When, Not If

On the morning of October 7, 2023, I watched Israel come under attack from a hospital bed in Boston.

I had been there for months by then, on a pump, waiting for a heart transplant. I could not get up. I could not help. I could not do a single useful thing. Anyone who loves Israel knows the feeling of distance on a day like that. Mine came with an IV line.

And lying there, I made a decision. I did not say if. I said when. When I get to the other side of this, I am going to take everything I know how to do and put it to work for the people living through this.

A week later, on October 14, I received my heart.

People assume they know what a man in that bed prays for. More time. To see his children grow up. I understand the assumption. It is just not how it went for me. From the day I was told I needed a transplant, I committed to positivity only. No self-pity, and no bargaining. I was in a place, with a team, in a time, where a second chance was actually possible. Not everyone gets that. So I prayed out of gratitude, for the chance itself, every day, before I knew how any of it would turn out.

A few days after my transplant, my father gave me a prayer. The rabbis wrote it, somewhere along the way, for a person who has come through a transplant, and he found it and put it in my hands. I have read it every morning since.

It opens with the oldest thanks there is. Modeh ani. I am truly thankful. It calls this heart what it is, an incredible gift, and it does not look away from where the gift came from. My life continues because another life ended, and the prayer asks me to honor that sacrifice by tending carefully to what was placed inside me. A new spirit has been placed in me, it says, borrowing from Ezekiel, who promised a new heart. I do not think Ezekiel meant it literally. I get to.

There is a line in it I cannot get past. Teach me to number my days, that I may gain a heart of wisdom. I do number my days. Every one since October 14 is counted. None of them is assumed.

The prayer ends by widening out. All people are bound together in a common humanity. Let this make me more compassionate, more sensitive, more responsive to the people around me. A mitzvah is usually translated as a blessing, or a good deed. The literal meaning is commandment. That prayer is a commandment I read to myself every morning. You got a second chance. Go make something of it.

It took two and a half years for the when to arrive. It happened slowly, and then all at once. Today I lead the US work of The Koby Mandell Foundation, which for 25 years has stood with bereaved families in Israel: parents who have lost children, children who have lost parents, widows, widowers, siblings. The Foundation was built by Seth and Sherri Mandell after their son Koby was murdered, and they built it the way the prayer describes. Gratitude turned outward. Loss turned into obligation.

Here is what this work teaches you. The crisis ends. The attention moves on. The grief does not. The families we serve live in the morning after, and the year after, and the decade after. So the work is not a moment of comfort in a terrible week. It is a camp a child returns to summer after summer. It is a retreat a mother can come back to. It is a community that is still there when the rest of the world has stopped asking.

From that hospital bed, I could not have told you any of this would happen. I did not know if the heart would come in time, and I did not know what my life would be for if it did. I only knew the direction. When, not if.

Underneath all of it is the phrase that has carried our people through everything. L’dor v’dor. From generation to generation. That is not a sentiment to me. It is a responsibility. Everything I have was handed to me. My faith. My family. And then, impossibly, more time. A stranger’s heart is beating in my chest, which makes the responsibility impossible to dodge. What I have been given is not mine to keep. It is mine to carry well, and to hand on.

That is what prayer sounds like now. Not asking for more time. Thanking God for the time, and then going out and spending it on purpose.