such a complete shock. There was such a disconnect between having just given birth and this madness that, while they were telling me about her condition, I was still getting messages saying mazal tov. “Shari, mazal tov, how wonderful to hear!” And at the same time, messages saying, “What happened? We heard something happened.” Prayers. Suddenly a link asking people to pray was being sent around all the WhatsApp groups, and I was saying, “What do you mean, a link asking people to pray?” I even had a moment of saying, “Don’t send it. I don’t want people to know.” And it was just...

11:26 Speaker 1 So it wouldn’t become real.

11:28 Speaker 2 Yes.

11:28 Speaker 1 That too.

11:28 Speaker 2 And also, you know, now this has to be made public to everyone. Something very interesting happened: Rabbi Stritzky from Tzfas, the rabbi of the community, came to us very quickly. He’s very wise. I don’t know if it’s something I would say to someone right at the beginning, but it was a very powerful thing to say. He told us, “Remember, you haven’t done anything wrong, and you don’t have to hide it or be ashamed. Let people pray if that’s what they can do right now, and help if they can help.” He said, “I know people in the community who hide medical situations or things like that, and so much of their energy goes into hiding them.” When he said that, I thought, fine, spread the links, do whatever you want. Let go. It wasn’t in my hands anyway. At first I’d told them to delete them, but then I let go, and it was amazing. Today I can truly say how grateful I am for that. At the beginning, a social worker came over and asked me, “Do you want to go see your daughter?” This was in the first few hours, and I told her, “No, I... I don’t.” I said, “Listen, if she doesn’t... if she doesn’t make it through the night, why do I need to? Why do I need to? Just leave it.” Because... It’s a hard question. It’s this fantasy that if I don’t see her or bond with her, then it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. The whole birth—I kept saying, “If she doesn’t live, I...” You reach a point where you take that possibility into account. “If she doesn’t live, I... it won’t have happened.” Yes, then this whole event won’t have happened. And she said to me—I remember her so clearly too, and we’ll get to how things turned out. Today we’re very, very close and keep in touch, and sometimes I

13:17 Speaker 2 remind her of it. I say to her, “Roni, you looked me in the eyes then and said”—we were just talking about it recently—“you said to me, ‘Shari, listen. This girl, who will soon have a name too, whether she lives or whether she dies, she is [unclear].’” She said it so directly, and today I’m so grateful to her for those words. She told me, “This girl will be your daughter because you gave birth to her. She is your firstborn daughter, and she will be the big sister to her younger siblings.” Now, to say “younger siblings” to a woman who has just given birth... you’ve already done me in. Give me a moment to breathe. But she really said to me, “This is your child. You don’t have to go see her right now. You can take your time and bond with her, but she is your daughter, and this is something that happened to you. This is an event that has happened now.” Today I know to say that to people. I’m a volunteer medic with United Hatzalah now, and to help people avoid trauma and post-traumatic stress, you need to tell them what’s happening while it’s happening. Don’t tell them, “Everything’s fine, everything’s fine.” If there’s a fire and everyone has been evacuated from the house and someone has a panic attack, tell them, “There’s a fire right now. We’ve gotten everyone out of the house.” Another thing is to give them some kind of task. Wow, that’s interesting. “Come bring me the documents. Come bring me whatever you can,” of course. Give them something to do. Give them something to do, but also tell them, in chronological order, exactly what happened. Because so often, when there’s a car accident, people say, “Everything’s fine, nothing happened,” and move everyone along. With children, you explain it at their level. But she simply told me that it

15:02 Speaker 2 happened. “This is what’s going on with your daughter. The outlook isn’t optimistic.” She didn’t lie, but she told me: this is your daughter, and this happened. Why am I so grateful to her? Because even after I saw my daughter, and afterward, and even today, when she’s four, I can still say that bonding with her has taken—and is taking—a very, very long process. Bonding with her, with her story and our story, with myself as her mother and with her as my daughter. So just saying, “This is your daughter. This is your story. It happened. It’s happening”—that matters. And it’s important to me to say something that maybe I should have said at the beginning. A lot of times, you know, people sit and listen to personal stories at farbrengens or on podcasts, and they’re really expecting some kind of happy ending. Some kind of “Boruch Hashem, today everything’s fine, she’s healthy and whole, and the Rebbe’s blessings...” [unclear]. “We opened the Igros Kodesh. With every question. I wrote asking that she be healthy, and a week later...” And everything worked out, and nothing happened, and so on. But with our story, I’m sitting here four years later, and you could say there still isn’t a happy ending. We’re still in the middle of a journey, and I think that journey is... Anyway, life is a journey. Yes, I was going to say, it’s not just the “happy”—it’s the “ending” part. So we’re still in the middle of our story. There’s no ending yet, but there’s a lot of happy, which is beautiful, because there really is so, so much happiness along the way, even though there’s no ending yet. And so many things have happened, so many good things. I really, really love to stop and look back. Maybe that’s also a message to take away from this. I often say to my husband, “Can you believe where we were a year ago? Can you believe…”

17:04 Speaker 2 Where were we four years ago? Every milestone like that makes you stop and think. Even today, with this podcast, I’m thinking, wow, this is really an opportunity to stop, tell the whole story, and even hear it myself. Though by now I’m already speaking about it in lectures. I mean, I’ve already shared it at farbrengens and onstage. Yes, you’ve already told it as one continuous story. Yes, today I can already say something that... But still, at every milestone, I really, really love stopping and saying: wow, you’ve been invited onto a podcast to tell the story. I mean, first of all, you’re no longer in the middle of it. You can talk about it. You can enjoy talking about it. Yes, exactly. So let’s go back to intensive care and all that craziness. And that craziness went on and on. In the first few days, we said to them, “Okay, tell us—my parents live in Kfar Chabad, so tell us...” In Tzfas. At Ziv, in Tzfas. Right. My parents were trying to decide whether to come for Shabbos and then go back, or stay and bring things for a longer stretch. They were trying to plan. We asked, “Is this a matter of a few days? Should they just stay?” And the staff looked at us and said, “Listen, this is going to take a long time.” Wow. “Either tell them to stay or tell them to go back—whatever you decide, wherever they can stay. But understand that this is going to take time.” I’ll jump ahead: we were in intensive care, first at Ziv and then at Schneider, for nine months. Wow. Almost a year. Another pregnancy. Enough time for that. It really was, yes. Nine months... Wow. You know, nine months to bring her into the world, and another nine months to bring her home. And even though they’d told us it would take a long time...

18:52 Speaker 2 What does being in intensive care mean? You’re sitting beside her nonstop, basically? Yes, yes, that’s what we’re about to talk about. Because they did tell us it would take time, but they didn’t tell us it would be nine months. They also didn’t say it would be—I understand they didn’t really know either. They didn’t know, and they didn’t say whether it would be a month or a week. They said it would take time, but they had no idea how long. So as time went on, we kept realizing it would be longer and longer. At first they wanted to see her breathing stabilize. Once that stabilized, there were consequences from the incident. She had suffered a real brain injury, and we were there in intensive care. I think that with any challenge in life, but certainly with a prolonged medical challenge, people cope in different ways. Everyone deals with it differently. But I didn’t know that then. My way of coping seemed to me the strangest thing in the world. I was sure I was the only one coping like that, and that everyone... Because I didn’t—I hadn’t even chosen it. Today I can say that my defense mechanism chose it for me, or my mind chose it for me: in order to function and hold myself together, I went into a kind of apathy, a certain detachment. I did function. I came to intensive care every day. They told us—the unit there was very, very small—they said, “We’re watching over your daughter twenty-four hours a day. You can...” They told us, “This is a long hospitalization. You don’t need to be here twenty-four hours a day. Go home to sleep, especially since you live nearby in Tzfas. Sleep at home and come in the morning. You need to maintain some kind of routine.” Let’s say that after a week or two of being there

20:36 Speaker 2 around the clock, with all the craziness, once they realized it was going to be prolonged, they told us, “With long hospitalizations, we become the child’s family too, you could say. Go home, come back in the morning, keep a routine, keep living your lives.” At some point my husband even went back to work. But I did come in—I naturally came every day. The intensive-care staff really became our family, and in a way you could say we lived there. You’re there all day. You know the staff, you know the people; the patients around you come and go. It really becomes an intensive-care routine. There is a routine there. Chani was growing. She turned one month old, then two months, then three. She was still so tiny, with so many machines. I remember all those early days: so many machines, a long period on a ventilator, beeping... And there’s a daily schedule. They don’t say, for example, “She’s hungry.” They say, “Okay, it’s feeding time,” or, “It’s time for nutrition,” or, “Connect her—”

21:40 Speaker 3 That kind of terminology...

21:41 Speaker 2 It’s terminology that stayed with us even after we came home. She still needed to be fed through a machine, and we’d say, “Connect her to the food.” Not, “The baby needs to eat.” And certainly not anything about nursing. At first I was still pumping milk for her. It was very, very hard because I was so detached. I remember my husband saying to me, “Shari”—the doctors had said it was preferable for her to have breast milk, even if she got it through the machine—and my husband said, “Shari, let’s think about what might help you pump.” He was very much of the mind that we should do everything the doctors said. We had a conversation about it, because I’d been a bit lax about pumping. He sort of “sat me down for a talk”—we sat together over coffee and talked pleasantly—and he said, “Let’s think about how we can put more effort into pumping, so Chani can have breast milk.” I looked at him, and more than the pain over her medical condition, there was the pain of: what kind of mother am I, that my husband has to tell me to pump milk for our child? He was explaining to me why it mattered, and it was awful. It was awful. Why wasn’t my natural instinct to want what was best for my daughter? Why wasn’t it my natural instinct to pump milk for her? It was a terrible feeling, and it stayed with me through that whole early period: what kind of mother am I? I remember coming to intensive care once, and the nurse said, “Well, do you want to hold her?” Because holding her meant doing it with a nurse. The nurse would lift her, and I was like some aunt.

23:28 Speaker 3 No, they don’t trust you to do it yourself.

23:29 Speaker 2 Yes. I’d sit down, and the nurse would bring her to me, because she was on a ventilator and they couldn’t let it shift. So I’d hold her, but I couldn’t get up and walk around with her. I had to sit there for however long I could, and I didn’t know how to talk to her, sing to her, or say pesukim to her. I tried, and when they asked, “Do you want to hold her?” in my heart the answer was no.

23:50 Speaker 3 That’s hard.

23:51 Speaker 2 But out loud I said, “Yes, of course.” I’m her mother. I wasn’t going to say no.

23:54 Speaker 3 That’s tough.

23:55 Speaker 2 And it’s not that you don’t want to, or don’t feel like it, or... How long can you hold her like that? It’s not even like babysitting. It’s more than that.

24:04 Speaker 3 Listen, she’s your first child too. I don’t know—I can’t put myself in your shoes. But I think there can be this feeling of, “Who is this child?” This isn’t the child I gave birth to. This isn’t the child I imagined, and...

24:19 Speaker 2 Also—

24:19 Speaker 3 And she’s hidden behind so many machines. Wow, it’s so complicated.

24:24 Speaker 2 Very, very, very, very. And it wasn’t only that she wasn’t the child I’d given birth to. I’ll say something that’s a little hard to hear: she didn’t even feel like a child yet. Think about it: she didn’t cry, she didn’t laugh, she didn’t... You know what creates that bond? You nurse a baby, and the baby laughs and looks at you and makes faces, and you melt. Even with a healthy baby, there are mothers who take time to bond. Here there was no feedback, no response. There was none of that language; as I said, it was “Connect her to the food.” And then think about how they bathed her in bed. They taught me how to bathe her there. Every new mother, after giving birth, might go to her own mother, who teaches her how to bathe the baby. Here, a senior nurse taught me, and it was this kind of bath with a ventilator.

25:17 Speaker 3 Not really a bath.

25:19 Speaker 2 Right. And beyond that, even if you didn’t come to intensive care, they would bathe her and feed her. Your daughter would be cared for.

25:28 Speaker 3 So the circumstances made it possible for you to detach.

25:31 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, yes. Even if one day, um, I had no energy and got up at twelve and came in, and I saw that they’d already done the daily routine—the bath and the food and all that—then maybe that also brought up this feeling of, what do they need me for? And what—

25:49 Speaker 3 Right.

25:49 Speaker 2 And again, what kind of mother am I in this situation? And that went on for a very, very long time. So first of all, there really was a sense of detachment, apathy, let’s call it, quite a lot of it. And I don’t know whether to say that was a result of everything or another part of the struggle. But listen, there’s something about intensive care, or hospitalization, or a medical journey that sounds to people on the outside as though we’re incredibly busy all day. “Wow, you’re in the hospital—what’s happening? You must be in intensive—” But really—

26:20 Speaker 3 Intensive care.

26:21 Speaker 2 Yes, intensive care. That must be crazy. Listen, after a few months, eventually you arrive and it’s: Okay, I came, I spoke to my daughter, sang to her a little, and then I just—I just have to be there. Because I tell myself, I’m not going to not be here. I won’t let that happen. So I’m there. I sit in the armchair beside her, and she’s in bed, either sedated or terribly groggy from the medication. She’s not really—

26:45 Speaker 3 Not with you.

26:46 Speaker 2 Not with us. So what do I do? Just hours and hours of having nothing to do. You can’t go back to work, you can’t develop... I won’t say you can’t, but for me, I couldn’t get anything going. Certainly not go back to work. This kind of vacuum and such an enormous, enormous lack of meaning that I could literally sit there for entire days. I’m telling you, it was to the point of—

27:14 Speaker 3 Wow.

27:15 Speaker 2 Eight to four, you know, just on my phone, on a laptop, WhatsApp, statuses. There were periods when the phone was blocked, then it wasn’t blocked, all sorts of things. So...

27:24 Speaker 3 As far as your family is concerned, you’re taking care of your daughter—

27:26 Speaker 2 Yes.

27:26 Speaker 3 And she’s being treated in...

27:28 Speaker 2 They come to visit. They do, but you’re in intensive care. That’s your routine right now, your occupation. But it isn’t an occupation. So there were so, so many hours of being sucked into nothing. And there’s something about a phone—it can fill that nothing for weeks, day after day, even though you feel that it’s nothing. And suddenly I said, What am I, a high school girl? Even in high school you have more to do, but sometimes in high school you go through those periods of spending nights on your phone, that sort of adolescent thing. And it felt awful, maybe even more awful than—

28:15 Speaker 3 I was supposed to be a mother at home with my daughter now.

28:18 Speaker 2 Working at something, probably building something.

28:20 Speaker 3 Sleeping every spare moment, and...

28:24 Speaker 2 I wasn’t supposed to be a mother at home now. I was supposed to be a shlucha overseas.

