She spent decades searching for spiritual truth, never knowing that the Jewish identity her family had hidden from her was still alive within her. Her story reveals a powerful truth: no matter how far a Jew may wander, the hidden flame of the Jewish soul can never be extinguished.
Have you ever felt like you were drowning, not in water, but in everyday life? You are trying to get through your emails, answer messages, pay bills, meet deadlines, and somehow find time to do everything else. A mother might feel like she is drowning in laundry, school pickups, grocery shopping, and driving her children from one activity to the next. And sometimes, after you finally get everyone into bed and sit down on the couch, you suddenly remember the three things you were supposed to do yesterday and the five things waiting for you tomorrow.
I think we all know that feeling. The responsibilities keep piling up, one after another, until we feel as though we can barely keep our heads above water. And it is not always about work or family responsibilities. Sometimes it is the news we hear, the things happening around us, or simply the endless distractions of everyday life. We get so caught up in everything that needs our attention that we can lose sight of what really matters.
The Rebbe often explained that this is precisely what King Solomon was referring to in the Song of Songs.
The Song of Songs describes a love story between a man and a woman, but our Sages teach us that, on a deeper level, it describes the relationship and love between the Jewish people and G-d. Toward the end of the book, in Chapter 8, King Solomon compares this love to a fire and declares: “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the rivers drown it.”
What are these “many waters”?
Chassidic teachings explain that the many waters represent the world we live in, a world that can sometimes feel like a turbulent sea. Just as powerful waves can overwhelm a person at sea, the pressures of making a living, the responsibilities of daily life, and all the distractions and temptations around us can threaten to sweep us away. We can become so absorbed in the struggle to keep everything going that we forget our connection with G-d and our purpose in life.
But King Solomon is teaching us something remarkable. Despite all these waters, despite everything that threatens to overwhelm us, there is something inside every Jew that cannot be extinguished.
Every Jew carries a hidden love for G-d, like a flame concealed within a glowing ember. Sometimes that flame is barely noticeable. Sometimes it remains hidden for years, even decades. A person can become so caught up in the world that he barely feels it. But the flame is still there, and no matter how much water comes rushing in, it can never be extinguished.
And sometimes, when life seems to have buried that flame under layer after layer of distractions, something happens that brings it back to life. The love awakens, the connection becomes real again, and the flame begins to burn brightly.
That is the deeper meaning of the words: “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the rivers drown it.” (Torat Menachem, Vol. 74, p. 212.)
This week, I read a story that illustrates this idea beautifully: the fire within a Jew will ultimately awaken.
A Journey Back to Her Roots
Barbara Hines, who was born in Germany in 1950 and grew up in Sydney, Australia, spent nearly two decades as a devout Buddhist. She traveled to Tibet and studied personally with the Dalai Lama. Before that, she had grown up in a Christian environment in the suburbs of Sydney, spending her Sundays in church without knowing anything about Judaism.
German was the language spoken at home. The public school she attended devoted one hour each week to Christian religious education, which became her favorite subject. She eagerly absorbed all the biblical stories about the patriarchs and the stories of the Torah, without the slightest idea that she was memorizing her own family’s personal history. In those days, the word “Jewish” was not even part of her world. “I didn’t know what a Jew was,” she admits.
Her parents were actually Holocaust survivors who had fled Germany. Her father had been imprisoned during the war because his mother was Jewish, and he was officially dismissed from the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, as “half Jewish.” One night, the prisoners were marched from their cramped cell into the forest, and her father managed to escape. During the war, he and his partner, Barbara’s mother, managed to hide in Germany under a false Christian identity.
After World War II, her parents decided to flee to the other side of the world. Out of concern for their daughters, who had been born in Germany, they decided to conceal their Jewish identity from their children and raise them as Christians.
Barbara first began to discover clues about her true identity when she arrived at the University of Sydney. Without planning it, she found herself surrounded by Jewish friends. One day, her closest friend brought her home for a visit. Years later, that friend told her how her father had looked at Barbara and said to his daughter in Yiddish, “She has a Yiddishe Kop”
Her German teacher at school also noticed that some of the words and expressions Barbara used simply did not exist in the German language. When Barbara returned home and told her mother about it, her mother casually dismissed the observation. “Oh, where I come from in Saxony, that’s simply an accent, a local dialect.” In retrospect, it became clear that these were distinctively Yiddish expressions that had survived within the family.
