Harriet Cabelly, LCSW
Therapist . Speaker . Author
“Each day I have to work to go on; each day I decide to live. I am not the same person as I was. That is the way it should be. Losing Koby means that part of me was killed. But rather than mourn the person I was, I work to bless the person I have become.”
I am humbled to present my March interviewee, Sherri Mandell. Mrs. Mandell is the mother of Koby Mandell, the oldest of four children, and founder of the Koby Mandell Foundation. She and her husband created this foundation in response to their son, Koby’s murder in May of 2001.
Koby was 13 when he and his friend, Yosef Ishran were hiking near their home in the town of Tekoa in the West Bank and were eventually found in a cave stoned to death.
Their foundation helps bereaved parents and children who have tragically lost loved ones “rebuild their lives and create meaning out of suffering.”
Ms. Mandell is a writer and author of the book, The Blessing of a Broken Heart.
That’s a hard question. I really don’t feel it was anything that was personal to me. I feel like it was other people- the community that helped me and my family. I received so much support and love that helped me continue on and move.
I had people helping me and they all had a special position –somebody who did our laundry, somebody who could sit and listen, somebody who organized the food for us.
To give you an example, after Koby’s murder, that first night after we got home from the cemetery (in Israel people are buried right away) my friend Shira made a basket for me on my bed and she put “from Your Guardian Angel.” It was people who surrounded me and my immediate family who kept me going.
I’ve become a different person. I’m much more driven and purposeful. I have a different perspective on life.
Self-pity is not the right term. When you’re destroyed you don’t have the strength for self-pity. I was just suffering and sad and destroyed. I didn’t pity myself; I just had to mourn my son.
You wonder Why you; but you know there’s no answer to that question. Also living in Israel it’s different. In Hebrew you don’t really have the word pity. It’s a different word. And it’s a different culture.
It was a series of things that pushed me forward.
It was Koby’s birthday, his 14th, five weeks after he was murdered. My friend Shira who’s a grief counselor told me I had to do something to mark his birthday. So my kids and I went into Jerusalem. We didn’t know what to do. We thought we’d go out to Burger King because being kosher and moving to Israel was a big fun event for us to be able to eat at a kosher Burger King. But we couldn’t go because it was just too sad for us. We went to a vegetarian restaurant. I got the idea to give money to beggars for Koby’s birthday. The minute I got that idea a beggar came up to us in the restaurant. We gave him a lot of money. Then my kids and I went out on the outdoor street mall and we went chasing after beggars to give to them. It was a really hard day.
But we were able to transform it into something that was fun and giving. And that’s what we do. We wanted to do something Koby would like, so it’s always fun.
There’s always davening (praying), learning {Torah-Bible} and taking care of my family. There’s Shabbos (the Sabbath), yoga and walking. And writing; I’m a writer.
Torah relates us to God and G0d is infinite. So when I was learning and relating to something infinite, I could relate more to my son because he was in that place. Torah connects you to other worlds. The language of Torah is very pure. And that’s what I felt I needed after Koby’s murder. I needed something that had that untouched feeling.
I received so much help and support. I wanted to give back what I had received.
My husband and I started a camp for bereaved children. We have 400 kids at the camp. We always try to do something fun and giving; to help teach people to rise from this and not be broken.
We also run programs for mothers. We have had over 25 healing retreats for different groups of mothers. I went to almost all of them. We have support groups. I’ve been part of a group that’s part of the Koby Mandell Foundation for the past 7 years. And we keep evolving. Wednesday is Koby Mandell Foundation day in Jerusalem. We have belly dancing, yoga, psycho-drama for the women. We have programs in resilience and renewal. These are for bereaved mothers who have lost children to either terror or illness or any form of loss. We also have a healing retreat over the summer, a bereavement retreat for Americans. We do a 5 day healing retreat for bereaved parents.
You have to use it to grow to be bigger. You have to basically change your life afterwards. You can’t go back to who you were. You have to find a way to give from the pain.
I read something by Rabbi Soloveitchik: “Every darkness has its own secret; and sometimes God only speaks to us in the darkness.” There’s a message there. It’s like the difference between growing in the light and growing in the darkness; there’s two ways to grow but growing in the darkness is much more common.
And language – that’s another thing. Ordinary language becomes unbearable because it can’t contain your experience. Like even the expression, making lemonade from lemons, phrases like that can’t describe it. You lose your connection to a lot of people because you can’t relate to what they say and the way they speak.
I think very few people talk about the language problem. They express it like they can’t bear their friends and people saying the wrong things. But I don’t think it’s just that people say the wrong things; I think it’s a matter of not having language to contain the experience. If you don’t have the feeling that people are there to support you, you’ll kind of begrudge what they say.
Also, grief and trauma are in the body. So you have to deal with the body, too.
“…It is when our hearts are broken that God sculpts our souls, prodding open the narrow entrances to the caves of our being. Whenever God takes from you, he has to give you something back. God has given me the blessing of a broken heart.”
Sherri Mandell photographed by Debbi Cooper
