As we prepare our wicks and count our candles, each day adding another level of light, do those numbers hold another special meaning for you?
Project Coordinator: Rachel Bachrach
By Binyomin Yudin
The most incredible conversations I’ve had in my career have been with people who know they are close to death. Replete with a focus on long-ignored priorities and a deep desire for life so rarely extant in everyday interactions, these conversations always leave an impression.
In my early 30s, I helped start a hospice program at the Jewish retirement facility where I was a chaplain. Although I had already worked with this demographic, my new role would bring with it experiences I never could have imagined.
One of my responsibilities was to be at the facility for Shabbos to perform my duties as chaplain — leading davening, directing discussion groups, visiting with residents. My family and I stayed in a house nearby. We had a guestroom, and one winter Shabbos, we hosted a young woman who was visiting her extremely ill grandmother in the facility. Our guest had grown up thousands of miles away in a chareidi town in Israel, but her savta was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, to a secular family with no Jewish upbringing.
That Friday night, we ate the Shabbos meal while our guest, who had come with her two-year-old son, spent time with Savta. After the meal, I prepared to go to the facility, and on my way out, I noticed our guest, who had since returned, starting her meal. She stood at the dining room table, her little boy on a chair at her side, holding a silver cup of grape juice. I was closing the door behind me just as she concluded the brachah in her strong Israeli accent.
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