Haaretz: How Facebook is helping to fight my friend’s cancer

As I write this, it’s hard to believe that just one week has passed since we received the devastating news as a Facebook post. Our dear friend, Pamela Weisfeld, was diagnosed with brain, liver, breast and bone cancers. Two and a half months ago, Pamela, a nursing mother, started experiencing back pain. Her doctor then found a lump in her breast and associated it with a blocked milk duct. Medications were prescribed to deal with what, at the time, seemed to be benign symptoms. Now that the illnesses have been fully diagnosed, both chemo and radiation treatments are being employed.

I’ve known Pamela’s husband, Shmuel, for over ten years. After arriving in Israel from England and then serving in the army, he enrolled as a student at Yeshivat Darche Noam/Shapell’s. My family lived in the Beit Hakerem neighborhood of Jerusalem, near the Yeshiva. During that time, Shmuel and I enjoyed sharing quite a few Divrei Torah coupled with single malt l’chaims over our Shabbat table. After his leaving the Yeshiva, our paths crossed on our various journeys. Most recently, Shmuel and his Rusty Mike radio sidekick, Stephen Rosenbaum, interviewed me on air for my organization’s Threshold project.

Pamela made aliya from New Jersey six years ago. She and Shmuel have been married for four years. They are blessed with two children, Shoham Adiel, two and a half, and Tehila Anael, eight months, and live in the Talpiyot Mizrach neighborhood of Jerusalem. Shmuel, in addition to his radio show, builds websites. Pamela has been working in social media and Internet marketing.

Tradition teaches us that the three weeks, particularly the nine days leading up to Tisha B’Av, are a dangerous time. Within the last two weeks, Israeli tourists in Bulgaria were murdered in a terrorist attack and midnight moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado, were slaughtered in the theater. And here in Jerusalem, a young mother of two suddenly finds herself fighting for her life. How should we, the “unaffected,” respond?

For a group of the Weisfeld’s friends, the answer was obvious. Marna Becker, Kelli Brown, Matt Gleicher, and Samantha Robinson started a Facebook page, Refuah Shlema (a complete healing) for Pamela Weisfeld (Ayala Pamela bat Leah). Since its inception a week ago, it now has over 3,000 members and continues to grow rapidly. A website is about to be launched.

There are regular, very moving, Facebook posts on Pamela’s condition from Shmuel. In the world that we live in, where virtually nothing is private, a real concern is that we, the readers, become voyeurs. But there is a crucial difference here. We want to know because we care deeply and we will take positive action based on changing conditions. And technology is being employed to engage an expanding audience to do more mitzvot in the merit of Pamela’s recovery and to provide care for the family.

Besides praying three times a day in our Shmoneh Esreh (Amida) an insertion for Ayala Pamela bat Leah in the blessing for healing, there are opportunities to say chapters of Psalms and to “take challah” when making our loaves for Shabbat. To formalize the commitment, there are Google Docs set up where friends sign up. Special classes are being taught from Jerusalem to London to New York, all in Pamela’s merit.

Want to make a meal for the family? You can sign up at the meal Train website, but please, no pizza nor red meat.

And of course, there is financial need. Friends from across the globe have been recruited to be collection points and to help raise funds for treatment and for the family using PayPal and other online giving tools.

Our Temples were destroyed because of sinat hinam (baseless hatred). Our response, we are taught, needs to be ahavat hinam (unconditional, boundless love).

Shmuel, in his first post on Facebook, wrote, “I have learned many things in the last two days, but the one thing that keeps slapping me in the face is: I am more mystified and at a loss on how to handle the chessed (lovingkindness) that Am Israel has shown us than I am on how to handle the reality of my wife with severe cancer and maintaining my children's welfare. Thank you for introducing me to Hashem and the Jewish people… Thank you.”

When I received my Semicha (rabbinic ordination) some years ago, Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel Yona Metzger addressed us and said, “At the end of our life’s journey, after our 120 years, we are asked questions about how we lived our lives. But, there’s an additional question to be asked today. Did you have Internet? And if the answer is yes, did you use it to learn Torah?”

I would humbly add another follow up question. Did you use the Internet to do chessed, acts of lovingkindness? For those thousands involved in assisting the Weisfeld family in its time of need, the answer is a resounding “yes.” May it only be for a refuah shlema for Ayala Pamela bat Leah and shalom for the entire family.

For those who want to learn more and help in some capacity, Rabbi Yehoshua Looks can be contacted at yehoshua.looks@gmail.com.

For Tisha B'Av

The short history of Kinot and some detailed explanations

Excerpts from the Koren HaRav Kinot

Book of Eicha

On Tisha B'Av, The Book of Lamentations is read and discussed. If you will not be able to go to the shul on Sunday, you can try at least to read this free version of Eicha which overviews the tragic moments we remember this day with the long history of persecutions of the Jewish people. 

It is a good reminder of where we are coming from and what we should stand for. A professional design and a lot of food for thought.

Shabbat Shalom!

By Faith Alone

"The IDF is the Army of the Jews, not the Tsarist Army that one would find every excuse to evade", said Rav Yehuda Amital, a Shoah survivor and among the first which articulated the need to integrate Torah study with military service.

The pros and cons the Tal Law will never end and most probably the lessons of Tisha B'Av will help maybe some of us to understand what is wrong and where we need to thin twice before launching various accusations. Doesn't make any sense to reproduce the accusations of both sides. What impressed me in the history of Rav Yehuda Amital was his power to support his own ideas regardless of the social consequences, because the Zionist ideas mattered.

