I recently found a YouTube channel called Piece of Hebrew and I’m a little bit addicted. I’ve been making YouTube lists for everything lately, for videos about Jewish history and Israel for the teenagers at my synagogue, for guided meditation and exercise videos for me, for Hebrew language shows of all kinds for me (and for any of my students who eventually want to improve their Hebrew). And each time I find one good thing, I find ten more that are sort of on topic, or not really, like videos to add background to my Jews around the World curriculum (there were a ton of virtual tours during Covid), and videos to help people plan trips to Israel (I found a really good Israeli tour guide whose videos are helpful and entertaining), and, of course, as soon as we watch a new show in my online Hebrew class I have to go to YouTube to see if I can find more episodes (there’s a great series about Israeli chefs in cities around the world and a bunch of the episodes are on YouTube, with Hebrew subtitles).
“We’re never going outside again.”
So, somewhere in there I found the Piece of Hebrew videos, hosted by an Israeli Hebrew teacher named Doron, where he talks about Israeli musicians and TV shows and movies, all in Intermediate level Hebrew with English subtitles. And then I watched some episodes that included Elsa, his live in girlfriend who made Aliyah to Israel four years ago from France and became fluent in Hebrew, and then I found out that she has her own YouTube channel called Piece of French, which is in intermediate and advanced French and all about her life in Israel, and in France, and on vacation, and with her family.
So now I have five or six pages of links to videos, all of which I want to watch right now. Part of the fun is getting to know the two of them and their dog, Bilhah, and how they met, and how and why they started their channels, and then what their lives are like in Israel on a daily basis: with videos on gardening and shopping and camping and whining about random things, all in French or Hebrew, with English subtitles.
“Does Bilhah bark in Modern or Biblical Hebrew?”
My current online Hebrew teacher was even mentioned in one of Doron’s videos, listing his five favorite Israeli female singers, which probably encouraged me to watch more videos early on, now that I think about it.
Of course, now I feel like I’m way too far behind in my French, much farther behind than I thought I was, and I worry that I’m not far enough ahead in Hebrew either, and I should be watching these videos for hours every day to improve. And I’m already overwhelmed with my actual work, and trying to figure out how to get everything done between naps, which is probably why I got so deep into the YouTube videos in the first place, because I could watch them on my phone, lying down.
“We love nap time.”
It’s so nice that the world has adapted to my chronic exhaustion by providing so much passive entertainment, but I wish I could be well enough to actually go to France and Israel (and Italy and Spain and Japan…) and see everything firsthand. Especially the food. I’d really, really like to taste all of the food for myself.
“Me too!”
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?
For my birthday this year, my mom offered to figure out how to add streaming to our regular TV, so that we could finally get Netflix and find out what everyone’s been talking about. Up to now we’ve only been able to watch streaming channels (like Hoopla and Kanopy, which we get free from our library) on our computers or phones, so it didn’t seem worth the extra expense to pay for Netflix. But Mom was determined to try, and she ordered a Roku device, and spent two very frustrating days setting it up (I would have given up in two seconds) until it was all connected and working. Then my brother got me a few streaming channels for my birthday, so now we have Netflix and Britbox and Roku’s free movies on top of the two streaming services from our library. And then there are the channels I’m supposed to be able to move over from cable into streaming, so that the shows will be available whenever I want instead of just when they are scheduled, but I’m not sure my brain has the bandwidth to figure out how to make that happen, and I’m already overwhelmed with so many options I can barely see straight.
“We’re exhausted too.”
It took us forever to look into a device to add streaming to our TV, mostly because I was sure it would be expensive, and require a smart TV, and add ten times more stress to my life; just like I waited forever to switch from my flip phone to a smart phone, because I was overwhelmed with all of the new skills I’d have to learn, and all of the decisions I’d have to make. But my smart phone has turned into a wonderful companion, and I think the Roku will probably be the same, eventually.
My first priority when the Roku was connected, and Netflix was added, was to start watching Shtissel – an Israeli TV show about an ultra-orthodox family in Jerusalem. I’d seen two episodes a few years ago, on YouTube, with only Hebrew subtitles, so now I could watch the whole series, with English subtitles to fill in the gaps where my Hebrew and Yiddish skills failed me. But as soon as I went looking for Shtissel, I found a ton of shows people have been recommending for years, and I had to fill up my watchlist before I could focus on watching any actual shows.
