The Path The Soul Remembers

A journey through Mount Meron, memory, revelation and the hidden Light within

by Leah Friedman

Thank you, Rochel Leah and Maskit, for guiding and facilitating a hike that turned out to be so much more. 🌿

Here is a little taste of what it opened for me, from the chapter that grew out of our journey:

“Before we had even properly begun walking, while we were still gathered at that first elah, Maskit opened one of its strange, thick, elongated growths and handed it to me. This was how our journey into the mountain began: not simply as a hike, but as a discovery, an adventure into worlds concealed within what appeared ordinary.

Inside I saw what appeared to be hundreds upon hundreds of tiny seeds. Then I realised they were moving. They were alive. The chamber was filled with minute insects. I did not know what they were. I knew only that what had looked sealed and almost lifeless held an entire hidden world.”

What happens when we slow down enough to discover what we would usually walk past? And what might that awaken within us?

My walk through Mount Meron continued unfolding long after I came home. Through the trees, stones, encounters and moments of tefillah, something deep within me began to surface. Eventually, it became a chapter.

I’m sharing it as a glimpse into what these journeys can open: wonder, reflection, closeness to Hashem, and a growing awareness of the Light within His creation and within ourselves.

If you’d like to walk a little of that path with me, I invite you to read “The Path the Soul Remembers.” 🌿

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I came home close to midnight, my body exhausted and something inside me intensely awake. There were stones and acorns in my backpack, photographs on my phone and dust from the trail still clinging to my shoes. Yet none of these could contain what I had brought home from Mount Meron. The mountain had entered me in a way I did not yet understand.

When I saw the advertisement for the next journey created by Rochel Leah Weinman of Ohr Pnimi Tours together with Maskit Ben-Moshe, I knew that I had to be there. I had met Maskit previously on our journey across the suspension bridge over Gei Ben Hinnom—the experience that became an earlier chapter in this book. Something had opened for me on that bridge, and when this new journey appeared, I felt the same unmistakable inner pull.

Before I knew how I could possibly reach Mount Meron so early in the morning, something within me had already said yes. It felt less like making a decision and more like recognising where Hashem was leading me next.

The event was an Ohr Pnimi Women’s Nature Hike called “From Hillel and Shammai to the Inner Light of Rabbi Shimon”: approximately six and a half kilometres through Mount Meron with a small, intimate group of women.

These journeys bring together two remarkable women and two ways of entering the landscape. Maskit is a certified Israeli tour guide and nature therapist, deeply knowledgeable about the land, its stones, trees, plants and hidden life. Rochel Leah, the founder of Ohr Pnimi Tours, creates the inner journey through pnimius haTorah, meditation and the deeper spiritual meaning concealed within what we encounter.

Rochel Leah is difficult to describe because she carries so much depth. She is like a fountain whose waters keep rising from somewhere beneath the visible surface—Torah, insight and an ability to open what lies within an experience. Together, she and Maskit created a journey through both the visible and invisible mountain. We did not simply move from one point to another. We stopped, touched, listened and allowed what surrounded us to enter our awareness.

Even reaching the mountain had required a path to open. I live in Elad, and there was no public transport that could have brought me to Mount Meron in time for our nine-thirty morning meeting. Maskit offered to open her home to me the night before so that I could sleep there and travel with her in the morning. Without her generosity, I could not have been there.

Even in her house, before we set out, I noticed unusual and beautiful stones. They did not feel like objects placed there for decoration alone. They seemed to belong to the way she lived—to her instinct for recognising form, colour and wonder in the natural world. Looking back, I can see that the journey had already begun inside her home. I remain deeply grateful to her, not only for guiding us through the mountain, but for making it possible for me to reach it at all.

In truth, the sightings had begun even before the hike. As Maskit drove us towards the meeting point, she kept noticing things through the car window. “Look at this. Look at this.” I was sitting beside her, travelling through the same landscape, yet I could not always see what she was seeing. Even while driving, her eyes were awake to details mine had passed over. She had spent years studying nature and guiding people through it. The landscape was not scenery to her; it was a language she knew how to read.

