Torah

And Hashem said to Avram, “Go for yourself from your land, from your birth place, and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”

– B’reishis 12:1

Raised in Brooklyn, Rochel grew up appreciating that she was Jewish, and that was about it. Her only connection to Orthodox Judaism came through deeply religious relatives who, later in life, had a profound influence on her. After meeting her husband at Harper College, their journey together led them around the world. In 1971, after being married for seven years, Rochel and her husband were living in Taiwan due to a Fulbright Fellowship, and it was there that their lives took an unexpected turn.

“You shall count for yourselves – from the morrow of the rest day (Pesach), from the day when you bring the omer (a measure of volume) of the waving – seven weeks, they shall be complete. Until the morrow of the seventh week you shall count, fifty days…” (Leviticus 23:15-16)

Chazal teach: “Hovei mis’avek b’afar ragleihem” (Avos 1:4) — Attach yourself to the dust of the feet of Talmidei Chachamim.

As twins, Yaakov and Esav shared the same DNA, the same nature, and yet they emerged as radically different people. One became a patriarch of our people and the other a great villain of Jewish history, the progenitor of Edom, the exile in which we remain until this very day.

Soon after the one-year commemoration of the deadly October 7 attacks in Israel, one man conducted 38 interviews focusing on the rebuilding efforts of the Israeli communities in the Gaza envelope. Among those he met was a woman named Dafnah from Kibbutz Re’im. She had been the cultural director of the kibbutz and one of the organizers of the Nova Festival. Touring the kibbutz, she showed him her charred house and the room in which her mother and children were found murdered together. She is the lone survivor of her family.