„Yeshivot without military service would produce non-Zionist Torah scholars, and the religious Zionist community would remain bereft of spiritual leadership“, he outlined, according to the book. He encouraged the capacity of his talmidim to think by themselves and to respect the diversity of opinions for the sake of Torah, as he did his entire life: “Whenever I feel that I can say something to benefit the Torah, the Jewish people or Eretz Yisrael, I do not hold myself back”. The experience during Shoah left him with a certain understanding of the world: “In Auschwitz, they did not check people’s tzitzit before sending them to the gas chambers; should we check tzitzit before regarding someone as a brother?”

Of course there are outstanding Torah scholars that would be better in yeshivot that in the Army, but the theory and practice need to meet. Plus, if you have the chance of living in Eretz Israel, why not trying to understand what this country is about, and thus to see what does it mean to fight for your country. The road to Eretz Yisrael was not a debate between scholars, but a hard fight and unless you go to see what does it mean to defend your precious land, the Torah knowledge is incomplete.

And what a beautiful book about friendship, Torah study and defense of the country is Haim Sabato’s book Adjusting Sights in the wonderful translation of Hillel Halkin. One day, I would love to learn more about what does it mean to be a religious person and to serve in the Army. Isn’t shameful, disgraceful or impossible.

The Rebbe: The life and afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson

I dare to say that I had a lot of expectations about this book that I decided to buy not because of the controversy around it, but because I appreciated some of the books written by both authors. The main accusation against the book was that either they used selectively the sources or they did not have access to some of them that would have create a different perspective on their subject.

My impression about the book was that the authors had access to many sources, including people from the close circle of Rebbe, but they were at a certain extent overwhelmed by the information. Many information are interesting, presented as new but maybe it is too much information and not too much analysis and evaluation - even strict selection - of the sources used. 

Maybe the Rebbe was not too religious and there were internal conflicts following his choice as the next Lubavitcher Rebbe, but it does not explain the overwhelming success of the movement and the dedication of so many young people that leave their comfort for fulfilling their mission in sometimes very far away corners of the world. It does not explain either Rebbe's influence of many non-Lubavitcher religious Jews from all over the world and the success of his educational model, as well as the particularity of Chabad within the other Hassidic groups in Europe, Israel and North America. 

For me, the book is unfinished and is too much focus on events when more analysis was needed. 

1 Minute for Munich

1 minute for 11 people killed by Palestinian terrorists was refused by the International Olympic Committee. Predictable? Maybe. Acceptable? Never. 

Meanwhile, there are many things that do not make sense lately, in a Europe that apparently lost the sense of its reasons:

- Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization

- After Germany, some hospitals in Austria and Switzerland decided that will not allow circumcisions and the European rabbis fear that the craziness can spread further. I've read today an article in the English edition of the German Der Spiegel where it is said that 'Circumcision for Non Medical Reasons is wrong' outlining that some Muslims demonstrated some 'willingness' in this issue. 

- The terrorist attack in Bulgaria where innocent people on vacation were killed by apparently people close to the organization that Europe refuse to consider terrorist. 

It is good to know that we will be always here. But sometimes it is hard to cope with the whole hate. 

Memories of the shtetl

All those we were born long time after Shoah will never know how the world of shtetls looked like. We have pictures some distant memories but not a direct contact with the practical and sentimental geography of those places. We will know nothing how it is to live with the fear of pogroms and what was the charm of the little stiebls, the smell of preparations for Shabbat and the quiet 25 hours thereafter. 

Nothing about how to grow up in this world, the emotion of going to the heder for the first time and where you can find the resources for fighting the overwhelming poverty. We grew up in a self sufficient world where we took everything for granted and refused to rely on anything else but ourselves. But this is never too late for second chances.

This is what I was thinking about while reading Sholem Aleichem’s Jewish Children. 

The passion of Leon Modena

The autobiography is not one of the strong points of the Jewish religious literature. Since this personal account of the life of Leon Modena, I've read a lot of stories and biographies written by people that used to be very close to a tzaddik and feel the need to leave behind a testimony of his personality. 

Modena, probably influenced by the literary styles of the non-Jews, that he was in contact with other Jewish communities within the Italian Peninsula and abroad, left us a unique account of his life, not poor in unhappy events as the death of his sons and the deterioration of the mental health of his wife. The life story of Leon Modena is full of unhappy events, from the persecutions to the deep poverty and a long list of children and relatives dying young. There were the times of the early Enlightenment in Europe, as Leon Modena writes his memoir in the first half of the 17th century.

Besides his contacts with the non-Jewish world, he was also a strong critic of Kabbalah, but I am not sure that his scepticism was inspired rather by a certain ambiance of the time, dominated by the Inquisition, instead of the sake of Rational thinking. 

Modena was not only a writer and thinker about the Jewish life in Italy and Europe and the interaction with the non-Jewish world, but he also had a very rich professional experience: he was editor, preacher, teacher for children from rich families, merchant, rabbi, musician or seller of amulets. Last but not least, he fought his entire life with his temptation to gamble. He deals delicately with this bad inclination that made him a lot of troubles as he apparently more lost than won. Obviously, it was not a secret hobby as he needed support sometimes to cover his debts. But it is how it was and he does not try to hide it and in the spirit of the authenticity, he mentions his problems, as part of his many problems and punishments he dealt with regularly. 

Leon Modena remains at a great extent an unknown personality and did not read too much about literary works inspired by his personality. An incentive to find out more about this atypical Venetian rabbi. Learning from mistakes is also part of our story, isn't it?