I remembered first seeing her unusual name written in a group before we had met. Maskit. I had asked her where it came from, and she explained its connection to an even maskit, a beautifully formed or decorated stone. Now the woman whose name itself held the image of a stone was teaching me to see the colours within the stones beneath our feet. She would lift one, turn it in her hand and reveal bands of colour and formation I might otherwise have walked over without a second glance. Once she showed them to me, the ordinary ground opened into intricacy.

Maskit once said that the creature she most identifies with is a deer.

Watching her move across the mountain, I understood. She seemed to prance over the uneven ground, light and instinctive, while the rest of us carefully negotiated the rocks. Nature did not feel like somewhere she visited. It felt like somewhere she belonged.

At the beginning of the trail, we gathered beside an elah, a terebinth tree. Rochel Leah spoke about its strength, endurance and deep roots, and about its association with covenant, significant encounters and revelation.

That word entered me: revelation.

The instant she said it, I felt something land in a place deeper than thought. I did not know what would be revealed, but I sensed that I had been brought there to receive something. It was as though an unseen door had opened before I knew what stood behind it.

Hashem, what are You going to reveal to me here?

I had imagined that I had chosen this hike. I had made the booking and arranged the journey. Yet standing beneath the elah, I felt that the decision had not begun with me. Hashem had been leading me through the choice, the journey and every circumstance that placed me with these particular women on this particular day.

For a long time, I have been asking Hashem to guide me. I make a place for Him every day through hitbodedut, speaking to Him personally and honestly. There are days when words pour out and days when I have almost nothing to say. There are days when I do not feel like talking at all. Still, I show up. I keep the time. I remain in the relationship.

For many years, some of my deepest hitbodedut has taken place outdoors. I have gone alone for hours into fields and forests in different parts of the world, away from traffic, telephones, technology and the relentless busyness of doing, so that I could return to being. At times, sitting there, I could almost hear the song of the field.

Rabbeinu Nachman teaches that when a person prays in a field, the grasses enter her prayer, help it and give it strength. He also teaches that every blade of grass has its own song. This was not only a beautiful idea to me. Sometimes I could feel it: the trees moving in the wind, the grasses, flowers and growing things surrounding me, all singing their praise to Hashem, and my own words being lifted together with theirs.

Again and again, I would ask: Hashem, if every blade of grass has its song, what is mine? What is the praise that I was created to sing to You? What did You bring me into this world to be and to do?

That had been my prayer for many years. Only now was its answer beginning to become more apparent.

I am beginning to see what this constancy has created. The more I turn towards Hashem, the more able I become to recognise where He has already been present. The more space I make for His Presence, the more the apparently separate pieces of my life reveal their connection. What had looked like my own decision to take a hike began to feel like another step in a conversation unfolding for years.

Before we had even properly begun walking, while we were still gathered at that first elah, Maskit opened one of its strange, thick, elongated growths and handed it to me. This was how our journey into the mountain began: not simply as a hike, but as a discovery, an adventure into worlds concealed within what appeared ordinary.

Inside I saw what appeared to be hundreds upon hundreds of tiny seeds. Then I realised they were moving. They were alive. The chamber was filled with minute insects. I did not know what they were. I knew only that what had looked sealed and almost lifeless held an entire hidden world.

Only later, while writing this chapter and searching for the name of what we had seen, did the next layer open. It was not a seed pod but a horn gall, and the tiny creatures were aphids. More astonishing still, the insects had not merely discovered a shelter. Their presence had induced the terebinth to produce living tissue around them. The tree had formed the chamber that became both their home and their food.

The revelation began when Maskit placed the gall in my hand, but it did not end on the mountain. It followed me home and waited inside the writing until I searched deeply enough to understand what I had been shown.

As we began walking, the elah appeared again and again. The entire trail seemed filled with these trees. Revelation was not marked by one dramatic encounter and then left behind. Tree after tree repeated its message: Hashem does not reveal Himself only once. His revelation surrounds us continuously. It is our seeing that becomes dulled.

