Last winter, I was in Jerusalem, planning to go to the North to visit the mystical city of Tzfat with its 15 th -century Abuhav Synagogue, one of the most beautiful and spiritual places I know of, and the nearby hill-slope cemetery with the cerulean blue gravesites of revered kabbalists, like the Arizal, the Holy Lion. I hadn’t been there in over thirty years. I never made it, though, because of an unexpected phone call that came from Holland: my mother had suddenly fallen critically ill.

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