My Yom Kippur in January

Sometimes you witness an event that impacts your soul. Years may go by, but the scene replays before your eyes. I share with you a moment that brought me to Yom HaDin. I was not in shul on Yom Kippur. No matter. I found myself with an open window, peering into what this time of year really means. Each year, as I approach Yamim Noraim, I take some quiet time and reflect on that day.

It was a freezing cold day in January. My father had been diagnosed with his final illness and I was going to spend some time with him in Sloan Kettering Hospital. I walked down the long hallway and reached my father’s room. My heart was heavy.

A nurse was in the room and she told me that she’s about to give my father a treatment. She asked that I either step outside or behind the curtain. “This will just be a few minutes,” she said.

I gave my father a kiss and hug. I don’t think that my father realized that I had chosen to stay in the room, behind the curtain.

As the nurse began her treatment, I heard a sound that I’ve never heard before. I can still hear the wordless cries. What is this sound? I wondered. And then I realized. My father was crying out loud.

I had never heard my father cry before. He had lost his entire family in the Holocaust, began his life anew despite all the sorrow, gone through many difficulties as he tried to build the shul together with my mother, and yet I had only seen my father b’simcha. Even after his awful diagnosis, he remained a tower of strength.

But today my father was crying.

“Rabbi, this is not supposed to hurt you. Are you in pain from this treatment?” I heard the nurse ask.

“No,” my father replied in a broken voice.

“So why are you crying, Rabbi?”

“I am crying because I know that soon I will be meeting my Creator. And I am so frightened. I will have to answer for my life.”

“But Rabbi,” the nurse responded. “You are a Rabbi! And you are the kindest, gentlest human being I have ever met. You have done only good deeds in your life. Why are you afraid?”

There was silence in the room. Only my father’s sobs filled the air.

And I? I wanted to run out from behind the curtain and envelop my father with my hugs. I wanted to tell my father that he was my lamplighter, my hero. He had suffered unimaginable loss, lived with mesiras nefesh for Hashem and His children, raised a family of ma’aminim with love, and had gifted me with his joy for life.

When my father was in the hospital a man came one day to visit him. He had known my father in Hungary, and in the slave labor camps where they toiled in forced labor together. In the hallway, before seeing my father, this man shared with my mother that in all their misery, there was one man who was renowned throughout the camp for his unwavering emunah. My father’s name was recognized as the one who refused to touch a morsel of treif. Despite severe hunger and physical pain, despite the emotional burden on his heart, there would never be a scrap of non-kosher food that would touch his lips.

The Nazis could extinguish my father’s family but they could not extinguish his faith. I remember one day in the hospital when my father had a chance to see himself in the mirror. “The last time I looked like this was in the Holocaust,’ my father said. “I was 97 pounds.”

And here, on a frigid day in January, in a New York City hospital, my father was teaching me what it means to stand before Hashem on Yom haDin. To reflect on the life one has been given. I thought to myself, if my father, who lived his life al Kiddush Hashem, is thinking about his life and sobbing at the thought of meeting his Creator, what must I say? What must I think?

Each year as Yamim Noraim, these holy days, approach, I travel back to that scene behind the curtain. I thank my father for teaching me this incredible path towards teshuvah, returning to be the person I was meant to be.

Wishing all my readers a Shana Tova filled with shalom for Am Yisrael, brachos and yeshuos.