Maskit embodied the opposite. Although she had seen these trees and their strange galls many times, familiarity had not robbed her of wonder. There was a childlike purity in the way she met each discovery as though creation had only just placed it before her.

How much is taking place beneath the surface of this world? How many realities are forming within things that appear closed, still or ordinary? We see an outer shape and assume we have seen the thing itself. Then the vessel opens, and another dimension is revealed.

Are we not also such vessels?

From the outside, a human being appears to be a physical body. Yet hidden within is the neshama, the soul—a dimension we cannot see or measure. We are not bodies that happen to contain souls. We are souls clothed in bodies. The body is the vehicle through which the neshama enters this physical world, makes choices, draws close to Hashem, performs mitzvos—the commandments Hashem has given us—and fulfils its mission.

A soul without a body cannot light Shabbos candles, give tzedakah—charity—comfort another person or choose to turn towards Hashem from within concealment. These possibilities belong to the mysterious meeting between body and soul. What the neshama achieves through the body here is what it carries onward. This is why those who remain perform mitzvos, learn Torah, pray and give tzedakah for an ilui neshama, the elevation of a departed soul.

The neshama knows far more than the conscious mind remembers. Before entering this world, it is shown its mission and chooses the circumstances through which that mission will unfold: its parents, siblings, financial reality, challenges, gifts and opportunities. Then it enters a body and forgets. If we arrived remembering everything, there would be little room for free choice. Instead, we enter a life whose meaning is concealed. We meet situations, people, gifts and difficulties that bring hidden parts of us to the surface. We keep mitzvos, learn, grow, try to do Hashem’s ratzon—His desire and will—and deepen our relationship with Him. Slowly, we begin to recognise the direction in which our soul has been travelling all along.

The ways of Hashem remain hidden. The Zohar, Kabbalah and the great mystical teachings offer glimpses, yet what we comprehend is no more than a drop within an ocean, one grain of sand within a world beyond measure. The neshama is described as Hashem’s breath within us, a chelek Eloka mimaal, a part of the Divine from Above. We speak these words, but can we grasp what they contain? We receive flashes, tastes, moments when the veil thins—and then stand before the Awesomeness of Hashem.

The elah also carried the echo of Emek HaElah, where David confronted Goliath. I thought about the giants we meet: difficult circumstances, old experiences whose voices continue after the event has passed, and beliefs that tell us we are small. Sometimes the giants are our doubts—about our abilities, Hashem’s gifts within us and even whether He is truly guiding us.

Doubt can tower over inner knowing until we forget what lives beneath it. Yet its presence does not mean emunah—faith—has disappeared. A part of us may tremble while a deeper part still knows. David did not become larger than Goliath. He stood rooted in a truth larger than the giant before him.

Experiences and mistaken beliefs may form layers around the heart, but they cannot extinguish the chelek Eloka mimaal within us. The Light remains. Our work is not to manufacture it, but to uncover what has never ceased to be there.

This uncovering was not mine alone. We were a small, intimate group, and each woman brought her own way of seeing. Maskit would point something out; another woman would call us to something she had noticed. “Look at this.” “Come and see this.” One person’s attention opened another person’s eyes.

We met female hikers descending, people walking quietly in solitude, and several groups of high-school boys with their teachers. They, too, were hiking and may have been moved by the views. Yet our group was engaged in something different.

They were hiking the mountain. We were living it.

We were touching, smelling, listening and allowing ourselves to be affected. Every woman was living a private inner journey, yet something collective formed. No one person saw everything. Together we entered a wider field of perception, as though each woman held another fragment of the revelation. Maskit showed us a dry-looking plant whose branches formed the three arms of the Hebrew letter shin. The shape opened a reflection on the Shechinah, Hashem’s indwelling Presence. It led me to Elokim and hateva, nature—two words with the same numerical value. What we call nature, what we dismiss as simply the way the world works, is one of the places where Hashem can be seen most clearly. Creation is so constant that we mistake constancy for ordinariness. Yet it is miraculous, brought into being anew at every moment. The more closely we looked, the more the mountain disclosed: the first sitvanit hayoreh, an autumn crocus emerging among stones; a mushroom beneath dried leaves; a green praying mantis resembling a leaf; berries hidden among foliage; caves within rock; and stones carrying colours visible only once they were lifted towards the light.

