When Rabbanit Yemima Mizrachi Met a Mother from Givat HaUlpana

When Rabbanit Yemima Mizrachi Met a Mother from Givat HaUlpana

A huge b’shaah tova to my teacher and mentor, Harabbanit Yemima Mizrachi, who is supposed to give birth any day now! At this advanced stage of pregnancy most teachers would have already stopped teaching, but this is Rabbanit Yemima we’re talking about, which means that she is continuing to teach and her classes are just becoming more and more awesome as she approaches her due date! Rabbanit Yemima told a very moving story in last week’s class about a woman who is preparing to be evacuated from her home in Givat HaUlpana at the end of this month, which I have translated for you below. Click here to receive Rabbanit Yemima’s amazing weekly class IN ENGLISH and FOR FREE.

Rabbi Pinkus zt”l taught: it is 3 PM on Friday, and you want to scream, you want to flee, but you restrain yourself and overcome. Thirty years later your young daughter will be in your exact same situation, and she’ll want to scream as well but instead she’ll find the strength within herself to restrain herself and overcome and she won’t know where her strength comes from…But you will know- her strength comes from you!

This week I gave a class, and women from Givat HaUlpana attended the class as well.

At the end of the class I was approached by a soft-spoken woman: “Yemima, I am quietly, quietly packing up my things day by day. And I want to share something else with you…”

This is what she told me, and what she said is difficult to hear and maybe infuriating but right now I am just a messenger passing on all of her words…

“Soon they will be removing me from my home. And what gives me strength?” she said. “I have a grandmother who would tell us over and over how she was driven out from this place to that place to that place when she lived in Germany, lehavdil. And how every time she was driven out, she would accept her fate, and she would pack up her Shabbat candles, and my grandfather’s tallit, and their prayer books, and she would say, “Hashem, I am following after You in a desert, in a barren land” just like her foremothers had during the Exodus from Egypt.

I know this is an infuriating comparison, and I am quoting this with thousands and thousands of differentiations. We aren’t in Germany, God forbid. That isn’t the situation at all. But this is what this woman told me, and I listened to her.

And she said, “I feel my grandmother’s blood flowing through my veins. It provides me with strength that I cannot understand at all, on a microscopic level, with tens of thousands of differentiations between my experience and my grandmother’s.”

I am quoting this in order to emphasize this woman’s feeling, that her grandmother’s staying power pervades her as well.

She told me something beautiful. “You know, this is what my grandmother would always say, ‘When a woman is commanded to wander, to be a niddah, banished from her place, afterwards there is always a Mikveh, a place of great hope and great purification.”

“And I know that her blood flows within my blood as well.”

…There is no suffering that is in vain, no tear spilled that is in vain. Certainly no child is every born in vain. There is no divorce that is in vain. There is no illness experienced that is in vain. You can’t fathom all the infusions of strength, of staying power at times of difficulty and challenge, that you are streaming to the coming generations just like this grandmother passed on to her granddaughter for her own time of difficulty.

One comment

  1. I just randomly read this and wow in this moment it gave me so much chizuk that I desperately needed. Thanks for posting everything you post – you are an amazing shaliach 🙂

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