Because HaShem: Finding Ground After the Fall
D’vorah has been close to death more than once. Not metaphorically. Not figuratively. Hospice paperwork signed, sepsis roaring through her body, breath shallow, months counted.
In April 2025, she wrote via text,
“I got kicked off hospice in February cuz I called 911 to get treatment for sepsis and live, and didn’t call my hospice nurse for comfort care to die. I’m tired, and still quite ill and probably will never fully recover, but I’m determined to make a couple more years. I believe HaShem supports that given the freaky surreal circumstances that allowed me to be alive and not die after septic shock in Feb.”
D’vorah’s body is frail from illness, yet her spirit is something else entirely. She sews tallitot embroidered with nature
and moonlight. And she makes strawberry cupcakes out of freezer scraps. “Not eating orally anymore,” she jokes, “but cupcakes! I can eat those!”
She is also deaf. A survivor of domestic abuse. A mother to Kochava, whom she hasn’t seen until D’vorah was hospitalized in ICU with septic shock in February 2025. After her release from the hospital, she has not been able to see Kochava again. And she is also a proud Jewish woman with deep trust in HaShem and the power of tzedakah (charitable giving) to bind a community together.
In April 2021, D’vorah’s husband left her and her daughter in Philadelphia, then quietly cut her off from all financial support. “I was suddenly and exclusively responsible for ensuring that Kochava and I had shelter, food, and necessary prescriptions—with utterly no access to any financial resources.” She had no idea what to do. “I took the onus of shalom bayit (peace in the home) very personally,” she shares. “I truly thought the abuse was somehow my fault.”
The financial abuse escalated quickly. While denying D’vorah access to any marital funds, her husband hired an expensive legal team. Two years ago, they overwhelmed her in court. He gained full custody of Kochava, and D’vorah was ordered to cease all contact with her daughter. It was not her choice.
She turned to her rabbis, and one of them told her about Hebrew Free Loan Society of Greater Philadelphia. “I knew what the Talmud teaches,” D’vorah says. “Tzedakah should not benefit the giver. Jews are happy to give money without knowing where it’s going. It creates a never-ending mitzvah circle. Asking someone for help is a mitzvah because it invites the person who will help to make the mitzvah of helping. Magic, really.”
Still, asking was hard.
“I was mortified. I was embarrassed to be in the situation I was in. I was full of second guessing and self-doubt.” But HFL met her without judgment. “Every person I encountered had a very positive approach. No one ever shamed me. Everyone made great efforts to project a strong sense of their collective support and respect for me as a person,” she shares.
The hardest part was asking someone to co-sign the loan. “I felt utterly humiliated to share my experiences with friends, most of whom had no idea I was being battered by my husband because I had held those secrets close,” D’vorah says.
The response overwhelmed her. “I was flooded with compassion… even from people who weren’t able to act as I was asking.” And then one friend did say yes. “He said he had been wanting to do something like this for a long time and just didn’t know how. He said he was grateful to me for asking him. Imagine that.”
The loan helped D’vorah and Kochava survive: “Food. Shelter. Transportation. Medical care. The absolute basic things.” It also allowed D’vorah to buy supplies and begin generating income again through creative work and bartering. “I was grateful for every repayment I was able to make,” she says, “because the loan had allowed me the means to crawl a little bit further from under the rubble of what felt like my life collapsing on top of us.”
In April 2024, D’vorah entered hospice. She worried she wouldn’t live long enough to repay the loan. “I may have fewer months left to live than the months I have left to repay,” she wrote in an email to HFL. “While I deeply hope and pray that my remaining days number more than the term of my loan, knowing that my obligation has been returned while I am still alive (and still kind of thumbing my nose at this terminally ill business…) will be such a mitzvah to me.”
Her words moved the HFL team, and an anonymous donor quietly stepped in to repay the rest of her balance.
D’vorah responded with a letter:
“Having someone in the Jewish community make a personal sacrifice in order to lift the obligation… was nothing less than an embrace of protection, shelter, and compassion at a time when I need it most.
Your act of generosity has been a breathing of life into the Hashkivenu.
It feels as if a tangible sukkah of peace has been created from one individual, acting in proxy for all of Israel, standing together with HaShem, guarding and saving me through this time, such as it is.”
Even while finishing her borrower interview, D’vorah texted, “I need to take a brief break, get my feeding pump started, and get some medication down… I’ll be back in 30 minutes.”
That is D’vorah: someone who pauses to hook up a feeding tube, then comes back to finish a story. Someone who makes art for the people she loves and uses the term mitzvah like a compass. Someone who insists on frosting cupcakes in between pain and praise. Someone who still hopes to have a few more years—because, as she puts it, “I’ve got too much hiddur mitzvah to create to accept dying right now.”
The tallitot on this page were made by D’vorah.