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Singing the Psalms

Posted on March 18, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            The part-time musical director/rabbinical student at our synagogue decided to do something different for our monthly musical services this year. Usually we would have a Shabbat band, made up of professionals and congregants, set up next to the Cantor, and making the service feel like a rousing concert. But this year, the sanctuary has been set up in concentric circles, with the congregant singers and musicians in the middle and the rest of the congregation spreading out from there. It’s more intimate without the professional musicians, and there’s more of a focus on meditation and silence between the songs. And, maybe most important, the new songs we learned for these services were from the Book of Psalms, excerpted and used like chants, with lots of repetition and rhythm.

            It’s been an interesting experiment, especially for me as one of the singers, because it’s made me feel more like a participant in making the music, instead of an observer on the sidelines. And it feels really good to sing again, even though I’m still struggling with my breathing. It feels good to be a part of a whole group making music together.

“But we want to sing too!”

            The Psalms have always been a part of the traditional Friday night service, but we haven’t always sung them at my synagogue, and certainly not all six of the Psalms that are included in the prayer book as part of Kabbalat Shabbat (the Welcoming of Shabbat, or the warm up before the official evening service).

We studied the book of Psalms a few years ago in Bible Study, but I don’t think I paid a lot of attention. I was probably still in graduate school for social work at that point, and struggling to pay attention to anything other than school, but I do remember the Rabbi saying that many of the Psalms are “macaroni songs,” or songs that can easily be sung to different tunes, and that opens them up to many different musical interpretations that can give a whole new energy to familiar words.

“I like macaroni!”

            The Psalms, as opposed to most of the rest of the Hebrew Bible, were created to be sung by the Levites in the Temple in Jerusalem. Some of the Psalms even tell you which instruments you should play to accompany them. The Greek word Psalmos means “a song accompanied by a stringed instrument,” and the Hebrew word for the Book of Psalms is Tehillim, which means “songs of praise,” though not all of the Psalms are about praising God. There are one hundred and fifty individual Psalms, and some are communal laments, and others express individual grief and anger at God, and some are thanksgiving and praise songs, but the value of the Psalms is that they give voice to a range of emotions, like joy and fear and rage and gratitude, and they appear in daily and weekly Jewish services, and holidays and funerals, because they can help us to express things when we have no words of our own.

            The Psalms used for Kabbalat Shabbat on Friday night are Psalms 95-99, plus Psalm 29, and there are a few versions that I really like:

            (From Psalm 96) Shiru L’Adonai by Nigunim Ensemble https://youtu.be/yM6_49gQmXw

       (Also from Psalm 96) Ya'aloz Sadai by Nava Tehilla https://youtu.be/QwGksNJixtc
       (From Psalm 98) Zamru L’Adonai by Nava Tehila - https://youtu.be/XQe7vqnCZmU
 

            One of the Psalms we sang all the time, without realizing it was a Psalm, was By the Waters of Babylon. I think we first learned it to sing at a school concert, or maybe at camp, but I knew an English version and a Hebrew version and only in my research for this essay did I realize it came from Psalm 137: By the waters of Babylon, there we sat, sat and wept, as we remembered Zion. It’s a communal lament at the loss of home after the first Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and the Israelites were exiled to Babylon. We always sang the first lines, but the Psalm goes on to another saying we learned in school: If I forget you, or Jerusalem, let my right hand wither. It always sounded so strange to me, especially on it’s own, because I was clearly an American kid, not longing to go anywhere else, and yet I was supposed to feel so guilty at not longing for Jerusalem that I would lose my right hand. And I’m a righty, so it bothered me a lot. The Psalm also includes a revenge fantasy against the enemies of Israel, and we can read it as literal – that we want to kill those who wronged us or took things from us, or we can read it as a moment of catharsis, to get our yayas out, that is not meant to be acted upon. I guess we get to choose how we read it, like a choose-your-own-adventure story. But the song I learned as a child focused only on the grief, not on the guilt or the desire for revenge, and I wonder if we excerpt these Psalms as a way to avoid the more complicated parts of who we are and how we feel, or the more complicated parts of peoplehood, so that we can just focus on the joy for a little while.

            But the Psalms are everywhere, not just in the Friday night service, and I never really noticed them before. I don’t think we studied the book of Psalms, either in elementary school or high school, probably because we were saying them daily in our prayers and our teachers assumed we knew them and understood them already. But we didn’t. Or, I didn’t.

               Psalm 137- Waters of Babylon by Don McLean - https://youtu.be/uTnspbSjKVc
               Psalm 137 - By the Waters of Babylon by Joey Weisenberg https://youtu.be/24SJuRGPpTI

            The Psalms can also be downright hopeless at times, like Psalm 90 – We spend our years like a sigh; the span of our life is seventy years, or given the strength, eighty years, but the best of them are trouble and sorrow, they pass by speedily and we are in darkness. It’s depressing, sure, but it’s also a chance to acknowledge the dark places in our lives, and in our world, and show them to God, and ask God to care that we are suffering, and, most importantly, to give ourselves permission to care that we are suffering.

“Hey! I suffer too!”

