rachelmankowitz

            Now that I have my official Singing Straw (The brand I found is actually called Sound Straw), I have to search for opportunities to use it each day, either doing specific straw phonation exercises or randomly singing a song through the straw. The idea behind it is either to build vocal strength or improve voice placement, or both, so the fact that I can feel the break between my chest voice and head voice gradually smoothing out suggests it’s accomplishing something. I’m also doing lip trills and humming and adding some Zinga Zinga Zah exercises for good measure. I’m still not sure if I’m doing all the right things, but I do know that I’m making progress, in my breathing and range and clarity, so something’s working.

After doing ten or fifteen minutes of vocal exercises, I try to sing along with seven or eight songs from my YouTube list (current favorites: The Story and The Joke by Brandi Carlile, Someone You Loved by Lewis Capaldi, Sweet Creature by Harry Styles, When I Fall in Love by Nat King Cole, Lose You To Love Me by Selena Gomez, and Piece by Piece and Mine by Kelly Clarkson), and that’s helping me build a sense of which songs fit my voice best and which ones are a little too challenging (or say things I don’t want to hear myself sing). The side effect of listening to all of these songs is that it’s re-activating my desire to write songs myself, but I still feel too intimidated by all of the music theory I don’t understand and I don’t have a piano or a keyboard anymore, so I’ve been a little lost. Along the way, though, I  had an idea for an elective to do with my students, where we would write new lyrics to existing songs (AKA macaroni songs), based on Jewish holidays or Jewish values I want them to focus on, and I realized that what I really wanted was to write macaroni songs for myself, to help me get song structure into my head. We did writing exercises like that back in graduate school sometimes, where the teacher would give us a model sentence from a famous writer and we had to copy the structure of it in our own words. It was a good way to stretch our minds in new directions, or at least to learn how to use a semi-colon, even though sometimes it felt like we were being told to copy and paste someone else’s superior style onto our own.  

            I learned the term “Macaroni song” from my rabbi years ago when we were reading the Psalms in Bible Study and he told us that a lot of the psalms were meant to be sung, and some of the psalms even listed the instruments that would be played or the popular melodies the psalms would be sung to. There was something very comforting about imagining my ancestors standing in the courtyard of the Temple in Jerusalem singing prayers to the equivalent of the latest Taylor Swift song.

Macaroni songs are ubiquitous in the Jewish world. I remember writing them for color war in high school, and the cantor at my synagogue writes a bunch every year for the Purim spiel, and there are a ton of Jewish acapella groups that put out songs for Chanukah and Passover where they tell the story of the Maccabees or the Exodous to the tune of a song from Hamilton or Star Wars or Uptown Funk. This year, almost every synagogue did a version of K-Pop Demon Hunters for their Purim spiel, re-naming the show K-Pop Haman Hunters, and you can even find pictures of Angela Buchdahl, the Korean American senior rabbi at Central Synagogue in NYC, dressed up for the occasion, living out all of her identities at once.

I’m not up to singing “Golden” (the big hit from K-Pop Demon Hunters) yet, if I ever will be (it’s really, really high), and I still haven’t written my first macaroni song, but I feel like I’m going in the right direction, singing through good days and bad days, discovering the sounds that speak to me, and even forgetting, sometimes, to keep my voice down.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my 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?         

            Recently, I’ve been seeing ads for the Michael Jackson movie everywhere and it’s making me angry. I’d noticed his songs making their way back into public spaces over the past few years, but this is another level of normalization. I don’t know if, as a society, we’ve decided that it doesn’t matter if he was a pedophile or not, or if we’ve decided that we don’t believe the victims who came forward, or if we specifically can’t tolerate knowing that boys are just as vulnerable as girls when there’s a predator around. The only argument I’ve heard, over and over again, is that the gifts of this or that famous man or woman are worth more to society than the lives they ruined. We do this a lot, this convenient forgetting. We go through a huge reckoning – after the Holocaust, the civil rights movement, MeToo – and then we get tired of having to be so aware all the time and our hard-won wisdom disappears. The problem is that, for the victims of the abuse, there is no forgetting. And there’s just so much abuse victims can do to heal without the support of society at large, by, at the very least, not celebrating, or electing, known abusers.

