My Story 49

The next ten years were blessedly uneventful. The only causes of anguish were the normal tensions and challenges of raising teenagers, compounded by the fact that we were teaching them a traditional Jewish lifestyle in a community where no one else was living that way. Yes, we were largely outsiders to the nearby Orthodox communities, but we continued to get encouragement and support from the Satmars, as well as from my teacher, Rabbi Kiwak, in Jerusalem. I could see positive effects of my presence in Island Park. Some people who used to drive to Shabbat services began to walk. Several people began lighting Shabbat candles. One young man who had been adopted, came to me for conversion, and accepted a completely observant lifestyle. One young woman who was already leaning in that direction, took the plunge. What I had thought would be a temporary stay, became semi-permanent. After a few years, I was given a lifetime contract. I was profoundly hurt by the tongue wagging in the Orthodox community, but I took comfort in the fact that Rabbi Nachman had gone through persecution, and urged a thought pattern of being happy with being right, even if everyone else thinks you are wrong. Besides, they were merely blindly following the New York rabbi who, for political gain, had declared the mechitzah to be Biblical (when it is not even rabbinical). My second year there brought two major changes in my life. First, as I have described in an earlier post, I had suffered greatly for twenty-six years from my separation from my daughter from my first, brief marriage. All the "experts" told me to stay away, as she was surely unaware of my existence. In September of 2002, she had discovered the website that my son, Nachman, had made for me when I was looking for employment. She contacted me. My absence had been a dark hole in her life all these years, as her absence had been in mine. She had heard terrible things about me. But she took a chance. We met, and fell in love with each other. Sima accepted her as a daughter. This was perhaps the most healing event in my life. She is now married with two beautiful children. We both feel blessed. At about the same time, I had a different kind of healing. For ten years, I never had a real night's sleep. I would wake up every twenty to forty minutes needing to go to the lavatory. The doctors in Israel assured me that there was no physical reason for this, and it was all in my head. In the last several years, I would, every five or six months, experience strange symptoms with several of my senses, weakness in parts of my body, and temporary memory loss. I now had an episode like this that was particularly bad. I was admitted to a hospital, where tests showed that I had suffered a series of minute strokes, called Wallenberg strokes, which had each affected small parts of my brain. I was told that nothing could be done, and these would continue, leading eventually to paralysis and death. At this time, the young woman in our congregation who became observant got engaged to a young doctor who specialized in sleep issues, especially apnea, which was a virtually unknown condition at that time. He invited me to his lab. where he found that I had severe sleep apnea. He prescribed a breathing machine known as a CPAP. The condition was literally gone overnight! Today, there is much wider knowledge about apnea. But, had I not come to Island Park, there is no doubt that I would not have lived much longer. Rabbi Nachman's teaching that we must look for the good in every bad situation was taking real form before my eyes. Over the next years, all of my kids married. In my ninth and tenth years in Island Park, Sima and I took three road trips. Only one of our kids was still unmarried at that time, but she was quite capable of taking care of herself. I have long had a very special feeling for the American South, but had never actually seen it. We took one trip to Virginia. Then another to West Virginia. Then, we took a very ambitious trip all the way down to Florida. We were on a shoestring budget. We stayed mostly with Facebook friends. We were warmly received everywhere. One lady in Florida with whom we had become quite close online, remarked with a smile "My Daddy must be rolling in his grave. I have house guests who are not only Yankees but Jews!". In Richmond, Virginia, we stayed with Rabbi Joseph Kolakowski, who soon would be instrumental in introducing our daughter Nechama, to the man who is now her husband. It was an amazing trip. When we returned, however, everything changed. That will be the next part of my story.