16/04/2026
What Are We Still Here to Do?
A shiva visit left me with questions I cannot put down
By Rivkah Isaacs
I came home from a shiva house last week, and I have not been the same since.
I went to visit a dear friend who had just lost her husband — a woman I have known for many years, a mother of twelve, already a great-grandmother. The house was full in the way shiva houses are: the unmistakable fullness of grief held together by family and friends, by memories of decades of a life well-lived.
I left inspired. And I left unsettled. Both at once, woven together.
❧
What I could not stop thinking about was something I knew, and heard again and again, about her husband: he had been “a doer.”
Always moving, always beginning something, always looking for the next way to be useful. But what struck me most was not the doing itself — it was the quality of the doing. He was not driven by outcomes. He did not measure himself by whether something succeeded or fell short. His question, always, was simply: What can I do right now? What does Hashem want me to DO right now?
There is a teaching in Pirkei Avos: לא עליך המלאכה לגמור — it is not upon you to complete the work. We say it and we know it and teach it. But this man lived it, quietly, in every area of his life, right up until the very end.
Sitting there, I thought about how often I hear the word “retirement.” People ask me about it gently — what are my plans, will I slow down, isn’t it time? Of course, I understand the question. Yet in that room, surrounded by the children this man had shaped and inspired, I found myself asking something altogether different: Do we actually have the right to stop? Is slowing down a kindness to ourselves, or is it something we will have to explain l'maalah, in 120? What does Hashem want from us in our later chapters — really?
I don’t have a clean answer, and I’m not sure I’m meant to, yet.
___
There was a second conversation happening across the room that afternoon — almost without my noticing, until I was pulled into it.
A group of young mothers had gathered near the doorway. Someone introduced me as a Jewish Montessori educational consultant, and almost immediately one of them turned and said, quietly but urgently: “Please — open a school. Our children need something different.”
The others nodded. And as I listened to them, I felt that same braided feeling again: inspired and unsettled together. Because I know there are beautiful schools out there, dedicated teachers, parents who give everything. And yet something, somewhere, is not reaching these families. There is a gap, and not a gap of effort or love, but of something harder to name.
One of the women told me she has been searching for a Montessori school for her child. I told her gently: the philosophy alone is not enough. Look at the staff. Look at the culture. Look at what has been built quietly over years. There are so many pieces, and they all matter.
I drove home turning it all over — the man who never stopped showing up, the mothers searching for something they couldn’t quite articulate, and my own quiet reckoning with what it means to still be here, still capable, still needed. And hearing there’s a need that maybe, b’siyata di’Shmaya, with help from Hashem, I could fill.
___
I don’t think these two conversations found me in the same emotionally charged and open place by accident. I think Hashem was asking me something. Something I need to answer to be shalem, to be whole, in His eyes (kivyachol) and in my own.
And I suspect, if you are reading this and feeling a flicker of recognition — He may be asking you something too.
