Tasha Cohen always lamented why she couldn’t find her purpose in life, why her mission was so elusive as she jumped from one profession to the next in an effort to see what most spoke to her. It was hard. As others around her easily fell into their careers, she vacillated between being a night nurse, working with infants, teaching, baking, being an operations manager and even trying her hand at carpentry.
But prior to the years of finding her niche, Tasha’s life was largely shaped by an unfortunate car accident that occurred on the cusp of her aliyah date, leaving her completely crippled in her early 20s. Forced to delay her impending move and to remain in England for three more years to endure multiple surgeries and hours of therapies and treatments to mitigate her pain, Tasha eventually made her way to Pardes Chana.
Tasha made great strides, but with each advancement in life came multiple setbacks. Each blow was profound and painful, flattening her to a place where she feared she might never rebound. In 2020, the year that struck so many of us in different ways, Tasha had hit her rock bottom but she also received the best gift, the opportunity that essentially saved her life: She spent 45 days at “Balance House,” with 12-hour days of therapies and treatments to focus on healing and on herself in a holistic way. She finally regained her footing and emerged without the ghosts of her past, a butterfly fresh from its cocoon.
But then October 7 happened and once again ripped open the world we thought we knew. With her now solid foundation, however, Tasha was indestructible, so instead of letting trauma and discomfort weigh her down, she immediately saw this as an opportunity to give back and care for others, just as she had previously been treated. There are those who receive and look to swallow more, while others jump up and try to pay it forward. Tasha showed she belonged to the latter group.
After a close friend called on October 8 to tell her that her brother had been tragically killed in his army service, Tasha dropped off her dog at a friend’s home and attended the funeral, thus igniting her spirit of contributing to the cause. She began by driving the husband of a friend who was in her ninth month of pregnancy to his reservist duty, and she put out a call to others that she was available to help. In this way, the very thing that initially broke her became a vehicle of repair.
Tasha never stopped driving. She began to trek all over the country, often spending 14-hour days behind the wheel, delivering food and supplies, and giving rides to soldiers to the North and back. Because so much of life is not about the destination but the journeys we have, Tasha found these trips to be wholesome and healing.
What she discovered along the driving trips, nestled in the security of the car walls, the humming of the engine and the smoothness of the wheels as they traversed the long roads, was that many of the soldiers on reservist duty were not accustomed to life on a bare-bones army base. They were men who hadn’t been in service for years, who were suddenly thrust back out into a rugged life where they had to sleep on cots or sleeping bags, sometimes in areas where there was not even running water, and many were suffering injuries. The experience was taking a physical and emotional toll on them, so the soldiers seemed to be grateful to have a listening ear, someone with whom they could share their burdens. And Tasha certainly knew how damaging pain and discomfort can be for the brain.
Under the expanse of the darkened sky, when possibilities seemed endless, Tasha decided she would bring help to these soldiers; she would heal them one by one, minimizing their pain through a plethora of therapies and modalities, and use her skills as an operational manager to organize and pull together this project. It was within the car, a place that had once birthed her pain, that these ideas got their wings. Sometimes from our destruction arises our greatest victories.
And so, Chayal’s Angels was born. What started as a few phone calls and a small WhatsApp group of ten therapists grew into an organization that has treated over 2,500 soldiers, offering yoga, Reiki, chiropractic treatments, sound baths, acupuncture, physiotherapy and physical therapy to those who need them on various army bases. As Chayal’s Angels offered a variety of treatments and eased the minds and bodies of the soldiers, Tasha realized she had never felt more fulfilled. Although she frequently had to ask for donations to fund her project and dedicated all of her time to this volunteer endeavor instead of to her paying job, she had never experienced this level of happiness, finding meaning rooted in her purpose rather than in any form of materialism.
But it all came to a head when one evening, while driving alone on a different route due to a cancellation, Tasha smashed into the back of a van. Looking up, she saw the first licks of flames devouring the top of the car. The roof of the vehicle that once held multiple massage tables on her frequent trips, supporting the weight of many, was now collapsing. A Palestinian/Israeli saw her, and ran to pull her out, but she paused momentarily as she exited, reaching back to get her phone that was somewhere on the seat. He yelled that they had no time, and as she took two steps backwards away from the reaching flames, the entire car blew up, just out of reach from her fingertips. As the force of the blow threw bits of her world into the air around her, Tasha realized the far-reaching effects of her acts of kindness, and that each moment in her life was perfectly curated to allow her to survive, time after time, to continue spreading her light.
Tasha’s resilience was evident: she borrowed a car and immediately resumed her work, not allowing setbacks to derail her. As her light burned bright, she looked into the future of Chayal’s Angels and foresaw herself making a rehab program for post-war trauma, a Balance House to restore inner equilibrium, bringing symmetry to the layers of her own life. She witnessed how the thirty minutes the soldiers spend with the practitioners affords them an opportunity to detach from the chaos, to tune into themselves and their own needs and to allow themselves the beautiful luxury of being cared for.
Sometimes they talk. Some sit in silence as thick as honey, but these moments fuel them with a new-found strength to be able to resume their positions, once again hitting the road.
To learn more about or help Tasha in her mission, please visit www.Chayalsangels.org.
Sarah Abenaim is a writer, life-coach and journaling workshop curator who lives with her husband and kids. To be featured in one of her “Out There, In Here” stories, please reach out to her at [email protected] or to David Siegel at [email protected]. To learn more about how you can make an impact in the war effort, check out https://tinyurl.com/Rinat-VolunteeringinIsrael.
