My Pedophile Miracle

By: Chana Jenny Weisberg

I had fled from the pedophiles, and there he was, sitting right across the room from me.

This year I had the most intense Elul of my life. Day after day was filled with names of more Nachlaot children who had been sexually assaulted by a growing list of suspected pedophiles at a growing number of mysterious locations on my little street.

The Nachlaot air was thick with suspicion and fear and suffocating impurity and evil. And I had a strange ritual that helped me to remain sane. This ritual provided me with a lung-full of emotional fresh air before I descended yet again into the Nachlaot tumah swamp for a few more days.

This was my pedophile-tumah-cleansing ritual:

1. Walk down to the Old City Burgers Bar so I was there for its 11 AM opening time.
2. Order a hamburger with garlic mayo and chimichurri sauce (is your mouth watering too?)
3. Spend an hour reading Rav Arush’s life-altering Garden of Gratitude, about feeling thankful to Hashem even at life’s darkest moments.
4. Force myself pulling-teeth style to compose lists on the Burgers Bar napkins about Hashem’s chesed within this horrific nisayon (i.e., thank You Hashem that now we KNOW about the pedophile ring so we can protect our children, thank You Hashem that now almost all of the molested children are receiving excellent psychological treatment, etc. etc.)
5. Read, once again, the chapter entitled “Miracles,” personal testimonials proving that if a person forces himself to overcome his nature by thanking Hashem for a nisayon, then Hashem would also change nature, and would bring about phenomenal miracles in that person’s life.
6. Rush to the Kotel, rush to the bus, rush to pick up my kids from gan.

I went to the Burgers Bar maybe 10 times in all over that intense Elul, and as far as I can remember there were never any unusual deviations from my schedule and, as far as I can remember, I always had the whole Burgers Bar to myself.

But one morning, something highly unusual happened.

The tumah was feeling especially crushing and suffocating in Nachlaot that day after a scary and borderline violent confrontation with the relative of a pedophile who molested my friend’s daughter. And as I made my tooth-pulling “Thank You God” lists, I tried to overcome the feeling of sharp despair and terror I felt.

And then he walked in.

I didn’t know his name. But I had seen his face around Nachlaot. And there was something about him that was screaming “pedophile.”

What?! I was running away from the pedophiles, and then, of all the Burger Bars in all the towns in all the world, he walks into mine?

“HASHEM! What are you trying to tell me?” I wanted to yell.

I felt the tumah of Nachlaot filling up my refuge like the smoke that fills a dream scene in a high school play…

And then something even more highly unusual happened.

Out of nowhere, about 20 policemen entered the Burgers Bar. These policemen, I understood, were on a walking tour and they had stopped for lunch at the Burgers Bar. I looked over at my suspected pedophile, and he didn’t look unnerved, but I was.

“HASHEM! What were you trying to tell me now???”

What was remarkable about this experience was the tremendous feeling of comfort that suddenly flooded me. I felt that this was a sign, Hashem waving to me from behind the thick curtain dividing this world from the next.

“Don’t worry, Chana’le,” I felt Hashem telling me, “there is judgment and there is a Judge. The people who inhumanly raped and tortured so many children will not go unpunished. These people are going to pay for what they have done, and not only in the Next World, in this world as well. You are going to see miracles, Chana’le, I guarantee you.”

But months passed by. And the situation remained as dismal as ever.

The police, the legal system, the press were generally apathetic about our neighborhood crisis.

But that unusual morning at the Burgers’ Bar stuck with me, and gave me hope that somehow, somehow things would get better sometime soon..

And then during Chanukah, I experienced my long-awaited miracle. The suspicious individual I saw at the Burgers Bar was arrested on the 5th day of Chanukah,* the auspicious day when light overtakes darkness.

And since that arrest, I have started to feel for the first time that the light is finally overtaking darkness in Nachlaot as well. Finally, after months of apathy, our neighborhood crisis is finally being seriously addressed in the Knesset, on the evening news, and in Israel’s leading newspapers. More arrests of suspects are being made and the police and State Prosecutor finally, finally seem to be starting to take this crisis, the largest pedophile case in Israel’s history, seriously.

And I finally feel my Burgers Bar vision coming to life, with God’s help.