In the face of personal tragedy, power kiruv speaker Rav Michoel Lasry draws on his personal reserves of faith
It’s a tradition that had been going on for two decades, and not even the unfolding personal catastrophe would make Rav Michoel Lasry give it up. Erev Shabbos before Shavuos, Rav Lasry, one of Israel’s foremost kiruv rabbis and sought-after lecturers on chinuch and shalom bayis — a dynamic and inspirational Torah speaker with the wit of a stand-up comic — was on his way from Bnei Brak to the southern development town of Dimona, where he had single-handedly build up a vibrant Torah community of hundreds of people over the last 20 years. After all, what would Shavuos be without their devoted rav?
His wife, Rabbanit Amalia, decided to forgo the trip this year, opting instead to stay with her elderly mother who had recently been hospitalized. Both were on the way to their respective Yom Tov venues when the phone call came: “There’s been an accident. Get to Barzilai as fast as you can.”
An hour before, their 20-year-old son, Shimon Yochai z”l, had gone with friends to a deserted part of the Ashdod beach for a pre-Yom Tov mikveh, when a deadly undertow pulled him away from the shoreline into the choppy waters. His friends managed to battle the waves and drag him back to shore, but by then he wasn’t breathing and had no pulse. MDA and Hatzolah teams who raced to the beach were eventually able to stabilize a heartbeat, yet he was brought to Ashkelon’s Barzilai Hospital in a coma on a respirator.
Rav Lasry’s driver made a sharp U-turn, and the Rav raced into the hospital ward to find a team of doctors fighting to save his son’s life. He sat down by Shimon Yochai’s bed, spending the next hour drenching his Tehillim with the desperate tears of a father in dire supplication for his son’s salvation.
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