Some trees I could not merely observe. I had to place my hands on their bark. I wanted to move from looking at nature as an object outside me into relationship with it. The photographs show my hands on the trunks, but cannot hold the feeling of wanting to enter the life I was witnessing.

Among all the elah trees, we met one katlav that could not be passed. Its sculptural trunk twisted upward in rose, salmon, copper, reddish-brown, silver-grey and charcoal. Green leaves surrounded it, with red berries among them. Maskit told us that she had once picked and eaten katlav berries elsewhere and that they were delicious. The berries on this tree were too far beyond our reach; otherwise, we might have tasted them ourselves.

The katlav continually sheds its outer bark, revealing new colour and vitality beneath. I went close and touched it. What might look like exposure or vulnerability is the tree’s natural renewal. The peeling is not evidence that it is falling apart. It is how the next surface emerges.

We were only days into Cheshvan, commonly called Mar Cheshvan—bitter Cheshvan—because it contains no festivals. Rochel Leah had read about the katlav and opened its meaning for us through the movement from Tishrei into Cheshvan. After Tishrei’s radiance, Cheshvan can feel empty. Yet she showed us that the letters of mar can be reversed into ram: elevated, uplifted. What surfaced within me was that the apparent emptiness can become a time of rooting. Tishrei’s Light does not have to disappear. It can descend beneath the surface and grow roots within us.

The katlav carried that teaching in its body. A layer falls away. A tender surface is exposed. What appears vulnerable is the passage into hitchadshut, renewal. Hashem renews creation at every moment, and He renews us within it. No moment is sealed by the one before it. Beneath what is peeling away, colour is already waiting.

We descended through steep, rocky sections where some of us literally held out our hands to one another. Maskit showed us where to place our feet, and we tried to follow her steps across the trickier places. The mountain was teaching us through our bodies as well: none of us had to find every foothold alone.

Eventually we reached a more level, open area containing the remains of an ancient synagogue associated with Shammai. One of the women discovered the burial cave that Rochel Leah remembered visiting before. The other women remained above while Maskit and I made our way down and entered.

When Maskit began to leave, I told her, “I want to stay here alone for a while and pray.” From outside, the cave had appeared completely dark. Inside, I sat on a low stone and became quiet. Then I noticed the ner tamid—the eternal olive-oil flame—burning inside a glass vessel on the cave wall. I davened. I spoke to Hashem.

From within, the cave no longer felt dark. It seemed filled with light.

Ein od milvado—there is nothing besides Him. Even what we call darkness cannot exist outside Hashem. The Light may be concealed from us, but darkness itself is held within His Presence. We may stand outside an experience, see loss, fear or uncertainty and call it darkness. Yet when we enter it, bring Hashem into our awareness and meet Him there, the difficulty can become an opportunity to expand our vessel. The challenge may remain. The cave remains a cave. But the expanded vessel can receive more of the Light that was present all along. What had surrounded us as Or Makif—surrounding Light not yet fully received—can begin to enter as Or Pnimi, inner Light that becomes part of how we live and experience the world. That darkness containing Light carried me back to the week in which this book truly began: the final seven days of my mother’s life.

I sat beside her in South Africa as her body weakened, remaining through the mysterious pull between the body appearing to surrender and the neshama seeming to hold on for one more day, one more breath, one more moment. I was present with her when her neshama—her soul—left her body. Afterwards, I watched over her through the night until morning, when her body was taken to be prepared for burial.

