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Stuart Schoffman: Rejoicing with Rafaela

On the mid-summer shabbat following the fast day of Tisha Be�av, Jews the world over chant the 40th chapter of the Book of Isaiah, in which the prophet offers consolation in the aftermath of destruction. It was on this day, known as Shabbat Nahamu, that my daughter Rafaela -- we call her Rafi -- was born in 1991 in Sacramento, California. The following week, we named her in a local synagogue, and I read the weekly portion from the prophets, again a soothing message from Isaiah. This year, in mid-August, we celebrated Rafi�s bat mitzvah, at Congregation Kol Haneshamah in Jerusalem, as she beautifully chanted that same haftarah, as well as a hefty chunk of the Torah portion from Deuteronomy, and delivered an insightful sermonette. That�s my girl.

Longtime readers of this page ("Naming Rafaela," Sept. 12/19, 1991; "Rafaela Revisited," Sept. 19, 1996) know that the proud-papa passage above is more than run-of-the-mill kvelling. In that faraway summer of 1991, as Americans puzzled over the survival of Saddam Hussein and Russian immigrants poured into Israel, I was battling lymphoma in Berkeley. My oncologist, Jeff Wolf, engineered a lull in my chemotherapy -- a hudna, if you will, a pharmaceutical cease-fire -- so that I would have the physical strength to attend my daughter�s birth. Roberta and I named her Rafaela, which in Hebrew connotes "healed by God." Five years later, with my lymphoma gone but now afflicted with leukemia, I underwent a bone-marrow transplant, again in California, on Rafi�s fifth birthday, July 26, which that year fell one day after Tisha Be�av. So you see, dear friends, this was no ordinary bat mitzvah.

Yet at the same time, I don�t believe that any bat mitzvah is ordinary. Let me share with you a bit of rabbinic wisdom Rafi and I came across as we prepared for the big day. In Deuteronomy 7, the Children of Israel are on the verge of crossing the Jordan into the Land of Canaan, and God, via Moses, is about to lay out a long list of dos and don�ts. If the Israelites play by God�s rules, God will smite their enemies as grandly as he smote the Egyptians, with "wondrous acts," "signs and portents," "the mighty hand and the outstretched arm." And then the text offers one specific detail, and one alone: "The Lord your God will also send the tsir�ah against them" -- the hornet. Why hornets? The 13th-century Judeo-Spanish commentator Bahya ben Asher suggested that the hornets are there to remind us that the Bible includes two kinds of miracles: those that flamboyantly transcend nature -- the Nile turning to blood, for instance -- but also "hidden" miracles, which occur quietly, within the natural order of things.

Children are a miracle: A single human cell develops into a tall, talented 12-year-old who makes nifty ceramics and chats with her friends via ICQ and thinks vegetables are gross. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great 20th-century sage, liked to startle lecture audiences by declaring that he had just witnessed a miracle -- the sunset. Judaism prescribes special blessings upon viewing rainbows or hearing thunder or eating cake. Our tradition is all about sanctifying the mundane.

Like my fellow cancer survivors -- Arab and Israeli, gentile and Jewish -- I have learned to take nothing for granted. I try my best to be attentive to the gift of life and to appreciate every good day, and the crummy ones too. I am grateful that Rafi�s bat mitzvah, by a stroke of political luck and symbolic coincidence, took place during the hudna, the fragile but still palpable time-out in the bloody conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Many friends and relatives were able to make the trip and rejoice with us -- though several guests were stranded in New York by the massive electrical blackout. (There�s always something.) Hotels in Jerusalem are full. The elusive miracle of Israeli normalcy -- the triumph of the best in human nature -- seems possible, if not probable.

It has been an interesting summer. Albeit preoccupied with readying my kids for their synagogue performances -- Dani, who was "bar-mitzvahed" (as they say in the Old Country) in November, took on part of the Torah reading -- I found time to visit Muhammad Dahlan, the new Palestinian security minister, together with a leadership delegation from the Anti-Defamation League. The muscle-bound men with huge weapons guarding Dahlan�s new compound in Ramallah commanded our collective attention, but what struck me most, amid the boiler-plate discussion of road map and roadblocks, was Dahlan�s body language, which radiated an overweening ambition to outfox competing warlords, make a deal with the Jews, and anoint himself Palestinian president in the bargain. If this will assure our children�s health, I wish him Godspeed.

The hudna notwithstanding, in early August Palestinian gunmen attacked a Jewish family of five, returning by car from a vacation in Sinai to their home in Har Gilo, a small apolitical settlement just outside Jerusalem. Among the injured was a 9-year-old girl who happens to be a friend of Rafi�s from school. On the Tuesday before the bat mitzvah, two Israelis were killed in small suicide bombings, one in Rosh Ha�ayin, the other in Ariel. The government decided not to retaliate, but everyone knows that full-scale violence can relapse overnight. "There is a feeling," wrote the veteran political analyst Danny Rubinstein in Ha�aretz, a few days before the bat mitzvah, "that every day the hudna lasts is a miracle."

I suspect that from Rafi�s point of view, the miracle was getting through her Torah reading ("You want me to do all that?" she gasped when we began her lessons) without a hitch. After she completed the lengthy opening section, Dr. Jeff Wolf of Berkeley, sitting in the synagogue next to my parents, rose to recite the blessings over the Torah, and it was Dani�s turn to read the words of the Deuteronomist. One must not say, chanted my son, "my own power and the might of my own hand have given me this hayil" -- strength or success or military moxie. We are bound, all of us, to one another, to something great and unfathomable. None of us, whatever our creed or culture, ever goes it alone.