The Day My Son Couldn’t Walk: A Mother's Spiritual Awakening

Mital Glam, a mikveh attendant from Kfar Yona, will never forget the day her life changed. It started with something that seemed almost trivial, her son Ariel, not yet three years old, said his legs hurt. Then he asked to be carried to the bathroom. At first, she thought he was being silly. But within hours, her world turned upside down.

“My husband carried him in his arms,” Mital recalls. “Then he looked at me and said, ‘There’s something wrong. He really can’t stand on his legs.’ I still didn’t think it was serious. I just said, ‘Maybe he’s tired. He’ll be fine.’”

The next morning, Mital called Ariel to come to the living room. It was Chanukah vacation, and she had plans to take him out. From his bed, he screamed: “Mom, I can’t walk! My legs have fallen off!” She dropped everything and ran to his room. His legs looked fine, but when she lifted and pinched them, nothing. No reaction. No feeling.

In a panic, they rushed to the local clinic, which immediately referred them to Schneider Children’s Hospital in Petach Tikva. After hours of tests, a doctor sat Mital down and asked a question that pierced her heart: “Are you sure your son ever walked?” She was stunned.

That night in the hospital, after Ariel fell asleep, Mital sat by his bed and cried from the depths of her soul. And in those tears, she understood something clearly: “Even though it might sound strange, I knew exactly why this was happening to me.”

Just before the crisis, Mital’s husband had begun returning to Torah observance. He started going to shul and attending Torah classes. Though they had both grown up in traditional homes, their married life was far from religious. But when her father-in-law was badly injured in a construction accident, the family moved back to Kfar Yona to help and her husband began to feel a spiritual awakening.

Instead of being supportive, Mital was angry. “I argued with him constantly. I hated the idea of keeping Shabbat. It didn’t fit the life I wanted.” She went out of her way to fight his observance. “When he went to shul, I would unplug the hot plate and put the food outside. I’d open the fridge he had carefully prepared. I’d even blast the television loudly.”

This tension lasted a year and a half, until her husband’s rabbi gave him gentle advice: don’t push. Let her be. Respect her process. Only go to Torah classes on Shabbat. Speak kindly. Let her come to her own understanding in her own time.

And then came the hospital room.

That night, watching her son sleep in a hospital bed with no explanation for his sudden paralysis, Mital looked inward. “I knew this was a message from Above. It was because I disrespected the Shabbat my husband tried to honor. I wasn’t religious then, but the message was so clear it was almost physical. I couldn’t deny it.”

So she prayed.

“I begged Hashem from the deepest part of my heart. I promised that from now on, I would keep Shabbat properly. No more fighting. No more mocking. And I asked forgiveness for every time I had dishonored His day.”

Over the next two months, Ariel remained in the hospital. There were hard days, endless tears, unknowns, and quiet prayers whispered at his bedside. But slowly, things began to change. After two and a half months, Ariel began to move his legs. Feeling returned. He started crawling. And four months after that dark day, a doctor handed Mital the discharge letter with a smile.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” the doctor said. “We couldn’t explain the illness—and we can’t explain the recovery. It’s a medical miracle.”

Mital’s family today is fully observant, and every year when Ariel’s birthday approaches, she remembers the moment everything shifted. “Twelve years later, I still cry from gratitude. Hashem woke me up in the most painful way, but He did it with so much love. We were never alone. Every step of the way, He was guiding us.”