I think of that week not as accompanying my mother through her death, but into another birth. This physical world is called the alma deshikra, the world of falsity; when the soul leaves it, it is born into Olam HaEmet, the World of Truth. Yet I do not claim to understand what I witnessed, or even what those words truly mean. What is the neshama? What is the passage from this world into the next? What remains when the body can no longer hold the soul it carried?

During those seven days, I felt that the veil was removed. It was as though Hashem was revealing Himself to me and allowing me to taste something that might be called Elokus—Divinity itself. It was not knowledge I could organise or explain, but an encounter at the boundary between worlds, something far greater than the mind can contain. Her body, which had carried her through a lifetime, was becoming weaker; yet the essence of who she was felt more present, not less. The body was never the whole person. It had been the sacred vessel through which her soul loved, chose, struggled, gave and fulfilled what it came here to do.

Since then, through grief, learning, prayer, inner work and writing, what was revealed beside her bed has continued unfolding. On Mount Meron the same mystery spoke through different forms: a closed gall holding a moving world, a dark cave containing Light, bark falling away to expose renewed colour, stones revealing formations beneath dust. Again and again, the outer form opened, whispering that what we see is never the whole story.

The last part of our journey brought these threads together in a way I could never have planned.

After descending Mount Meron over difficult terrain, the route turned upward towards Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai—Rashbi—the holy Tanna, one of the early rabbinic sages whose teachings form the Mishnah. He is the great revealer of the Zohar’s hidden Light and spent years concealed in a cave with his son. Rashbi has long been where I feel most alive, most at home and most connected to myself. Something in the air there brings me an inner calm, a shalvat hanefesh—a tranquillity of the soul—that I experience nowhere else. For years, approximately once a month, I have taken a day to go alone. Other women may restore themselves through shopping, a restaurant or friends. My gift to myself has been a day alone with Rashbi.

It has become my monthly vitamin, almost an infusion of spiritual strength. No matter what I may be experiencing in my life, being there restores my sense that I am held: that Hashem is guiding me, protecting me and loving me, and that His Presence surrounds me. It is not only a place where I believe in Hashem. It is a place where I experience Him.

On those monthly visits, I spend some time inside the building above his burial place. I daven—Shacharis, the morning prayer; Mincha, the afternoon prayer; or Maariv, the evening prayer. I say Tehillim—Psalms—and pour out my heart. But where I feel most at home is outside, sitting for hours on a rock surrounded by trees in the valley below the kever, the burial place, going only as far as feels safe for a woman alone.

Sitting in that valley, watching the sunset through the trees and listening to the birds, I would feel the teaching of Rabbeinu Nachman come alive: when a person prays in a field, the grasses enter the prayer, help it and give it strength. Every blade of grass has its own song. Surrounded by that living praise, feeling such closeness and yichud—a deep sense of unity—with Hashem, I would almost beg Him: Please guide me. Show me my song. What did You create me to bring into this world? What is my purpose? What is the mission for which You sent me here?

From that familiar place, I would look down. The valley appeared vast, distant and full of terrain. I imagined exploring it, but never felt it wise to descend alone. For years I looked towards it and wondered what was there.

Now, after six and a half kilometres down the mountain, I was standing at the bottom of the landscape I had always seen from above.

Some women were exhausted and waited to be collected. I was tired too.

Maskit asked whether I wanted to remain or make the final ascent.

“Obviously I’m going up,” I answered. “This is what I’ve been dreaming of doing for years.”

One other woman and I followed her uphill. As we climbed, I suddenly saw my rock, my trees, the exact space where I had sat and spoken to Hashem month after month.

“I can see my space,” I told them. “That is where I’ve been sitting all these years.”

I knew where to walk because I knew the place intimately, but I had never known it from this direction. From above, the distance had seemed enormous. From below, it was almost nothing—perhaps ten or fifteen minutes. The immense valley of my imagination was only a short ascent away.

How often had I sat above looking towards something that felt impossibly far, when all along I had been so close?

For years, I held a similar picture of my life. One day I would become someone. One day I would contribute something meaningful. One day I would use my voice and bring what I had learned into the world. That future seemed real, beautiful and far away.