Then I went through Britbox and ended up putting most of those shows on my watchlist too – because I’m a sucker for a British mystery, but also because even on the large screen I can barely read the show descriptions, so I added a lot of shows without really knowing what they’d be about, just assuming it’s a British mystery, so it has to be good. We’ll see how that goes.
“You can never assume!”
Of course, now I’m eyeing those channels I don’t have yet (apple+, Prime Video, Hulu, etc.) because I keep seeing ads for shows I can’t access, and it is insanely frustrating, and then I get overwhelmed with all of the options, and wish I could go back to only having two hundred or so channels to choose from.
“Is there a squirrel channel?”
But I am, gradually, getting used to all of this. I’ve even learned how to juggle the three TV remotes we need now, one for cable, one for Roku, and one to switch back and forth from Roku to cable.
My mom, who got all of this set up, says she is flummoxed by the three remotes, and all of the options, and leaves it to me to make the decisions about what to watch and when. She tells me that the Roku was a present for me, not for her, so she will happily watch whatever I choose. But I know that, eventually, she will find a streaming channel devoted entirely to quilting or photography, and I will be unable to convince her to hand back the remote controls, so I am doing my best to get on board and watch all of the shows I like now, before it’s too late.
“Don’t let her do it! She already sews too much!”
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?
The word Chanukah means dedication, and refers to the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem, in the 2nd century BCE, after it had been won back from the Seleucid Greeks. So, to get my synagogue school students into the spirit of the holiday, we created a Human Chanukiah (complete with dance moves to represent each candle being lit), and I asked each of them what they wanted to dedicate themselves to this year, for Chanukah, or, given the time of year, for the New Year. And for the most part, they wanted to dedicate themselves to fun things: like sports, and candy, and getting more presents, and playing with their friends. Not one of them said they wanted to dedicate themselves to getting good grades, or doing their homework, or eating healthier food; they just wanted to live in the moment and live well, on their own terms.
“Sounds good to me.”
I keep forgetting how much wisdom the kids have to share with us. As a teacher, I keep judging myself by my success at getting them to focus on Hebrew and prayers, and being good and generous and charitable, but that’s not what they want most for themselves. Just because their parents want them to do well in school, and be good at sports, and end up in successful careers that earn them enough money to send their own kids to synagogue school, that doesn’t mean that that’s what motivates the kids to get up each morning. And I think the most important thing I can do for them is to focus on what they really want and who they really are, so they know that they matter to the people around them. Because if, someday, they feel motivated to work hard and be kind and accomplish great things for society, it needs to come from their own values and feelings and beliefs, and not just from the hope of pleasing other people. When things get hard, which they always do, the thing that will keep them going in the midst of all of that work is the ability to find joy and meaning in who they actually are, and the light they have inside of them.
Miss Ellie, full of light
I struggle with this all the time, because I keep getting confused about whose goals I should be working towards, mine, or the people who are judging my accomplishments or lack thereof. And I thought about this a lot this past week when I heard that Stephen “Twitch” Boss, a dancer and judge from So You Think You Can Dance and DJ on The Ellen Show, had killed himself, at age forty, leaving behind a wife and three children. I don’t know why he did it. There seems to have been a suicide note mentioning past challenges, but I don’t know if that made things clear to his family and close friends or if it was too vague even for them to understand. So, of course, I’ve been trying to process the loss in my own way.
I felt a lot of different things at the news: disbelief, of course, because he was such a passionate, charming, talented, and seemingly happy person; grief, because even though I never met him, his dancing and his humor and his kindness and his patience with other people all made him seem like someone I’d want to know; anger, at him, for choosing to go and not to continue to share his love and talent and light with us; sadness, at how much pain he must have been in to see suicide as the only answer, and to so completely prevent anyone from stopping him once he’d decided to die; and anger again, that he had a gun, because guns are the most efficient way to kill yourself, and maybe if he’d used another method he could have been reached in time to receive the life-saving help he didn’t know how to ask for; and then I felt fear, that if he could be overcome by his darkest emotions, despite all of his talent and love and resources and friends, what’s going to save me if I fall into the deep dark again? And then I felt survivor’s guilt, for being so lucky as to have found the right kind of support, and medication, and therapy, to not be in the place he was in.
I’ve been comforted by how many people loved him, and cared about him, and were deeply impacted by his death. Grief is easier to bear when it’s shared, and when the value of the lost one is so completely acknowledged and understood.