When Barbara finished college, she decided to travel to Germany to find her roots and meet her extended family. Just before she left, her father told her that his mother, her grandmother, had been Jewish. He also told her for the first time about his imprisonment and dismissal from the German military. At that stage, the information remained a dry historical detail. Hines did not connect it to her own identity and continued with her life.
Later, Barbara met her husband, Gerald, a businessman and real estate mogul. They married and moved to Texas, where they had two children. Later, hoping to give their children a European education, the family relocated to London.
Throughout all those years, however, Hines’s spiritual journey took her in the opposite direction, toward the Far East. She began practicing yoga and eventually found her place in Buddhism. While the children learned Christianity at school in London, Barbara taught them Buddhism and practiced meditation with them at home.
Her son Trevor, who was interested in history, decided to investigate the roots of Christianity. One day, he came home and announced to his mother that he had found too many contradictions in Christianity and believed that the truth lay in the original source, Judaism.
“He told me he wanted to become Jewish,” Hines recalls, “and I was fine with that, as long as he had a connection to G-d.”
When Trevor called his grandmother in Australia to tell her about his decision, something extraordinary happened. His grandmother, who was already eighty years old, finally broke her silence and revealed the truth that had never been told. Not only had his father’s grandmother been Jewish, but his mother’s mother and grandmother had also been fully Jewish.
Trevor ended the phone call, looked at his mother, and said the words that would change her life: “Mom, that means you’re actually Jewish.”
Barbara’s transformation began when she once walked into her son’s room and saw him wearing tefillin. “I didn’t know what they were at the time. I thought it was some kind of crazy cult,” she recalls. But her initial alarm soon turned into an intensive journey of learning.
To make her son comfortable eating at home, she began studying the laws of kosher food in depth. From there, the path to learning about Judaism as a whole was short.
At the same time, her sister began researching the family tree and discovered that at least eighty six members of their extended family had been murdered in the Holocaust. This information shook Barbara deeply.
“I realized that my heritage had been taken away from me because of Hitler. I asked myself: Am I going to let this mad, antisemitic dictator determine my future, my life, and my inheritance? Am I going to let him take this away from me too, in addition to all the family members who were murdered?”
From that moment on, Hines decided to embrace Judaism fully. She found Chabad and is now an observant Jew who keeps kosher and observes Shabbat. All her children married Jews. After her husband passed away, she immigrated to the Land of Israel and settled in Jerusalem. (Israel Hayom newspaper.)
This raises a question: “Why did G-d do it this way?” Why did it have to happen like this? A Jewish woman was born to parents who never told her she was Jewish. She lived her entire life without knowing she was Jewish, and only now, thanks to her son, did she discover her Jewish identity. Why did G-d arrange things in this way?
The Waters That Awaken the Flame
The Rebbe offers a remarkable explanation.
“This is the explanation for the question of why G-d did things this way: to place a Jew in a situation that the Torah describes as being in the category of ‘many waters,’ like rivers that rush and sweep everything along. Through this, the heart is awakened and inflamed, burning with love for G-d. This love becomes more revealed and grows stronger precisely because of the ‘many waters.’ On the contrary, by becoming clothed within these ‘many waters,’ as mentioned above, it can reach an even higher level than the one it occupied before descending into this world.”
Sometimes G-d allows a Jew to go through an entire lifetime without knowing his or her Jewish identity, surrounded by “many waters,” a world that can distance a person from a connection with G-d. But precisely this situation can awaken an even stronger love for G-d, one that can reach a higher level than the love the soul possessed before descending into this world.
This week, in our parsha, Noach, we read the story of the Flood. The Rebbe asks:
“What lesson can we learn from the entire subject of the Flood? Particularly since the Flood was a one time event and will never happen again, as G-d promised. Therefore, it would seem that there is no need for instruction on how to behave if a flood were to occur in the world.”
The Rebbe answers:
“And this is the general lesson we learn from the Flood. At all times, there is a spiritual equivalent of the ‘waters of the Flood,’ namely, the ‘many waters’ of the world of earning a livelihood and so on. Every Jew must fulfill the command ‘Come into the ark,’ without being intimidated by the ‘many waters,’ knowing that ‘they cannot extinguish the love.’” (Torat Menachem, Vol. 38, p. 198.)
So the next time life feels overwhelming, and you feel like you are barely keeping your head above water, remember that you don’t have to let the waves carry you away. Somewhere beneath all the noise and pressure, that flame is still burning. Sometimes all we need to do is slow down, make a little room for it, and let it shine again.
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