28:28 Speaker 3 Wow, that’s even more...

28:30 Speaker 2 Yes, that was the thing. The, the—I think the...

28:33 Speaker 3 You were actually living in a dream.

28:34 Speaker 2 The second loss.

28:35 Speaker 3 In a way.

28:36 Speaker 2 One thing was that I was in intensive care, day after day, with my daughter. It wasn’t clear what was happening, what this was. And the medical team made a point of telling us—and there’s something good about that, too—but they kept reminding us that this wasn’t an illness you treat and it goes away. We’re treating her now, but even when we “finish” treating her, you’ll have a daughter with special needs.

29:02 Speaker 3 [unclear]

29:03 Speaker 2 From the beginning, they said that even when you’re discharged and go home, it’s not as though we’re curing your daughter now. So even after you’re discharged, you’ll be dealing with a child who has special needs.

29:15 Speaker 3 It didn’t have a name yet, right?

29:16 Speaker 2 Exactly, and for a long time it still didn’t have a name. Later it became a brain injury, cerebral palsy, and suddenly you start entering the circles of parents of children with special needs. But that took time. So we also had a daughter with special needs. And that was so, so, so discouraging, because you think, Even when we’re discharged... You don’t even want to be discharged. You don’t even want to—you have no idea what that will bring with it. What will it bring? What does it mean? Right now they’re still treating her, right now the responsibility is theirs, especially when I’m still so detached. So what then? And the second loss really was the shlichus. I think today I can say it truly was a loss—not just the loss of shlichus or of something to do, but a loss of meaning. Because, you know, if we’d been a month or two after the birth and then gone overseas, there was perhaps a certain fantasy in that, too. You know, “When I’m a shlucha overseas”—it was something I’d never done and really wanted to do. Some women say, “When I have a business,” or “When I have...” I don’t know what. People have dreams like that. On a podcast I heard recently, a woman said, “My dream was to be a teacher.” And I was exactly the opposite. I didn’t want that. When you have a dream, you place so much on it: it’ll give me meaning, it’ll give me...

30:30 Speaker 3 That’s where you see yourself.

30:32 Speaker 2 Something to do. I want to be there, and suddenly all of that shatters. So suddenly you ask yourself, What meaning do I have? What...

30:40 Speaker 3 Who am I?

30:40 Speaker 2 And I hadn’t studied anything else I could do if I didn’t want to be a teacher. That was the only thing I’d studied. And now I also wasn’t going overseas. So what am I? Who am I? I’m telling you, it was an all-encompassing crisis.

30:55 Speaker 3 Existential.

30:56 Speaker 2 Truly existential. My identity, my sense of meaning, even on the level of a career. If I don’t want to teach, then what do I want? It wasn’t—what is this—

31:10 Speaker 3 And these are the years when you’re building your sense of who you are and what you are. So this just mixed everything up—turned everything upside down, as they say. Wow.

31:21 Speaker 2 And all of that in the middle of an ongoing trauma. Yes, and I think there was also a crisis, or a little crisis, of faith—a pretty serious one. I had so, so many questions about that, too. It sounds funny to say, but when a Chabad woman is going through something difficult, especially something medical, there’s a very, very clear message from the people around her. In those first days, the only thing we heard from everyone around us was, “Everything will be good. Everything will be okay.” A woman came to visit me and brought me this wheat in a tzedakah box, and said, “This happened to my son too.” And she was sweet; she meant well. That was another thing I learned—to recognize good intentions.

32:02 Speaker 3 I think that when people don’t understand the full extent of what happened, they try... They didn’t really understand what had happened, and you didn’t know either. So they try to hold on to hope and—

32:15 Speaker 2 To encourage you. It’s natural, and also—

32:16 Speaker 3 Yes.

32:17 Speaker 2 Come on, in the end it’s a good thing. I’m glad they didn’t say, “Oh, you poor things, how awful.”

32:20 Speaker 3 No, but there’s also such a thing as ordinary empathy.

32:22 Speaker 2 Right, but I really think almost the only thing we heard was, “It really will be okay,” and “It happened to us too, and my son...”

32:29 Speaker 3 “Let’s daven for you.”

32:30 Speaker 2 I remember what she said to me that first week. She said, “It happened to us too, and baruch Hashem, we see miracles.” So I said to her, “Okay, and how is your son today?” Because the same thing had happened to him. And she said, “He’s in a wheelchair. He’s a child with special needs. But there are miracles, there are miracles.” And I’m thinking, What miracles? Are those the miracles I’m supposed to want now?

32:51 Speaker 3 Wow.

32:52 Speaker 2 You’re saying that even though her son didn’t recover completely—I mean, she has a child who is disabled today, and—

32:59 Speaker 3 And that’s how she encouraged you.

33:00 Speaker 2 And still she told me, “There are miracles, and everything will be okay, and you’ll see the light.” And you really don’t know what to think anymore.

33:08 Speaker 3 Wow.

33:08 Speaker 2 Whether to feel encouraged, or what exactly that light is. I really connected with something when I heard about you—how you came from Ukraine and went through a real upheaval, too. I think you’d already built a life there and then came to Israel. And I don’t know, maybe I heard you say on a podcast that you really had to reinvent yourself. So I was in the middle of that upheaval; I still didn’t have the—

33:32 Speaker 3 Oh wow, everything you’ve already been through.

33:34 Speaker 2 No, no. What I mean is, back then I couldn’t yet say, “Okay, I’ll reinvent myself.”

33:39 Speaker 3 Right, that’s how I see it.

33:39 Speaker 2 When you’re in it, you’re one hundred percent focused on today. It’s really inspiring to me to hear how you found yourself anew. Today I can tell you—today I can say, “Yes, we reinvented ourselves.”

33:51 Speaker 3 I’ll tell you something more. I think that after some time has passed, you look back and say: We’re four years on. Four years is a long time, though in another ten years it may seem like a short time, and so on. But there’s something about not just saying, “I went through a crisis and got back up.” You understand how that crisis was part of your path. At some point—maybe you’re not there yet, maybe you already are—you suddenly see your whole life. And maybe you’re only looking at two years, a certain stretch of time, and you say: There, that’s part of my path. I thought I’d be in India. Hakadosh Boruch Hu brought me somewhere else. This is how He did it. So it’s not that I fell and got back up, but—

34:37 Speaker 2 As if someone wrote your story.

34:38 Speaker 3 Yes, exactly.

34:39 Speaker 2 As if someone wrote a story.

34:40 Speaker 3 And it’s as if you suddenly see it from the outside. You say: Wait, this was part of a particular journey of mine. It wasn’t just falling and getting back up. Yes, it was a crisis, and you do get back up. But getting up from the crisis and what comes afterward—the crisis is an inseparable part of it. It stays with you.

34:57 Speaker 2 Right.

34:58 Speaker 3 And the things that come out of it—good things, less good things.

35:01 Speaker 2 I also think most events aren’t something that just... Well, maybe in stories with a happy ending they are, but a lot of events in life are ongoing.

35:10 Speaker 3 Right.

35:10 Speaker 2 Something happens, and it has consequences. It continues. Even if it’s an event that, on the face of it, has ended, it’s an event in your life. It happened. It will affect you; it does affect you, and that’s okay. So, as she said to me: “This is your daughter. This is what happened to you.” This is something that happened to us. I would never have written it into my story, not in any form. And then I started with small things, small things. I’ll tell you about the big things later, but I started with these little things... It wasn’t even some dramatic decision to say, “I’m going to get up, stand on my feet and keep living.” You know, sometimes, G-d forbid, someone passes away, or people lose a child, or something like that. And in the stories, you really hear about those dramatic steps, the—

35:59 Speaker 3 The turning point.

35:59 Speaker 2 “I decided I wouldn’t break. I’d get—” I didn’t decide. There was no... And I want to give hope to women who are going through something difficult. It doesn’t have to be some dramatic, unequivocal decision. Even if you don’t have the strength for a big decision, like, “I’ll get up and start an organization,” even if you don’t, after a while you’ll stop and look back. Or even today, you can probably stop—I’m saying this to whoever is listening—wherever you are in life, look back and say: Wow, even if there wasn’t some dramatic decision, and I didn’t come out of the crisis... There are even women who think they “failed” at having a crisis, you know? They didn’t get back up and have one of those amazing stories. But there were surely moments along the way when you did things, even small things—whether by choice or, you know what, just to survive. Okay? I can say that I did those things to survive: so I wouldn’t feel disconnected, so I wouldn’t be stuck in that awful feeling about the whole situation. Look at those things. They’re part of the story too. You did them; you were given the strength to do them. So I really don’t know where the strength came from, but I started doing little things like that. For example, it drove me crazy that every day I’d come into her room, hear the beeping, and everything would look the same. So I said, “Come on, I want to start decorating her room.” And you realize that you’re there—this is home. At least I could decorate her room. After all, she’s a baby. That realization that, yes, she is a baby, she is Chani, she is a little girl. I am a mother. I think those were the first little signs of it.

37:45 Speaker 2 So I started buying her pink sheets, and one day I bought a curtain for the window there. Now, it was a tiny space—not even a room. The whole intensive care unit was one room, but she had her corner between the curtains. And one day I just went to Max Stock. Honestly, I’m telling you, I went out of boredom and to survive. And think about it: you don’t have a room at home to decorate for her. So I bought this little pink clock to hang there. There was already a clock, but this one was pink. And one day I went and bought two little pots of real flowers and put them outside the window, in the window box. And... what do you call them? You know those signs with sayings on them? “Breathe, believe, grow.”

38:35 Speaker 4 Yes, yes, all those—

38:35 Speaker 2 Inspirational sayings.

38:37 Speaker 4 “Calm,” “serenity.”

38:38 Speaker 2 Exactly. Now, what calm and what serenity? But never mind. I said, let’s hang it up; maybe it’ll bring a little—

38:42 Speaker 4 A little calm and serenity?

38:43 Speaker 2 Maybe she’d calm down a little.

38:43 Speaker 4 Joy.

38:44 Speaker 2 Exactly. Anyway, it was like those rooms you see on Pinterest with all those sayings, and I thought, come on, let’s do that for her. Let’s decorate her space. Then Chanukah came, and my nieces and nephews drew pictures, and we hung them up... I really remember the staff. We hung the pictures all around her space, and I remember the staff getting so excited and saying to us, “Wow, you’re such special parents. You’re such an inspiration.” It brought so much light. You know, you don’t think about it, but it could give a lot of other parents they see there strength. And I was thinking: What special parents? What inspiration? I spent whole days on my phone, like I told you. So I bought a plant once. Looking back today, I can say yes, her space ended up pink, and it was nicer to walk into. Then, say, my husband’s birthday came around, and we were in intensive care. It was only about the second birthday of his that we’d celebrated together. And I said—

39:37 Speaker 4 Your marriage was still so new.

39:38 Speaker 2 Our marriage was still so new, and everything was genuinely chaotic. So I said, okay... I think today I can say it was some kind of unconscious decision. I didn’t say it out loud or anything, but: I’m going to keep living. I’m going to keep living. We were a young couple; we were practically kids. So wait, I’m not talking about big things yet. But even the little things mattered. So I went and bought him a present and balloons. And I also said—this just came to mind today—maybe I’d seen it on... You know, you see things. Oh, how many status updates and stories I used to watch.

40:18 Speaker 4 You know where you saw it.

40:20 Speaker 2 No, I mean, you see everyone celebrating. And you know how it is these days: it looks like everyone’s celebrating, everyone’s succeeding, everyone has purpose and a business, while you’re stuck in intensive care with your phone, just watching it all. Then I saw that someone had made shirts for her kids with a picture of their father on them for his birthday. And I thought, why not make her a shirt with his picture? So I asked the nurse, and she told me, “Listen, you can’t, because she’s on a ventilator. You can’t put a regular shirt on her.” I could only dress her in those wraparound clothes, you know. At first I was really disappointed, and then I said, okay, maybe I’ll buy a little romper and cut it open. How crazy is that?

40:58 Speaker 4 Wow.

40:58 Speaker 2 I’d cut it open at the back. I was so determined. I don’t even know where that came from, but—

41:03 Speaker 4 I think you were holding on to it.

41:04 Speaker 2 I was holding on to it. It really was survival. I’m telling you, it wasn’t... Anyone who’s been through something can say, “Wow, that was how I survived and kept living.”

41:13 Speaker 4 It kept me going.

41:14 Speaker 2 Yes. So I bought a shirt and cut it open at the back, put the picture on it, and we sort of wrapped it around her without it getting in the way of the ventilator. And then he arrived.

41:27 Speaker 4 How sweet.

41:28 Speaker 2 It really was. Looking back, we can say how sweet it was. We really were young and sweet.

41:33 Speaker 4 You were already a family, too. You celebrated his birthday with your daughter.

41:37 Speaker 2 Right.

41:37 Speaker 4 You made it a family occasion.

41:38 Speaker 2 Right.

41:38 Speaker 4 And that was only possible there.

41:40 Speaker 2 Right. Right. We didn’t have... Yes.

41:42 Speaker 4 Wow.

41:43 Speaker 2 She still wasn’t home. I mean, home was just for sleeping. That was it. It really was little things like that. And on Shabbos—just think—we spent Shabbos after Shabbos there. There was a little guesthouse with a few rooms, so we’d take a room there for Shabbos. Even on Shabbos, we weren’t home. I’m remembering now that every Shabbos, you’d prepare the food and then have the meal in that little intensive-care room. How much do you feel like putting into making a lovely meal? But after one Shabbos, two, three, four, five of living out of a suitcase, you suddenly realize this isn’t temporary. We’re going to be here a long time. So I started bringing real dishes for Shabbos.

42:24 Speaker 4 Wow.

42:24 Speaker 2 Yes, real dishes and placemats. I thought, I don’t know, why not? I don’t know how to explain it. I brought placemats, okay? I said, we’re going to make a Shabbos atmosphere here. So that we’ll have something nice, so that we’ll enjoy ourselves.

42:35 Speaker 4 If we’re already here, we might as well do it properly.