I hear too many people espousing therapy as THE answer – meaning, it’s your job, as the victim, to heal yourself; no one else needs to be involved or feel responsible or be inconvenienced by what happened to you. The mental health industry has contributed to this magical thinking even further by espousing short-term manualized therapies: 16 weeks to recover from childhood abuse, six weeks to fix your OCD symptoms, 4 weeks to overcome your addiction to heroin. Done. We even make jokes about people who remain in psychotherapy, or worse, psychoanalysis, for years, as if we believe that still being in therapy after a few years means you are a lost cause or just wasting time. I can promise you that I have worked very hard in therapy, for thirty years or so, and could spend the rest of my life working hard in therapy without fully healing. That’s just how it is. The damage human beings can do to other human beings is deep and lasting and people don’t just “get over it” through willpower or positive thinking or trauma-informed Yoga (sorry Bessel Van Der Kolk). Add to that how hard the work actually is, and how much it can cost, and how difficult it can be to find a good therapist in the first place, and how much shame can be thrown at survivors by the people around them for daring to keep “harping on the past.”

            As a society, we don’t have the patience to tolerate lifelong recovery, and yet we are unwilling to recognize the role those unresolved traumas have on our society on a daily basis. We even have a tendency to excuse abusers because they were abused as children, even though most abuse victims would never hurt anyone the way they’ve been hurt, on pain of death. The mantra “Hurt people hurt people” is incomplete and therefore wildly misleading, and yet I’ve heard it parroted by psychologists and social workers and doctors and activists, because people like pithy statements that can fit on a sign. Being hurt as a child is, yes, a necessary precursor to becoming abusive as an adult (and no, I don’t believe that some people are born evil despite having had a perfect childhood), but childhood abuse isn’t enough to create an abuser. More often than not, abuse survivors continue to suffer the effects of the abuse for the rest of their lives, refusing to take it out on anyone else around them, believing they deserve to suffer in silence, and society judges them for their failure to thrive.

            In the age of social media, we have become, if possible, even more simplistic in our thinking. We want to believe that Superman is good and Lex Luthor is bad and that’s the whole story, because we don’t want to be bothered with parsing each personality trait and recognize that sometimes the bad guy wins us over by being charming and convincing, and sometimes the good guy gets ignored because he’s boring, or gets some things wrong. We crave certainty. I think this is how we ended up with Donald Trump. When a politician is uncertain or willing to question their own assumptions, we tend to dismiss them in favor of someone who thinks they know everything. No questions. No doubts. We, as a society, are acting like trauma survivors who want to forget the past because it was too painful, but the cost of forgetting is that the abuser continues to create chaos. It’s a culture-wide dissociative disorder that we can’t seem to recognize, let alone heal. But that leaves the actual victims of the abuse to try to heal while their abusers are actively being brought back into the fold. Woody Allen’s daughter had to change her name in order to get some peace, Michael Jackson’s victims have been forgotten again, and even Jeffrey Epstein’s victims have had to fight to be heard over all of the noise about his crimes, as if what was done to them isn’t at the heart of the story.

            When it comes to cases like Michael Jackson or Woody Allen or Donald Trump, we have the chance, as a society, to send a message to every victim that we will support and protect them, and that what happened to them could not have happened in the light of day. But when we elect and laud serial abusers and pedophiles and rapists, we are telling their victims, and everyone else, that no one gives a shit about their pain and they are out there on their own.

