Sitting Shivah for Mom   

The choices made by four out of their five sons to take on full Torah observance would have been a surprise to my parents when they married 75 years ago. But those choices were not an accident. Though we were raised in a Conservative home, my parents always conveyed the message that being born Jewish was our greatest privilege. Thus when we told my parents that they had no one to blame but themselves for the direction in which their family had gone — i.e., we had simply taken their messages seriously and each gone on to explore Torah Judaism — they admitted responsibility.

And having done so, they gave us their full backing. My father always said, “I think I have raised good sons. So I must respect their decisions.” At his 70th birthday party, he told us, “I have been very blessed. And I am doubly so in that I know how blessed I am.”

After my youngest brother Mattisyahu ztz”l passed away, Rabbi Beryl Gershenfeld, his first teacher of Torah, went to visit my mother. She expressed her happiness that Mattisyahu had found a life of learning and teaching Torah that so suited him and gave him so much joy.

My mother had her own theory about the trajectory of her sons: zechus avos. During shivah, a much younger friend of my mother’s shared that my mother attributed her children’s choice of fully Jewish lives to the dedication of her father, Maxwell Abbell, to the Jewish People.