42:37 Speaker 2 I think I said that too—it’s like with special education. If I’m going to study it, I’ll study it properly, and if I’m already here, let’s make it nice for ourselves. Somehow I understood that you don’t need to suffer more than you’re already suffering. Sometimes I see parents in intensive care who... There’s this feeling that you’re not allowed. You’re not allowed to enjoy yourself, you’re not allowed to be happy, you’re not allowed... Sometimes I say to a mother, “Maybe go out for coffee with a friend?” She’s been there for days on end. There’s someone who can take over for her. And she says, “No, I can’t. I need to be here.” Now, that feeling that she needs to be there is real, but it’s not as though she physically has to be there because she’s doing something. It’s really just about being there. I tell her, “Go out for an hour, just one hour. Go have a coffee, breathe.” I guess not everyone understands that you can keep living, keep enjoying life. I tell her, “You’re allowed to. You don’t have to apologize.” Say she comes back and says, “That was so nice,” while her child is in intensive care. She feels she isn’t allowed to say she had a nice time. I tell her, “You’re allowed to say it. It’s okay.” So you’re allowed to enjoy yourself. Even if we’ve been through something hard, even if we’ve experienced losses—really, on the level of loss. It’s on the level of...

44:00 Speaker 4 Not just allowed. You need to.

44:02 Speaker 2 You need to, yes, but first you have to know you’re allowed, because—

44:04 Speaker 4 Yes.

44:05 Speaker 2 We hadn’t suffered a loss. I mean, there hadn’t been a death, but it was—

44:08 Speaker 4 It’s a loss.

44:09 Speaker 2 It’s a loss.

44:09 Speaker 4 On a certain level.

44:10 Speaker 2 Yes. But I’m saying that even after a loss, and after this too, you’re allowed. You’re allowed. It’s okay; you don’t need to apologize. I thought about it when I’d meet friends. Did I have to apologize? A friend sees you, knows you’re in intensive care and knows the whole story, and automatically the question is, “How are you?” There’s no casual “Hi, what’s up? How are things?” It’s a hand on your shoulder and, “How are you doing?” And maybe that day you’re actually doing okay. You woke up feeling good and said, “You know what, maybe we’ll go to the pool today,” okay? Because I’ve been in intensive care for months and I’ve had enough. So you went to the pool and had a good time, and then it’s, “But how are you doing?”

44:50 Speaker 4 Despite the war and...

44:53 Speaker 2 And you feel awkward saying, “Listen, I went to the pool. It was perfect.”

44:56 Speaker 4 That’s something.

44:58 Speaker 2 So you say, “We’re okay, we’re...” At some point I started saying, “There’s no news, but boruch Hashem, we’re...” In short, that’s another thing you have to deal with.

45:09 Speaker 4 You have to learn life all over again as a mother, learn a kind of parenting you’ve never seen anywhere, in a place you’re not supposed to be living. And as you say, socially and within the family, you have to learn all over again how to communicate with everyone in this role—in... not a role.

45:30 Speaker 2 In this situation.

45:31 Speaker 4 In this reality.

45:32 Speaker 2 Yes, exactly.

45:34 Speaker 4 You have to tell yourself the story, and then figure out how to tell it to everyone else.

45:38 Speaker 2 Yes.

45:39 Speaker 4 First of all, to yourself.

45:41 Speaker 2 Right, to yourself too.

45:41 Speaker 4 So many stages of... of processing it in your mind. Understanding where you are, what you’re going through, how you tell yourself the story. It’s incredible. It really is incredible. I hadn’t even thought about meeting people and how you...

45:55 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, yes. It’s a process. Now, we were in intensive care, which is something very visible. People knew about it and wanted to help. And speaking of wanting to help, there’s something else that was very powerful. Right at the beginning, my mother—may she be well, and may she hear this podcast and have nachas—she has this... We’re Ashkenazi, but she has something Moroccan in her soul. She told me, “Shari, listen to me carefully.” Right at the start, she said, “Listen, two things. First, if someone offers to help you”—I had just given birth, and this applies to any woman who’s just given birth. Between us, it applies to any new mother and anyone going through something—“if someone offers to help you, say yes. People want to help; people want to bring things. Do you want lunch? Yes. Don’t say no.” Our instinct is to say, “No, I’m fine.”

46:51 Speaker 4 I’m fine. Everything’s okay.

46:53 Speaker 2 Yes. Say yes. The second thing: if someone offers to help and it doesn’t work for you right now, say no.

47:00 Speaker 4 Wow. Interesting.

47:00 Speaker 2 Someone might ask if they can visit or bring lunch, and today doesn’t work for you. So many people wanted to visit us when we didn’t feel up to it. Say, “Thank you so much for offering, but come on Tuesday,” or “Bring dinner, not lunch,” because right now it doesn’t work, you don’t feel up to it. Whatever it is. Don’t waste energy saying, “I’m fine,” and then not get any help. Let them shower you with cakes, and be grateful that this is your community, that this is your family.

47:30 Speaker 4 And knowing how to say no is...

47:31 Speaker 2 Right. And the second thing really is that if it doesn’t work for you, say no. Because if someone wants to help and it doesn’t work for you, the good they meant to do is lost and everyone feels uncomfortable. They’ve come to visit and everyone feels awkward. So know how to say yes, know how to say no, and know how to say thank you for every offer of help. And what a community there was in Tzfas, what support, what a family. Truly, it was a lifesaver. It sustained us and gave us tremendous, tremendous strength—support from the community and family.

48:04 Speaker 4 You don’t have family there.

48:05 Speaker 2 Right, our family is in the center of the country, but the community was like family. I think, though it’s hard to say, that a lot of it was thanks to our knowing how to accept help without being embarrassed. They even wanted to hold an evening in the community for us, for our daughter’s recovery. And you know, your first instinct is that you don’t want to be...

48:25 Speaker 4 Don’t put the community to any trouble.

48:25 Speaker 2 Don’t trouble them, and you don’t want to be the person everyone pities. But then you think, just the opposite. If they saw us as people to be pitied, they wouldn’t have dared suggest it. It was precisely because they loved us, because they saw us as strong and felt they could offer us something and daven for us. I don’t know how to explain it, but I told myself, say thank you. Be grateful that people want to help this way. So that was how we approached all the help. Then two amazing things happened. It took time—a few months. Think about it: Chani was born in Cheshvan, and what I’m talking about happened at Pesach, in Nissan. So there was Kislev, Teves, Shvat, Adar, Purim—all those months and holidays. Then Seder night came. There had still been some talk that maybe she’d be discharged, maybe this or that. But in the end, we realized we’d be there. That year, Seder night was on Motzaei Shabbos. So there was Shabbos and then Seder night, followed by Yom Tov. At first we thought we’d go to our parents, but when we realized it was Motzaei Shabbos, we said, “No, three days is too long to leave her.” So I understood that we’d be having the Seder in intensive care. That was a huge thing to take in, a huge disappointment, even though we’d already been there for months. But Seder night is the most family-centered holiday. Everyone’s messaging in their WhatsApp groups about whose parents they’re going to. My mother does a kind of survey before every holiday: “Who’s coming to us? Who’s going where?” What am I supposed to tell her? Where are we—in Ziv Hospital? And wait, am I going to clean the house? I hadn’t prepared our home for Pesach yet, and I’d be making Pesach at home only to spend it in intensive care. So I’d clean the whole house and...

50:19 Speaker 4 Kasher the kitchen just for the food containers.

50:21 Speaker 2 Exactly. I mean, what, catering? Even getting organized for it physically is depressing. It’s depressing. You don’t feel like cleaning the house just so you can, like you said, take food containers into intensive care for three days. A Yom Tov and Shabbos just with ourselves. No one was going to come visit, after all. I sat with my husband, and he saw that I was really crying and disappointed. So he said, “Come on, let’s go out for coffee. Let’s get out of intensive care for a moment.” We went to a restaurant—I remember where we sat—and suddenly I said to him, his name is Yinon, I said, “Yinon, let’s make a communal Seder at Ziv. Let’s do it. Come on. We dreamed of running a Chabad House abroad. What would we be doing now? A Seder for hundreds of people, right? So what’s actually happening at Ziv?” And suddenly we started looking into it. We called the administration. We told them, “We’re hospitalized here.” We weren’t outsiders, some shluchim coming in.

51:16 Speaker 4 We’re the ones here.

51:17 Speaker 2 Right, we’re in intensive care. We asked, “Is there anything here, some kind of Seder?” And this was the week before Yom Tov. Understand, a week before Yom Tov, maybe a little more, but—

51:29 Speaker 4 You still hadn’t—

51:30 Speaker 2 I still hadn’t agreed to decide whether we were going away or staying. I hadn’t cleaned the house. I mean, understand how disconnected I was: I said, “Okay, if I stay, I’ll get the whole house done in a week and we’ll manage.” Or I don’t know, we’ll sell the house and live in a hotel. Anyway, we started asking about a communal Seder at Ziv, and the administration told us that since COVID, there hasn’t been one. The hospital has a rabbi, an official rabbi, who puts a Seder plate in every dining room. Whoever wants can take from it. Most people don’t. That’s it.

52:09 Speaker 4 Okay, Yom Tov is in a week, and we’re talking about a communal Seder. But after you’ve been thinking about shlichus in India, things like that suddenly don’t seem far-fetched.

52:16 Speaker 2 Something lit up.

52:17 Speaker 4 Absolutely.

52:18 Speaker 2 I think it was the first time something really lit up that wasn’t just about survival. Suddenly there was initiative, suddenly there was room to develop something. Suddenly, you know, the beginnings of something, like when you have an idea for a business. I don’t know. Like when you suddenly have an idea for your purpose, when something lights up inside you. A real spark.

52:36 Speaker 4 No, it wasn’t just any old thing. This was after months of—

52:38 Speaker 2 Months of—

52:39 Speaker 4 Of an incredibly difficult struggle, of feeling a vacuum, of losing dreams, of losing so many, many things. And suddenly you say, “I want to do this.” I have an idea for how to do something meaningful, to be active, to fulfill something very close to my dream. Even if it’s under different circumstances and… I know. It looks different from what I imagined, but it’s the same thing.

53:02 Speaker 2 Right.

53:03 Speaker 4 Okay, I’m with you.

53:04 Speaker 2 It really brings things together, too. Like you said, it brings together so many aspects: meaning, and suddenly something to do, even just those few days of getting it organized. I thought, “Wow, I haven’t been on my phone for hours.” Even that was wow—

53:18 Speaker 4 It occupied you.

53:19 Speaker 2 Suddenly you have something to do.

53:20 Speaker 4 On a meaningful level, too.

53:21 Speaker 2 Yes, meaningful too. But you know, even before the meaning, just practically: you ran around, you bought things, you got things done. And we really started, like two kids, just making it happen. We went to—what’s funny is that we went to the social worker who was always helping us and looking after us and asking how we were, and suddenly we came to her one evening and said, “Listen, we need your computer to print something. We want to print notices for a Seder with Chabad.” She was shocked. I’m telling you, the notices were even in black and white. At that point you don’t have graphic designers, you don’t have printing, you don’t have anything. A week before the Seder, every Jewish home already—

53:58 Speaker 4 So it was all improvised.

53:59 Speaker 2 Yes, every Jewish home already has aluminum foil all over the kitchen, and you’re saying, “Let’s make a Seder at Ziv.” And suddenly it gave me such motivation to clean the house. It was nothing, because that really was just a means to an end. Suddenly I said, “Okay, I’ll make the kitchen kosher for Pesach,” because somewhere along the way you realize you can do the minimum and the house is clean and kosher for Pesach. It’s all fine; you don’t need to worry about dust and all that. Then something interesting happened. We said, “Okay, how many people should we prepare for?” We had no idea. So a week before, a few days before, we simply started going up to the wards. We told the care team—

54:32 Speaker 4 This all started a week before.

54:33 Speaker 2 Yes, exactly. So by then it was four days before. Think about it: four days before Pesach. Okay, we’re going up to the wards to invite people, to put up our notices, just like at camp, like kids.

54:44 Speaker 4 Like a little girl who suddenly says, “Wow, this is something! I’ll spend fifty shekels on it.”

54:48 Speaker 2 But here’s the thing: I think all shluchim have that—every shliach who first goes out on shlichus has those—

54:53 Speaker 4 Right.

54:54 Speaker 2 Those things you do where you say, “Oh my goodness, this isn’t official, this isn’t, you know, professional.” I don’t know, even the—

55:04 Speaker 4 It has to start that way.

55:05 Speaker 2 Finding a place that’s just some little hole in the wall.

55:07 Speaker 4 There’s an adventurous feel to it.

55:08 Speaker 2 Adventurous and exciting. And suddenly it’s cool, right? You say, “Oh my goodness, we’re like kids.”

55:14 Speaker 4 Yes, looking back, it can be funny. On the other hand, it’s exciting and has this real feeling of a beginning.

55:22 Speaker 2 And how wonderful that we had that stage, that it wasn’t all handed to me on a silver platter. So we actually put the notices up with tape. Today I think, who puts up notices in a hospital with tape? There are official places to post notices. But no, no. Anyway, it’s amazing that that’s how it started. We put up the notices, then went up to the wards. Say we went into the maternity ward: my husband waited outside, and I went from room to room and told them, “Listen, we’re making a Seder here on Saturday night.” And the new mothers would say, “No, I won’t be here anymore. I’m being discharged today, or tomorrow, or the day after at the latest.” More than that, they’d say, “Heaven forbid I’m here for the Seder! I’ll be home for the Seder.” Everyone wants to be home for the Seder. So we said, “Okay, that’s the maternity ward.” Then you think, “Wait, but new mothers will arrive by the Seder, so they will join.” But how many? I had no idea. We went down to another ward, and there too, nobody wanted to be there. Suddenly you realize a hospital is a place where nobody wants to be for your Seder. You’re so excited, and people are trying to avoid the event. It really gives you superpowers, while they’re saying, “Heaven forbid we’re still here.” And even someone who said, “Okay, I’ll still be here after surgery,” we’d say, “Okay, maybe someone from your fam—” and he’d say, “No, my family won’t come, because everyone is at home for the Seder.” So even though on an ordinary Shabbos people come to visit, patients have people with them day to day, they have families, on Seder night… only those who have to be there. Only those who have to be there, and some of them can’t even

57:02 Speaker 2 come down. We wanted to hold it in—they told us, “Do it in the shul. There’s a shul; set up a table there.” But someone who’s ill can’t come down. Then they said to us, “Oh, maybe you could bring us matzah, wine, something for us,” because some people can’t even get out of bed. Think about it: people after surgery, elderly people. And it’s four days before Yom Tov, and we say, “Okay, for those who can’t come, let’s make them kits.” Wow, that meant a lot of doing. Matzah, wine and so on—we actually prepared these kits, just bags, not even branded bags. A bag with matzah and wine. And we really didn’t know how many people would come. Who would come? We said, “Okay, let’s prepare for ten people,” and I told my husband, “Worst case, it’ll just be the two of us, and that’s okay.” That had been the original plan anyway, for the two of us to sit together. Yes, back to… yes, at least we tried. So we set a table for ten and asked the caterer to bring ten portions, and there were the notices and then the kits. And it’s amazing: the first time I went up to a ward to bring a kit to a woman who had asked for one, she was a Russian woman who certainly didn’t appear to be observant, and she said to me, “Wow, I haven’t eaten matzah in years.” And I said, “What? Matzah? In Eretz Yisroel, you assume everyone eats matzah.” She said, “No, we live on a kibbutz; we don’t have any of that.” Then she said, “But I miss charoses so much. Do you have charoses?” Ah. This woman hadn’t eaten matzah, and charoses was what she… I brought her charoses and wine, and suddenly you say, “Oh my goodness, what a shlichus.” This woman hadn’t ea—hadn’t eaten matzah, and even if she hadn’t been in the hospital for the Seder, she wouldn’t have eaten matzah at home either. Matzah, I mean

