What I Said to the Mom Getting Divorced (3-Minute Mommy Peptalk)

Posted by JewishMom on Jun 16, 2019 in Inspiration, Inspirational Videos, Israel, Jewish Moms, Motherhood, My life | 16 comments

Reminding myself, in the age of social media, how important it can be to help a single person.

This morning I saw a mother I see several mornings a week at gan drop-off and pick-up. She looked unusually lovely this morning, in a long flowing floral dress. So I told this mother, whose name I don’t know, “Wow, you look beautiful today!”

This woman has always struck me as a strong person. A real sabra. So I was pretty surprised when she drew closer to me, and I saw that she looked nervous, shaken. She said, “Please bless me that I should be successful today.”

Maybe she was on her way to a job interview? I thought. So I was shocked when she told me, “You heard that I’m getting divorced, right? Today is the beit din. Please bless me!”

“Oh…I hadn’t heard!…” and I dug into my heart and said, with real focus: “I bless you with hatslacha, with success, I bless you with all the yeshuot, help in every area you need in life, please God.”

I felt so happy that our paths had crossed this morning. To give her a blessing and a tiny spark of encouragement on one of the most challenging days of her life.

Last week I had to call a certain well-known rebbetzin to ask a small question I was embarrassed to bother her with.

When I called her home phone, she answered on the first ring. I apologized for bothering her, twice. But she didn’t seem to mind at all. In fact, she sounded genuinely happy to help me out.

Afterwards I thought how remarkable that was. That I called a person, a public figure no less, on her home phone, and she answered right away. And that she answered my silly question with zero self-importance and 100% sense of shlichut, to help a fellow Jew who needed her help at that moment.

Since Shavuot, I’ve been thinking a lot about something. In this age of the internet, it’s hard to remember. It’s easy to forget how important it is to help a single person.

You can post something on your neighborhood list, and reach a hundred people within minutes. I can post something on facebook and reach 5000 people by dinner.

It is very easy, at least for me, to get lost in what a friend once referred to as “all this biggering and biggering.” We want to be bigger, to reach more people. Rather than focusing on the importance of reaching out and helping a single person in need.

And I’ve been thinking about how, if I post something, and it gets 1000 likes that is not necessarily a more successful post than something that I posted that was read by a single person for whom that post helped them that day, like my blessing to the sabra wearing a beautiful dress this morning.

And I’ll go further than that. What if I posted something, and nobody, not even one person saw it. Except me. Cause I had to see it, cause I wrote it! And that thing that I wrote that nobody liked or even saw helped me to grow in the right way, as a mom and a wife and a Jewish woman?

I’ve been thinking about how, in Hashem’s eyes, that post that nobody saw but me might have been more pleasing, more important, more successful than the post that reached 10,000 people.

So this is what I’ve been doing. Since Shavuot. Every time I post something, I imagine one mother reading my post. Or watching my video. And being touched, and feeling at least a little more inspired that day.

And if I can focus on that one mom, on just you hearing my words and being touched by them, then I know that I have accomplished what I set out to do. Even if that one inspired JewishMOM is just me.

Have a great week!

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