On the mountain, the distance collapsed. I had been waiting to arrive in a life that had already begun. Rashbi reveals the hidden Light, the pnimius—the inner dimension concealed beneath the surface of the world. And now, in the landscape surrounding his burial place, I was being shown that truth through my own life.

Sometimes we can spend years praying for a miracle without recognising the moment when the prayer begins to take form around us. I had spent years asking Hashem to reveal my song, my purpose and what I had been brought into this world to do. Yet I was no longer standing outside that prayer, waiting for its answer. Somewhere along the way, the answer had begun to form around me. I was already living in the middle of the miracle I had been praying for.

The prayers I was sharing, the women I was teaching, the meditations through which people told me they had felt healing, the workshops and the book itself were not merely preparations for a distant day when my contribution would become real. They were the path beneath my feet. The woman I imagined in the future was not waiting at the end of the climb. She was already walking.

The revelation was not about becoming greater. It was about coming closer to the person Hashem had created beneath the layers around my heart. Those layers had not appeared without reason. They had helped me protect myself, survive and become the woman I was. They did not deserve judgment; they deserved compassion, understanding and gratitude for the way they had carried me.

But there comes a moment when what once protected us begins to distance us from who we truly are. As healing creates greater safety and wholeness within us, we can hold those layers tenderly, embrace the parts of ourselves that needed them, and begin releasing what no longer serves its purpose.

Awakening the Light within is not forcing ourselves to become someone new. It is returning to our deepest self, drawing closer to the neshama Hashem placed within us and aligning our lives more truthfully with Him.

The dots began joining with an intensity difficult to hold. Teachers, courses, retreats, friendships, relationships, prayers, losses and choices that had seemed separate revealed one movement. The seven days beside my mother.

Her soul leaving her body. The veil removed. The garden created in her memory. The book emerging. Years of speaking to Hashem. The elah. The hidden chamber alive with movement. The cave full of Light. The valley seen from its other side.

This was what it had all been about—not because I had reached a final understanding, but because for one moment I could see that I was already inside the unfolding.

Only after the hike, when I read the full invitation to the Princess of Dan retreat that Rochel Leah had created for the following week in Tzfat, did another thread become visible. It centred on meeting the woman one is becoming and stepping into geulah not only as an idea, but as an experience. I had not read those words before the mountain gave me its teaching. The retreat had not created my realisation. It named something I had already begun to live.

The hike felt like Hashem’s gift after Tishrei, preparing its great Light to take root within ordinary life. Before Princess of Dan, I would first attend a retreat with Chava centred on speaking to Hashem—another deepening of the conversation that carried me here. Then I would travel to Tzfat, not knowing what would meet me there.

My personal movement is one small current within something greater. We are living through upheaval and revelation as the world moves towards its final geulah. Redemption is not only an event for which we wait. Its consciousness begins to enter us when concealment loosens, when the layers no longer have the final word and when we recognise the Divine Light present even inside what we called darkness.

I am writing from within that movement. I do not want to wait until I have reached some imagined destination and then describe the journey from a safe distance. I do not know whether there is such a final arrival in this life. The journey itself is where the soul is revealed. I want to write while I am still inside the transition—while one form is loosening, another has not yet fully emerged, and each discovery continues to transform me.

My mother and I shared a deep love of butterflies. They surround me still; an entire wall of my bedroom is covered with them. In her final letter to me, she wrote that she would always be with me—that the touch of the wind against my cheek or the sight of a beautiful butterfly would remind me of her presence, her love and her energy. She told me that she would be holding me and healing me from Above.

A butterfly does not enter the world with wings. It begins as a caterpillar and then withdraws into the darkness of the chrysalis, where its familiar form can no longer remain as it was. Yet it does not become the darkness it enters. The darkness is not its identity; it is the protected place in which its wings are being formed.