             My latest YouTube deep dive led me into the history of One Direction, the boy band from the UK that took over the world for a while in the 2010’s. I wasn’t paying attention to any of the craziness at the time, not even when Liam Payne died from a fall from a hotel balcony at age 31, overloaded with cocaine, alcohol and antidepressants. I remember hearing about his death in passing, but I didn’t really know who he was or who else was in the band and I just accepted the story that this was inevitable and unpreventable. So, during my deep dive, I was surprised to find out that Liam, in particular, had been really open about how and why he was struggling in the aftermath of his years in the group, and yet no one seemed to know how to help. He spoke eloquently, years before his death, about how he thought young people in the entertainment industry needed to be taken better care of, both protected from predators and offered psychological and emotional supports to help them navigate the bizarre world they’re in. We’ve actually seen a number of documentaries over the past few years about the damage done to young stars, kids who ended up relying on drugs and alcohol to get though their days while adults made millions of dollars off of them. What I haven’t heard, though, is any resulting plan to reckon with these situations and make sure they don’t happen again. No, instead we hear about cases like Liam Payne’s, of young people who had it all and then crashed and burned, as if no one was responsible for the damage except for him. If this is happening to famous kids, right in front of our eyes, just imagine what’s going on in the lives of children who are not famous and don’t have the media following their every move. Why is this okay with us? Why are we still unwilling to know what we know and make societal change to protect children and young adults from the predators around them?

            I haven’t seen the Michael Jackson movie, or the Broadway show that’s been in the works for a while now, but I’m sure they both dwell heavily on the abuse he suffered as a child and refuse to hold him responsible for the abuse he perpetrated as an adult. This is how the cycle of abuse gets perpetuated: first we don’t protect the child, then, because we feel guilty for what we didn’t do back then, we allow the abuse to be re-enacted on the next generation, and fail to protect the child victims once again.

            Why can’t we do better than this?

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my 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?

            There are so many books on my bedside table waiting to be read, and notebooks filled with half-finished stories, and a pile of descriptions of classes I might want to take, and random pieces of ripped out notebook paper everywhere. I feel like I’m swimming in unfinished thoughts. My year of rejections has also continued unabated, even though I was sure this was the novel that would break through. And my health is still what it is, despite all of the doctor visits and medication trials and weight loss. I keep thinking that if I could just have a time out, I’d be able to catch up with my to-do list, but when I do have time, I spend most of it playing games on my phone or watching YouTube videos, because I can’t concentrate on anything more complicated than that.

            This school year has been especially hard, because no matter what I try, I am no match for my current group of students. We get our lessons done, but it feels like I’m doing battle with an army of court jesters each time, and I need days to recover before I can think straight, let alone focus on my to-do list. I’ve been questioning everything about teaching this year, questioning whether I have any talent for it, or if I can learn the skills I’d need to learn to get better, or if I even want to bother anymore. I feel like I’m hitting a wall, but I don’t know if I should push through it in the hopes that a breakthrough is coming, or if I should try to pivot to something else. And if so, what?

            Either way, I need to be able to write more each day, because there are so many projects screaming for my attention, and collecting rejection letters is too overwhelming without an ongoing writing project to give me hope. The problem is that I struggle with the transition from teaching to writing, and from one writing project to another, both because I don’t feel confident that I’m doing anything right and because I keep placing the voice of authority outside of myself, but not consistently in the same place. From the outside, it may seem obvious what I should do and who I should be, but from the inside I feel like a blur, like I can’t get a grip on who I am, what I’m good at, what I need to do, or what I want to do. There are moments, very short ones, when I feel like I’m on the right track, but then I’m off spinning in another direction and feeling lost again.

I remember learning about Beginner’s Mind from Natalie Goldberg’s Zen-influenced books on writing, where she emphasized approaching each new experience with a lack of preconceptions, and I loved that idea because it made my self-doubt seem more like a value instead of flaw, as if I was choosing to approach the world with humility, even though it really wasn’t a choice. I wake up most days feeling like I’m starting from scratch, having to re-learn all of the lessons and make all of the choices all over again, as if yesterday never happened. And it’s exhausting.

I wish I could figure out how to cultivate something more like Expert’s Mind, or even Advanced Beginner’s Mind, and wake up each morning with a sense of confidence that I know what I’m doing, but I’m not there yet. To be fair, there are a couple of games on my phone that I’m getting pretty good at. So, there’s that.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my 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?