When Moran Stella Yanai could shape little about her fate, she leaned on one thing that she could still control: her mind.
She closed her eyes, she recalled, and directed her senses to another realm — imagining a shabbat dinner put on by her mother, with salads, five courses, singing, ritual, a little fight which resolved into laughter.
“I was there. I started to smile,” she said at her Tuesday night talk at Chabad Jewish Center of Chattanooga. “Physically, my body started smiling.”
Then someone said her name. She opened her eyes to another realm, which she could not escape: She was a hostage in Gaza, in a brutal war.
That Yanai found herself months later in Chattanooga, of all places, was a miracle of fate, she said she has come to realize.