Chaim Elchanan Idan lives with cerebral palsy. He cannot walk, eat, or speak on his own. A few years ago, when he tried typing on a computer as usual, he felt once again that his fingers weren't responding quickly enough. His nose, on the other hand, tapped out letters in rapid succession.
"Right now I'm typing to you with my nose," he wrote when I reached out to him this week on WhatsApp. Then he sent me a file — his weekly newsletter on the Torah portion. A newsletter called *Ohr HaTorah* ("The Light of the Torah"), which he began publishing back in seventh grade. It turns out he sends the texts and printing instructions to the print shop himself, and also distributes the newsletters through the streets of Jerusalem in his motorized wheelchair, dropping them off at synagogues. "I have to act and do things," he explained, "otherwise I get depressed."
This is what he wrote this week in his Passover edition — and perhaps, really, about himself as well: "Many people ask what *'V'hi She'amda'* means — the famous passage from the Passover Haggadah. Who or what is *'she'* — 'it'? I heard a beautiful idea: *she* is our faith. What has stood by our ancestors and by us throughout all generations is faith — even in the hardest moments. There is within us an inner capacity to believe that things will be good. When a person holds onto faith, he is already on the path to freedom!"
And here is his message to all of us for these days. The Western Wall plaza is nearly empty because of the current situation — only 50 people are permitted to enter at one time— and Chaim was one of them. This week he wrote: "Thank you for the special privilege of being your messenger and praying here. My advice to everyone is to pray, to speak with God always —not only from the prayer book, not only in Hebrew, but even in your own words. I speak with Him a lot, and I highly recommend it. He is there, He is listening. And you don't need to type to Him with your nose…"