And when the transformation is complete—when the time is right—the chrysalis splits, and the butterfly slowly works its way free. Even then, it cannot fly immediately. Its new wings emerge soft, folded and crumpled. It must pump fluid through their delicate veins, allowing them to expand, and then remain still while they dry and strengthen. Only then can it open them and take flight.

Maybe that is why butterflies have always seemed to me so free and so real. Their freedom has not come from escaping transformation, but from passing through it. The lonely darkness did not erase the butterfly or become its final home. It held a hidden process that could not yet be seen from the outside. Within that darkness, colour was being created. Delicate beauty was taking shape. The capacity for flight was growing in silence.

This chapter belongs within such a passage: not the finished butterfly, and no longer the earlier form, but inside the sacred transition itself. I am writing while the chrysalis is beginning to open—while the questions are still alive, while the next step remains concealed, and while something within me is gathering the strength to spread wings I could not see being formed.

The stones and acorns from Mount Meron have already found their place in my balcony garden, my garden of hitbodedut, where I speak to Hashem each day. They rest beside stones gathered on other journeys and beside crystals, rocks and shells my mother loved and gave to me while she was alive, some of which I brought home from South Africa. They surround the pond and its flowing water in the garden I created in her memory.

There, the separate parts have become one landscape: my mother’s love of gardens, stones and shells; the water; my conversations with Hashem; objects gathered from moments that changed me; and now the stones and acorns from the mountain. The garden holds memory, prayer and becoming. It holds what has left this world and what is still unfolding within it.

The following morning, I stepped onto the balcony to pray and water my plants, and it seemed that everything had opened overnight. The white and red bougainvillea were in full bloom. My rose bush, which had always offered only one or two buds at a time, suddenly held six beginning to open together. It was not one isolated flower appearing, but the whole bush coming into bloom. The greenery looked abundant and intensely alive. What I had once thought of as a balcony had become a garden, almost a miniature forest, with life unfolding before my eyes.

As I stood there, I felt that the garden was growing with me. As I was opening, transitioning and beginning to recognise the abilities Hashem had placed within me, the space I had planted in my mother’s memory was also coming into its fullness. Its blossoming felt like another language of the same revelation: inner life, given room and tended with love, eventually becomes visible.

I looked at the flowers, the stones, the shells and the water, and felt myself speaking to her: This is the life you planted in me, Mommy. This is your garden still growing through mine.

I began beneath the elah asking, “Hashem, what are You going to reveal to me here?”

I thought here meant the mountain. By the end of the journey, the question had opened into my entire life: this body carrying a neshama whose mission I am not remembering all at once, but slowly beginning to live; darkness in which His Light had never been absent; grief opening into writing; prayer becoming a path; and a distant future revealing itself only a few steps away. My life was not waiting beyond the next ascent. It was opening beneath and within the steps I was already taking.

I did not leave the mountain understanding the mystery.

I left knowing that I had entered it.

And somewhere beyond what I could yet see, the next revelation had already begun.

As I place the final words into this chapter, it is almost four o’clock in the morning. I am sitting in my balcony garden, reading and correcting, still inside everything the mountain opened within me. And then I feel it: the first gentle drops of rain beginning to fall.

Immediately, my mother comes to mind. She used to bless me with words I can still almost hear: “May Hashem’s blessings and abundance fall upon you as gentle raindrops.” We both loved the rain.

For a moment, I do not move. I simply breathe it in—the cool drops, the early-morning darkness, the garden alive around me, and her presence woven through it all. I have just written of butterflies, transformation, hidden Light and the life she planted within me, and now the rain is falling upon the garden I created in her memory. It feels as though the chapter is no longer ending on the page. It is being answered from the sky.

The rain begins to fall more strongly, the drops gathering closer together until they are wetting my face. At last, I rise to go inside and sleep for a few hours before waking my children and beginning another ordinary day. And as I leave the balcony, I feel my own eyes begin to rain. The raindrops merge with a tear upon my face—a tear of longing and closeness at the same time.

Before night gives way to morning, I carry that moment inside with me: the blessing falling, the garden receiving it, and my mother very close. Holding me. Healing me from Above.