When I checked my phone on Monday morning, a new notification from WhatsApp popped up, asking me: “Do you want to restore your messages?”
Of course, I selected, “yes,” only to be told, “You do not have enough storage.”
Old story. Or so I thought. After all, who hasn’t been through this? So I did my usual—deleted old pictures, emails, PDFs, videos, GIFs, anything that would free up space.
Then I returned to WhatsApp and pressed, “Restore messages.”
And that’s when my entire world shifted.
Every conversation and every voice note I’ve sent or received over the last 10-15 years was simply gone. Every emotional exchange. Every joke. Every plea for assistance, every message from the soldiers we help, every request from anyone in our community … all gone, deleted, poof.
And WhatsApp is not a peripheral part of my life! I live, breathe, work, and organize my entire life through that app. That morning alone I was engaged in over twenty active conversations!
The important document I’d received the day before, gone. All the messages I hadn’t even opened yet, gone with no way of knowing what they were or who they were from.
I was panicking. Truly panicking. There were so many loose ends in those missing messages; how would I ever recover? I spent the rest of the day in a daze. I felt lost and disoriented.
But by the following morning, I had almost convinced myself that “it is what it is - Hashem has a plan.”
Then I shared my frustration with someone, and he said, “Why don’t you uninstall and reinstall?”
I did.
And suddenly, WhatsApp asked: “Do you want to restore your messages?”
Of course I do!
And it started restoring.
Restoring.
Restoring.
Restoring.
It took a full 36 hours for all my messages to repopulate. And when it was finally done, I realized that most of my messages were back. Everything from November 2025 and earlier was restored.
Some messages were out of order. Some were incomplete. But at least they were there.
But everything from December, January, and February was permanently gone. Three full months of my life missing and unrecoverable.
But then it dawned on me: You can lose every message in your life … you can even lose all your material possessions … but the one thing you can never lose is a mitzvah.
Every mitzvah you do is yours for eternity.
You can never lose a tefillah you davened. You can never lose a Shabbat that you kept. You can never lose a dollar you gave to charity.
Those are backed up, permanently. Imprinted on your soul and uploaded to Heaven.
While I’m very glad to have most of my messages back, I’m even more glad for the reminder about what’s really important.