And I’ve also seen a lot of posts and videos on social media professing knowledge about why he killed himself, looking for clues and conspiracies or people to blame. It’s his wife’s fault, or Ellen DeGeneres’ fault, or he was in a financial hole because someone cheated him, or he didn’t kill himself, he was murdered. And I understand the impulse, the need, to make sense of a loss that is so hard to accept. I want something to grab hold of too. I want an explanation. Most of all I want it to not have happened. Even if he never danced again or never showed himself in the public eye, it would be better to be able to think of him as alive, and living the life he wanted for himself.
But I’ve also been watching his old dance routines on YouTube, and I can’t help wishing that he could have been given more opportunities to share his gifts, more time on stage and screen, more time with great choreographers. His dancing reminded me of Gene Kelly, with the charismatic full body presence he had, and the humor and warmth and energy that filled every step, and I could picture him in those MGM musicals, dancing on the ceilings and singing in the rain, because he was the kind of leading man you could believe in, and love, and root for. And he was a dancer who could capture your heart no matter what style of dance he tried. But maybe that’s just me wishing for things for him that he didn’t want for himself.
What I want to learn from his death, and what I want to make sure my students know, is that even when you don’t achieve all of the goals you set for yourself, or the goals others set for you, you still matter and you still deserve to take up space in the world. And if you can hold onto who you really are, and the things that bring you joy, that can be what brings you back from the brink when the darkness sneaks up and tries to convince you that life isn’t worth living anymore. We all deserve joy, and love, and time to play with our friends, and all of the presents we want, even if we can’t always get those things.
After a Jewish funeral, and then yearly on the anniversary of the death, Jews light a memorial candle, a yahrzeit candle, that is meant to last twenty four hours, to mark the memory of the loved one and the light they brought to the world, and I feel like Chanukah, with its eight days of light, came at just the right time to support me through the loss of Twitch and his light; eight days of manufactured light, to fill the void left by the passing of his natural bright light. It’s a small comfort, a metaphorical comfort, but it is real.
I feel so lucky that Twitch existed and had a platform to share his light for as long as he was able. I wished for more for him, and from him, but what a gift he already was! I hope that his friends can bring light into the lives of his wife and children, and his mother and grandfather, for as long as they need it in order to get to a place where their own light can shine again, and when the memory of Twitch can bring them more light than grief.
Zichrono livracha, may his memory be a blessing.
Here are some clips to watch, if you want to share some of the light Twitch brought to the world:
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?
In this season of miracles (for Hanukah) and magic (for Christmas) I’m always inspired, and a little bit confused, about what’s possible and what’s not. I don’t think Santa is going to come down my chimney, wearing a blue suit covered in Stars of David, with a bag of presents just for me; if only because I don’t have a chimney of my own. And I don’t think my Chanukiah (a menorah with an extra candle for Chanukah) is going to stay lit for eight days; in fact, I’ve never had candles that lasted more than half an hour at a time. But there’s something in the air, and in the lights and presents and TV movies and special foods and decorations, that makes it feel like anything is possible.
“Can we plant chicken trees this year?”
I don’t really believe in magic, though I really, really, want to, but I’m intrigued by it and by all of the things we’ve called magic in the past that turned out to have understandable, if complicated, causes.
Recently, my rabbi talked about how, when the ancient Israelites first entered the Land of Canaan, the Canaanites taught them all of the latest agricultural science, including the rule that you should only make unleavened bread in the spring, so that all of the leavening (AKA fertility) could go to the land itself. As a result, we have a Jewish holiday each spring which features unleavened bread, or matzah (at some point, the holiday of unleavened bread was combined with the celebration of the Exodus from Egypt, to become the single week long holiday of Passover). Over time we gave new meaning to the ritual of eating unleavened bread in the spring, combining it with the memory of the way the Israelites had to escape from Egypt quickly and therefore had no time to let their bread rise, but the ritual is the same and its source is a belief in sympathetic magic.
“Matzah does not count as food.“
Sympathetic magic is magic that derives its power from a connection between similar objects, like a voodoo doll, with a lock of the enemy’s hair on the doll to create a link, so that whatever happens to the doll happens to the enemy. You don’t have to believe that this is magic in order to understand the metaphoric value of a ritual like this: the voodoo doll creates a catharsis, so that an individual can cause harm to a lookalike doll instead of going out and physically harming their enemy, allowing the person to work through their pain, and the fantasy of killing the other, without actually hurting someone else or putting themselves in danger. Isn’t that an incredibly powerful, and even magical, thing for a ritual to be able to do?