58:46 Speaker 2 You know, the Holy of Holies. For you, that’s basic. For me, wow, wow—if I hadn’t, like, it wouldn’t even have been in my vocabulary, lol. Suddenly understanding what shlichus means. Yes. And if you call it “Shlichus as a Way of Life,” today I can say that shlichus is life. Shlichus gives life. I get chills saying that, because it took me time to reach even that point, despite all the light of those first moments of going on shlichus. From there, it was a process of truly becoming a shlucha—of accepting it, wanting it, all of that. Identifying with it, too. Identifying with it. I don’t know if many shluchos will relate to this, but I believe some will: there’s the part where you go on shlichus and decide, okay, this is our place, and then there’s a process of settling into shlichus, being on shlichus, becoming a shlucha, wanting it, actually enjoying it, loving it. All sorts of things. Connecting to it. Like giving birth. Okay, you’re a mother, and maybe you wanted and chose to be a mother, but suddenly you actually have to be a mother. Yes. And getting to the point where you say, “Wow, motherhood is life,” or “It gives me life and strength”—that takes time. Yes. So it was Seder night, and earlier that same day, on Shabbos, we made another round and asked people how many would come to the Seder. Exactly ten. Oh! Really. Ten people sat around the table with us. A minyan. A minyan. And you can’t imagine how interesting and special a Seder in a hospital is. Think about it: three people came—two men and a woman, siblings—and their mother. They had come to be with their father for Shabbos and Yom Tov. Each of the siblings was married, had left their family at home, and had come with their mother to be with their father while he was hospitalized

1:00:46 Speaker 2 And on Shabbos morning, their father passed away. Um, really, on the morning before the Seder. Exactly. Shabbos morning, before Yom Tov, which began Saturday night, their father passed away. So they had to stay at the hospital because they couldn’t travel. Wow. And they didn’t even have a hospital room anymore. They had nothing to do at the hospital, and the funeral hadn’t happened yet. He had passed away, and the funeral hadn’t taken place; he was still there, awaiting burial. It was terribly, terribly, terribly, terribly hard. And then we met them, just a few hours after he passed away. They were still in shock. What do you do, halachically? You know, they couldn’t notify anyone. None of their families knew. We were the first people they told: “Dad passed away.” It was at that point. Suddenly my husband said to them, “Listen, we’re making a Seder downstairs. Come, let’s do it in his memory. Let’s do it.” It was hard even to say “in his memory,” but—for his sake, for you. And when they heard it would be in his memory, they said okay. So they came, and they brought all their food with them. They had brought everything from home, and they just couldn’t stop crying. Imagine crying as though at a shivah. It felt a little like a shivah. We were sitting with them, talking to them and comforting them. And how do you start a Seder now? Kiddush, maror, a festive Seder. Oh my. I’m telling you, they were crying. And just when they managed to stop crying for a second—it wasn’t even like a shivah. You know, at a shivah there can already be laughter. Yes, they hadn’t reached that stage yet. Even the funeral was still ahead of them, Hashem protect us. So just when they managed to compose themselves, the mother would suddenly start

1:02:27 Speaker 2 crying, and they would hug her, and it would all start again. And every time another guest came in, they would ask what had happened, and the family would start telling the story all over again. Then suddenly someone came in: “Mazel tov! I’ve had twins!” Oh my. He was so excited, telling us how many years they’d waited for them. And he didn’t have anyone to call, either, so he told us. What a moment. Really. And suddenly you see people from all the different wards talking, letting it all out. You see how this place holds life and the opposite of life, healing and illness. I hadn’t grasped that yet, but suddenly I saw it for the first time. Wow, what can exist in the same building. I mean, physically, it has everything—births and deaths. It’s awful, but it’s also amazing, because we suddenly saw it with our own eyes. And they suddenly began sharing in his joy. They forgot about their own situation. It took them out of it a little. Yes—“Mazel tov!” Hugs. “Tell us about them.” And he began telling them, and they asked, “What are you going to name them?” and all of that. Did they name one after the grandfather? I don’t know. No. Maybe. I don’t know. That’s another thing: people go on their way, and we don’t know what happened afterward. It’s interesting. Um, we sat with them for the Seder, and everyone brought something of their own. They were, um, I don’t know which community it’s from, but they do that “Bivhilu” thing with the Seder plate over the heads of the people at the table. They brought their community’s customs, and others brought theirs, and someone had his own food, and... Suddenly there was laughter and fun and interesting conversation and songs, and everyone was telling stories. And they told us about their father. Then the Seder ended, and they really didn’t want to get up.

1:04:12 Speaker 2 We sat there for hours, until one in the morning. There was one patient, and suddenly a nurse came down from his ward and said to him, “Hey, what’s going on? You said you were going for an hour. You need your medication.” And he said, “Oh my, I forgot I’m in the hospital.” You know? Oh my. It draws you in. Really. Even a shul is a different world altogether. And suddenly there’s a Yom Tov table and everyone is sitting together. I’m telling you, it’s amazing. And a nurse from the operating room came, too. She said, “Do you understand how disappointing it is to work a shift on Seder night? Everyone’s at home, and I’m here.” We met her right there in the hallway. I don’t even know if she’d seen the notice, but we met her in the hallway and she said, “Okay, I’ll pop in. I’ll come. How nice that there’s something here.” So she came, with her phone, you know, ready to be called. She told me, “The moment I get a call, I have to run.” And of course, she couldn’t drink wine—no wine, no grape juice, nothing. She said, “I need to be sharp for surgery.” But she had matzah and just a tiny, tiny bit of wine. And she was there. She was there for about ten minutes, and then she got a call and ran back. That was amazing, too. It gave us a sense that, hey, the staff here need this as well. The staff here need a Chabad House, too. And people kept saying to us, “What, there isn’t one here? You don’t do this every year? There’s no Chabad House here? Nothing like this? So what happens?” And I think the most amazing thing that happened was that, at the end of the Seder, we went back to intensive care. And we—I’m telling you, it was just like,

1:05:51 Speaker 2 I don’t know. A descent from... from the highest heights. From the highest heights to the deepest pit. But the feeling was different the first time we went into intensive care. Suddenly—I’m telling you, we even walked through the corridors of Ziv standing tall. And we were shluchim. Okay? No, shluchim. Nobody had told us that, nobody had called us that. Nobody had said anything to us. You felt this light coming out of you. Suddenly I looked at my husband, and it was as if there was something about him, you know, in the way he carried himself. Suddenly he was a shliach. Suddenly, the way he spoke to people, the way I suddenly spoke... Wow. Suddenly you come to intensive care and you’re already—I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that the beeping, the beeping sounds different, and my father-in-law’s condition suddenly seems... It sounds euphoric. I mean, yes, come on, the next day I went back to my phone, back to my computer, back to intensive care. It wasn’t as though everything was solved and everything changed in one day. But suddenly, for the first time, we felt something different there, something more uplifting, more enjoyable. Something happened to us. I felt that the shlichus, more than it helped other people, really helped us. And suddenly we’re walking through Ziv, and we’re not just people with a family member in the hospital, not poor things. We’re... And then we started looking into it and suddenly realized that Lev Chabad operates all over the country. Except— What— That’s what I’ve been holding myself back from asking this whole time. Yes. There wasn’t a branch there? No, no. No, I don’t know. It was waiting. Things get stuck on the climb up from Rosh Pina, on the way to Tzfas. It hadn’t managed to get any farther. Things take time to reach Tzfas, and apparently it took time and waited, I don’t know, for us or maybe for someone who— You really are saying you don’t know. Of course it was waiting for you. Yes, but I don’t know why there hadn’t been one until then. Because

1:07:35 Speaker 2 there’s a big Chabad community and everything, but you know, those were also the years when Lev Chabad was starting to grow and expand into more and more locations. Today it’s in almost every hospital in the country. Yes. But, um, back then, the whole idea of Chabad Houses in hospitals... Suddenly I discovered there was one at Rambam, and one here and one there, and... none at Ziv. So we said, okay, we have to bring shluchim here. At first you think, we need to bring shluchim here—someone to see this and continue the work here. After all, we’d be going home soon and heading out on shlichus. And then the second realization was: wait, maybe it’s us? Maybe we’re those shluchim? So we spoke with the leadership of Lev Chabad and with the leadership of Yitzchak[?] in Tzfas, and so on. We wrote to the Rebbe, and suddenly there was a really great blessing for the shlichus, and... Okay, we actually signed—while we were still in the hospital. Our daughter was in intensive care. We actually signed. I remember signing, then going to say l’chaim and sign with Rabbi Lip[?], the head shliach in Tzfas. And we sat with the director, Rabbi Mendelson, the director of Lev Chabad. He came to Ziv to see us and get to know us, and... Then he said, “Wait, but what will you do after you’re discharged and go home? Will you want to continue the shlichus here? Right now you’re in the hospital; that’s different.” And I said to him—it was interesting—I said, “Listen, we really had thought about shlichus abroad, and maybe if we were being discharged now with a child without special needs, we would go back to our original dream. But most likely...” This was already close to discharge, after many months. We said, “Most likely, we’re not going to be discharged with a child without special needs. We’re going to be discharged with a child with special needs. We’ll need to stay in Israel.” Um,

1:09:25 Speaker 2 It works well for us. It suits us—

1:09:27 Speaker 5 Completely.

1:09:28 Speaker 2 This shlichus. Looking back, I mean, even afterward we would sometimes come back to the hospital from home. A child with severe special needs has more hospital stays afterward, and other things... And we’d be hospitalized and do the shlichus. Believe me—

1:09:41 Speaker 5 It’s completely your second home.

1:09:44 Speaker 2 That’s what I was going to say: it was our second home, even if we didn’t want it to be.

1:09:47 Speaker 5 Yes.

1:09:47 Speaker 2 And we didn’t want it to be. We’d be upset about every hospitalization, and we hated Ziv. And today we’re Chabad shluchim at Ziv Medical Center.

1:09:57 Speaker 5 Wait, but hang on, you’re also a doula.

1:09:59 Speaker 2 Oh.

1:10:01 Speaker 5 Come on, let me ask it this way: are you ever at home, or are you out there?

1:10:04 Speaker 2 I’m at Ziv a lot. I’m at Ziv so, so much. Today we’re at Ziv every Shabbos. You could almost say we live at Ziv.

1:10:09 Speaker 5 How did you become a doula?

1:10:10 Speaker 2 Oh. That’s another story, but let me just say that today—um, it’s amazing, because today we come to Ziv for Shabbos, for example. We come every Shabbos and every weekday. We’re there. That’s our shlichus. That’s our Chabad House. We’re there. My husband is a full-time shliach. He’s there every day. Today we run—well, it’s become an empire. It’s only been four years, but there’s a whole network of volunteers to manage, and we have... The place where we’d stayed closed, and then we started getting calls: “Do you know somewhere we can stay for Shabbos?” At first we sent people to various guesthouses, and then we opened a guest apartment. We took an apartment in the closest building and gave it a real makeover. We also made it a project, you know, with crowdfunding, and then we opened the apartment. That was really amazing too. And after a year, another apartment, because the first one is full every Shabbos. So today there are two guest apartments and a tefillin station. It’s not a booth; it’s really like a kind of Chabad House space. It just isn’t a physical room. It’s a very large tefillin station where people come, and there are refreshments and coffee. And there are so many people from the Chabad community in Tzfas involved—which, by the way, is an advantage, an incredible privilege, for shluchim who live near a community. We have so many, really dozens of regular volunteers at the station, men and women. So not long ago, the station reached ten thousand times that tefillin had been put on there—

1:11:41 Speaker 5 Wow.

1:11:41 Speaker 2 Since it opened.

1:11:42 Speaker 5 It’s nice that you count.

1:11:43 Speaker 2 Right, right, that’s something too—

1:11:44 Speaker 5 Who counts? But you do.

1:11:47 Speaker 2 I don’t know, my husband had this thing where, when he opened it, he bought one of those counters. At first he said, “I want to count—”

1:11:52 Speaker 5 It’s a trend today. Every kid has one of those clickers.

1:11:55 Speaker 2 Exactly, with the... what do you call it? But he wanted to count so he could write to the Rebbe at the end of the month how many people had put on tefillin, and also to motivate the volunteers a little—how many each person...

1:12:02 Speaker 5 No, it’s an amazing idea, because then you have milestones too.

1:12:05 Speaker 2 Right, right. He says, “Look, plenty of shluchim have probably helped people put on tefillin ten thousand times. It’s nothing unusual.”

1:12:10 Speaker 5 Right, but they don’t know it.

1:12:11 Speaker 2 Exactly. So you count and you know. And those milestones also let you stop for a moment and look: What have we done? This week—this week, actually, yesterday I attended a birth. And because my husband likes counting and marking the successes and the goals and all of that, not long ago he told me, “Count how many births you’ve attended.” And then I told him, “The next birth I attend will be my fiftieth.” So yesterday I attended my fiftieth birth. There were balloons and flowers, and we celebrated it. And I say, if I hadn’t counted, I really wouldn’t have been able to.

1:12:45 Speaker 5 Right. If we didn’t know how old we were, we wouldn’t know when to celebrate.

1:12:47 Speaker 2 Right, a birthday. Yes.

1:12:49 Speaker 5 So in the end, you count.

