The Blessing of a Broken Heart
Reviewed by Michael Skakun, The Jewish Press

The Blessing of a Broken Heart by Sherri Mandell. New Milford, Conn.: The Toby Press, September 2003. 226 pp. $19.95.

Ernest Hemingway wrote in his novel A Farewell to Arms: "The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong at the broken places." The texture of scar tissue is perhaps rougher and more cohesive than any other, certainly more durable in memory than the instrument that inflicts the wound. The extraordinary resilience of the body and the mind in the face of all that negates it is one of the strongest arguments for salvation. Only in a hallowed world can a surfeit of pain give birth to the poetry of transcendence, to the search for symbols, the binder of time and loss.

In Sherri Mandell`s The Blessing of a Broken Heart, we are brought into a rare encounter with the redemptive paradoxes of human suffering. On May 8, 2001, Koby, her 13-year-old son, and his friend, Yosef Ish-Ran, were found bludgeoned to death in a cave in the Judean desert near Tekoa, their settlement home 12 miles from Jerusalem. These two innocent Jewish schoolboys had skipped class that morning to discover their landscape, to go hiking in a nearby gorge only to meet death in its most horrific aspect. In prose deeply felt and artfully shaped, the grieving mother conveys her emergence from an abyss of grief, her steely determination not to sink into the quicksand of despair. She writes, "I could have stayed in bed the rest of my life mourning him. I could have remained broken, resenting my life, my lot. But there is something in me that refuses to be broken, no matter how intense the pain, something that moves toward light."

A professional writer with a strong poetic sensibility, Mandell, a Cornell graduate and a ba`alas teshuva, sees the world through the scrim of signs and portents. Ever since the loss of her eldest child, "the child who taught me to be a mother," she is a sleuth for meaning, a drinker of infinity. Divinity for her truly lies in the details, in the objects of this world that point beyond themselves to a deeper and more rapturous reality.

After her astounding loss, signs abound in every cleft of stone. Birds, symbols of the soul and the bridge between worlds, evoke some of her most moving stories, as do crickets and archaeological vessels, all objects brimming with spirit. Her voice is like the liquid contralto of a nightingale singing its pain. After reading this book, one is all the more convinced that if, as a poet says, religion makes the mind abundant, then loss makes it profligate with meaning and implication.

Mandell draws analogies from the widest sweep and the narrowest interstices of experience. She speaks of being pregnant with death. "Mourning my son has similarities to labor. The contractions of pain rush through my body like a knot that is tied tighter and tighter so that I am unable to breathe, dead along with my son. My womb becomes a grave. I feel the pain of him in my belly, a pressure bearing down on me."

Sorrow is for her the great dialectic of personal history, a force so strong that it gives birth to new wisdom and maturity. Once Koby is martyred, she develops a powerful feeling of fellowship with all of creation, for the spirit of her son now resides everywhere. Instead of stoical resignation, she chooses an all-encompassing mindfulness that makes the world intensely more alive and offers the promise of greater sanctity. "In suffering my son`s murder, I`ve also been reborn. I am not the same person. I`ve acquired a new mission in life. Koby is leading us to a new sense of holiness, still bumping against us, forcing us to define ourselves, creating a deeper belief in G-d and in our mission on this earth."

Sherri Mandell and her husband, Rabbi Seth Mandell, a former Hillel director at the University of Maryland and Penn State University, have chosen to honor their son`s life by establishing a foundation in his name whose purpose is helping survivors of terror cope, heal and grow. In its first year of operation, its healing programs and retreats assisted over 1000 family members. The Koby Mandell Foundation (www.kobymandell.org) is at one and the same time a gesture of solidarity, a therapeutic strategy and a new science of healing the heart in extremis.

On an archaeological dig at Beit Guvrin the Mandells took with 10 other bereaved families — part of the healing program of the Koby Mandell Foundation — they climbed down into the darkness of a cave and unearthed after much effort an unbroken vessel the size of a jug of wine. It was a revelatory omen. Sherri Mandell writes with signature grace, "After all the time that had elapsed, all the generations that had died and been born, something whole remained. And the same is true for those who feel the suffering of loss. There is something in us that clings to life and refuses to be diminished or broken. We ourselves are vessels, filled with G-dliness. And though we may chip and crack, our souls are whole even when we aren`t." Rarely has pain been transmuted so powerfully into prayer, into a benediction of words, offering the reader so profound an example of attentiveness to being and the world.