The Jewish ritual of Tashlich, where we throw our sins into the water (in the form of bread or birdseed) on Rosh Hashanah, has power because it offers us the chance to feel unburdened, as if we’ve really released a weight from our lives. It’s similar to the therapeutic practice of having a patient who has lost a limb use a mirror to create the illusion of two healthy limbs, so that she is then able to relax the muscles and nerve endings leading to the missing limb, creating real change in the body as the result of an illusion.
Some sympathetic magic hasn’t aged quite as well, like using herbs with yellow sap to cure jaundice, or eating walnuts to strengthen the brain (because walnuts look like miniature brains), or drinking red beet juice to benefit the blood. And yet, at the time that these cures were used they must have seemed like powerful magic, or even the science of the day.
And that makes me wonder, what if the ideas we call magical thinking are simply hypotheses we’ve come up with over time to explain phenomena we don’t yet understand? When there is proof that a hypothesis is wrong then it would be delusional to continue to hold onto that theory, like eating walnuts because they look like brains rather than because of their actual nutrients, but when there is no means to prove or disprove a hypothesis then is it really so unreasonable to hold onto these magical ideas if they offer us comfort?
Another example of sympathetic magic that resonates for me is the horcruxes from Harry Potter, where part of the person has been transferred into an object, and therefore the person can’t be killed until the object is destroyed. J.K. Rowling made this concrete in her books, to prolong the life of Voldemort and make him that much more dangerous, but don’t we often use works of art, or clothing, or photographs, to represent our connection to the person who owned them, allowing us to feel their presence even when they are gone?
Miss Butterfly
Miss Dina
There’s a reason why the Harry Potter books were so successful with adults, as well as with children: because the magical logic resonates. Magic is a powerful metaphor for the things we struggle to give full weight in our emotional lives. It is often used in fantasy stories and superhero movies to bring hard-to-explain feelings to the surface, like the Dementors in Harry Potter who represent the unbearable feelings of grief in physical form, so that they can be seen and fought off. Or like Superman’s one weakness being kryptonite, because it is the raw material of his home planet; this is powerful sympathetic magic and deep psychological truth all at once.
In Harry Potter, Voldemort’s name was replaced with he-who-must-not-be-named, because they believed that saying his name would make him appear, and we have this in Judaism too. We are never supposed to say the “true” name of God, the unpronounceable four letter name in the Torah – the Tetragrammaton – that some pronounce as Yahweh, and we are supposed to save the other names of God only for prayers and blessings, because we’re not supposed to say God’s name in vain, or for no meaningful purpose. All of this is because we recognize that words have power: to create, to shame, to guide, to honor, to express love.
There are lots of things that I don’t believe in literally that bring me comfort and allow me to keep going, even when reality is deeply disappointing, and I think that’s often the purpose of magic, and religion too. And sometimes, inexplicably, the magic works: a call comes just when you prayed for it, you wish on a star and the wish comes true, or you get a feeling about someone you love far away, and it turns out to be true. Maybe it’s a coincidence, or an educated guess based on deep knowledge of the other person, but it feels magical, as in, unexplained and powerful. And who’s to say it’s not? Especially at this time of year.
“If we put our heads together and think hard, maybe the chicken will come!”
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?
Each year, my synagogue school class has to sing two prayers at a Friday night service, one about the requirement to celebrate Shabbat (the Sabbath), and one hoping for peace (there are many, many prayers hoping for peace, even within a single service). And each year I look at those prayers again, through the eyes of my new class, or through the lens of my ever-changing experience of my own life, and I see new things. This year, after watching dozens of Christmas movies, even before Thanksgiving, I started to think about how celebrating Shabbat is like having Christmas once a week (though when I tried this idea out on my students, they rolled their eyes and said, but we don’t get presents on Shabbat!).
“Where are our presents?”
Shabbat, as the day of rest each week, is, for Jews, about taking a time out to think about how your life is going, and being with family and friends, and singing familiar songs, and eating familiar foods, often to excess, and focusing on joy and connection and comfort instead of on accomplishment and being busy. And those are the goals at the heart of most of the Christmas movies I watch too – along with all of the romance and silly subplots and misunderstandings, of course. Each movie, in the end, is about the search for a version of joy and comfort and love that fits the individual characters in that story. There’s also a lot of family drama, and rigid rules to overcome, and the race to get everything done in time, and awkward socializing, and odd food you don’t really want to eat, just like on Shabbat.
