In Kelm, they focused on how to live — but also on the great avodah of how to leave the world with calm and faith

There are moments in life when the clouds of confusion lift, and we’re left to survey our world with clarity and a sense of purpose.

I suspect that I’m not alone in identifying Rosh Hashana 5786 as one of those moments. Any one who, like me, stood in Ramat Beit Shemesh’s Gra shul during Shacharis likely experienced the same thing as Ouriel Dzikowsky z”l entered in a wheelchair.

Hooked up to an oxygen tank and breathing with great difficulty, Ouriel’s arrival was hard to miss. His struggles were the result of the aggressive disease that had reduced him from a healthy young man to one fighting for every breath.

To those who’d seen him just a couple of years previously, the change was shocking. Elegant as always in his French-American way, Ouriel was a shadow of the young man who’d made aliyah just a few years before.

I’d first met him in that very spot in shul after he arrived with his family from Baltimore — one of a wave of post-Covid arrivals.

In the interval, I’d only seen Ouriel sporadically. Along with the same fine impression that he made every time, I always walked away with renewed admiration for someone who’d picked himself up from life in the US to make Eretz Yisrael his home at a time in life when most people are focused on getting ahead.

Then came the illness. The next time that we met, Ouriel had to use a cane, having required amputation to battle the sickness that would take his life.

It was enough to make anyone bitter. Within three years of making aliyah, he’d lost his health. Yet Ouriel didn’t rail at the world. He had the same warm smile, the same quip when he greeted you.

As the sickness returned, Ouriel kept up his routine of work, chesed and learning as much as possible.

Then came Rosh Hashanah morning. As Ouriel entered in his wheelchair, the atmosphere in the shul shifted.

It was obvious to all that here was a very sick man. People greeted him, and he said hello with a nod of the head or a word accompanied by a smile. It took courage to face the world, to hold his head up high.

As he sat there davening and sipping water, Ouriel was wrapped in his own world, which became our world, too. Because suddenly, the words of the machzor came alive for us with crackling energy as we watched a living Unesaneh Tokef.

Ouriel, a man who’d lost his health, whose life visibly hung in the balance, didn’t sob. He lived the words that spoke of his reality, and davening alongside a man with a clear vision of the world as it really is, we lived them together with him.

In Kelm, they focused on how to live — but also on the great avodah of how to leave the world with calm and faith.

Ouriel z”l leaves behind a legacy of chesed, Torah, and yishuv Eretz Yisrael (a sefer Torah is being written in his memory). And for those fortunate enough to see him on that final Rosh Hashanah, also of the awesome fortitude and self-possession that a Jew can reach as he faces life’s ultimate test.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1085)