            The most famous Psalm I know of is Psalm 23 – The lord is my shepherd I shall not want. Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. I like to think of it as an aspirational Psalm, a Psalm describing how we want life to be and to feel. It’s phrased in the present tense, as if all of these good things are already here, and I am already comforted, and I already feel safe, and will only experience goodness and love from now on. But I think the idea of a prayer like this is to help us hold onto a vision of a better world, even when that’s not how things are for us right now, which is why it’s often said at funerals. I found a really beautiful version of this one, in Hebrew and English, by one of the Jewish-male-acapella groups who usually sing silly holiday songs to the tunes of popular American music.

            Psalm 23 – Gam Ki Elech – Six13 –  https://youtu.be/bezjJbBkWkg

            But along with the pain, the Psalms can also teach us how to celebrate when things go right, and how to express our gratitude for answered prayers – not because we’re ungrateful creeps who wouldn’t thinking to say thank you on our own, but because celebration and expressing gratitude is just as cathartic as expressing doubt and pain and anger. These Psalms allow us to feel like what we feel and say and do in the world has inherent value, not just to us but to God, who is our clearest personification of the world at large.

            The last of the one hundred and fifty Psalms is Hallelujah and it’s all about praising God, here and there, for his acts and greatness, with horn and lyre and dance and lute and pipe and cymbals. There are a lot of beautiful versions of this one, but I picked two of my favorites.

            Psalm 150 – Halleluya – by Nava Tehilla - https://youtu.be/RV3xV9NJgss
            Psalm 150 – Halleluya – by Nigunim Ensemble - https://youtu.be/ngybRjtv-dk

            Some people learn best through reading, or doing; I learn best through music. So getting the chance to hear the Psalms, and feel them, through music, finally made them seem like more than just words on a page. My hope is that even when we go back to the rowdier version of musical services at my synagogue next year, we can keep the new takes on the Psalms, and add more as they are created, because each new variation seems to capture another feeling that I didn’t notice before, adding more joy and insight and space without ever taking anything away.

Some more songs I love that are taken from the Psalms:

Psalm 92 - Tov L'Hodot by Joey Weisenberg - https://youtu.be/cXwoXKDDGmw

Psalm 118 – Min Hameitzar by Deborah Sacks Mintz – https://youtu.be/EMe4-ggSkdY

Psalm 121 – Esa Einai by Nefesh Mountain – https://youtu.be/aLTt2HytfXQ

“Can you please turn the music down? We’re trying to sleep over here.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Planning My (Eventual) Trip to Israel

Posted on March 11, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            Ever since my High School best friend visited from Israel, back in January, I’ve been thinking about what we’ll do when I finally get to Israel. I think the biggest result of my almost two years of online Hebrew classes from Tel Aviv, and watching so many Israeli TV shows to practice my Hebrew, is that I’m much more interested in visiting smaller neighborhoods and meeting the people than I am in going to the traditional tourist sites. For example, I really don’t want to get up early in the morning to hike Masada, or even take a cable car to the top to watch the sunrise, because I’ve seen more than enough pictures of the view, and because I’m not sure I want to celebrate a place where so many Jews felt like their only option was to commit suicide in order to avoid being captured.

I’m reluctant to go to the Dead Sea (Yam HaMelach in Hebrew), because… bathing suits, and because I usually have one wound or another and the salt stings. But I wouldn’t mind going further south, to Eilat, because there’s supposed to be a spectacular underwater preserve, where you can snorkel or go on a glass bottom boat ride to see fish and coral, and then you can go to the Dolphin Reef to swim with dolphins. But again, bathing suits, or a wet suit, which is just as bad.

Of course, I’ll need to go to Jerusalem for a few days, just to see if I fall under its spell. I’m kind of hoping I will, because it sounds like an incredible high the way people describe it, though I don’t want to get the official version of Jerusalem Syndrome, which includes psychotic breaks and believing you are Moses or Jesus or someone like that. More likely than not, I’ll get to the Wailing Wall, look around, realize I’ve seen it all in pictures and videos already, and then spend the rest of my time at the Mahane Yehuda Market.

“Do they have food?”

            Time of year will make a huge difference in what kind of trip I can take, because if I have to go in the summer I will not be able to spend much time outdoors. I’ll just go from one taxi/bus/train to another, and one hostel to another, carrying buckets of ice to toss over my head in case of emergencies.

            I found an Israeli tour guide on YouTube, named Oren, who does tons of videos: on how to plan trips to Israel in general; and how to manage public transportation, and how to navigate the weather, and the people, and the supermarkets, etc. He’s an opinionated guy, and I don’t always agree with his point of view on politics, but he’s knowledgeable and detailed, and funny, and he really loves Israel.

Some things I’ve learned from Oren: they don’t stamp passports in Israel, because then it would be difficult for people to travel on to Arab countries, so instead you get a paper called an Electronic Gate Pass that you have to keep track of; the New Israeli Shekel, Known as NIS or “Shach,” equals about thirty to thirty five American cents; you need an adapter for any American electronics (hair dryer, electric toothbrush, etc,); you will need an Israeli provider’s sim card for your cellphone in order to have Wi-Fi, outside of a hotel/hostel that provides it for you; March and April are the best time to go to Israel, but any time after October is okay, because the winters are mild; The preflight security interview at El Al can be intimidating and annoying, but you’ll survive; buy traveler’s insurance; keep the Jewish holidays in mind when planning your trip, because there’s no public transport on Shabbat and holidays in most of the country, and flights into the country are more expensive leading up to the big holidays; only go to the Negev in the winter, otherwise you will burn to a crisp; you need a guide of some kind in order to visit the old city of Jerusalem, but there are group tours, apps, and guide books if private tours are too expensive, and keep in mind that Jewish and Christian tours are very different; in an emergency dial 101; don’t be surprised to find yourself standing next to an Israeli soldier carrying an Uzi.