1:12:51 Speaker 2 I told you that we see so many different ways people cope, and I think the fact that we were in intensive care gives me so much empathy for people. And you know, you still always have to be very, very aware of what to say and when to say it. But a lot of the time, I actually find myself thinking, just let it go for now. You don’t need to talk right now. Just listen. Maybe she doesn’t even have the energy to think about someone talking to her. So don’t. Just come and say, “I’m here if you need me,” and leave. Because I remember sitting in intensive care and thinking, honestly, I don’t have the energy for all the heart-to-heart talks with the social workers. A lot of the time I did, and they did so much good, but you have to know when it’s right and when it isn’t. And that was the first amazing thing that happened. The second thing was—and I think this is also part of what we were saying—learning to accept help amid all that apathy, and hour after hour with no direction for work or anything else. My husband really tried to help me with that. Now, I say that in the end, help comes to each person. Hakadosh Boruch Hu sends different people. For one person, a friend will come and say, “Maybe this, maybe that”; for another, it’s a mashpia or a psychologist, or I don’t know—everyone has someone. My husband really wanted to help and made sure to do it. He would actually take me out—we called it “taking me out”—of intensive care so we could sit somewhere, talk and think. And he would say to me, “Okay, Shari, it’s true that you can’t go back to work right now, and you can’t do that. But what can you do? Think about what you can do, what the small things are.” And it really was the small things, like I said earlier. But it was also about thinking, okay, so what can I do? And suddenly I—

1:14:35 Speaker 2 I don’t know. I think that was the second miracle, or the second gift. I call it a miracle because sometimes the miracle isn’t that the child is healthy. Sometimes the miracle is that Hakadosh Boruch Hu gave me the idea to hold a Seder night at Ziv. I could just as easily have stayed in the sadness and depression, and that’s true to this day.

1:14:53 Speaker 5 Yes, yes. A lot of the time, when an idea comes to me—a good idea, one I know is positive—I’ll stop and think, “Wait, maybe…” And then I tell myself, “Hakadosh Boruch Hu put that idea in your head. How can you be embarrassed?” Really. Sometimes we keep asking Hakadosh Boruch Hu to help us and help us and help us, and there He is.

1:15:10 Speaker 2 Right, right. Like the story of the drowning man: “I sent you a boat, I sent you a helicopter.”

1:15:16 Speaker 5 Yes, yes.

1:15:16 Speaker 2 He says, “No, I’m fine.” But no, because sometimes it really is hard. A prisoner cannot free himself from prison. Sometimes it’s really, really, really hard. It took time. A lot of the time my husband would say, “So what can you do? What can you do?” And then the second miracle really was the second idea that Hakadosh Boruch Hu planted in my mind. I said maybe—he suggested it, because I’d told him, “That’s it. I don’t want to be a teacher, and I have no other ideas.” And he said, “Maybe study something? Maybe think about a course you could fit into your life. You could travel once a week. You could…” I don’t know. I do think that at one point, even before I got married, I’d thought that if I wasn’t going to be a teacher, maybe I’d be a midwife. But I said, “No, I’m not going to study midwifery, because I’m going abroad, and I’m not going to be a midwife in India.” So I thought, okay, not midwifery—but maybe I could train to be a doula? I’d given birth already, so I knew what childbirth was like, and I… It connected again with my strong desire to be somewhere meaningful, doing something meaningful, helping women at significant moments in their lives. Not just being something…

1:16:30 Speaker 6 But being a doula is also quite a field. You really have to connect with the whole subject of childbirth and…

1:16:40 Speaker 2 Right, right.

1:16:42 Speaker 6 It’s not just, “Let’s help someone.”

1:16:44 Speaker 2 Right, because there are so many kinds of help. So many… Everyone wants to do something meaningful, and the fact that Hakadosh Boruch Hu specifically put this in my mind… Look, a lot of women are put off by the delivery room. So when I say it’s not just “let’s help someone,” I mean it’s something you really have to…

1:16:58 Speaker 6 Of course.

1:16:59 Speaker 2 Connect with and love. It’s not just, “Okay, let’s be a doula.” I mean, I don’t think I’d be a doula, even though I really love everything to do with childbirth. I don’t know; I just can’t see myself…

1:17:08 Speaker 6 Absolutely not. Not until it’s my turn.

1:17:10 Speaker 2 Giving birth and going into the delivery room.

1:17:12 Speaker 6 Right, right. And I think I’d want to spend as little time there as possible.

1:17:14 Speaker 2 No, and it’s also about being with another woman while she gives birth. You have to… There’s something incredible about that.

1:17:21 Speaker 6 That’s why, when someone tells me, “You know, I have this dream of being a doula,” or “I’ve thought about it,” I tell her, “You should know that not many women have that dream.”

1:17:27 Speaker 2 Exactly.

1:17:27 Speaker 6 It’s not for nothing.

1:17:28 Speaker 2 Yes, it’s not just, “Go be a doula,” and you say, “Sure, let’s give it a try.”

1:17:31 Speaker 6 It’s also not a matter of saying, “Let’s think about what pays well, and I’ll go work at something that makes money.”

1:17:36 Speaker 2 Yes, I think you have to have a passion for it, a really strong connection to the field.

1:17:41 Speaker 6 Absolutely, absolutely. And I think it’s a miracle. Like you said, sometimes Hakadosh Boruch Hu plants an idea in your mind. Look, sometimes there are bad ideas too, yes, but sometimes… And it’s also a kind of blessing that Hakadosh Boruch Hu sent me the idea of my purpose in life relatively early—the thing I love doing, that I’d have this passion for, this desire and love for… Someone said to me, “I want to spend as little time as possible in a delivery room. Just let me…” And I’m the opposite: give me as much time as possible in a delivery room. When I walk in there, I really…

1:18:15 Speaker 2 I was with you for a month—I don’t understand.

1:18:17 Speaker 6 When you gave birth?

1:18:18 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:18:18 Speaker 6 And she really was there with you.

1:18:20 Speaker 2 Maybe. I wasn’t. Never mind, it’s a long story.

1:18:22 Speaker 6 Yes. A story. No, no, I’ll stop there.

1:18:24 Speaker 2 Birth stories aren’t something you can just mention in passing.

1:18:26 Speaker 6 If we start telling birth stories… Everywhere I go these days, it’s, “But when I gave birth…”

1:18:32 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:18:33 Speaker 6 Luckily for me, I find it interesting.

1:18:35 Speaker 2 “You have to hear this,” and then…

1:18:35 Speaker 6 But in my case it does interest me, so I really enjoy it.

1:18:39 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:18:40 Speaker 6 And fairly quickly—when things started going a bit better, too—I found a place to study. It was toward the end of COVID, and they were offering classes online.

1:18:50 Speaker 2 Oh wow, a doula course online. How do you practice?

1:18:52 Speaker 6 Exactly. So some of the—sorry, some sessions were in person for the things that really are physical. But all the theoretical and emotional material, the information and everything, was online. It turns out even that can be taught online. So—

1:19:10 Speaker 2 I hope you’re not delivering babies online. I hope you’re not an online doula.

1:19:14 Speaker 6 Listen, it’s not so far-fetched. I think that if there’s no doula available, or someone’s abroad or whatever, then—

1:19:22 Speaker 2 There’s a way to help.

1:19:23 Speaker 6 There’s a way to help. Because a lot of what a doula does is physical, but a great deal of it too—I don’t know whether to say fifty percent, but a great deal—is guidance, being present, offering reassurance, and just… A lot of the time it’s simply about telling the woman giving birth… It reminds me of how she said to me, “This is your baby, and this is your experience.” And it came up many times. So much of a woman’s calm during labor comes from knowing what’s happening. Listen, she’s just been examined, and they told her she’s four centimeters dilated and she’s having contractions. “Listen, you’re at four centimeters now. Things could move quickly from here, but it could also take many hours.” Just taking a moment to explain what’s happening now, what the process is. And, at the most basic level, saying, “You’re not alone. Someone’s here with you.” And it’s not just, “Everything’s okay, breathe.” It’s not just about breathing; it’s also, “Let’s make sure you know what’s happening,” because—

1:20:14 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, that helps a lot.

1:20:15 Speaker 6 There’s so much to it.

1:20:16 Speaker 2 Yes. Understanding what’s happening.

1:20:19 Speaker 6 So, back to intensive care: I would sit there in intensive care studying to become a doula. Such extremes. I would actually sit there with my laptop, join the class, put on my headphones and study.

1:20:36 Speaker 2 With Chani next to you.

1:20:37 Speaker 6 And I enjoyed it, with Chani right there beside me. Baruch Hashem, she developed, she grew, became more alert, and was more present with us. She still needed monitoring and, mainly, help with her breathing. But yes, she was growing. It took time. Think about it: she was maybe six months old, maybe older, when she made a sound for the first time. She went “wow,” and we couldn’t believe it had come from her. I said, “What was that?” It was a shock. And the first time she coughed, after a few months, the whole intensive care team said, “What? Chani Lang coughed?” They applauded her. I’m telling you, a child coughing means she can breathe on her own. That was a step toward trying to take her off the ventilator, because she had coughed. We don’t realize what it means for a child to cough, or for a child to cry. I don’t want to get into the whole “putting things in perspective” thing, but when a child cries, you have to thank Hashem. It’s true.

1:21:42 Speaker 2 I’m sure there’s a whole arsenal of sayings like that.

1:21:45 Speaker 6 I say, let every mother come to understand that on her own. I don’t like those sayings. Fine, I have things to learn too. But yes, suddenly, when a child cries, in the end, you do...

1:21:57 Speaker 2 Right.

1:21:58 Speaker 6 So, uh—

1:21:59 Speaker 2 Whether you want to or not.

1:22:00 Speaker 6 So she was developing, and I sat beside her. Sometimes I held her, and I would study there in intensive care. That’s another thing: even the studying itself, when it’s a profession you connect with, and you come out of a class glowing—that’s a very, very big sign. I remember saying to myself, “What is this? All through high school and seminary, I never took notes like this.” I was filling notebooks with notes, writing things down, asking questions, reading more about it, looking things up. Suddenly you say, “Wow, this field interests me.” The teacher would be talking about a C-section, and I’d think, “Wow, I want to see that with my own eyes.”

1:22:40 Speaker 2 And you’re like, “Let’s just go down a floor.”

1:22:43 Speaker 6 Exactly—“Let’s go up to the fourth floor.” It really was like that.

1:22:46 Speaker 2 Go up.

1:22:47 Speaker 6 Yes, in our hospital, the delivery rooms are on the fourth floor.

1:22:52 Speaker 2 So Ziv isn’t for me, let’s put it that way.

1:22:54 Speaker 6 Hopefully you won’t need it.

1:22:55 Speaker 2 No, you know, actually, with my first pregnancy—she was born on Rosh Chodesh Elul—when I was 39 weeks along, the whole family was vacationing in Tzfas. So I said, “Well, if anything happens, I’ll go to Ziv.” By the way, there’s this stereotype that you’d rather not go to Ziv yourself. So I didn’t wait. But, um...

1:23:14 Speaker 6 That was your encounter with Ziv.

1:23:17 Speaker 2 Yes, that was the potential encounter. Yes.

1:23:20 Speaker 6 Yes.

1:23:21 Speaker 2 No, so you said, “Okay, let’s go up a floor to see a C-section.”

1:23:25 Speaker 6 So...

1:23:25 Speaker 2 No, but really, you came in living and breathing that atmosphere.

1:23:30 Speaker 6 Yes, in the hospital.

1:23:31 Speaker 2 You were really immersed in your profession and in that atmosphere.

1:23:36 Speaker 6 But there’s a very big difference between intensive care and the delivery rooms. A hospital—there are a lot of people who go through...

1:23:43 Speaker 2 Even a certain contrast.

1:23:45 Speaker 6 Yes. And maybe that’s exactly why I said, “Okay, I’m already somewhat familiar with the medical side, so let’s take it somewhere good.” Today, it puts me off much less. It doesn’t deter me. I even went to train as a medic, which puts a lot of people off—the blood or the injections.

1:24:01 Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

1:24:02 Speaker 6 So let’s take it in that direction. But I also think that a lot of people who go through some kind of medical ordeal, or spend time in a hospital, want to put it as far behind them as possible. Sometimes now, when I speak to someone who wants to volunteer—for example, I spoke with a woman who wanted to join, and then she had second thoughts and said, “Wait, does that mean going into the wards?” I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “I can’t bring myself to go into the wards. My father passed away, and I was with him through it.” That’s very, very natural and understandable. There really are volunteers who don’t want to volunteer in a hospital; it makes them anxious. And there are others who are the opposite: they specifically want the hospital. “Give me as much time with the patients as possible.” Because there are all kinds of volunteer work: preparing food for Shabbos, shopping, maintaining the guest apartment—it’s a whole operation. So I often tell a volunteer, “Okay, there’s work in the wards, with the patients, and there’s also logistics.” Some choose one, some choose the other. For some people, the medical side is very, very, very daunting.

1:25:00 Speaker 2 Daunting, yes.

1:25:00 Speaker 6 And I also think it’s a kind of blessing, because we’re shluchim in a hospital, and the birth is in a hospital. Baruch Hashem, today it doesn’t just not deter me—it even makes me curious. When I hear medical terms, I’m curious. So I studied there and started training to be a doula. By the time we were discharged and went home, I had finished.

1:25:21 Speaker 2 Basically, the most available doula, because all you have to do is go up a floor.

1:25:24 Speaker 6 Right. Today, think about it, we—

1:25:25 Speaker 2 Wait, there’s a birth at Ziv right now. What do you do?

1:25:27 Speaker 6 Exactly. I said I’d put my phone on silent, and then I thought, how nice—because until yesterday, when I accompanied the birth, I’d been on call for that mother—

1:25:34 Speaker 2 Ah, you were on call.

1:25:35 Speaker 6 I can’t put my phone on silent. That’s not an option for me.

1:25:37 Speaker 2 So she gave birth yesterday.

1:25:37 Speaker 6 Exactly. And when she gave birth yesterday, I said—well, I don’t even say this to them, but I always think, “Wow, how wonderful that it’s today.” The timing is always hashgachah pratis at the highest level, and—

1:25:49 Speaker 2 She went to give birth.

1:25:50 Speaker 6 It’s truly seeing G-dliness. Really, I’m telling you, you can’t even call it heavenly; it’s the most physical thing in the world. You see G-dliness. You see a baby. You—I mean, if I start talking about it now—you see a baby—

1:26:04 Speaker 2 You see a human being born. It’s a soul—

1:26:06 Speaker 6 Coming out of its mother’s womb. You see the whole process. You see all the hashgachah pratis: how labor starts, how it unfolds, how unpredictable it is. The strongest thing, the thing that sustains you most through a birth, is “Cast your burden upon Hashem.” And I keep telling myself that I’m privileged to experience what a woman in labor experiences. With the expectant mothers I prepare for birth, we talk about this a lot: if you want the best birth, you have to let go—if you want the most control over your birth, you have to give up as much control as possible.

1:26:44 Speaker 2 The more you let go, the more—

1:26:45 Speaker 6 The more you let go, the more present you can be. So I get to experience that myself at every birth I accompany. Because think about it: imagine someone tells you, “You have to record a podcast, but you don’t know when. We’ll let you know, and the moment we do, you’ll get up and record it. You won’t be able to do anything else.”

