Messages, Madness, and Miracles

I have just witnessed an outright miracle. It is the end of a long and emotional journey; and hopefully heralds the tentative beginnings of a renewed and inspired life.
 
Our friend grew up with Torah in her life. She always kept kosher, and was Shabbat observant. Shortly after her father’s untimely passing, she packed up and moved to Israel, where she got married. The happily newlywed couple were miraculously blessed with two sons, in quick succession – despite her suffering from endometriosis. And then the trouble started.
 
Her husband, feeling outnumbered by the babies occupying his wife’s attention, left the home, the children, and the marriage. We were stunned. It was as swift as it was sudden. Our friend was left to care for two boys under the age of two years old. The one silver lining on her terrible cloud was that her ex-husband never once shirked any of his parental or financial responsibilities and has been a good provider for her and the boys, and maintained constant regular contact and visitation with his sons.
 
Very soon after their divorce, my friend simply could not maintain her Shabbat observance anymore as an overworked, overstressed and overwhelmed single mother. Since her ex-husband was no longer keeping Shabbat, it was inconsistent, in her eyes, for the boys. She felt it was an all-or-nothing situation.
 
Add to that the alluring fact that Saturday is the only day off in the Israeli six-day workweek, and it was her only fun day off for her and her sons.
 
Fast-forward several years and moves, through thick and thin, various jobs, even some good times and vacations abroad. Life seemed to have its own rhythm, and being alone was not so hard anymore, now that the boys were older and easier to manage. Things started to look up significantly with her purchase, finally, of an apartment; and life thankfully became more settled. Around that time, we moved to another city and were not in constant touch anymore.
 
Then, about a year ago, at a wedding, we saw the ex-husband. He told us that our friend had a bizarrely severe freak accident, a devastatingly damaging fall in her mother’s home while on vacation several months before, and was still recovering. Reeling from the shock, we tried to get in touch but to no avail. We would find out later, why.
 
About two weeks ago, my husband suddenly had the urge to get in touch with the ex-husband with whom he rarely speaks. He called him and was told: “Look, we are at the hospital with our oldest son. It’s not good. It’s really bad. I’ll call you”. It was worse than bad. Having noticed a lump in their ten-year-olds throat; a routine visit to the ear, nose and throat specialist turned into a nightmare when his gravely determined, on-the-spot fluid puncture presented alarming lab results. The following emergency biopsy and a week-long exhaustive battery of hospital tests and scans confirmed the worst: cancer of the throat.
 
Stunned anew by the latest devastating turn in their lives, we once again got in touch. This time our friend was relieved to hear from my husband, whom she had not seen since we got close to Breslev. She requested to see him. He went to visit her and her mother, who had arrived from abroad to offer support. After regaining her initial shock at the sight of him, now a Breslever Chassid in full garb, she related to him a chain of events so dramatic that his hairs stood on end.
 
As her life finally fell into place, she told him, things began to go terribly wrong.
 
She had to go to court to fight the ‘real-estate agent’ who sold her the apartment, to sue him for the commission: it turned out he was the husband of the ‘owner’, and it was a con scam. She won, but it was traumatic. At that point my husband, aiming to comfort her, commented how lovely the apartment was.
 
Yes, she said, that’s understandable: everything was brand new. Shortly after the court case, her apartment burned completely. It was a miracle that no-one was hurt. After the overwhelming task and sheer inconvenience of having to replace all the contents of her apartment she took a well-earned break from life and went to visit her mother in France, while the boys stayed with their father.
 
One night, she was woken up by a stubborn cramp in her leg. Entering the kitchen to fetch herself some pain-relief, she is not sure what happened next but she completely blacked out and woke up on the kitchen floor with the back of her skull cracked open and blood everywhere. Unable to call out because of the tremendous pain, she miraculously managed to crawl to her mother’s bedroom, where she somehow stood up and got a gargled sound out of her throat which woke her mother. Upon waking to the horrendous sight of her daughter bleeding profusely from the head, her mother witnessed the truly shocking and ghastly sight of her daughter, already seriously wounded, falling again: this time forward, flat on her face, in a dead-weight crash to the floor.
 