            Recently, I’ve been getting really interested in seeing the north of Israel, because I know so much less about it, and because it is not as hot as the south, but Oren has fewer videos about the north, so far, so I had to go to Wikipedia and other sites for information.

            Haifa is the big city in the north of Israel, and there’s an Israeli saying that goes, “Haifa works, Jerusalem prays, and Tel Aviv plays,” which doesn’t make it sound very exciting, but it has the only underground rapid transit system in Israel, called the Carmelit (Tel Aviv is in the process of building its own). And it’s also one of Israel’s mixed cities, with a significant population of Arabs and Jews living in the same place, with Arab Christians, Arab Muslims, Druze and Bahai communities, plus a lot of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and even an ultra-orthodox minority. So it seems like it’s worth a visit, and it could be a good jumping off point for visiting other parts of the North. Haifa is also one of the few cities in Israel where buses operate on Shabbat.

I want to see Tsfat (Safed), which is known for art and mysticism; and Akko (Acre), which is an ancient city with remnants from the Hellenistic-Roman period, and the Crusader period, and the Ottoman period; and then there’s Tiberius, which was founded in 20 CE by Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great, and became a hub for Jews after the destruction of the second temple (and where the Jerusalem Talmud was put together); and there’s Mount Hermon, bordering Lebanon, which is the one place in Israel that gets enough snow for skiing in the winter (but since I don’t ski I’m not sure why I’d go there, except to cool off); and then there are a lot of Kibbutzim and Moshavim to visit, with fruits and vegetables and cheeses and mushrooms galore.

“I like cheese!”

But it’s all still up in the air, especially when it’s so much easier to watch videos of all of these places on TV. And I’m still dragging my feet about getting my passport renewed, though, partly because of my reluctance to have my picture taken, and partly because it’s one more appointment I’ll have to make and organize and get to. And the thing is, I don’t really want to go to Israel alone, or plan a whole trip by myself, and I can’t expect my friend to abandon her family for weeks at a time just to keep me entertained. My synagogue is planning an Israel trip next year, in the spring I think, but it’s bound to be expensive and involve a lot of walking, and visiting places I don’t particularly want to go, and it would require me to make up my mind far in advance, which I seem incapable of doing.  So, in the meantime, I’m watching Israeli movies and TV shows: on my Kan 11 app, or the Izzy streaming channel, or just on YouTube. At the very least, by the time I get to Israel I’ll know the best places to go for Chummus.

“Have them send all of the food here!”

Some of Oren’s Israel videos:

The 10 Most ISRAELI Things You Don't See On the News (14:33) https://youtu.be/q4lmXwqGDHg
The Israeli Supermarket (11:54) https://youtu.be/OFUximyJ3rI
Running the Dead Sea Marathon (10:14) https://youtu.be/THKJDJQUww4

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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I Want My House Back

Posted on March 4, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            I keep having dreams that I’m back in the house I grew up in, and I discover all of these extra rooms and higher floors, and walls full of windows, and I start to have all kinds of ideas for how to make the house more stable and welcoming and beautiful, and then the dreams introduce  obstacles: my father still lives there and I can’t afford to buy him out, or the house is under attack and there are bombs hidden in the basement/attic/bathrooms/backyard, or there are random people living behind secret doors and eating all the food in the house.

“It’s me, hi, I’m the one who ate all the food.”

            Dream interpreters tend to say that houses stand in for our bodies in our dreams, and I can see how that could be one explanation, especially given all of my health issues and my endless wish to be healthier and feel more secure. But I think the dreams are about more than my body. I think they’re trying to tell me something about my self, or my soul, because what I really want is to feel like there’s more light coming into my life, and more of a sense of possibility and security, and the obstacles to reaching those goals just refuse to go away.

            I’ve been watching this new show called “The Way Home,” on the Hallmark channel, about a teenage girl who time travels, through the pond on her grandmother’s property, and finds out what her mother’s family was like before their big tragedy changed them. And the idea that I could go back to my childhood, or even my mother’s childhood, with everything I know now, and fix the past, is enchanting, and, of course, frustrating in its impossibility. But changing the past isn’t really what I want. I want to feel like I belong somewhere in the present day, and have ownership over my identity, and feel more completely myself, instead of still feeling so fragile and unfinished.

            I want to wake up in the morning and feel secure in my goals and values, and look in the mirror and recognize myself as a specific person and not just a blob (though that last problem could be because I sometimes forget to put my glasses on before looking at myself in the bathroom mirror).

“You look blurry to me all the time, Mommy.”

            I think the dreams are trying to help me figure out how to get to a better life, and also trying to remind me of all of the work I’ve done already, building my internal structures, and breaking down walls and raising ceilings, despite all of the obstacles that have always been in my way. I just wish the dreams could be a little bit more prescriptive sometimes, like, telling me which directions to go in, or maybe writing my novels for me so I won’t have to break my head over the plot points ad infinitum before I can even get a draft on paper.

