I’ll get back to translating the rest of the Rav’s ‘earthquakes megilla’, from two weeks ago, in the next post, BH.

Depending on my shabbos cooking.

That first earthquake in Venezuela, the 7.2, was centred on Moron = MERON.

The hints are flowing thick and fast, if you care to see them.

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For now, I want to tell you about a visit I made to the hospital yesterday, to visit an older woman named Chaya.

Chaya was an immigrant to Israel from the former USSR 40 years ago, and while many of her peers chose to go to Am-er-ica, the goldene medina, Chaya decided to stay put.

She immigrated with her elderly parents, without a word of Hebrew, and as the only child and a single woman, she just got on with trying to make a living here, to keep her family going.

Baruch Hashem, she managed it.

She worked like an absolute dog, while her own mother stayed home with Chaya’s two kids, but today, she takes great satisfaction in the fact that she is leaving her two kids two apartments, each, when she croaks.

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However, the rest of the story is not so happy.

Chaya was working so hard, she never really forged a deep relationship with her own children. She showed her love by making them exotic russian delicacies, that take hours slaving in a kitchen – but her kids, now grown up and with their own families – don’t like that sort of food, and find themselves having to force it down, to keep mama happy.

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Chaya had some expectations of how life would like, once she finally stopped working so hard, and retired.

She’d be in her big apartment, surrounded by loving children and grandchildren, a bit part of the growing family’s life, and finally claim her place in the sun.

In reality, that hasn’t happened at all.

Chaya is incredibly generous – but also very strong-willed, and she wants things ‘her way’. Both her kids have been smoking since their early teens, but Chaya still doesn’t know this. She doesn’t know, how much one of her kids loves pizza – a ‘forbidden food’, because it’s a) not russian and b) not ‘healthy’.

Chaya would never dream of ordering a pizza in, when the kids come around.

Her relationship with them is based on her giving advice, and haranguing them for not doing things as well as they could be – and incessant worrying, that they aren’t sleeping enough, eating properly, getting on in life, etc etc.

It’s really exhausting to be around.

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Recently, Chaya’s stress levels exploded.

She was worrying about the war…about the future of the country…about her kids not living in a place with a security room…about her grandson not developing properly (in her own mind)…about how expensive property is getting…about people not getting their shots on time, or even, at all….

Long story short, Chaya’s stress levels maxed out, about three months ago.

And she crashed, physically.

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All of a sudden, she couldn’t walk.

She couldn’t talk so much.

She couldn’t cook.

She found herself having to finally quit the job she loves so much (three years after retirement age here…), and stuck in a chair alone, in her too-big flat, casting around for some meaning, some purpose to life.

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Like many people from the former USSR, and also, many people in the West, Chaya was raised with a strong belief that unless someone is ‘productive’, however you chose to define that, they are meaningless.

They are ‘freeloaders’, ‘useless eaters’, the language escalates up and up, even to the point of comparing so-called ‘unproductive people’ to ‘parasites’ and cancerous growths, leaching the life out of so-called ‘humanity’.

It’s a very hard klippa to overcome.

It’s communist and also capitalist.

It totally and utterly denigrates the value of human life, and especially, that inner dimension of human life, the soul, which achieves great things that cannot be measured directly via bank balance or hours spent ‘doing something’.

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To give one example:

A person wracked with physical pain, who connects that pain back to God, and tries their hardest to accept their situation with love – that person is achieving such high things, spiritually, for their soul, for their tikkun, it’s hard to put it into words.

But our communist-capitalist system finds this idea anathema – that’s why all the big push for euthanasia. Get the co-called ‘useless eaters’ out of the equation, and stop them pointless using up resources, like food, housing, electricity…

They don’t say this bit out loud, but it’s an accurate, and incredibly disturbing and anti-human, depiction of the general push to brainwash us all into thinking if someone isn’t ‘productive’, in the communist-capitalist meaning of the word, then they have no right to continue to exist.

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Back to Chaya.

Yesterday, the hard shell started to crack a bit, and she finally started to cry, about her disappointed hopes for her golden years.

It’s not that her family don’t care – they care very, very much. They are calling, they are visiting, they are offering practical ‘help’.

But the core of the problem is this: Chaya is essentially a stranger in her children’s lives.

Where all the ‘shared experiences’ should be, the conversations, the stuff done together, the meeting of minds, and the sometimes violent disagreements – none of that really happened.

The family visits and interactions all followed a strict formula, which was suffocating for her children, and not satisfying for anyone involved.

There were too many conversations you just couldn’t have. Too many topics off the table. Too much ‘rigid thinking’ and need for control, and yes, let’s say it, selfish behaviour, that treated the children as just an ‘audience’ for the star of the show, the parent.

It’s very hard to patch all that up now.

But it’s not impossible.

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Yesterday, I spent an hour telling Chaya that the time for obsessively ‘worrying about others’ is over. She now has to focus on getting herself well again.

But, I can no longer make the delicious soup my children love so much!!

• Buy them a pizza instead, I tried to tell her. She didn’t take the hint.

But, I can’t help them with the kids the way I wanted do!!

• Just focus on ‘being’, instead of ‘doing’ and show them your love in other ways (outside of the kitchen…)

By the end, to her credit, she was starting to listen.

She is hopefully going to move out of the too-big, lonely, empty apartment, to one of her smaller places, with a little garden, where she can actually sit outside and still be part of humanity – even though it’s in a less des-res area.

Your kids love you so much, Chaya.

I told her.

Let them figure things out a bit more, without you ‘helping’ all the time.

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My takeaways from yesterday were many.

First, easy to see when it strikes someone else and not you, lo alenu, but it was obvious that Chaya’s illness has actually been sent as a hidden blessing, to shake up a whole bunch of things that were actually just suffocating her, and everyone else, and making her very unhappy.

Like, that ‘big apartment’.

Like, that ‘super-satisfying job’.

Like, being a ‘success’, materially – a great cook, a good organiser, a very efficient financial planner.

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For me personally, who quit my successful career 20 years ago, when I could see that my parenting totally sucked as a result, it’s also very validating.

How many years, I spent in the wilderness, watching a ton of my more ‘successful’ peers have their big houses, fancy vacations, important jobs.

While I stayed at home, having countless internal battles with myself, trying to work on my bad middot, lack of emuna and issues with my kids. (And, lack of money and ability to buy the ‘big house’, on just one salary.)

Now, I am so grateful that I picked that path, because you can always work like a dog again at any stage of your life.

But you can’t go back and be a good parent to your kids when they really need you growing up, if you wasted that time stuck in your work emails.

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The last thing I understood, is how deeply ingrained this whole idea is of ‘being productive’.

It’s the same stick being used to hit the chareidi world over the head right now, that totally negates the value of spiritual endeavours, and the human soul.

Or to put it another way, the whole, entire reason we are down here on planet earth, in the first place.

It’s mamash a battle between good and bad, on so many levels.

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I’m not judging anyone.

I’m not judging Chaya, she really worked like a dog for decades, to make sure her elderly, immigrant parents had a place to live, and food on the table.

She’s a remarkable woman, in so many ways.

And that’s why, God is giving her the chance to finally put her feet up, and to get to know her kids and grandkids properly – and most importantly of all, her self.

I hope she’ll accept the invitation.