Pivotal Moments

My oldest has always had a very sensitive disposition, in every way. She has a ton of food allergies, some more problematic than others, and body and soul, she just ‘feels’ things far more than most other people.

For example, while most small kids can happily stuff in E-numbers, food coloring, sugar and additives without many obvious side effects (let’s not talk about the hyperactivity, obesity, trouble concentrating in class, etc.) – my daughter can’t. If she eats too much junk, she gets terrible patches of eczema behind her knees that are sore and very itchy.

I used to get very upset about it, and wonder why Hashem was making such a small person suffer in that way. But a while ago, I actually realized it was a present in disguise. Most people don’t appreciate the connection between their health and their diet, and their health and their emotions, until a lot of water has passed under the bridge, and a lot of damage has already been done.

Thank G-d, my daughter understands that there is a price to pay for unhealthy emotions, and for unhealthy diets: itchy, sore, cracking skin.

Thank G-d, it’s also been an obvious cue for me to rein her in more on the junk food, and raise my game in the kitchen, and to talk to her about her feelings, and see what’s really going on in her life.

Like I said, the eczema has actually turned into a hidden blessing. But over Pesach, it stopped being so hidden, and suddenly appeared all over my daughter’s face. Initially, I didn’t pay too much attention to it. I figured it was allergy season; it was the out-of-the-ordinary Pesach diet; it was all the late nights doing the Seder and going out for day-trips.

I did what I always do, and got very strict about the amount of sugar and food coloring she was eating, and waited for it to start to clear up. Except this time, it didn’t. This time, instead of getting less itchy and starting to heal, my daughter developed even more symptoms: itchy, runny eyes, extreme lethargy, stomach aches, headaches – and the rash on her face was getting worse and worse.

Hmmm. Something was going on here.

Hashem has blessed me that I live in a great place, with a lot of very intuitive people who are seriously into healthy living and healthy eating. One of them saw my daughter’s face, and told me that rashes like that often develop as a result of a wheat allergy.

Hmmm. The allergies to nuts, kiwis, and sesame seeds I knew about. Allergy to wheat was a new one on me. But I know there is no such thing as coincidence, so as well as saying a few psalms for my daughter’s well-being, and doing a lot of asking Hashem to show me what was going on, I also decided to book in to see a kinesiologist, who uses the body’s own responses to determine what products are ‘good’ for it, and what, conversely, is ‘bad’ for it.

I told the kinesiologist my daughter’s symptoms, over the phone, and without even seeing her, she thought it could be something to do with the wheat harvest that was taking place all around my village. For days and days, the wheat was being cut, thrashed and bundled, and wheat particles were all over the place.

She could only see my daughter in a few days’ time, so in the meantime, I carried on saying psalms for her every day – and I cut out all wheat. To be on the safe side, I also cut out all gluten – and the change was almost instantaneous. The angry rash on her face started to subside, her eyes got clearer and brighter, and she stopped feeling itchy all the time.

So far, so good. But something wasn’t sitting right with me. On the physical plane, the problem was clearly some sort of allergic reaction. But I knew that there had to have been a ‘spiritual’ reason why the allergy happened in the first place, and this was where I was drawing a blank.

I sat on the couch with my husband, and we had a ‘teshuva brainstorming’ session. My husband went through our clues: my daughter had had a bad allergic reaction to something that had come in from outside, and was polluting her environment.

Was there a spiritual parallel?

We thought and thought, and then my husband had a ‘eureka!’ moment. In my quest to get healthier, I started trying to do Pilates, but the classes were very expensive and I was looking for a cheaper alternative.

We had guests from outside of Israel staying with us for Shabbat, and I asked them to bring me a couple of Pilates DVDs, to do exercises at home. The DVDs were great; the routines were great; the teacher was great and not too cheesy or annoying. There was only one problem: she was wearing immodest, low-cut, super-tight exercise clothes.

But I had such a strong vested interest to ‘do things my way’, I pretended that was fine. Of course, my daughters wanted to join me doing Pilates, and I let them. And again, I had a small twinge of conscience that maybe, just maybe, this wasn’t the best thing to do. But I batted it away, because I couldn’t see any other, cheap, alternative.

But G-d showed me that we pay a very high price for these ‘minor pollutants’ – and the spiritual damage showed up very quickly in my daughter’s skin.

I chucked the DVDs out, but I was quite cross for a few hours afterwards.

“Why is everything so hard?” I grumbled. “Why can’t I just exercise in peace? I was feeling so good from starting to be a bit more physically ‘healthy’…”

But in my heart, I knew it was wrong. In my heart, I knew I’d slipped up. So yesterday, I went to the City of David in Jerusalem, the biblical site of King David’s city, and did some very introspective personal prayer.

G-d is so kind to me. He gives me these clues so obviously, and He helps me to take notice and to act on them. After I’d done a bit of praying, I realized what a kindness He’d done for me.

We simply couldn’t ignore the rash on my daughter’s face; if it had been anywhere else, it would have been far more ‘manageable’ – and I would have probably missed what was really going on, beneath the surface.

So He arranged an ‘impossible to ignore’ cue; He gave us the clue to what was going on spiritually by mirroring it in our physical environment; and He gave me the clarity to understand the message, and the strength to act on it.

We all have these pivotal moments in life – all of us. I’ve learnt from my pivotal moments that once you get that flash of clarity, you have to act on it immediately – because if you don’t, the yetzer gets back in the door very quickly and convinces you that ‘it’s not so bad.’

If I’d have waited one more day before I chucked out those DVDs, I probably wouldn’t have.

G-d fixes it that the world appears to work ‘naturally’, and that allergies clear up once you remove the irritant that’s causing them. But the spiritual damage? If we don’t take action to clean that up, it continues to lurk under the surface, and it continues to chip away at our faith in G-d, and in His Torah.

Our physical issues are just the tip of the iceberg; there is always a spiritual reason for every hardship we have in our lives.

Our job is to ask Hashem to help us dig beneath the surface of whatever challenge we have, and then, to try to make that small, but profound commitment to change for the better.