1:27:05 Speaker 2 So you have to let go.

1:27:06 Speaker 6 You don’t have a time, a date, or an hour for your client’s birth. And then you’re thinking, “Should I travel? Shouldn’t I? I need to be available. Wait, if it happens now, what do I do with my daughter?” It’s uncertainty on a daily basis, okay?

1:27:24 Speaker 2 Like working without a schedule.

1:27:26 Speaker 6 There’s no—there’s no fixed schedule.

1:27:26 Speaker 2 Days, nights, holidays.

1:27:28 Speaker 6 Exactly. Holidays, Shabbos, Yom Kippur, nights. That’s the job. But I often tell myself, “Shari, when you catch yourself trying to control something—even though it’s not in your hands anyway—what’s the point of trying? ‘But wait, if she calls now, I’ll do this, and if she calls in an hour, I’ll do that.’ Shari, tell yourself what you tell the expectant mothers: ‘Cast your burden upon Hashem.’” You have to make arrangements. You do your hishtadlus, you do what needs to be done: arrange the babysitter, work out when she’s coming, and so on. But inwardly, relax. Let go. Really, you—

1:28:04 Speaker 2 Let Him manage the schedule.

1:28:05 Speaker 6 You can’t—yes, you can’t. Just as you can’t give birth that way, you can’t accompany a birth that way either.

1:28:09 Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

1:28:10 Speaker 6 You have to let go, and you have to be—

1:28:11 Speaker 2 No, it’s an integral part of the profession. You can’t separate it out and say, “Fine, I’ll only work with women who know when they’re going to give birth.”

1:28:18 Speaker 6 No, you can’t. You can’t.

1:28:19 Speaker 2 And you really are the doula with the greatest availability, you could say, right?

1:28:22 Speaker 6 Yes. Baruch Hashem, that’s a very, very big advantage. Today I see how it all fits together, and it’s amazing. For example, we spend Shabbos at Ziv, so it’s very convenient when a woman in labor comes in on Shabbos. For many doulas, it really is complicated: they have to stay at the hospital until Shabbos ends. With us, the mothers even come to the Shabbos meal, so it becomes enjoyable and helps pass the time pleasantly. But from a halachic standpoint, there’s—

1:28:46 Speaker 2 An all-inclusive doula.

1:28:48 Speaker 6 Yes, exactly. So—

1:28:50 Speaker 2 Hire a doula and get a Shabbos meal too.

1:28:52 Speaker 6 Listen, I won’t call it an advertisement, but it does persuade women about to give birth. They say, “Oh, okay, I’ll come give birth at Ziv,” even if they live around Tzfas and are considering other hospitals. These days I tell Ziv’s management, “Listen, we’re bringing you women who are coming to give birth. It pays off.”

1:29:07 Speaker 2 It works well for Ziv.

1:29:07 Speaker 6 With the guest apartments and the—

1:29:09 Speaker 2 Right.

1:29:10 Speaker 6 All kinds of projects we’re trying to move forward.

1:29:12 Speaker 2 It sort of completes the birth experience for people, the...

1:29:14 Speaker 6 So today—

1:29:15 Speaker 2 It gives you a bit of certainty amid the...

1:29:16 Speaker 6 So today a woman about to give birth says, “My husband will have a guest apartment to sleep in if it’s Shabbos, and we’ll have Shabbos meals.” That’s definitely a consideration.

1:29:25 Speaker 2 What other option is there in Tzfas, actually?

1:29:27 Speaker 6 No, there are other places near Tzfas—Poriya, HaEmek, Rambam, Yad... all sorts. But I, I really—

1:29:33 Speaker 2 I’m so unfamiliar with the north that I can tell you, just forget it. Don’t ask me how far it is from one place to...

1:29:42 Speaker 6 Right, so that’s it. Today there really is this whole support system, and it makes things so much easier for me and for the woman giving birth. For example, this Shabbos I came to a woman who had arrived, and it was every doula’s nightmare, and every woman giving birth’s nightmare too. She got there and they told her she wasn’t in labor yet. But it was Shabbos, so she couldn’t go home, and the doula couldn’t go home either. So they admitted her to the ward, and then as a doula you have to... What I told her really, really calmed her down. I said, “It’s all right. I’m here in the apartment near Ziv.” On Shabbos we rent an apartment near Ziv. “I’m here in the apartment near Ziv for Shabbos, I’m here for the Shabbos meals, I’m right downstairs. Call me when you need me.” It was really a very, very big blessing. She didn’t even need to call, because she simply sent her husband to the shul to get me, and we went up, and it was a really beautiful birth. See? So today I can sit here on this podcast and pause and say: today I’m a doula, boruch Hashem, and a shlucha of the Rebbe at Ziv Medical Center, and the mother of my sweet, sweet, sweet Chani, who I—

1:30:44 Speaker 2 You have to tell me how she’s doing today, yes.

1:30:46 Speaker 6 Yes, that’s the big question. Today she’s four. Uh...

1:30:50 Speaker 2 Maybe we’ll put up a picture of her right now.

1:30:52 Speaker 6 Right, right. In my talks, yes, there’s a presentation. You have pictures of her now, and there’s...

1:30:58 Speaker 2 What is her day-to-day life like?

1:31:00 Speaker 6 So, remember the woman who came and told me, “Listen, my child is in a wheelchair, but miracles—miracles”? That’s how it is with us too, because Chani is a miracle child. I mean, they didn’t know if she would live, and they didn’t know if she would breathe. They thought she would need a ventilator for the rest of her life. Today she’s a child with special needs. She has CP and sits in a wheelchair. She’s sweet, sweet, sweet, but she doesn’t speak yet, she doesn’t eat on her own yet, and she doesn’t walk yet. So it really is a choice of what to focus on. Because on the other hand, she’s growing, and to us she’s our miracle: she breathes on her own now. She no longer needs a ventilator or even oxygen. Even after we brought her home from the hospital, for a very, very long time she needed oxygen—an oxygen tube under her nose all the time, and an oxygen tank wherever we went. That also made it very complicated to keep up the shlichus. If I think about it, we started doing Shabbos there once she was weaned off oxygen. Once we could simply bring her to Ziv for Shabbos, things settled into a routine. Until then, we came for Yom Tov. Think about it: the first Seder night, we spent with her in the hospital. A year later there was already an official Chabad House, so we needed to hold a Seder. We brought her with an oxygen tank. When I remember it today, I say, “Wow, we were crazy.” We took an oxygen tank, drove with her to Ziv, stayed there with her, slept there with her in—in—

1:32:26 Speaker 2 You say, “We were crazy,” but to me it sounds like the most natural thing in the world to come to a hospital with medical equipment... You know what I mean? If not there, then where?

1:32:33 Speaker 6 But you’re not coming to be admitted. You’re—

1:32:35 Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

1:32:37 Speaker 6 What? What?

1:32:37 Speaker 2 It had already become your home situation, really.

1:32:39 Speaker 6 No, I mean, what were we doing? We’d been discharged from the hospital, and we were going right back into the line of fire. We were going back to... insisting on it. I don’t know, it’s crazy. I’m telling you, if it weren’t for the shlichus and the Rebbe, and this work, which is a shlichus in a hospital... It’s a place you run away from, a place nobody wants to be, and we were...

1:32:57 Speaker 2 Going back.

1:32:58 Speaker 6 I don’t know, insisting on going back. And every time, I get emotional at that moment when we arrive at Ziv. I see the Ziv Medical Center, the emergency room, and we go in—not to be admitted. Not because of trouble or misery or uncertainty. We’re coming for a Shabbos of shlichus. Today I come to Ziv with my Chani and tell her, “We’re going to the Chabad House, we’re going on shlichus. How...” And people enjoy seeing her, and they’re moved. We tell them... Every Shabbos at the meal, my husband tells them how we were hospitalized there.

1:33:28 Speaker 2 And the guests change each time.

1:33:29 Speaker 6 Exactly. It’s fun. You can repeat the jokes, repeat the stories.

1:33:31 Speaker 2 Work hard on the material.

1:33:33 Speaker 6 It’s really cool, and also very, very, very, very, very interesting. Quite an experience. Every Shabbos there really are new people, new stories. Each Shabbos you don’t know how many people will come, who will come, or when. There’s a sign-up list, and volunteers who invite people on Erev Shabbos, so we have some idea. But then there are people who say, “My mother-in-law and the whole family are staying at my place. Everything’s on the hotplate. Then suddenly, after candle-lighting, I fell, and now I’m here, having the meal with you. What are the chances?” And there are people from all over the country who came on vacation to the north and suddenly end up with us. We go around the table introducing ourselves at the Shabbos meal, and you hear people from Petach Tikvah and Eilat and everywhere else, who came north and are now at Ziv. You see how this place brings together the whole Jewish people, all the stories and communities—people who wanted to be there and people who didn’t. And I think that’s what you feel—and maybe we’ll end with this. What you feel in a hospital, and I hear this from people a lot, is that as soon as you enter, for whatever reason, there’s a certain letting go of control. Again, a kind of “Cast your burden upon Hashem.” There’s that moment when you still think you’re in control: the emergency room, the admissions process, and you’re... Then suddenly someone says to a woman, “All right, you need to stay here for a few days,” or “You need surgery,” or something else. And you think, “Where did all my... A moment ago I was at home, at work. I felt like everything was in my hands, everything was under control—all the plans, all the arrangements, everything organized. What about the kids, what about this, and that, and that?” And in a second, without... Most people arrive unexpectedly, you know. You’re like a puppet on strings. All that control—

1:35:14 Speaker 2 You even lose your sense of time.

1:35:15 Speaker 6 Your sense of time too, absolutely. And all control slips out of your hands. I’m telling you, that’s a feeling—I don’t know whether it’s physical, but it’s very, very real.

1:35:23 Speaker 2 That’s it. All your plans go out the window. Everything.

1:35:25 Speaker 6 All your plans go out the window. Suddenly everything has to be rearranged around this. Sometimes you see people who manage to take something good from it. For example, a woman who came—this was also on the most recent Seder night—came in a wheelchair, with her leg in a cast. She was the one who said, “The whole family, my husband’s whole family, is at our place. Everyone, my mother-in-law...” Then she said, “You have to understand, my husband doesn’t know where the forks are in the kitchen. I don’t let anyone into the kitchen.” Think of that level of control. And she said, “And on Pesach, of all times! They don’t even know where things are. They don’t know what’s dairy and what’s meat. Nobody does.” You know those people who don’t let anyone into their kitchen?

1:36:06 Speaker 2 Your generation.

1:36:07 Speaker 6 She said, “Suddenly I’m here, and I say to myself, well, apparently they’re managing. Apparently.” So there you go—they’re managing without me.

1:36:15 Speaker 2 A lesson in control. A lesson in letting go.

1:36:17 Speaker 6 Letting go of control at the highest level. And she says, “Suddenly I’m here. I can’t move my leg. I really can’t walk. I’m in a wheelchair. I’m so completely on the receiving end.” She says, “What are the chances that I’d be sitting here with you at a Shabbos meal, and I’m the one being helped? I’m the one in need? I’m now...” I like to tell people, “You’re not a needy person,” because people are embarrassed too. They come in wearing hospital pajamas, a hospital gown, and say, “I didn’t get dressed for Shabbos.” And I tell her, “Just the opposite. This is a home. We’re family here. Sit with us—look, everyone’s here.”

1:36:45 Speaker 2 That’s part of letting go: suddenly you’re in a somewhat vulnerable place.

1:36:47 Speaker 6 Vulnerable, receiving, in need. It’s a hard word, but...

1:36:51 Speaker 2 More vulnerable, needing help. Yes.

1:36:53 Speaker 6 And then, after she started eating and enjoying herself, she said, “Wow, listen, this is wonderful. For the first time, at a Seder or a Shabbos meal, I’m sitting down.”

1:37:04 Speaker 2 “I’m being served.”

1:37:05 Speaker 6 Exactly. She said, “Think about it. If I were home right now, I’d be running from the kitchen to the living room, back to the kitchen, back to the living room, over and over. Serving and serving like some kind of slave. Why do I have to be a slave? Look, they’re managing without me. Everything’s fine. I can come visit.” It was really a lesson for her—something that took us nine months to learn.

1:37:23 Speaker 2 Wow.

1:37:24 Speaker 6 All at once, she understood. She said, “How wonderful to have a Shabbos meal and actually sit down. A Yom Tov meal and sit down. I don’t have to run around like a servant, and apparently they manage without me. So even when I go home, I can accept help.” Letting go of control teaches you so much. People really see that Hashem is there. It’s not for nothing that they say [unclear].

1:37:49 Speaker 2 Yes, yes. And you really can let go of control when you see that He takes the—

1:37:54 Speaker 6 There’s that moment when you say, “You have no choice.” Someone wrote a story here that I wouldn’t have wanted to experience. I feel this very strongly in our case. When you look back, you say, “Well, we didn’t have a choice.” It’s not as if I was some kind of hero. Someone once said something to me that I love: “Even if you had no choice, you’re still a hero.” The very fact that this happened to you, and you dealt with it and got through it. Regardless of how you dealt with it, the fact that you got through it. People say a hero is someone who, you know, makes a decision: “I’m going to choose life.”

1:38:27 Speaker 2 Who chose to face that challenge.

1:38:28 Speaker 6 Chose life. What can I tell you? That I chose life? Things just happened, you could say.

1:38:34 Speaker 2 They unfolded.

1:38:34 Speaker 6 But the fact that they unfolded—and the fact that Hakadosh Boruch Hu gave us the ideas, and that in the end we took hold of those ideas with both hands. And even, you know what, even if things simply happened, they happened to you. So you’re a hero.

1:38:48 Speaker 2 I got through it.

1:38:49 Speaker 6 So you’re a hero. I got through it, yes. You don’t need to make dramatic decisions. Things happened, and they happened to you. So... you’re a hero.

1:38:57 Speaker 2 And aren’t you going to tell us about your husband and what he decided to do?

1:39:01 Speaker 6 That’s what I was starting to tell you.

1:39:02 Speaker 2 After he’d been at Ziv day after day after day. No, I’d just heard about it, and, okay.

1:39:08 Speaker 6 Listen, that’s part of it. And you were right when you said you were already very involved in the medical world, and that has a real... Yes, it had a real effect on the connection in our case. So, as part of our shlichus, my husband spent a lot of time in the dialysis unit. He visits—we visit—all the wards, including dialysis. It’s an incredibly hard ward. You see people coming in three times a week for a very difficult treatment, and they really have no life. Between treatments, you’re just resting, waiting for the next one and recovering. It’s terribly hard. So he decided he wanted to donate a kidney. There was even a particular person there he thought he might donate to, but in the end it didn’t work out. So he...