            It would also be nice if I could have transcripts of my dreams already written out for me when I wake up, because trying to remember all of the details before they disappear is an impossible task.

            But maybe the dreams can’t really tell me more than I already know, which is that houses and selves don’t just renovate themselves overnight; it takes work, and time. And if I keep doing the work, and breaking through my internal walls, and searching for the hidden bombs, and defusing them, I will eventually get to a good place. Wherever that may be.

“Wherever you go, we go.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Chutzpah

Posted on February 25, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            Just the other day, someone described me as having chutzpah, because of some small thing I said in a meeting that no one else seemed willing to say. I wasn’t sure if I was being complimented or not, or even if chutzpah was the right word for such a small thing, but the moment stuck with me.

            According to Wikipedia, chutzpah is a Yiddish word meaning audacity. It has strong negative connotations, but can also be interpreted in a positive way, as courage or guts. It’s originally from the Aramaic/Hebrew root word “Chataph,” meaning insolent or impudent, and is often used to refer to someone who has overstepped the boundaries of polite behavior.

And I can see that in myself, because I’m not especially good at being polite. I’ve often gotten in trouble for saying things I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to say. Chutzpah, even the saying of it, requires impoliteness, like coughing up phlegm, and not being so lady-like or quiet.

“You should have named me Chutzpah instead of Cricket. This is me!”

            If we stick with the root word, chataph, and define chutzpah as insolence or impudence, both of those words describe the behavior of someone with less power towards someone with more power, and that fits with the origin of my impolite behavior, in childhood. A parent can’t be impudent or insolent towards their child; they can be mean, insensitive, hurtful, etc., but a child can be impudent or insolent towards a parent or other adult, breaking the rules of conduct and risking punishment by ignoring the rules imposed on them.

            Yiddish as a language overall has chutzpah. It’s heretical, and powerful, and antagonistic to the norm, and in my quiet way I am all of these things; not because I want to be, but because my reality is so different from what I’ve been told to expect.

Yiddish almost became a dead language, when the majority of Yiddish speakers were killed in the Holocaust, but it’s coming back to life, and I think that’s because it serves a much needed purpose. Yiddish is about seeing the world from an outsider’s perspective, and poking a finger at those in power, and being subversive, and funny. It’s a language that is used to talk behind someone else’s back (preferably someone who doesn’t understand Yiddish), or to take the stuffing out of a person (who does understand Yiddish), or to complain about a frustrating reality, or to do some truth telling instead of trying to calm the waters.

            As I said in the beginning, my form of chutzpah is generally a willingness to say what no one else in the room will say: that the emperor has no clothes on, or that the elephant in the room is starting to smell. I’ve done that from early childhood, not because I wanted to be disruptive or rude or audacious, but because I couldn’t figure out why no one else was acknowledging the obvious, and it hurt my brain to try to pretend things weren’t happening when they were. I don’t mind politeness in general, I just mind it when it is hiding important truths. Like, let’s not pretend that the guy in the doorway with a gun is just coming over for tea, okay?

“But are there snacks to go with the tea?”

            I read another definition of chutzpah, though, that said that someone with chutzpah is someone who ignores what others think, and denies personal responsibility for their actions, and lacks remorse, regret, guilt, or sympathy. And that’s not me at all. But it’s hard to get a handle on a word that means so many different things to different people. It’s not a word like, say, light bulb, which everyone will understand in pretty much the same way.

            I had an English teacher in High School who made us memorize definitions for our vocabulary words, and if even one word varied from the exact definition she’d given us, we’d lose points. She didn’t test us on our ability to comprehend the word in context, or to use it in a sentence, instead she treated every word as if it had an exact and unchanging meaning. Except, words aren’t like that. Words are adopted and adapted to fit the current needs of the speakers of the language. I see this every week in my online Hebrew class, where words I learned thirty years ago have gone out of style, or picked up new baggage from how they’ve been used on the street or in business or in politics in Israel.

            I’d like to think that if I do have chutzpah, it’s the good kind and not the sociopathic kind, but most of the time I feel like I don’t have enough chutzpah, or self-confidence, or whatever it takes to really make a mark in the world, and make change. It takes so much energy to speak up in a discussion, and argue against the speaker’s certainty, only to find out later that mine was actually the majority opinion in the room but no one else felt free to say anything. I’d rather not have to fight at all, honestly, but that doesn’t seem to be an option. So, maybe next time I have to be chutzpahdik and speak an impolite truth, someone else will stand up and be chutzpahdik with me. God, that would be so much better.

“We’re with you!

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Watching Therapy Videos

Posted on February 18, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            Early in the school year I went searching for information on ADHD and Autism, to try to understand behaviors I was seeing in some of my students at synagogue school. I didn’t learn much about either diagnosis in my three and a half years in graduate school for social work, or even during the two years prior to that, when I was studying psychology in hopes of applying to a doctoral program in clinical psychology. And I certainly didn’t learn much about how to teach kids with those learning differences.

