Night After Night

Reb Avraham Moskowitz from Bnei Brak related the following:

One day someone came over to me and told me he was embarrassed to do something, but he knew it had to be done. "What is it?" I asked. And he told me his story. It was a story about his nights, something that had been taking place night after night after night for 365 days in a row! A year earlier, his eldest son, a sweet, angelic baby boy, was born to him.

When they brought him home, it turned out that the angel had a healthy pair of lungs and excellent vocal chords, as the grandmothers would say. During the day, he often slept or lay peacefully in his stroller looking up at his mobile, but when night fell, the choir began. He would scream and cry without letup, and they had no idea how to calm him down.

Of course, he told me, they tried everything. Doctors, natural remedies, reflexology, changes in the mother's diet, and more. Nothing seemed to help. Their baby seemed determined to keep them awake throughout the nights. The beleaguered parents were both falling apart from exhaustion, to the point that the young man feared for his wife's health.

I tried to refocus the conversation. "So what is it that you feel you can do, that you're embarrassed to do?"

He explained that at one point, he'd decided to try another form of hishtadlus, and he'd asked advice from a certain tzaddik.

"You should say ten perakim of Tehillim every day," the tzaddik told him, "and when you finish, ask Hashem to help the baby fall asleep easily and to sleep well."

He did exactly as the tzaddik instructed, and two weeks later he'd completed the entire sefer Tehillim; his son was still keeping them up all night. The next day, he passed by a sefarim store, stepped inside, opened a certain sefer, and "incidentally" opened to a page in which someone had written about the exact same problem as his. This was an avreich whose baby also kept him up all night for many nights, and who sought the advice of an adam gadol. The gadol told him to think about whether he had ever hurt anyone, and he immediately recalled that as a young yeshivah bachur, he'd often played music very loudly late at night, to the chagrin of the yeshivah's neighbors - families with small children.

Many of the neighbors knocked on the yeshivah dormitory door and asked the bachurim to lower the volume, but as a young bachur, he thought they were exaggerating. What could possibly be so bad? Were all these children so spoiled that they couldn't fall asleep if there was some music playing in the background?

He'd carelessly continued playing music at high volumes late into the night, despite the neighbors' complaints. Now he understood. Hashem was repaying him measure for measure, and his own baby was keeping him up at night.

He wrote in the sefer that with all the unpleasantness involved, he went back to the neighborhood where his yeshivah was, knocked on doors, and asked forgiveness from all the neighbors, and they forgave him. On the night after he made this concerted effort to gain forgiveness from all the people he had harmed, his baby slept through the night.

Now the young man, who "incidentally" read this story on the very day when he'd finished saying all of sefer Tehillim and asking Hashem to help his baby sleep, was in a quandary, because, as he told me, he knew he was guilty of something similar, maybe even worse.

"We are accountable for everything," he told me with tears in his eyes. "E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g."

He explained that he was very musically inclined and played several instruments. He had a neighbor, an elderly Holocaust survivor, who lived in the apartment above his. He would come down at night when the young man was banging away on his drums and would plead with him, "Please, the banging takes me back to the Nazis marching through our town. Please stop making so much noise."

"I was just young and thoughtless," the man told me, tears in his eyes once again. "I didn't really hear what the man was telling me. I would always lower the volume and even stop when he asked, but I always started it up again. I never realized how much pain, how many nightmares, and how much lost sleep I was causing him."

"Do you understand?" he asked me. "My baby is still screeching through the nights. Hashem is repaying me measure for measure. And I have a debt hanging over my head. I need to ask the man for forgiveness. But as I told you, I know it has to be done, but I'm too embarrassed to do it."

I told him to try to overcome his shame. We discussed what he should say and how. I decided to ask him the next day whether he'd had the courage to do it.

The next day, he said he was thinking about it.

The following day, he was still thinking, and his baby, of course, was still crying through the nights. Only now, his cries seemed to be demanding of his father to do what had to be done.

Finally, after several more sleepless nights, he inquired about his previous neighbor and heard that he'd moved into a nursing home. He called the man's son, overcame his deep shame, and relayed the entire story.

"Can you possibly ask your father for forgiveness from me?"

The son was sympathetic. He explained that his father was not always lucid, and he had to find the right time and opportunity to speak to him. For several days, the young man davened intently to be zocheh to get the man's forgiveness. Finally, the son called him back and relayed that he'd indeed been able to give over the message to his father that his previous neighbor wanted his mechilah. The father had immediately responded with the words machul lach, machul lach, machul lach.

The young man thanked me from the bottom of his heart for pushing me him to ask for forgiveness. "In your zechus, I was able to receive his forgiveness in his lifetime," he said emotionally.

And his baby has grown. He sleeps well through the nights, and is satisfied and refreshed during the daytime. Hodu laHashem.