It's All From HaShem: Being Lonely

Chanukah is over. Soon the menorahs will be cleaned and put away and most of us will return to our healthy diets. As I straightened up my grandchildren’s mess from Shabbat Chanukah I couldn’t help but remember the miserable Shabbat Chanukah I’d had a lifetime ago, when I was only nineteen-years-old. I recalled how I’d been admitted into the university’s infirmary just before the first night of the holiday began. Confined to a hospital bed that Shabbat I’d tried not to feel sorry for myself but it was a difficult challenge. Second degree burns down the front of me were painful*. The medication I was on made me weepy. And I was lonely, incredibly lonely.

Unbeknown to me the head nurse had decreed on Friday morning that I should have no more student visitors as I was not resting enough. That ban even included my best friend and I couldn’t understand why he’d abandoned me. There was no way that I could have known then that a little over a year later he and I would be married. I could have never dreamed that forty years afterwards my Shabbatot Chanukah would be so full of children and grandchildren that the only time I would be by myself would be when I was in the bathroom.

Like me in that hospital bed so many years ago, the nation of Israel is feeling indeed lonely today. BDS, UN condemnations, and the biased media reports leave us feeling as abandoned as I felt that Shabbat Chanukah in the infirmary. Still, I know that the day will come, as we learn from the prophets, when the third and final Holy Temple will be rebuilt and, as it says in Zecharia, Hashem will be One and His name will be One. Then, as all the inhabitants of the world flock to Jerusalem to worship the true King, they will realize that the Jewish people were always the chosen nation. Gone will be the hate and censures. As nations beat their swords into plowshares we, the nation of Israel, will be as overwhelmed with support as I was this past Shabbat Chanukah with the joy of grandchildren.

It may not happen for forty days, forty weeks, forty months, forty years or even four hundred, but it will happen. I pray the time comes soon, speedily, in our days.