            I watched a lot of short, explanatory videos on ADHD and Autism that left too much unexplained and undescribed, and then I watched a lot of videos made by adults with ADHD and Autism who could describe the neurological differences they experienced, but still couldn’t give me, as a teacher, a clear idea of how to be helpful. And then I watched a bunch of videos about the blurry lines between ADHD, Autism, and trauma responses in children and adults, many of which validated my own experience of the mental health field, which is that there’s a lot we don’t know, but there are a lot of people who like to sound certain anyway, which is just annoying.

“So annoying.”

            But while I was looking into ADHD and Autism for my students, I kept finding videos that resonated with me, and I realized that I’ve been hitting a wall in therapy, in large part because the plans I had for my life have been derailed by my health issues and that has left even my therapist stymied as to how to help me. So even though the ADHD and Autism videos weren’t panning out, I thought I would keep looking though YouTube to see if I could find some ideas to try out in therapy, or even just ways to help me accept where I’m at and find some peace.

            I took a deep dive into the big names in Psychology, and especially in Trauma and Sensorimotor therapies and Attachment, thinking I must have missed some important ideas along the way that could have healed me by now, but I realized quickly that I’d heard all of it, and studied it, and parsed it for all of the helpful morsels of wisdom long ago. In almost thirty years of therapy, I realized, I’ve learned at least a doctorate’s worth of information/wisdom on the impact of trauma, even though I struggle to feel confident in what I know.

            But then I found a relatively young therapist/social worker named Patrick Teahan who had made a lot of videos about dealing with the impacts of a traumatic childhood in really down to earth, practical ways. And while he wasn’t telling me things that were new to me in theory, he had a way of talking, especially when sharing his own stories, that was validating and made me feel less alone. He shares a lot of concrete examples about what it feels like to have your sense of reality constantly challenged, and he’s able to describe situations and put things into words that often remain blurry for me.

            He can be a bit verbose at times, though not in an academic way, more like if a friend were telling you a story and kept interrupting himself to tell you about another aspect of the story, and then getting back to the main idea only to go off on another tangent. I decided to take notes when I watched his videos, to help me follow the main through lines of what he was saying, and to give myself permission to take the videos more seriously, and to take my time with them, because the real value I was getting was a sense of his basic kindness as he worked to remove the shame that comes with a difficult childhood and from the lifelong dysregulation it can cause.

            He works in a form of therapy I’d never heard of, called the Relationship Recovery Program, and I have no idea how commonly it’s practiced or where it’s practiced, but I like the way he seems to respect each person’s life story, and I like that he doesn’t profess to have all of the answers. Most of all I like his sense of hope, that with time and effort people can come out of therapy feeling better and seeing things more clearly than before.

            I haven’t watched all of his videos, but I have a long list of the ones I want to watch carefully, taking notes and absorbing the material without overwhelming myself too much. And whenever I watch one of his videos, YouTube recommends a handful of other videos on similar topics, with other therapists, and even if I don’t watch them right away, there’s this reassuring sense that they’ll be there for me, some day, when I need them.

            The biggest gift from all of this video research, though, has been the reminder of how much I already know, about myself, and my students, and how valuable it is to just be a witness to what others are going through and to validate their experiences instead of evaluating or diagnosing them. Attention and kindness really can help people heal. I just have to keep reminding myself of that.

“I’ll remind you!”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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The B’nei Mitzvah

Posted on February 11, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            My first students ever in synagogue school are now old enough to be getting ready for their B’nei Mitzvah, the ritual celebration of leading a prayer service on turning thirteen to mark becoming a full member of the community. I haven’t seen much of these kinds so far this year, because they come to school just as I’m leaving for the day, so I only glimpse them here or there, or hear about them from their younger siblings. I don’t even know if they remember me (though, because they were my first class, they probably remember the candy I used to use to bribe them into paying attention). When I saw them last year, the boys still looked mostly the same and the girls looked ten years older, but I don’t know if they’ve changed in other ways: if they are calmer or angrier, sadder or happier, more cautious or more curious. I don’t know if they’ve learned everything they need to learn for their B’nei Mitzvah services or if they’re struggling. I don’t even know if they are still connected to each other the way they used to be or if they’ve grown apart.

            Last year, when I started to realize that this milestone was coming up, I had all kinds of plans to go to every single B’nei Mitzvah service, two and a half hours on consecutive Saturday mornings for months, to show my support (and not just to share in the snacks afterward). But now, because of my health, that doesn’t feel possible. The idea of getting up early enough to be at the synagogue by 9:45 AM, and standing and praying and socializing for hours, week after week, just seems so unlikely. But maybe I can make a commitment to go to each of their Friday Night services in person, instead of just on Zoom.

“But I love watching on Zoom!”

            At our synagogue, we start celebrating the B’nei Mitzvah at the communal Friday night services the night before the big day, where the kids lead a few important prayers and tell us about their mitzvah (service) projects, like walking dogs at the local animal shelter, or raising money for school supplies for underprivileged kids, or coaching developmentally disabled kids in soccer, or anything else that interests them and feels doable for a thirteen year old, with some help. The parents also go up and tell us about their children through a collection of books they’ve chosen as gifts – books connected to both being Jewish and loving sports, or cooking, or history, or art, or theater. It’s a chance for the rest of the community to celebrate with the family, and get to know them better, especially if we’ve never met them before.

“So where are my books?”