I am barely holding back my tears as I write this. Her head, already cracked open at the back of the skull, smashed directly onto the floor: breaking her jaw, most of her front teeth and her nose. If that wasn’t enough, she also broke her collarbone. My teeth are clattering as I type. At that point she remained unconscious, and her mother thought she was dead.
 
And then, as a weary veteran of several reconstructive surgeries, weeks in a wheelchair and fighting depression with medication which has caused a steep weight gain, all the while somehow maintaining some kind of touch with her reality as a mother: she had to face the unbearable news of her son’s burgeoning cancer.
 
Now, she begged my husband. “I know something is happening. This is not normal. Please, help me, tell me anything, tell me what to do. I don’t know what to do.”
 
My husband spoke to her for a while about her emuna, and talking to G-d in her own words. She understood that these life-shaking events were all wake-up calls from Him, that were getting increasingly, life-threateningly louder: my husband encouraged her that it can all still be reversed. He reminded her gently of her previous Shabbat observance: and she told him that she had already understood the hint, and that she had already decided before her son’s cancer to take on more in that area.
 
Relieved, my husband told her that she had already done the hard work: namely, to recognize Hashem’s Hand in what was happening and not to be resentful, but to see the need for change. She was well on her way, and, please G-d, her son’s way, to recovery.
 
Next in line were the mezuzahs, the holy scrolls attached to every doorpost in Jewish homes, for protection. She anxiously asked him to have them checked, and since we have a close friend who writes them, this was done immediately, with dramatic results. Every single one of the scrolls were damaged, or incorrectly written and, my husband noticed, most had been incorrectly positioned. But her son’s scroll was the worst of all. Incredibly, my husband later told me that although all the mezuzahs were easily removed, he had to use a screw driver, pliers, and every ounce of his considerable physical strength to take the mezuzah off the post of the son’s bedroom, it so stubbornly refused to come off…. My husband immediately ordered new scrolls for her home, and returned to hang them, this time, in strict accordance with Jewish Law.
 
In the midst of all this, the son underwent surgery to remove the tumor, which was thankfully successful, and completely removed. But the ordeal was not over. Shortly after returning home, he had a fever from a post-operative infection and needed antibiotics and another stint in hospital. After all that, he would still have to undergo chemotherapy for a year, since the tumor was clearly cancerous, and the post-operation pathology reports were awaited with much tension to find out which strain of cancer he had and what his course of treatment would be.
 
Meanwhile, with the mezuzahs replaced, our friend resolved to go to more Torah lessons, sought out books on Breslev thought which she became drawn to, and her son’s operation to embed the chemotherapy tube in his arm was scheduled.
 
The day before the operation, the pathology reports had not yet returned. Our friend asked the professor if they should perhaps postpone the chemo-tube surgery until the pathology came back to know for sure that he would need it? It was a lot of added trauma for the child to go through for naught. The professor was furious and berated her for being in denial. “Your child has cancer. You must understand that. The report will not change anything. He must have chemotherapy. I am the professor here. I know what I’m doing.” Stunned into compliance, the operation was scheduled to go ahead.
 
That was supposed to be today. Today there was a general hospital strike in Israel. Only immediate life-saving surgeries would be performed.
 
My friend nonetheless went to the surgical ward, not wanting to assume anything in the case of child cancer, or to invoke the professor’s wrath once again. As they waited, she saw the surgeon who had removed the tumor. “What are you doing here?” He asked her. She updated him on the situation, as his face became increasingly darker. “Wait right here,” he ordered. When he returned, his face was deadly serious. “I’m sorry to tell you this right here in the hallway, but –
 
– I can assure you that your son does not have cancer. In fact, it seems he never did. Here’s the pathology report. It turned out to be a growth from a severe infection. You can go home.”
 
My husband had said to his friend: Do you understand what is happening? Hashem is calling. First it was softly, then it got louder, and louder, then stronger, and stronger.
 
She understood. She undertook to take action, to listen, to believe, to pray. She re-opened her lines of communication with Hashem. She has returned to Him, and now clearly sees His intervention in her life, and she is even slowly learning to be thankful for it.
 
Today she was miraculously rewarded for her honesty and efforts. And we were privileged to witness it, and now, to share it.