Lift Your Head: A Powerful Lesson on Faith, Hope, and the Red Heifer

During the days of the war with Iran, my daughter Yehudit stayed with me along with her baby daughter, Ora.

Not long ago, I met a lovely woman whose name is also Ora. When I mentioned that my granddaughter shares her name, she seemed genuinely surprised.

"Why would you call her that?" she asked. "It sounds old-fashioned. It's a name for elderly women!"

I smiled.

"You don't realize how beautiful that name is," I told her. "Say it slowly: O-ra. Do you hear it? It means light. Every morning, you can tell yourself: I am Ora. I am light. I don't just bring light to myself—I bring light to the world."

She was deeply moved.

A Baby Who Wouldn't Lift Her Head

My granddaughter Ora is almost four months old.

I began noticing that she wasn't lifting her head. When her mother or I held her and tried to play with her, she would raise her eyes slightly, but not her head. Even when something caught her attention, she seemed to give up because the effort was simply too difficult.

Something didn't feel right.

I told Yehudit, "We should have this checked."

But it was wartime. Sirens, missile attacks, uncertainty. Getting to a doctor was not so simple.

So we began working with her at home.

We placed her on her stomach, rolled a blanket beneath her shoulders, encouraged her to look upward, played with her, and tried to engage her attention.

And then, after only a week and a half, something remarkable happened.

She began lifting her head. She started searching for faces, looking upward, raising her eyes.

Thank God.

We Are Not So Different

As I watched her progress, I realized that many of us are exactly the same.

Sometimes we don't lift our heads toward Heaven.

Not because we don't want to — but because we're simply out of practice.

Our eyes are fixed downward. We look for answers in information, in screens, in Google searches, in experts, in friends, in doctors, and in endless solutions offered by the world around us. We search for salvation in the lowest places, while forgetting to look upward.

The truth is that when we become accustomed to keeping our gaze down, something within us grows weak.

The muscles of faith.

Just as a body needs exercise, faith needs strengthening. It is time to do Pilates for your faith muscles. Practice lifting your eyes upward and practice lifting your head.

Head Up, Eyes Up

Start training yourself. Head up. Eyes up.

This Shabbat we read about the Red Heifer, the mysterious mitzvah that purifies the deepest form of impurity — the impurity associated with death.

But perhaps there is a lesson here for us as well.

Spiritual "death" is the feeling that everything is over. It's the voice that says: "I'm finished." "I can't do this anymore." "There's no way out." "Nothing will ever change."

These thoughts create a kind of spiritual paralysis and they convince us that we have reached the end of the story.

The Cure for Despair

Open your hands and open your heart.

The very reading of the mitzvah of the Red Heifer reminds us that even the deepest impurity can be transformed.

It reminds us that despair is not reality, hopelessness is not reality, and the feeling that there is no future is not reality.

The mitzvah teaches us to illuminate the darkest moments, to lift our heads toward our Father in Heaven, and to rise from the dust.

A Jew never gives up. A Jew never surrenders to despair.

There Is No Despair in the World

Begin practicing.

Lift your head, lift your eyes, and repeat these words to yourself:

There is no despair in this world. My Father in Heaven loves me. He has loved us with an everlasting love. A great and boundless love.

Sometimes faith begins with something as simple as raising your eyes and remembering where your true help comes from.

Head up. Eyes up.

The light is waiting.