            Right now, though, even that commitment feels like more than I can handle. But it’s really important to me to be there, in person, where my former students can see me, and their other teachers, and know that we care about them and their journeys and their futures. I remember my own Bat Mitzvah so vividly and how most of my religious classmates couldn’t be there because it was on Shabbat and they couldn’t travel. And I remember how the rabbis at my orthodox Jewish day school disapproved of a girl leading services at all. It would have been so validating to have had all of those people there in the room with me, to see what I’d accomplished and to see what I could become. It would have meant the world to me.

            So I have until March to figure out how to make those Friday nights possible. Maybe some of my upcoming doctor visits will lead to progress in my health, or if that doesn’t pan out, maybe I can just plan to rest all day on Fridays, with no errands, no appointments, and no lesson planning, in order to have energy left at the end of the day to get to the synagogue in person. Wish me luck!

“Harrumph.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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What Were the Rabbis Thinking?

Posted on February 4, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            In Bible Study, a few weeks ago, we read one of the multiple mentions of the prohibition against boiling a kid in its mother’s milk, and it hit me, once again, what a strange law that is. First, because who would even think to do such a thing? And second, why did the rabbis interpret that line to mean don’t eat meat with milk at all?

            In the research for my Jews Around the World curriculum, for my synagogue school students, I found out that Ethiopians Jews, who went into exile before the Talmud was written, interpreted the prohibition against boiling a kid in its mother’s milk to mean don’t eat a young goat until after it has been weaned. And that made so much more sense to me! It made the dietary laws resonate with the lesson Abraham learned in Genesis: that it was no longer cool to sacrifice your children to the gods, or even to the God.

“Humans are weird.”

            One explanation given for the original prohibition against boiling a kid in its mother’s milk, is that the pagans who lived near the Ancient Israelites would literally boil a young goat in its mother’s milk as a fertility ritual to encourage better harvests, and the Israelites, in order to avoid the temptation of being like the pagans, were prohibited from doing that ritual in particular.

            Another explanation I read recently was that “do not boil a kid in its mother’s milk” was an idiom of the day, that we no longer understand out of context, that meant: don’t mix the newest and best of the harvest with last year’s leftovers, because the first fruits, of the harvest and of the womb, were traditionally treated as special.

“Does being first adopted count as special?”

            None of this was discussed back in my eighth grade Jewish law class in Yeshiva, in large part because the prohibition against eating milk and meat together was so taken for granted that it wouldn’t have occurred to any of us to ask where it came from. And it has become such a point of identity for many Jews, second only to avoiding pigs and shellfish, that no matter what the source of the law, changing it now would feel like cutting ties with our ancestors.

“Like when you tell me not to chase squirrels?”

            We don’t really know when the Israelites adopted the stricter prohibition against eating milk and meat together (as opposed to not boiling a kid in its mother’s milk, or not eating a goat until it has been weaned), because even though the stricter prohibition was first written down in the second century of the Common Era, the tradition says that the rabbis were collecting the wisdom that had existed for generations, finally seeing the need to write it down because the Israelites had been exiled from the land of Israel and scattered around the world. We do know that the rabbis who wrote the Talmud liked to create a fence around a fence around the law, to avoid even accidental sins, so they may have seen the blanket rule against mixing any milk with any meat as a necessary safeguard once they could no longer be sure which goat had provided their meat or their milk.

“I hate fences. I like freedom!”

The prohibition against mixing meat and milk would have been much easier to maintain in the ancient world, though, because the Israelites were sacrificing their goats and sheep and cows at the Temple maybe three times a year, if that. They weren’t going to the supermarket for meat every week, so the temptation to sprinkle some parmesan on their meatballs and spaghetti wouldn’t have come up very often, either in Ancient Israel, or when the rabbis were finalizing the Talmud in the first few centuries of the Common Era. Maybe if the Rabbis had been able to envision our lives today they would have gone with the Ethiopian interpretation way back when, or just stuck with the literal meaning of the law, which would have become as irrelevant as many other laws in the Hebrew Bible once the Jews were exiled from the land of Israel and could no longer make sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem. But who knows, the rabbis were an obsessive bunch and they liked to create complicated rules for just about everything, so they may have stuck to their guns even if they could have seen the difficulties Jews would face in the future.

            The rabbis also had a mandate to continue the Israelite tradition of using rituals and laws to keep the Jewish people separate from their neighbors, in order to maintain their belief in one God, and having such different eating habits could certainly keep people separated from each other. I have a notebook full of the rabbis’ strictures from my eighth grade Jewish Law class, where I learned that most of what we did at my house wasn’t kosher enough, and therefore I could never invite my school friends over, so I know how well it works.

There are Jews who ignore all of these rules and traditions as out of date and unnecessary, and others who think that these strict rules around food are meant to ritualize eating and therefore infuse it with holiness. Others say that the kashrut laws in general were specifically created to make it difficult to eat meat, so that we would avoid that temptation as much as possible, and there are yet others who say that the rules make no sense, but you should still follow them anyway, because…God.

“You mean, because I said so!”

