A Short Story, Not a Sad One

A round five months ago, I sat facing my brother Matisiyahu in his living room. I asked him whether he harbored any anger at anyone for the delay in diagnosing his cancer (one that included aggressive in its name) at the outset and the slowness with which the results of his first scan came back. He did not flinch before answering: “I believe in G-d. If that’s how it worked out, that’s how it was supposed to work out.”

Matisiyahu was a yarei Shamayim through and through. He used to joke that he was perhaps the first baal teshuvah in history to become religious from a fear of Gehinnom.

To that yiras Shamayim, he would add overwhelming ahavas Hashem. In an email to Rabbi Yisrael Shaw, the editor of his forthcoming sefer, six days before his passing, he wrote that “acknowledging G-d’s good should be a special focus for me in particular. The name Matisiyahu has the connotation of ‘G-d gives’ or ‘gifts of G-d.’ ”

He achieved that rare madreigah, described by Rav Wolbe in Alei Shor, of coming closer to Hashem, even as Hashem was taking his life. His oldest son, Avraham Yeshaya, heard him repeating Shema over and over, in a barely audible voice, in his final moments.