Towards the evening of the 'awakening' for the studio girls in the Cave of the Patriarchs, I was in distress. It was the month of Elul and that year a novelty was added to the studio that the educator would give a lesson to another class.
I was very very very stressed and walked around the house like a sleepwalker. Not only do I not know the girls and I do not know where to start with them in the one-time meeting, I did not know how to wake them up? How do I shock them? How do I get to this thing?
All day I confused my husband's mind and told him that he must help me and I read about Rabbi Aryeh Levin and I tried but I could not formulate anything. At noon I decided I would go to bed so I would have the strength to be awake all that night.
I was sleeping deeply and suddenly, not a dream, I felt that I was being watched. A really physical feeling that brought me out of the depths of sleep. I open my eyes out of this feeling and on my arm, 2 centimeters from my nose, there was a huge cockroach, a nasty, shiny black cockroach, such shiny eyes, the tentacles almost touched my face. It was an awakening!!!
I gave a scream at home that they thought at least a squad of terrorists had penetrated through the window.
By then I already had a story to tell the class, a story about waking up. I really woke up, my heart was pounding. I could not relax for a long time, even now that I remember it, I with chills, it was just disgusting. When do you meet a cockroach like that and me?
I have a problem with this story. My problem with it is that both coma and panic, in my opinion, are two sides of the same coin.
While there is an awakening but it is not a good awakening. How to direct the panic from such an awakening in a way that will not be paralyzing?
How does a person wake up well? How on the one hand we will not be left with a sense of routine permanence, and on the other hand we will not reach panic, fear and palpitations? What is the way to wake up well?
My other problem with this story is that it was good at the time to build a ninth grade, but today we have a lot of 'cockroaches', no shortage of moments of panic, we sum up a year of many moments of heart palpitations, many shocking encounters that we did not believe we could move on from them. Panic, like the one that woke me up, is not what we are missing today. The question is what do we do with coma and what do we do with panic?
I ask myself this question many times as a human being, as a Jew, as a wife, as a housewife, as a mother, as an educator. How to make the transition from routine to moment of awakening and awareness so that it enters the heart in a good and not distorted way.
That's my question.
Dina Horowitz