            Often we search for logical reasons to do the things that have emotional meaning for us, and at this point in my life it would feel more meaningful to avoid eating lamb, or kid, or veal, than to avoid eating a cheeseburger. But it’s possible that if my grandfather, who loved being Jewish and felt strongly about keeping kosher, were still alive, the act of carefully waiting hours after eating brisket before even thinking about a bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream would have more meaning for me, because it would strengthen my connection with him. I don’t know. A lot of the rules still grate on me, as triggers for bad memories from my childhood and adolescence with my father. But feelings can change over time. Who knows what the future will bring?

“Chicken Parmesan?”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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The Ways of Waze

Posted on January 28, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            My best friend from high school came in from Israel for a family visit recently, and my only job was to find a way to get to where she was staying in order to catch up. It seems like it should be easy to get from one part of Long Island to another, to see an old friend I rarely get to see, but I’m me, so…

“Uh oh.”

            I downloaded WAZE on my phone, per Mom’s instructions, and also printed out a hard copy of the directions from Google Maps to study ahead of time. I’d managed a trip out to the Far Rockaway area a couple of years ago without WAZE, for a visit with the same friend, but it’s a route I rarely drive and I wanted to be prepared.

            And then I had a flare, or a worsening of my symptoms, or whatever I’m supposed to call it. My symptoms have been bad for a while now (exhaustion, pain, brain fog, Psoriasis and Lichen Planus outbreaks, walking trouble, breathing trouble, headaches, etc.), but on the Thursday before the visit things got even worse, to the point where Mom had to drive me to and from work to avoid a possible disaster on the road.

“I can’t watch.”

            I still thought the flare would pass by the day of the visit, though, and I avoided anything stressful or difficult in the days leading up to it, in hopes of recovering in time. But when I got up that Sunday morning, I knew I couldn’t do the drive; I could barely figure out how to open WAZE on my phone and make the directions appear. So Mom volunteered to drive me.

            It’s embarrassing to be an adult who needs her Mom to drive her to a get together, or to what my students would call “a play date,” but it was either be embarrassed or miss the visit altogether.

            Mom and I had both programmed our phones for the route, out of an abundance of caution and anxiety, so even after we’d decided to just use my phone, held aloft in the passenger seat so I could repeat the directions as many times as necessary to avoid missing our exits, Mom’s phone kept talking, in an echo. I finally figured out how to shut down her phone completely in order to make the echoing stop (later I realized that I could just have pressed stop on the WAZE screen, but, as I said, brain fog).

            We still had a hard time following the directions, of course, missing a few turns here and there, and then WAZE told us about a hazard up ahead, too late for us to turn around and change the route, and we found ourselves driving through a lake in the middle of the road. The car swam for twenty feet or so before getting to dry road on the other side, but it survived again.

            In my job as holder of the phone, I also discovered that WAZE likes to put little smiley faced icons all over the screen, which look suspiciously like the hidden pictures in one of my phone apps that I’m trained to tap with my finger until they are all removed and I win lots of points. I was just barely able to stop myself from pressing all the icons, so I have no idea what would have happened to the directions if I’d given in. We’d probably have ended up in Brooklyn.

            But we managed to get to our destination on time and safely, and it was a joy to see my friend again. Mom dropped us off at a coffee place to chat and then spent the next two hours on her own, taking pictures of big rocks and collecting shells at the beach, and then we dropped my friend off back at her sister’s house, with lots of hugs, and started up the WAZE again, a little more hopeful that the drive home would be uneventful. And despite some interesting “short cuts,” leading us behind factories and through one way roads that seemed more like driveways (probably to avoid the lake in the road), we made it safely home to the dogs, just in time for their afternoon walk.

            Ellie was thrilled to see us and zoomed around the yard in circles and figure eights, with breaks to come back and give us hugs and kisses, and Cricket spent her time sniffing scientifically at small patches of grass, searching for messages from her friend Kevin, the mini Golden Doodle, and looking longingly at the steps in front of his building, to no avail.

“He peed here. I know it!”

            And then we were back inside, home, with WAZE silenced and no more left turns to make across traffic, and I was relieved. The fact is, I was incredibly lucky to have Mom there to drive me, and WAZE to help us get there safely, and a good friend to meet with and catch up on all of the life events that can’t be shared in a text. Life has so many moving parts, with so many hazards along the way, but every once in a while the puzzle pieces actually come together. And it’s wonderful!

Home.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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All Those Cooking Shows

Posted on January 21, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            I’ve been watching a lot of cooking shows lately (mostly in Hebrew, as language practice) but I haven’t been doing much cooking, to Cricket’s great frustration. I am a messy cook, and as I chop, many pieces of red pepper and carrot and sometimes even chicken land on the floor right in front of her, where she is, conveniently, waiting. Instead, I am microwaving frozen meals, and all she can do is fight with her sister for the leftover sauce in the bowl (Cricket always wins).

“It’s all mine!”

            It’s not that the cooking shows aren’t inspiring. In fact, I feel like I should be making long lists of ingredients to search for, and printing out recipes for Shakshuka with eggplant and Kibbeh, or five kinds of Chummus, and instead I’m eating oatmeal for breakfast, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch, and anything I can warm up from the freezer for dinner (unless I’m lucky and Mom does the cooking, but she is not a messy cook, sorry Cricket).

“Harrumph.”

            I should at least be ordering out from Wild Fig (a Turkish restaurant with multiple locations nearby), or buying readymade Falafel or Bourekas from the international supermarket, but I’m not doing either one, and I’m not sure why.

