After Losing His Daughter: “Thank You, Hashem, for Every Second”

Matan, who lost his daughter Aviva Chaya, delivered a deeply moving, faith-filled eulogy in her memory.

“A few hours before Aviva Chaya passed away, my rabbi, Rabbi Menachem Levi, said something that changed my entire outlook,” Matan recalled. “He told me, ‘Matan, until now you and Lizet have served Hashem. Now there is an opportunity to make a Kiddush Hashem, to strengthen people in complete faith, and to show them Hashem’s true goodness, even within this difficult situation.’”

“Then it clicked for me, and I understood what the rabbi meant,” Matan continued. “For a year and two months, we had the immense privilege of raising our precious and beloved daughter with tremendous devotion, day after day, in clinics, in hospitals, and even when we brought the hospital home. There wasn’t a minute of rest. Thank Hashem, there was always something happening: sleepless nights, the beeping of the monitor and feeding-tube machine throughout the night, entire nights without sleep.

“And sometimes I allowed myself to complain and say, ‘When will all this noise finally end?’ Oh, my Aviva... today, looking back, I would sleep with that noise for 120 years, just to see you, hug you, breathe you in, and whisper in your ear how special you are and how much I love you.”

“Faith Begins Where Our Intellect Ends”

Now that Aviva Chaya was no longer physically with them, Matan said he wanted to use his loss to speak about faith.

“And now, with Aviva Chaya no longer here with us below, she sits beneath the wings of the Shechinah, alongside righteous men and women, in the shelter of Hashem. Now I can only try to explain to you what faith is, and how within all this hard and terrible thing, everything happened for the good, and all of it is kindness and immense mercy from Heaven.

“Remember: faith begins where our intellect ends. Put the intellect aside and don’t try to understand the Divine mind. We’re Jews. We simply need to believe.”

Matan then recalled another painful loss from much earlier in his life. His father, Shmuel ben Simcha, of blessed memory, passed away when Matan was only 17 and a half. In his father’s memory, Matan studied Tractate Berakhot and completed a siyum. There he encountered the teaching of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai that Hashem gave the Jewish people three precious gifts through suffering: the Torah, the Land of Israel, and the World to Come.

Looking back, Matan felt that his own life had unfolded through those three gifts, in precisely that order.

“The Torah was the first gift,” he explained. “Thirteen years ago, when my father passed away, I merited for the first time to receive the Torah: to accept upon myself the yoke of Heaven, to know the Creator and creation, to build a faithful Jewish home grounded in holiness and purity, and to raise my children in Torah study.

“You can look at it negatively and say, ‘What a difficult beginning for a child without a father.’ But when I lost my physical father, I came to know my spiritual Father. For a teenager, that is very hard, but it was also the greatest gift I received. There is nothing like our sweet Torah.

“When Hashem takes your father, He becomes your direct Father, and speaking with Him becomes much closer. Maybe only an orphan will understand what I mean. Our Father in Heaven is with you every second. Even when I made mistakes, I felt Him with me. So yes, there was suffering, but through it I merited the Torah. That was the first gift.”

Three Gifts Through Suffering

The second gift, Matan continued, was the Land of Israel.

“After many years in the Diaspora, we merited to come to the Land of Israel. And as they say, ‘The Land of Israel is acquired through suffering,’ and that was true for us too. We arrived in Israel three months before October 7. There were hardships, tests, chaos, struggles with livelihood, even with shalom bayit. But here we are today, in the Holy Land. That is the second gift.”

Then came the third and most painful of all.

“The World to Come was the third gift,” Matan said. “We merited to return that precious deposit, Aviva Chaya bat Lizet, and to accompany her to the completion of her tikkun, to life in the World to Come.

“On one hand, it looks like judgment. But Hashem, as only He knows how, opens the eyes of the blind and allows me to see the kindness within the judgment. I can testify, as someone who has a close conversation with Hashem, that I literally feel Him sitting beside me every moment, stroking my face like a baby being caressed by his mother while taking a sweet pill wrapped in something bitter.”

Matan urged those listening to look at the events of their own lives through the lens of faith.

“Dear friends, open your eyes. Hashem speaks with each and every one of us, through your wife, through your children, through life itself. No evil comes down from Heaven. It is all one great good.”

He shared an analogy he had heard in a sermon: When a person strikes a dog with a stick, the dog attacks the stick rather than recognizing the person holding it. In the same way, Matan said, people can become consumed with blaming the immediate source of their difficulties instead of looking beyond it.

“That’s us. We blame everyone for our troubles instead of understanding that everything is from Hashem with mercy.”

