For a long time now, I’ve attended most of the Friday night services at my synagogue online. At least last year I had to go in person once a month to teach, but our program changed and I no longer teach on Friday nights, so even those services have been lost. Part of the change is physical: I’m just so tired by the end of the day, and at the beginning, and in the middle. One small trip to the grocery store wipes me out so much that I need a three-hour nap just to recover. After that, I can’t even fathom taking a shower and getting dressed to go to synagogue, not even when one of my former students is marking their b’nei mitzvah, despite the promise I made to myself that I would go to every Friday night service for every student who’d ever been in my class.
I’ve always been tired, and I’ve always been in pain, but still, something has shifted.
Maybe it happened when our senior rabbi cut down to a quarter time, and started to show signs of age, so that even when he’s there and vibrant and funny and inspiring, there’s still this underlying sense of doom and grief, as if a clock is ticking in the background.
Maybe it happened when I started taking weight loss medication, and something in the mechanism that cuts my appetite also cut into my ability to enjoy the rest of my life.
Maybe all of the antisemitism that’s been unleashed since October 7th has finally pulled me under, because it doesn’t feel temporary anymore. After the ceasefire, it doesn’t feel like something with a cause and effect anymore. It feels endemic.
Maybe it’s all of the rejection, after sending my writing out for so many years, with no idea why I’m not what anyone’s looking for.
I still had some sense of energy last spring – I can vaguely remember what it felt like – when I started to plan the Israel trip, and started researching agents for the new book. I even felt hopeful, and brave, and willing to push through the hard tasks and difficult feelings to get to the good stuff on the other side.
My hope is that the current malaise is a side effect of my travel anxiety, and once I get to Israel and the anxiety can disperse, I’ll find the rest of my feelings, and I will feel brave again. But I miss the feeling of hope that pushed me to start going to Friday night services in person way back when, and to make the effort to talk to new people and to sing and to speak up. I miss the feeling that I was building up to something, creating something that would continue to grow and bring me joy and comfort.
Maybe I just need to recommit to the practice of going to services on Friday nights, forcing myself out of the house no matter how tired I am, the way I used to do before zoom services were a thing. I don’t know. Maybe spending a shabbat in Israel will wake something up in me that has been on pause for a while, and I’ll be ready to make more of an effort once I get back home. That would be something to look forward to.
(I’ll be away from the blog for the next couple of weeks, but hopefully I will have a lot to share when I return. Fingers crossed!)
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?
rachelmankowitz 