I had never seen or experienced thirst and passion for doing mitzvos — a passion that was riveting, and addictive.
S ome people have their midlife crises in midlife. My husband, Baruch, and I had ours much earlier. We had been married for several years, we had a baby, and we were both working full-time, he as a computer programmer and I as a speech therapist. Life was easy — but it didn’t feel good. We kept the mitzvos. We believed in the Torah. But our observance felt ritualistic and hollow. One fine day, we looked at each other and said, “Is this all there is?”
All around us, in our Modern Orthodox community, we saw our friends sinking spiritually. When one of Baruch’s pals came to shul on Shabbos jingling change in his pocket, we knew it was time to move on.
At around that time, someone introduced Baruch to the books of Rav Avigdor Miller, which he devoured. When he shared these books and ideas with me, I was very skeptical. If Rav Miller’s approach was correct, then my whole life had been a diluted version of what it could have been, and how was that possible? I had grown up religious, after all.
Yet I had never seen or experienced thirst and passion for doing mitzvos — a passion that was riveting, and addictive.
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