Sensitivity

 

Anyone who knows me, knows that I'm an expressive person.  I honestly communicate what's on my mind & heart, and I'm willing to be vulnerable.  It's my greatest asset, but it's also my greatest liability.  It's an asset because I'm relatable and human.  I don't feel the need to be perfect in everyone's eyes and I'm willing to share a struggle, which people appreciate.  At the same time, being expressive has its risks.  When you're on the ball and in touch, expressiveness is refreshing and real.  However, expressiveness without sensitivity is dangerous & causes hurt. 

The key to life is sensitivity. Sensitivity is the key to marriage, raising children, developing a relationship with G-d, and even pool safety as I will write about later.  And I struggle with sensitivity.  In the past five years at Chabad of Temecula, we've done a lot of good.  I try to do the right thing and don't eat myself up over the small mistakes that we all make.  Looking back, there are only two mistakes that I can't forget about, and they both involved being insensitive to someone who needed it most.

Over the past week I've had a whirlwind of thoughts and feelings to process, and indeed it is a process.  The first few hours and especially the first few minutes after I ran to pull Levi from the pool, I didn't feel anything.  The thoughts of those emotionless moments will be forever etched in my mind in slow motion, but I was mainly doing: pulling Levi from the water, doing CPR, going to the hospital and writing to the Rebbe. 

The next morning, I started to feel.  Saying the Modeh Ani prayer with the boys, and reaching the words "שהחזרת בי נשמתי- You have returned my soul to me", I was overcome with feelings of gratitude, and I broke down crying.  The whole day was an emotional overload.  That night at the Shabbos meal I was overwhelmed with emotion, and was VERY expressive.

Next, Natanya and I started brainstorming ideas for how we can pay back and contribute towards pool safety awareness, and settled on getting a children's book written about it, to educate children and their parents.  We have already emailed a publisher about it.

Two nights ago, after writing the email and facebook post about our miracle, I started to feel guilty.  Someone had tagged a website called Levislegacy.com in a comment.  It's a tribute to a boy named Levi Hughes who drowned in a pool in 2018, and its mission is to raise pool safety awareness.  I started thinking about four personal friends of mine who lost children in pool accidents.  Why was I deserving and not them?  How would they process my celebratory email and Facebook post?  I spent at least an hour reading the news articles and Facebook posts from their horrors, some of the incidents lasting weeks, rallying the world in prayer for their precious children.  I thought of the guilt phenomenon in many Holocaust survivors.  They saw their entire families murdered in front of their eyes, and for the rest of their lives asked what they did to deserve being spared.

I thought again about the blessing for your life being saved:  הגומל לחייבים טובות- He who grants kindness to the guilty.  Indeed, I was guilty.  This is a kindness that I didn't deserve.  Indeed, maybe that is the point of the blessing; to remind myself that my prayer wasn't more valuable than theirs.  My son's life was not worth more than theirs.  Why did he survive?  This is a question I'll be asking myself as long as I live. 

Then, yesterday afternoon, I received an email from one of those friends who lost a child in a pool.  Before seeing his email, I had already edited the Facebook post (same as my last email) to reflect more humility, but it was too little and too late.  Indeed, he was hurt.  Very hurt.  Now I can add a third person to that list of people I've hurt with my insensitivity, and will think about it for the rest of my life.  The Torah warns many times about being sensitive especially to the convert and orphan because they need it most, and I blew it three times.  

I hope that just as those two people knew my heart was in the right place, even though my words were tone-deaf, and found it in their hearts to forgive me, that whoever I hurt with my post will do the same.

I'm heartened that many people were inspired to increase their pool safety, write to the Rebbe, and come closer to Yiddishkeit because of our story, and there was much of that, but the message was tone deaf. 

How could I have done it better?  Gratitude with humility.  Gratitude that G-d gave us back our son, and humility, knowing that we weren't any more deserving than those other parents who weren't as fortunate. 

With this in mind, my daughter asked me the other day for the single most important life lesson I've learned.  My answer was to not be afraid of failing.  I've failed many times and in many ways before, but I won't give up, and I won't stop writing or expressing myself.  Hopefully I've learned the lesson this time, have grown from this, and will be more expressive & sensitive, but I won't give up.