            My first theory for why I was struggling was that most of the recipes, like the shows, are in Hebrew and measure in grams, which makes them largely incomprehensible. So I went online to look for similar recipes in English and found a treasure trove on Jamie Gellar’s site (she’s an orthodox, kosher cook who covers a wide range of styles of cooking, including Israeli).

But now I have a pile of new recipes that I have no energy to make.

            I don’t think it’s depression that’s holding me back, if only because once I take my afternoon (or morning) nap my moods are pretty good, even if my energy level still stinks. But there’s something about knowing how little energy I’m likely to have tomorrow, or next week, that has changed my calculations for what kinds of plans to make, if any.

“Plan to take a nap.”

            I’d like to believe that I’ll be able to do some cooking over the summer, when I won’t need all of my energy for teaching, but there’s also a long list of writing projects and exercise goals and doctor visits and household tasks that I need to catch up on over the summer, and even then, we don’t have air-conditioning in the kitchen to make it bearable, just a fan that tends to read between 80 and 95 degrees all summer long.

But I keep watching these cooking shows and wishing I could just walk down the hall to the kitchen and make an Israeli salad, or bake my own pitas on the top of the stove. I need to believe that something will improve soon so that I’ll be able to use all of this inspiration to actually make plans and follow through on them, or else I’m afraid I’ll get so stuck in my reality that I’ll forget how to hope for more.

Some links:

From Jamie Geller – Machane Yehuda Recipes (in English) (10 min.) https://youtu.be/lgjdy7VQJ0I

From Piece of Hebrew (with English subtitles) A SABICH recipe (14:18) https://youtu.be/nY29TRUh_MY

From Anachnu Al HaMapit with chef Michael Solomonov in Philadelphia (mostly in English with Hebrew subtitles) (53:15)https://youtu.be/EH-WpezAOTg

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Living at the Dentist’s office

Posted on January 14, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            Lately I’ve been living at the dentist’s office, or the oral surgeon’s, depending on the week. First there were regular checkups to see how I was healing from this summer’s oral surgery, and then at about the three month mark a crack appeared in the temporary upper teeth, not visible on the outside, and, luckily, the oral surgeon had been testing out his own 3D printer this fall and made a second version of my temporary device, so it was available to be switched out for the cracked one. And after that, I had to start the process of going from a temporary implant to a permanent one, which means molds and try-ons and who knows what else.

            But in the meantime, I also had regular cleanings, and more extractions, because my bottom teeth were jealous of all of the attention the upper teeth had gotten, and I had to get a temporary tooth, called a flipper, to fill the empty space up front, so now I have to be even more careful about what I eat, so I don’t accidentally pull out the flipper and swallow it with my dinner.

“That doesn’t sound yummy at all.”

            I wish this was all as entertaining in real life as it looks on paper.

The bone and gum loss in my mouth is so premature and seems to be a big honking clue that there is some underlying systematic disease process at work in my body, but no one can explain it or tie it to a specific diagnosis. So I continue to lose my teeth, and I continue to get more and more exhausted, and nothing I try seems to be able to slow this process down, let alone reverse the damage already done.

            I’ve also had to go for blood tests, and a mammogram, and a gynecological checkup, and there’s the oral pathologist and the primary care doctor and the gastroenterologist coming up, and, of course, the continuing dental visits.

And I’m tired. I’m tired of having to spend money on my teeth, and on tests and supplements, and I’m tired of having to spend so much energy and time going to doctors and researching potential diseases and treatments, without success.

            My nutritionist mentioned that someone she knows, with similar autoimmune issues to mine, had some success with Low Dose Naltrexone (the regular dose, which is prescribed to interrupt opioid addiction, is covered by insurance, but the low dose is an off label use and therefore only available at a compounding pharmacy, and therefore not covered), so now I’m doing research online and asking my various doctors what they know about that. But I’m worried that either the doctors won’t prescribe it, or that they will and then I’ll spend more money and time on yet another possible solution and get no improvement.

And in the meantime, my micro-part-time job is getting harder to manage, and when, on top of that, an emergency comes up: like the smell of gas in the building (leading nine members of the fire department to stomp into my apartment, silencing even Cricket, and then they turned off the gas for the whole building, for two weeks, while they checked the connections in every apartment), or the toilet leaking into the apartment below us (leading to a new wax ring and therefore a new toilet and new tiling because our toilet had been set in place with concrete, for some reason), the resulting invasion of workmen makes life even harder.

“Oy.”

            But, Mom has been doing better, and has had a string of good luck with new doctors who seem to know what they’re doing and care what she has to say. And the dogs both passed their yearly checkups with flying colors, and Ellie survived yet another dental cleaning and now has fresh clean breath, and I still love my work, and have tons of good things to watch on TV, and good books to read, and good food to eat…

            And I feel like I should be celebrating all of this good fortune, but I don’t have the energy. So I keep trying new probiotics, in case the gut microbiome is the source of all disease (as Facebook keeps telling me), and I keep trying new breathing exercises and yoga poses and guided meditations, in case a calm mind really is a healthy mind (again, Facebook), and I hug the puppies, and I take my naps, and I read my mysteries. Because what else can I do?

“Bark. At everyone.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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