At the Shiva for Eliyahu HY”D
Tonight I visited the shiva for 19-year-old Eliyahu Avraham Bernstein HY”D, one of the 1300 Israelis sadistically massacred by Hamas terrorists this Simchat Torah.
I ended up at the Bayit-Vegan home of this family I’d never met because my soldier-daughter was concerned that this Charedi family whose son had chosen a different path would need extra chizuk. Who would comfort these poor parents? So she sent me…
My daughter needn’t have been concerned that there would be a lack of visitors, the shiva was full of comforters, including the Sephardi Chief Rabbi.
And my daughter was also mistaken regarding who would give chizuk to whom at this shiva. Instead of comforting Hadassah, the remarkable mother who’d just lost her beloved son, the oldest of her 10 children, she comforted us. Hadassah’s emuna glow, beauty-of-holiness reminded me of Devora Paley, the mother of Yaakov and Asher HY”D, who comforted and united an entire nation following her family’s unfathomable tragedy.
About 10 minutes after I arrived, out of the crowd of comforters Hadassah looked straight at me and asked, “And who are you? Where did you come from?”
So I sat down next to her, and she told me about her Eliyahu:
“As a child in the Belzer cheider, Eliyahu’s rebbe said he was an ilui. He loved learning Torah.
“I had a special connection with Eliyahu. He was my oldest child, how could I not? When he was missing, we were already davening, and when I told Eliyahu’s younger siblings that their beloved oldest brother had died sanctifying Hashem’s name, they were inconsolable.
“And since he’s like this [she points to the photo of Eliyahu with long hair] I was even more connected with him. I wasn’t connected to him despite the fact that he’s like this, but because he’s like this. This is the way he could get to his true self. And the more he was his true self, the more he could express his greatness. It’s important to learn Torah, to do teshuva, but with Eliyahu, I feel like he was was already incredible, just incredible. And even when I would pray for him [that he would return to religion] I thought, “But he’s already a wonder, with so many talents, but even more than being talented he had his huge smile with those big dimples. And he was so connected to the home, so connected to the family. And that’s not something to take for granted, at all.”
May Hashem bless this beautiful, broken family with comfort among the countless mourners of Zion and Jerusalem. Amen.
