Books: Choosing greatness

The tale of Rebbetzin Henny Machlis, a Jerusalemite who invited hundreds into her home each weekend.

By RIVKAH LAMBERT ADLER
Rebbetzin Henny Machlis in the kitchen preparing a Shabbat meal (photo credit: Courtesy)
Rebbetzin Henny Machlis in the kitchen preparing a Shabbat meal
(photo credit: Courtesy)
The stories of Rebbetzin Henny Machlis could probably have filled many more than the 500-plus pages written by Sara Yocheved Rigler in Emunah with Love and Chicken Soup.
Known for the huge Shabbat meals she served out of her family’s modest apartment in the Ma’alot Dafna neighborhood of Jerusalem, Machlis was not yet 60 when she died of cancer in October 2015.
On any given Shabbat, the rebbetzin cooked and fed three meals to a few hundred people altogether – tourists, the homeless, young men and women spending their gap year in Israel studying Torah, people recovering from deep trauma, soldiers, older singles and many more. Week after week. Year after year.
This is the core of the Henny Machlis story and the hessed for which she is best known.
Structuring the book thematically, Rigler pulls together the core narrative, enhancing it with anecdotes from a range of people.
Dozens of black and white family photos are interspersed throughout the book.
Rigler opens the book with a chapter on the famed Machlis Shabbat meals. She describes the family kitchen as the site of regular miracles, such as the time when there was a shortage of chickens in Israel.
It was Friday afternoon and there was not a chicken to be had in all of Jerusalem, let alone the 40 the rebbetzin generally cooked each week.
Her son-in-law, Rabbi Avraham Willig, was in the kitchen, pestering his motherin- law about the lack of chickens. Machlis remained calm. Late that afternoon, a knock at the door brought a special delivery of a case of fresh chickens. The many family members and volunteers who worked in the kitchen alongside her grew to see these small miracles as an intrinsic part of Henny Machlis’s world.
The 60 years of Machlis’s life were astonishingly full. In addition to serving a hundred people at every Shabbat meal, she and her husband raised 14 children, including a son with severe hyperactivity and a daughter who has Down syndrome, is autistic and does not speak. Beyond that, there are hundreds of stories from people whose lives she touched. As Rigler writes, “The Machlis home was not a soup kitchen; it was a soul kitchen.”
In a series of sidebars she calls “In Her Footsteps,” Rigler highlights what other people learned directly from the rebbetzin.
Rigler contrasts Machlis’s approach to time with her own and describes how things changed when she began to adopt the mantra “I have all the time.”
“Now whenever I feel anxiety about not enough time, I say, ‘I have all the time,’” Rigler writes. “Then, magically, I relax.
And because I relax, I’m more efficient in doing whatever I have to do. Of course, it’s irrational. Saying, ‘I have all the time’ doesn’t give me any more minutes, but somehow it works.”
Reading the stories of her adult life, it can seem that Machlis was gifted with a kind of superhuman holiness. Yet, in the chapter about her early years, Rigler writes: “Nothing in Henny’s childhood indicated that she was destined for greatness. In fact, greatness was not her destiny; greatness was her choice.”
Later chapters bring together her wisdom on parenting, matchmaking and self-improvement.
While Machlis was a committed, religious woman, her home was open to all kinds of people, both Jewish and not Jewish. It is clear from Rigler’s storytelling that Machlis’s influence and her wisdom extended very far beyond her modest apartment in Ma’alot Dafna.
Rigler took on a big challenge writing a biography of a person about whom there is so much to praise. In the hands of a lessskilled writer, Machlis could have been portrayed as too perfect to have been a real person. Rigler neatly avoids that flaw, in part by relying heavily on stories told by Machlis’s family, friends and students.
In the end, it doesn’t matter if you were one of the tens of thousands of people who once ate a Shabbat meal in the Machlis home or if you never heard of her before now. Emunah with Love and Chicken Soup will inspire you to see how much good one person can do with the life she or he has been given.