“Tomorrow Cannot Be Like Today”

Matan did not suggest that grief should simply disappear. Instead, he spoke about the need to keep moving forward through it.

“The righteous Rebbetzin Levi said to me and Lizet, ‘You’re allowed to be depressed, but the depression is so that you’ll come out of it, not stay in it.’ On the first day of shiva and today, which is the last of the 30 days, you cannot be in the same place. You must move forward.

“So I’m asking everyone: Make a personal accounting. Hug your children, your wife or husband. And most importantly, smile. When you smile, you influence the other person to smile. Your face is public space. This world is short. The question isn’t when we go, but with what we go.”

Matan then recalled one of the most frightening moments of Aviva Chaya’s illness. He was at work when the hospital called to tell him that his daughter needed her first emergency surgery.

“Nothing with her was predictable. I stood in front of a doctor who seemed cold as ice. Next to me was my daughter, with a tube in her mouth, wires and stickers everywhere, and two tears running down her cheeks. It is an image I will never forget.

“He said to me, ‘Sign here, here, and here.’ And I, as her father, tried to understand what I was signing and the enormous responsibility on my shoulders. I asked him innocently, ‘Doctor, what are the chances?’

“He looked at me and said, ‘Sir, you’re a religious man. You know it’s all from Above,’ and pointed upward. In that moment, I signed.”

For Matan, the doctor’s response became another reminder that medicine has its role, but the ultimate outcome remains in Hashem’s hands.

“Friends, we are only human,” he said, quoting the teaching that a person does not even stub a finger below unless it has been decreed Above. “Everything is Hashem, blessed be He. Only fear of Heaven is our free choice.”

“This Child Gave Birth to You”

Matan compared his experience to the Binding of Isaac, but his father-in-law, Gabi, pointed out a painful difference: Isaac had agreed to be bound.

“And Aviva Chaya... she didn’t say that to me. Maybe just a tear,” Matan said.

Yet he found strength in a teaching shared with him by Rabbi Levi.

“Rabbi Levi said to me, ‘Matan, this child gave birth to you, not you to her.’ And that is so true. I am not the Matan of yesterday. I am Matan, Aviva Chaya’s father, and she raised me to another level. And I merited. Thank You, Hashem, for every second.”

He also expressed his gratitude for the extraordinary support his family received from the Jewish community.

“I want to thank you for the love of Israel we experienced. It was something amazing. There is simply no people like ours. I love each and every one of you with endless love. Thank you for not leaving us for a moment, not with words, not with prayers, not with help, not with support of any kind.”

But his greatest expression of gratitude was reserved for his wife, Lizet.

“The biggest thank-you I want to give is to the greatest and strongest person here in the room, the person who teaches me simple and complete faith in Hashem and every day reveals something new about myself and how much I still need to fix. I want to say a huge thank-you to my wife, my mirror, Lizet.

“I am nothing without you. It is completely clear to me why Aviva Chaya chose you in particular. An amazing mother, willing to give everything to her children, torn day and night between the hospital and home, never leaving Aviva alone and never abandoning Katya, Naomi, and Shmuel Yaakov. I learned so much from you. I learned parenting from you.”

A Mother’s Extraordinary Faith

During Aviva Chaya’s final surgery, she underwent three resuscitations. When doctors warned the family after the second that it might be the last, Matan froze.

Lizet responded differently.

“She put on a song: ‘Hashem Yitbarach always loves me and I will always have only good,’ and she started clapping her hands and singing.

“Friends, these are not simple things I’m telling you. That is faith. Who claps? Who listens to songs at a moment like that? ‘Be wholehearted with Hashem your G-d.’ That is something no one can take from you, Lizet. Thank you for giving me another lesson in faith.”

Later, when they came to say goodbye to Aviva after the surgery, a nurse suggested that Matan take a photograph.

“I didn’t understand why, but I took one. Lizet lifted Aviva in her arms and said Mizmor LeTodah with simplicity and innocence. She returned her to the Creator with thanks.”

On Aviva Chaya’s memorial marker, the family chose a verse from I Chronicles: “For all things come from You, and from Your hand we have given back to You.”

“Because in the end, we returned this amazing gift to Hashem,” Matan explained. “‘Hashem gave, Hashem took. May the name of Hashem be blessed.’”

As he brought his eulogy to a close, Matan returned once more to the importance of family, marriage, gratitude, and faith.

“Thank you all for listening to me, the small one. And thank you to Aviva Chaya bat Lizet. Everything is in her merit. And most of all, thank You, Hashem,” the bereaved father concluded.