1:39:50 Speaker 2 Hard to choose. He knows everyone.

1:39:52 Speaker 6 No, no, you also need to be a match, and you need...

1:39:55 Speaker 2 Who would get his kidney?

1:39:58 Speaker 6 I don’t even think he told him. But there was someone in particular whom he visited every day.

1:40:02 Speaker 2 And they were a match?

1:40:03 Speaker 6 Yes, he knows everyone, but he gave him his... And that was a process that took a long time to come together. Then his thirtieth birthday came around, and he said, “That’s it, I’m...” We also have a friend who had donated a kidney the year before. He sat down with him, talked to him and asked a lot of questions. It happened slowly, slowly, slowly. It’s a very long process too—about six months of tests and review boards. They have to see that you’re in perfect condition. Perfect.

1:40:31 Speaker 2 For me, it was proof that I’m perfect.

1:40:33 Speaker 6 They actually give him a certificate.

1:40:35 Speaker 2 Why didn’t you give me that before the wedding?

1:40:38 Speaker 6 First I chose him; afterward I got proof. But they check your physical health and your mental and emotional health—your psychological health, really.

1:40:45 Speaker 2 That’s quite something.

1:40:46 Speaker 6 Yes, to make sure you can donate. And boruch Hashem, this past Chanukah he went in for...

1:40:52 Speaker 2 So that’s very recent.

1:40:54 Speaker 6 Yes, it was this past Chanukah. It was amazing, because we had all our activities. Chanukah is the busiest Yom Tov for activities at Ziv: every day, every evening, there are menorah lightings in all the wards. So lots and lots of volunteers and families come to help with the mivtzoim. Well, for all shluchim, Chanukah is the busy one.

1:41:17 Speaker 2 Yes, eight days without a break.

1:41:19 Speaker 6 Yes, there’s so much activity. Then they offered him a date for the donation: either the last day of Chanukah or a month later. He said, “No, I’ll take the date they give me.” But what would we do? We ran all the activities through the end of the Yom Tov, and for the last day or two—because he had to be admitted the day before—we brought in a couple to take over so the activities would continue. It felt so symbolic: straight from our shlichus and all the whirlwind of Chanukah activities, we drove to Beilinson. The donation took place at Beilinson, and he was admitted there. Then we saw the shluchim’s activities there. Suddenly we were joining them, but this time as patients.

1:42:01 Speaker 2 It was still Chanukah.

1:42:02 Speaker 6 It was still Chanukah, and he actually did the main menorah lighting there. They invited him to light. There he was, with his kidney...

1:42:08 Speaker 2 Boruch Hashem. How do they do things here?

1:42:09 Speaker 6 Right. There’s a lot to learn about how things are organized in other places.

1:42:13 Speaker 2 Sticking your nose in, yes.

1:42:14 Speaker 6 It was interesting: when we got there, we immediately started looking at how Chabad works there, how the atmosphere works there, how everything works—instead of just being patients. We can’t seem to let ourselves be patients. We have to learn something, or be shluchim, or whatever. Anyway, that’s where we met the recipient. They introduce you very close to the operation, about two hours before, a few hours before.

1:42:38 Speaker 2 Oh, wait—so it wasn’t someone he knew from Ziv?

1:42:40 Speaker 6 No. In the end it wasn’t someone he knew, but he said, “I’m going ahead with the donation.” They do a paired exchange: he donates to someone else, and that shortens the wait. So the person from Ziv’s wait was shortened too. He said, “I’m donating. It doesn’t matter to whom, as long as he’s Jewish,” and he had a few other conditions. But he just wanted to shorten the wait. As far as he was concerned, it didn’t matter who received it. Then we met the recipient and his family. It was incredibly moving. Really, it’s the kind of moment for which there are no words. It’s not a matter of saying thank you, or saying...

1:43:16 Speaker 2 You don’t say anything.

1:43:16 Speaker 6 There’s nothing to say. Just hugs and emotion, and boruch Hashem, it all happened very quickly. It goes beyond thank you. And in the end, he wanted to donate. He wanted to give, he wanted to donate a kidney. The fact that someone else receives it is another part of it. So it isn’t just the recipient thanking him. In a way, he wants to say thank you too.

1:43:40 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:43:40 Speaker 6 How can I put it? The recipient makes it possible for him to donate. He gives him the experience of donating a kidney, of truly saving someone. It’s not like simply handing someone something. It’s much bigger than that. Then he went into surgery. It was so powerful, so moving. He woke up, and afterward they were both hospitalized in the same ward. They actually met in the hallway.

1:44:06 Speaker 2 You look familiar. You’ve got...

1:44:07 Speaker 6 Yes, “You’ve got my kidney.” And he told him, “You’re getting a kidney from a Chabad chossid—watch out...”

1:44:12 Speaker 2 It’s contagious.

1:44:12 Speaker 6 “You might suddenly start becoming a shliach or something.” So...

1:44:18 Speaker 2 Afterward there are a few days of recovery, and you—

1:44:20 Speaker 6 Exactly. It’s interesting how much it resembles childbirth. First of all, the procedure is very much like a C-section. They take something out—only instead of a baby, it’s a kidney.

1:44:31 Speaker 2 Wow.

1:44:32 Speaker 6 But it’s a similar procedure, and the recovery is similar too. I’d never had the opportunity to accompany a woman giving birth by C-section. I mean, I have accompanied women, but not after the surgery.

1:44:43 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:44:44 Speaker 6 And not during the surgery itself. Suddenly I thought, “Wow. Women who give birth by C-section—what a recovery!” I got a glimpse of that world, because he actually said, “I feel like a woman who’s just given birth.” I said to him...

1:45:02 Speaker 2 Maybe that’s what he wanted.

1:45:03 Speaker 6 Yes, maybe to feel it a little. I felt a bit like a doula again, and... But he also said, “Wow, how do you give birth and then take care of a baby afterward?” Really, think about it: this is surgery, and afterward he rests in bed.

1:45:17 Speaker 2 Like women say, “I wish my husband understood how I feel.” So...

1:45:20 Speaker 6 Yes, and then he says he has a fever of 38, so he—

1:45:23 Speaker 2 He did it, yes. He did it to me.

1:45:25 Speaker 6 Yes. Exactly, so he felt—oh, good. So you’re saying that at my next birth, he’ll feel it.

1:45:29 Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

1:45:29 Speaker 6 He’ll be able to relate. Yes, definitely. But it really is no simple surgery. I mean, there’s a complicated recovery afterward, and you need to—but you go into it with a lot of knowledge beforehand. You prepare for it. And, you know, family support.

1:45:46 Speaker 2 You want it, and you’re ready for it too.

1:45:47 Speaker 6 Exactly. The pain and everything are intense, but they’re part of something so happy and so moving. And he actually met the recipient in the hallway. They were both just starting to walk, very, very slowly, like in a maternity ward hallway. And the recipient said to him, “Listen, today was the first time I drank as much as I wanted.” And he said, “What do you mean?” He hadn’t even known. The recipient told him, “Listen, when you’re on dialysis, you’re not allowed to drink. You’re thirsty, and you’re not allowed to drink.” Can you imagine?

1:46:21 Speaker 2 What distress.

1:46:22 Speaker 6 Imagine being thirsty and not being able to—we don’t even think about it. We’re thirsty, so we drink. He told him, “There’s a limit to how much you can drink, when you can drink, how much the kidney can handle.” Suddenly the doctor told me, “Drink, drink, it’s all right.” That also meant the kidney had taken, and baruch Hashem, that was very good news. Wow, so I can drink. And more than that—it feels awkward to say—but he said, “I can go to the bathroom.” That’s another thing you can’t do normally. Suddenly I can go to the bathroom, I can drink, I can—imagine, it’s a new life. You really can’t understand it.

1:46:56 Speaker 2 Do you think the organization, the organization called...

1:46:59 Speaker 6 Matnat Chaim?

1:47:00 Speaker 2 Yes, that’s its name.

1:47:01 Speaker 6 Right. Matnat Chaim really is a gift—a gift of life.

1:47:04 Speaker 2 Exactly.

1:47:05 Speaker 6 So it’s amazing. Really, really, incredibly moving.

1:47:14 Speaker 2 What would you say to a woman listening who thinks, “Maybe I’ll donate a kidney? Maybe my husband will donate a kidney?” Although you aren’t your husband, a wife is like her husband’s own body—like his kidney.

1:47:24 Speaker 6 Something I think connects to this is that not many people get the idea of donating a kidney in a practical, concrete way. I mean, a lot of people read the pamphlets—

1:47:42 Speaker 2 Maybe it crosses their minds.

1:47:42 Speaker 6 It crosses their minds: “Maybe one day.” And a lot of people are of childbearing age, so it’s a bit less relevant. But for both men and women at an age when it’s possible, it crosses many people’s minds. For some of them, the thought stays. And for some, it goes on to become something practical. If Hakadosh Boruch Hu put that idea in your mind as something practical—and certainly if the medical tests also show you’re a match—then it’s from Heaven. It’s from Heaven that Hakadosh Boruch Hu gives one person the idea to give in this way, another the idea to be a shliach in a hospital, and another the idea to donate a kidney. So yes, we very much encourage it and raise awareness. We love hearing from more and more people who ask about it and are interested. They also ask me as the wife of a donor. One woman, for example, told me, “My husband wants to, but I thought there was no way. What would I do with three little ones?”

1:48:40 Speaker 7 Oh, wow, you—we have about the same circumstances.

1:48:42 Speaker 6 Yes, right.

1:48:43 Speaker 7 Maybe it is possible.

1:48:44 Speaker 6 It is possible. And also, wait a second, what does it take? What does it mean? I tell her, “Listen, I won’t lie to you. It takes time.” You saw that it took a few weeks before he managed to go to shul.

1:48:55 Speaker 7 Wow.

1:48:55 Speaker 6 Before he could really leave the house. We had to bring people in—we really had to plan for it.

1:49:00 Speaker 7 That sounds like even more than a C-section.

1:49:02 Speaker 6 Yes, yes, it’s similar. But everyone recovers differently. It took a whole operation, logistically. Think about it: we had to bring in families, or a couple, to take our place in the shlichus for that period. Every Shabbos, a family was there in our place. People who would be—

1:49:22 Speaker 7 Wait, was he hospitalized at Beilinson?

1:49:23 Speaker 6 He was at Beilinson for a few days, and then we came home, but he stayed at home. He couldn’t go to Ziv, couldn’t go do the shlichus. I was with him too, and he couldn’t—he wasn’t allowed to lift anything, absolutely anything. Not even a grocery bag.

1:49:39 Speaker 7 Wow.

1:49:39 Speaker 6 I think it was five kilos and up, so he couldn’t pick up our daughter. That’s why I say you really have to plan for it as a family, with work, and make sure everything lines up. But it’s possible. It’s possible, and it’s amazing. It’s a very powerful, moving experience. It’s strange to say, but he says—and it’s not the sort of thing you normally say—that there’s a certain feeling that even if I were to leave this world today... Just recently, a friend of his, sadly, passed away very young in a car accident. It was an event that really shook all their friends, our whole community. And he said, “It’s frightening to think about, but I think everyone has the thought: What if I die today?”

1:50:30 Speaker 7 Yes.

1:50:31 Speaker 6 For some people, that spurs them to action. There’s that saying: think as though you’re going to die today or tomorrow.

1:50:38 Speaker 7 As though tomorrow is your last day.

1:50:40 Speaker 6 Exactly. It really motivates you. And he says there’s something about donating a kidney that gives you a sense of, “I did something significant in my life,” on the level of—

1:50:50 Speaker 7 I rest my case. It’s like the saying that a soul descends to this world and lives seventy or eighty years to do a favor for a Jew in matters of Torah and acts of kindness. So he can say, “Well, I definitely did that favor.”

1:50:58 Speaker 6 Now, chas veshalom. That doesn’t mean his role is finished. There may be... I think it’s like how mothers feel after giving birth: “I’ve left something in the world.” I mean, I have something—

1:51:08 Speaker 7 Wow, something physical.

1:51:09 Speaker 6 Physical. I bought property, I brought a child into the world, I donated a kidney. I believe that when a person finds that meaningful thing they do in life, they can say, “I’ve fulfilled a purpose, a shlichus.” Now, that doesn’t mean, “Okay, I’m done, and now I’ll go.”

1:51:28 Speaker 7 Something meaningful enough to...

1:51:30 Speaker 6 Yes. I mean, looking at it that way is the negative side. The positive side is that it’s something worth living for.

1:51:36 Speaker 7 Yes, yes.

1:51:37 Speaker 6 So that’s about kidney donation. That’s it. And baruch Hashem, baruch Hashem, it’s nice to pause.

1:51:46 Speaker 7 What’s next for you?

1:51:48 Speaker 6 Wow.

1:51:48 Speaker 7 With Ziv and everything...

1:51:52 Speaker 6 There are a lot of projects on the way. People say this, but right now we really are in the middle of a Chinese auction and a major campaign for Kol Lev Chabad throughout the country.

1:52:04 Speaker 7 Oh, I saw that.

1:52:05 Speaker 6 Yes, to help the Chabad House grow.

1:52:07 Speaker 7 We’ll share a link.

1:52:08 Speaker 6 Yes. And there are many new projects. Some we can talk about, and some we can’t, but that’s where things stand.

1:52:14 Speaker 7 Stay tuned.

1:52:16 Speaker 6 Yes. Because I think even the kidney donation, for example... Oh, I didn’t tell you—we took a trip to India. This was after, last Cheshvan, we opened the second guest apartment in honor of Chani’s fourth birthday. “For Chani’s fourth birthday, we’re launching a second guest apartment.” It was such a moving event. It was a proper launch: the mayor was there, and the management of Ziv was there. A while earlier, when we were working very, very hard on the apartment, my husband suddenly came out with this idea. He said to me, “Sari, listen, let’s set ourselves a goal.” We were running a campaign and setting up an apartment—we ran the campaign, we set up the apartment—it was crazy. It really felt beyond our reach. “But let’s decide that if we pull it off, the next day we fly to India.”

1:53:10 Speaker 7 Oh, wow.

1:53:11 Speaker 6 I said—it seemed absurd to us. To me, anyway, it seemed absurd. I mean, what, Chani and...

1:53:17 Speaker 7 Right, where did you find her?

1:53:19 Speaker 6 Good question. So that’s exactly it: an idea often comes to you, and at first it seems absurd. But then you start feeling your way, start looking into it, start... I happened to mention it to someone who...

1:53:30 Speaker 7 Chochmah, binah.

