Rabbi Hurwitz is in NY

 

Finally, I've gotten a bit of writing spirit back in me, and put together what I think is a nice piece (for two weeks actually).  Then I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about Rabbi Yitzi Hurwitz. 

For those who have been keeping tabs on the family, Rabbi Yitzi has made the unbelievable travel to NY to celebrate his youngest son, Sholom's, bar mitvah.  Mazal tov Rabbi Hurwitz, Dina and Sholom! It is a dangerous journey for a man on a ventilator but he urged his family "We can't be so busy staying alive that we're not living."  To read the full article, see here or continue reading.

Rabbi Isaac Hurwitz is as much a rock star as a Hasidic Jew can be. He writes regular Torah commentary for L’Chaim, a weekly newsletter distributed to schools and shuls run by the Orthodox Jewish movement Chabad. One of his songs was made into a widely shared YouTube music video. Rabbi Yitzi, as he’s known, also runs a marriage blog that advises men how to be better listeners and partners. He welcomes countless scholars, students and friends to his home in West Hollywood, Calif., to chat, study, pray or play guitar.

This might not seem remarkable, but for the past six years Rabbi Yitzi, 47, has been weakened by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the neurodegenerative disease that infamously befell Lou Gehrig. Rabbi Yitzi has bulbar ALS, a particularly nasty form of the disease that attacks nerves and muscles associated with basic functions such as speech, swallowing and respiration. He has lost the ability to move and spends his days in bed. A ventilator expands and contracts his lungs so he can breathe. He receives nourishment through a tube and is at high risk of a stroke or heart attack.

Yet with a robust support system and technological assistance—and with his hearing and vision still intact—this remarkable rabbi has stayed productive and present for his wife, Dina, and their seven children. He writes her a weekly love letter using laser-based software that tracks eye movements to nudge a laptop cursor through its paces. “I get a text each morning along the lines of ‘Good morning, my love,’ ” Dina says. Another note may follow later: “You kvetch so nicely.”

Using the same eye-gazing program, Yitzi painstakingly writes his weekly Torah commentaries. It sometimes requires a day to complete a column that once would have taken two hours. One recent piece addressed whether someone can be commanded to love another in the same way as loving God. “To be loved, is to be understood,” Yitzi concludes. While he has rabbinical dispensation to use his computer on Shabbat, Yitzi often refrains and rests his strained eyes from the intense workouts. “He communicates differently on Shabbat, looking at everyone’s faces directly; it’s more pleasant,” Dina says. She adds that she still detects the mischief and happiness of the man she married in 1996.

Shlomo Bistritzky—a fellow Chabad rabbi in Westlake Village, Calif.—grew up in Brooklyn with Yitzi. “If you want to see what a beautiful soul looks like, go meet Rabbi Yitzi,” he says. “Everyone who visits approaches nervously with acid reflux but leaves feeling uplifted. As his body has failed him, his joyous spirit shines through.”

When his symptoms first appeared in 2012, Yitzi and Dina were living in the California desert town of Temecula. They had moved there in 1999 to establish a Chabad house, which grew from their living room to a storefront serving a growing Jewish community. Yitzi was an active pulpit rabbi—overseeing Hebrew school and adult education, along with weddings, births, funerals and daily prayer services. He composed songs on guitar and was usually the last one dancing on holidays. He counseled families during the financial crisis and took extra jobs to support his own brood. This included work as a chaplain in a state hospital for the criminally insane and as a supervisor of kosher operations at a dairy farm a half-hour up the road.

“We told him, you have to start sleeping in a bed,” Dina recalls urging her husband, who would nap in his car to wake up with the cows. But the slurred speech and drooling they noticed weren’t from fatigue. Even after his diagnosis, he tooled around on a scooter and texted at rapid pace, until only one thumb worked. Just before an emergency tracheotomy in 2015, Rabbi Bistritzky asked Yitzi if he wanted to forgo treatment. He remembers explaining the other rabbis would give their blessing. He watched as his friend slowly typed on his phone, “I want to watch my children grow up.”

“For whatever reason Hashem gave this illness to Yitzi. If he can embrace it, then we all have an opportunity to turn it into a mitzvah,” Rabbi Bistritzky says. He and a group of five local rabbis rallied their communities to support the family financially. Dina overcame her dread of public speaking and now gives talks on helping families overcome severe challenges.

Last June, Rabbi Yitzi’s eyes beamed as he was wheeled beside his daughter Fruma at her wedding in Los Angeles. And this week the entire family flew to New York for his son’s bar mitzvah. The boy will read Torah in the Brooklyn study of Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, the late leader of Chabad-Lubavitch. “It was totally Yitzi’s idea for us to come,” Dina says. “We said, ‘No way, it’s too risky and difficult.’ ” Her husband’s response was classic Yitzi: “We can’t be so busy staying alive that we’re not living.”