Five Thousand Prayers
By Kiki Ehrenpreis
 
Shavuos is a bittersweet holiday for my family. Six years ago on Shavuos my beloved niece was born. Five years ago during the Shloshes Yemei Hagbala, her father, my brother Akiva, was in an accident. By the time Hatzala was called his brain had been critically deprived of oxygen and he lost consciousness.  Akiva has been in a coma ever since.
               

And so, over the past five years my family has waited. Many things have changed. Siblings married and had babies. His little girl learned how to run and sing and say brachos. And still Akiva lies unconscious and we have no idea what is going on in his mind. In a way it is ironic that the accident happened during the time of Matan Torah. Akiva was a tremendous Talmid Chacham—the serious eighteen-hour-a-day kind of masmid. I have almost no concept of how it is possible for a person to be able to study and concentrate with that kind of consistency and passion. He once described learning Torah on that level to me. He said that sometimes it is challenging, and then sometimes, when he is learning with a particularly good chavrusa, it sets his heart on fire. Akiva had such an inspiring love and devotion to Hashem and the Torah. I remember once as a teenager asking him about how one attains Ahavas Hashem, and that he told me that it is something that tends to come to a person more naturally at age seventeen.
 

Akiva was always devoted to the klal; people with problems seemed to drift to him for support. Although he was always conscientious to be timely and efficient, he didn’t seem to give off an air of pressure or irritability. One time we both coincidentally had jury duty on the same day. We took the train together, and as usual I ended up davening shacharis on the train. I didn’t realize when I started shemona esrei that our stop was in Brooklyn, and when we arrived I was still in the middle of praying. So although he had taken the day off to go with me there, Akiva patiently waited as we stayed on the train as it drove onto the bridge to Manhattan, and then as we crossed the platform to take the train back across the bridge to Brooklyn.
 

The hardest thing about having my brother in a coma is to keep davening and davening… waiting for some sign of recovery… and then going back and davening again. Rabbi Yisroel Reisman shlita once said that one of the hardest things in life is to daven for the same thing more than once and still maintain the bitachon that our davening has power.  It is so hard to sustain kavana for something you’ve been praying for over and over and over again. In parshas Vaeschanan we learn that Moshe Rabeinu davened 515 times to be able to go to Eretz Yisroel, and if he had prayed just one more time he would have had to enter.  I calculate that I must have prayed for my brother’s refuah over five thousand times (three times daily—at least— for five years), and that’s not counting the tefillos of family, friends, shuls, and all of the tehillim lists that his name is on. How does one keep davening faithfully for the same thing five thousand times and really feel like this time will make a difference?
 

Rabbi Fishel Schachter, shlita, has said that when a person is going through a difficult time the yetzer hara’s trick is to make him or her think that things will never get better. According to Rabbi Shraga Silverstein the yetzer hara is represented in the imagination, or dimyon.  Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, wrote a book called Stumbling on Happiness in which he discusses the phenomenon that when people imagine the future, it is really, really hard to visualize it being much different from the way things are now. But can we ever see situations or people really change? Being privileged to know and learn with many baalei teshuva, I have seen that people can change; that of course is the essence of Teshuva. As a psychology student, I’ve learned that inasmuch as hopelessness is one of the hallmarks of depression, the goal of therapy is to learn how change behaviors and thought patterns in order to bring about recovery and joy. The fundamental goal of the mussar movement, as I understand it, is for the individual to identify characteristic middos and learn how to do the incredibly difficult work of changing them for the better, which according to the GRA is our purpose in life. As we learn from the “five levels of pleasure” class of Rabbi Noach Weinberg, zatzal, the goal of channeling both of our yitzros, good and bad, to Hashem is to create ourselves and thereby become dynamic , self-made human beings.
 

In Jewish history we have powerful examples of people waiting and waiting for a yeshua, and then when everything seemed most hopeless it finally came. I am sure that Sara Imeinu never felt that her tefillos for a child were in vain, and she waited for ninety years. And then suddenly things did change, and the future of klal Yisroel began. When these things happen in our time, when a couple has a baby after many years,  for example, we are reminded that a nisayon doesn’t last forever, even if it truly feels that way within its midst.
 

The ultimate comfort, however, while we are still waiting, is to remember, as Rabbi Yitzchok Kirzner zatzal explains, that suffering has a purpose. Akiva, who had many painful medical problems growing up, once told me when I was going through a personal difficulty in my own life about the effect that his challenges had on him. He said that if he had never gone through his illness he would just be an “ordinary” Jew, but instead his yissurim had led him to analyze his purpose and goals in life and ultimately inspired him to become the person that he is. As Mesillas Yesharim says, it is ideas like these, the ones we may know intellectually but not feel on a continuous basis, which we must review constantly to keep us going when we need it. 
 

Sometimes in considering my brother’s situation I think about the meaning of life. Developmental psychologists have studied what children use to identify whether something (e.g. a doll versus a baby) is alive. Some of the factors included goal-directed behavior and organic trajectories of movement. I find this to represent critical features of our lives; the need to constantly grow toward our goals, and the reality that constant linear movement in a positive direction is unrealistic— it’s normal to have ups and downs. But how does this relate to Akiva in his current state? I have certainly seen how much Akiva’s situation has inspired those around him to grow, the prayer and mitzvos that so many people have taken on in the merit of his refuah. Last year my family organized a project asking people to devote extra learning time on Shavuos night as a zechus for a refuah shelaima for Akiva. We estimate that hundreds of people all over the world committed to learning Torah on Akiva’s behalf while he could not do so himself.  This year once again we are asking men and women to have Akiva in mind on leil Shavuos and dedicate a few extra minutes beyond what they would have learned to be a zechus for a refuah shelaima b’karov for Akiva Shamai ben Ahava Rivka.
 

We learn from the Rosh Hashana davening that tzadikim are always alive because they are connected with the Source of life. Rabbi Yisroel Reisman shlita said that while Akiva is in a coma his mind is even more intimately bound to Hashem. Sometimes I wonder if he is continuing to mentally learn Torah even though we can’t see it. Another quintessential factor of life is the possibility of hope. When I see my brother lying in a coma, I don’t see Akiva, but rather a corporal representation of my brother that is here with us while we are waiting for him to come back. And I know that that representation contains the spark of hope that is Akiva’s life-force. Chazal say that “Yeshuas Hashem K’heref Ayin,” and as we watch Akiva’s eyes blink, waiting for that hint of communication, all we can do is hold on to that hope… and pray.
 

This Shavuos please dedicate a little extra Torah learning as a zechus for a refuah shelaima b’karov for Akiva Shamai ben Ahava Rivka.