1:53:31 Speaker 6 Exactly. And I threw the idea out to someone who...

1:53:34 Speaker 7 You know, they say that men are... men are chochmah, and women are binah.

1:53:38 Speaker 6 He brings the idea.

1:53:38 Speaker 7 And you women take it and bring it into practice.

1:53:42 Speaker 6 That happens a lot at the Chabad House: he comes up with an idea, and I’m like, okay, so how? And then we put it into practice. So I spoke to someone who had been Chani’s caregiver last year. She got really excited and said, “Listen, Shari, you’re bringing her to my house.” She’s someone I trust so, so much, and Chani really loves her. “Bring her to my house for as long as you need. You go away—two weeks, whatever.” Every mother’s dream.

1:54:08 Speaker 7 Yes.

1:54:08 Speaker 6 To have that...

1:54:10 Speaker 7 Half a year.

1:54:13 Speaker 6 I was like, “Stay even after we get back.” No, no, but that’s how it happened. That was the first moment of saying, wow, maybe this could happen. And it was another milestone: looking back and saying that two years ago, even a year ago, this would have seemed like the most far-fetched thing in the world. Chani was on oxygen. We still had hospitalizations now and then—she’d get sick and be admitted. That was part of our routine. And suddenly you say, look, things... Over time—not that time itself fixes things—but things stabilize, things calm down. Sometimes a woman after giving birth, or anyone facing a challenge, thinks, “This is the end of the world. That’s it. There’s no life anymore.” But with any challenge, after a while, things can stabilize and calm down. Suddenly we can leave her with a babysitter for two weeks, which is unbelievable.

1:55:15 Speaker 7 Truly unbelievable.

1:55:16 Speaker 6 But once it was... we said, “Let’s do it.”

1:55:17 Speaker 7 It’s not unbelievable [unclear] especially, right?

1:55:20 Speaker 6 Right, but I think the very fact that...

1:55:23 Speaker 7 Even more so.

1:55:24 Speaker 6 Because it had seemed so far-fetched, we said, “Let’s do it—for two whole weeks.” You understand?

1:55:29 Speaker 7 Go for the whole trip.

1:55:30 Speaker 6 Yes, not just two days. And really, so much of it was thanks to her. It was truly something sent from Heaven. So we went, and in a way, like I told you, I got to experience that dream of shlichus in India. Suddenly I saw Chabad Houses in India. And suddenly I also saw that it wasn’t quite... I mean, it... I’ll tell you what happened there. Suddenly I said, “Wow, thank You, Hashem, that we’re at Ziv.”

1:56:00 Speaker 7 It settled that question for you.

1:56:01 Speaker 6 I think every shlucha should pause and spend a few days at another Chabad House. Sometimes you feel that at the Kinus Hashluchos, when you talk to other women. You know that joke about the person who said, “Wow, what a burden Heaven gave me”? So Hakadosh Boruch Hu brought him into a room and showed him everyone else’s burdens. He said, “No problem, you can trade.” And in the end, he looks at one and says, “Oh, that one looks interesting,” and picks up his own. Because in the end you look at the others and say, “No, no, no. Not that one.”

1:56:27 Speaker 7 But it really is that way: Hakadosh Boruch Hu gives us challenges and the strength to face them. So it’s tailor-made.

1:56:34 Speaker 6 It really is tailor-made. And in the end, I want my shlichus, with my difficulties. Give me my children, with all their...

1:56:43 Speaker 7 Give me my Ziv, with its problems, with its challenges.

1:56:45 Speaker 6 You understand that when a shlucha from India comes to Israel, she says to me, “Give me my Chabad House, with our travelers.”

1:56:50 Speaker 7 Yes, yes.

1:56:51 Speaker 6 So you realize that sometimes you’re imagining something. Maybe if we’d gone there, it would have been right for us. But you imagine it—and I’d imagined it a bit as a girl, too—that shlichus in India means sitting on sofas with travelers and farbrenging all day. You don’t know what it takes to bring...

1:57:07 Speaker 7 So many things, so many dreams. You see the side that looks fun, perhaps, and the outward side that everyone sees. You don’t see everything underneath.

1:57:17 Speaker 6 And that’s another thing: sometimes we have a dream, or even a sense that something is missing, and we pin so much on it. You should know that even at times when I found it hard to connect to our shlichus at Ziv, for all kinds of reasons—every shlucha has her own process with shlichus, you know.

1:57:35 Speaker 7 Shlichus isn’t one single thing. It’s made up of so many things. You connect to one part, and another part you...

1:57:40 Speaker 6 Yes. It’s like motherhood: there are different phases. Shlichus is like that too. There are times when you feel more connected to it and times when you feel less connected. And I’d say to my husband, “No, it’s because we aren’t shluchim in India.” Just kidding.

1:57:55 Speaker 7 It was there, in the background, all the time.

1:57:57 Speaker 6 “No, I feel like I’m missing out on shlichus abroad, and that’s why I’m not connec...” Just kidding, just kidding. What I’m trying to say is that sometimes we have this sense of missing out, this dream that, first, seems unattainable, and second, we pin things on it that aren’t even related. Like, “If I had that, then...” And no, I don’t know. You can make all sorts of dreams come true, but with many of them, sometimes you just need to tick that dream off the list. Do it. Someone told me, “No, my dream really is impossible.” I asked, “Why?” She said, “I dreamed of hiking the Israel National Trail.” Now I tell her, “I spent two weeks in India. Go hike the Israel National Trail. Put a pack on your back, get a babysitter for three days. Just start—even just get a taste of it. Start the trail. Suddenly you may see that it isn’t quite...”

1:58:46 Speaker 7 What you imagined. So often, our imagination...

1:58:50 Speaker 6 She’s lived a whole life saying, “That’s it, I’ll never hike the Israel National Trail. I got married.” And then you realize what she means: “I married young, I have children, and my children are a burden to me.”

1:58:59 Speaker 7 That you have to sacrifice your whole life.

1:59:00 Speaker 6 Exactly—that’s the sacrifice she feels she has to make. Or you can say, “No, you can do almost anything.” And then there’s the question: we didn’t go on shlichus to India, but we went to get a little taste of it, to see it. And suddenly I said, “That’s it.” Something settled, and we came back to our shlichus. There are still challenges and everything, but there’s something very powerful about getting a taste of that dream, of the thing you felt you were missing.

1:59:26 Speaker 7 Yes, and then you reconnect even more strongly.

1:59:28 Speaker 6 To what’s yours. Yes. Wow, is there anything else we’ve left as a question mark? Anything?

1:59:33 Speaker 7 I have loads of questions that I think I’ll ask you afterward. Loads and loads.

1:59:39 Speaker 6 What about the listeners? What about the viewers?

1:59:41 Speaker 7 Then maybe I’ll ask you now, and if you’re not comfortable with it, we’ll cut it out afterward.

1:59:46 Speaker 6 Yes.

1:59:47 Speaker 7 First, I wanted to ask whether you have any children besides Chani.

1:59:49 Speaker 6 Oh, good question. At the beginning, before we started the podcast, you asked whether there were any questions I wouldn’t want you to ask. And I said, “If there is one, it might be...”

2:00:00 Speaker 7 No. It feels terribly intrusive, but I feel like I need that piece of the puzzle.

2:00:04 Speaker 6 On the other hand, it really is part of the puzzle. You can’t say, “We don’t talk about that.” So Chani is our only child so far. We’re still hoping, with Hashem’s help, that Hakadosh Boruch Hu will give us more. That’s another journey we’re on, with Hashem’s help, to grow our family. It’s interesting, because it isn’t connected to Chani, but it’s also part of our lives. And with Hashem’s help, by the next podcast I’ll be able to tell you...

2:00:30 Speaker 7 Next time, we’ll have you on.

2:00:31 Speaker 6 Amen. With Hashem’s help.

2:00:33 Speaker 7 Sarah. Shterna Sarah.

2:00:34 Speaker 6 Shterna Sarah.

2:00:35 Speaker 7 Shterna Sarah.

2:00:36 Speaker 6 Bas Mindel Miriam.

2:00:37 Speaker 7 Bas Mindel Miriam. Amen. May you be blessed with children who will live.

2:00:40 Speaker 6 Amen. Amen. With Hashem’s help. That’s another thing I’ve learned, by the way: to say amen and thank you.

2:00:45 Speaker 7 Right? Right, right. When you’re little, you think, “Wow, saying ‘Amen’ and ‘Soon by you’ is such a grown-up thing.” But we need brachos. We really do. And in general, I think that on shlichus you also learn all of this... You see so many people facing so many challenges, and you see the power of connection. Because in the end, you bring people together at Shabbos meals, in your one-on-one conversations. And Hakadosh Boruch Hu tells us, “You are all brothers and sisters, and you need to get along.” But it’s not only about getting along; it’s also about drawing strength from one another. Suddenly you can find yourself saying, “Wow, some random woman I never thought I’d meet, sitting beside me in the corridor at Ziv, is giving me strength.”

2:01:29 Speaker 6 Exactly. You can draw so much strength.

2:01:31 Speaker 7 You have to let it happen. Let it happen.

2:01:33 Speaker 6 Right. Right, to be in a place where you can receive and listen, and again, to say thank you for it. To say thank you for the shlichus. I really think about what our lives would be like without the shlichus. It’s not for nothing that I tell you today: the shlichus is our life. It gives us life. Because I think that even right now, with our hope, G-d willing, to grow our family, and with everything we’re dealing with concerning Chani, all of that could fill our entire lives. It could take up so much space, both practically and emotionally. And I’m telling you, it has its place. I mean, life’s challenges are still there. It’s not that shluchim...

2:02:16 Speaker 7 Right, right.

2:02:17 Speaker 6 ...don’t have challenges. We do. But being involved in shlichus... I don’t know if it makes those things smaller so much as it lifts you up.

2:02:26 Speaker 7 Right.

2:02:27 Speaker 6 This past Purim, we were at Ziv. On Purim there’s an activity, volunteers, all of that, and pictures. It’s fun, really so much fun. And then there was this moment—Chani has a feeding pump that stays with her in her stroller. I don’t even notice it anymore; it’s just part of the scenery. Then the pump started beeping and acting up. It wasn’t working properly, so I dealt with it for a moment, and then again and again and again. A woman I know was standing beside me, and she said, “Wow, what a challenge. That’s so hard.” She actually said to me, “How are you so patient with it?” Because it really was annoying. I hadn’t even noticed, because I was caught up in the little Purim outreach activity. I’d stop for a second to fix the pump, go back to the activity, and then go back to the pump.

2:03:23 Speaker 7 I think it does make it smaller. It just fills you with so much light and strength that you face your own challenges with more energy. Suddenly you see them differently.

2:03:30 Speaker 6 I told her, “Imagine if I were home right now on Purim with my daughter and the pump, while the whole family was happy and celebrating and everyone else had children without these challenges, and I had to deal with the pump.”

2:03:41 Speaker 7 Absolutely, absolutely.

2:03:41 Speaker 6 That would have felt so different from being here. I don’t make it bigger than it is. I don’t even have time, you know, to get stuck in it.

2:03:49 Speaker 7 It puts you in a different place, and then you see things differently.

2:03:51 Speaker 6 Wow, wow. Today I really tell you, that’s our miracle: the shlichus, and also my work as a doula and supporting women through childbirth. Every time I go to a birth and come back—and baruch Hashem, my husband is incredibly supportive and takes care of Chani when I go out—I’m telling you, it keeps me busy. It fills my life. Suddenly your lives aren’t only about a medical situation, even though we’re still dealing with one. I still spend all day connecting her to her feeds and everything, and now she goes to a rehabilitation preschool. So being a parent of a child in a rehabilitation preschool, with a feeding pump, is still a challenge. It’s complicated. But suddenly it’s another part of life, you could say, or part of something bigger. Or maybe there’s just this feeling of being lifted up.

2:04:41 Speaker 8 Yes.

2:04:43 Speaker 6 That...

2:04:43 Speaker 8 It lifts you up, and when you look at things from above, they seem smaller.

2:04:48 Speaker 6 Yes.

2:04:48 Speaker 8 All the challenges become... Again, it’s not that they’re diminished. It’s just your perspective, I think.

2:04:52 Speaker 6 I think so. But what can someone... Say a woman says, “I’m not on shlichus,” or “I’m not there yet.” I think everyone—

2:04:59 Speaker 8 Ah, but everyone is on shlichus.

2:05:00 Speaker 6 Exactly. That’s why we’re here.

2:05:03 Speaker 8 Just look at what you’re doing as a shlichus, and then it will be a shlichus.

2:05:07 Speaker 6 Right. Right, everyone has her own shlichus. Even a mother with several children can say that other things, like paying property tax or whatever, become less significant. Or you can see the shlichus in your business, your work, your children. Even the fact that it keeps you busy. I’d say even on a practical level: you’re occupied, you’re doing things, you’re giving, volunteering, taking part in mitzvah campaigns, doing shlichus. Everyone has her own shlichus. Just the fact that you’re busy. I can tell you that being busy is not something to take for granted, in any way. So if you’re saying right now, “I don’t have time”—

2:05:52 Speaker 8 Right.

2:05:53 Speaker 6 Thank Hashem that I don’t have time, and that I’m not stuck in a hospital with too much time and nothing to do with it. These days, the days when I don’t have time are really the most blessed days.

2:06:05 Speaker 8 It’s a blessing. It’s understanding that it’s a blessing. Understanding that you’re—

2:06:08 Speaker 6 Yes.

2:06:08 Speaker 8 —busy doing things, and that you’re doing something good.

2:06:10 Speaker 6 Yes.

2:06:11 Speaker 8 And it’s about saying, about understanding, that what you’re doing is what Hakadosh Boruch Hu sent you into the world to do. Sometimes we’re busy doing something and we say, “Well, I haven’t reached my shlichus yet. I haven’t discovered my shlichus yet.” You’re here; you’re there. Maybe later you’ll change careers and continue your shlichus in a different way. But the whole journey of our lives is a journey of shlichus.

2:06:27 Speaker 6 Wow, absolutely.

2:06:28 Speaker 8 Thank you so much, Shari. Thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for the inspiration.

2:06:31 Speaker 6 Thank you.

2:06:32 Speaker 8 And I’m sure you’ve given strength to so many women.

2:06:34 Speaker 6 That makes me so happy.

2:06:35 Speaker 8 Each one at the point she’s reached in her own journey of shlichus.

2:06:39 Speaker 6 Oh, Chani, thank you so much.

2:06:40 Speaker 8 Thank you, and have a safe trip.

2:06:42 Speaker 6 Oh, thank you! That’s right, I’m leaving now.