Living the Chapter

In 2019, I entered a world I never imagined I would have to know.

Chemotherapy. Immunotherapy. Survival.

I thought the assignment was obvious.

Stay alive.

But there was one thing no treatment plan had prepared me for.

The rest of my life had not received the diagnosis.

Life kept going.

I was still a husband. Still a father. Still a son. There were people to love, responsibilities to carry, bills to pay, decisions to make, and Torah to learn. Treatment could interrupt my body. It could interrupt my work. It could rearrange almost every plan I had made. But it could not be permitted to become the definition of who I was.

For years, I thought the great challenge was getting through illness. Slowly, I discovered something harder: how to keep living while walking through it.

And sometimes, living did not require something heroic. It meant finding the one small thing I could still do.

A Finger Was Enough

For me, it began with the Rabbi Gordon App.

There were days when I felt too tired to think. The body could not stand, the mind could not focus, and even prayer felt beyond reach. But I could still move a finger.

So I pressed Play.

Rabbi Yehoshua Binyamin Gordon’s voice filled the hospital room. Warm. Steady. Fatherly. His humor made room for a smile; his clarity made difficult ideas feel within reach. Sometimes I sat with earbuds in, eyes closed, and simply listened.

I had entered the hospital for treatment. Through that small screen, I entered a classroom.

Chumash with Rashi. Tanya. Rambam. Tehillim. Hayom Yom.

This was the daily learning rhythm the Lubavitcher Rebbe encouraged: Torah entering every part of the day. Tanya opened the inner world of the soul. Tehillim gave words to what I was carrying. Rambam gave me somewhere to go.

I wasn’t studying for achievement.

I was studying for oxygen.

A Roadmap Through Fire

My study of Rambam began simply: the daily study of a few mitzvot. I still keep the complete list of all 613 beside my desk. It reminds me of who I am trying to become.

Eventually, I entered the cycle of one chapter a day, completing the Mishneh Torah over three years.

Fourteen books. Eighty-three sections. An entire landscape of Jewish life.

During illness, that order became priceless. When the body weakens and tomorrow becomes uncertain, clarity becomes an anchor. Every day I knew where I was. Where I was going. What I was building.

The Rambam begins with Mada—Knowledge. Before teaching us how to observe, he teaches us about the One Who gave us the commandments. Faith, character, Torah study, repentance: while my body entered uncertainty, my learning gave me foundations on which to stand.

This was never abstract learning.

It was survival with direction.

Then came COVID in 2020. Three months in the hospital.

There were days when I could barely eat. Days when breathing required effort. Days when exhaustion settled over every thought before the day began.

On those days, the Rambam never asked me to conquer the world.

He asked me to learn today’s chapter.

Tomorrow would bring another. I did not have to carry fourteen books through a single afternoon.

Only the chapter waiting for me.

What No One Saw

Somewhere along the way, something quietly beautiful began to happen.

I was completing cycles.

Chumash. Rambam. Tanya. Tehillim. Day after day, in silence. Without applause. Without posting or sharing. The doctors and nurses walking past my bed did not know what was being built through those headphones.

When we returned home, I shared the journey with Young Israel of Forest Hills. We arranged a siyum, a celebration of completing the learning.

A few hundred people came.

It felt miraculous, but still local. Still ours.

What we did not know was that Rabbi Zalman Mergui had invited members of Chabad media. They listened. They asked questions. They wanted the story shared.

Then cameras entered our home.

The learning that had accompanied us through hospital rooms became a film: Rambam in the Shadows of Death.

It traveled farther than we could have imagined.

The Room Grew Larger

In 2023, our family participated in the International Siyum HaRambam at 770 Eastern Parkway.

I had never set out to give a siyum before a worldwide audience. I had been trying to get through the day with a chapter of Torah.

Now there were some thirty thousand people gathered for the celebration, with others watching around the world.

At first, I stood quietly among the crowd, happy to be there.

Then the lights lowered.

Our home appeared on the screens. Our headphones. Our Rambam.

Something that had happened almost unseen was now being seen across the world.

I had no plan for this. No campaign. No ambition to turn a hospital bed into a public story. Yet there I was, watching what had carried me in private encourage people I would never meet.

I felt that Heaven had noticed what no audience had been there to see.

The Rebbe’s dream of Jews learning together had reached me through a phone. Now our story was traveling back through those screens, reaching others.

What moved me most was not the attention. It was seeing people following Rambam on their phones—the same doorway through which I had entered when I could barely move.

It was Torah’s moment.

After the Applause

But there was more to live through.

In 2024, I underwent a bone marrow transplant at Memorial Sloan Kettering. High-dose treatment. Isolation. Uncertainty. Recovery that tested the limits of what my body could endure.

The screens and the crowd belonged to an extraordinary night.

Now came another ordinary day that was difficult to get through.

And the Rambam was waiting.

The hospitals changed. The treatments changed. Learning remained.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe taught that the eighty-three sections of the Mishneh Torah correspond to the numerical value of machalah, illness, and spoke of the spiritual power of this learning to nullify illness and draw blessing.

I carried that teaching with me. I also carried the daily responsibility. Torah learning had not spared me another hospital room. It helped me remain myself inside one.

Survival asks, How do I make it through today?

Life asks something greater:

Who will I be while I do?

The Chapter Before You

Now, in the middle of my third Rambam cycle, I think about the days behind those chapters.

The Rambam teaches that even someone who is ill or burdened with suffering must set aside time for Torah study, by day and by night. Those words in Hilchot Talmud Torah 1:8 became companions.

Illness had changed what I could do. It had not erased my place among those called to learn.

That is the invitation I want to pass on. Three chapters a day, one chapter a day, or the daily study of the mitzvot. Begin where you can.

Some days I studied actively. Some days I simply listened. The journey had room for both.

I could not have imagined, pressing Play in a hospital bed, where that small movement would lead. A local shul. A film. A worldwide siyum. Another hospital. Another chapter.

But the public story was never the measure of the private learning.

Even if no camera had ever entered our home, those days would still have mattered.

I had thought the assignment was to stay alive.

Torah kept reminding me to live.

And today, there is still one chapter waiting.