“What’s this food I don’t want to eat?”
It’s possible that I’m just seeing this comparison between Shabbat and Christmas as an excuse for the many many Christmas movies I watch each year, but I think it’s also the reason why I watch the movies in the first place: each one, or at least each of the good ones, is a chance for my soul to reset and refill with hope and wonder, so that I can get through the difficulties of the rest of my life.
When the kids learn the prayers in class they have to do a lot of talking, and writing and drawing, about what they want their own versions of Shabbat to be, and, inevitably at least one of my students tells me that she shouldn’t have to do the work because her family doesn’t celebrate Shabbat, because they don’t celebrate it in the traditional ways. And I tell the kids that, even though I don’t always celebrate Shabbat with all of the rituals, I’ve been able to take things from the tradition that work for me and add my own ideas in order to reach the goal of connection and rest. Shabbat is a weekly holiday of aspiration, as much as of ritual; it’s about finding a way to fill your soul so that you can get through the rest of the week feeling whole, instead of fragmented or out of whack. And really, anything you can do to fill your soul is like your own version of Shabbat. Maybe you meditate or do yoga, maybe you spend time with friends and reconnect with the version of yourself that you can’t be at school or work, or maybe you spend time reading, or talking to your family, or playing board games, or making art, so that you can take a deep breath and feel like yourself again before going back out into the world and doing what’s required of you. To which most of my students roll their eyes, of course.
But I really believe in the power of using Shabbat as a lesson for our lives as well as making it a special day of the week, and the dogs, as always, are great role models for this. For example, I think the dogs have their own mini-Shabbat each time they go outside (unless Kevin is outside, in which case Ellie runs back to our door to wait for us while Cricket plays out her romantic comedy). Even on a bad weather day (though not in the rain), the dogs sniff all of the messages from their friends and neighbors, and they listen to the sounds of the birds and trains and children and buses, and they run and play and scout out good places to pee, and then they go back inside rejuvenated and ready for their next nap. Although, I think Cricket and Ellie would agree with my students that all of this Shabbat stuff would be made much better with presents, preferably food-related. And I can’t disagree.
“We need presents!”
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?
What with Cricket’s thinning hair, and aging temperature-control-system, and the onset of colder weather, plus a much-needed visit to the groomer, Cricket needed something to cover her up – both for warmth and for modesty. We already had one sweater: a red and black plaid one that came as a gift from our neighbor (when she realized it was too small for her brother’s dog) and that originally went to Ellie, who doesn’t really need or want to wear a sweater. Then I went online and found a white and grey cable knit sweater, so Cricket would have something to wear when the red and black plaid started to smell.
“Harrumph.”
Strangely, Cricket actually seems to enjoy wearing her sweaters, though getting them pulled on over her head can set off her panic response (aka biting), so we have to be careful not to dilly dally when dressing her.
“Harrumpherrumph.”
But even now that Cricket really needs to wear sweaters, because you can see all of her age spots and cauliflower bumps and pink skin shivering in the cold, I still can’t really go whole hog into dressing her up, because she wouldn’t put up with it, and because my mom would roll her eyes at me, and because I can’t actually afford it. And, really, Cricket and Ellie would much prefer having any extra money spent on food and treats than on clothes.
“I really don’t like clothes, Mommy.”
The thing is, I have wanted to dress the dogs up forever, but I felt guilty about it, because Cricket was so resistant to wearing jackets and harnesses, and Ellie and Butterfly, and Dina, all looked like they were being punished when they had to wear anything at all. But recently, Cricket’s friend Kevin, the mini-Golden-Doodle, has been wearing sweaters and sweatshirts all the time, and he looks so cute and cozy and loved! For Halloween he had an adorable hoodie with a skeleton painted on the back, and I felt like such a neglectful dog mommy looking at naked Cricket in comparison.
I actually hate dressing up myself, because it makes me feel self-conscious, and all of my body shame gets triggered. Instead, I live in a uniform of sweaters and jeans and sneakers, to avoid drawing attention to my body. When I see adult women all dressed up I tend to feel intimidated, and vicariously exhausted, and triggered into body shame just by looking at them. But Cricket and Ellie look perfect to me, and they are unselfconscious about their bodies, and I keep wishing that I could dress them up and live vicariously through them, and they won’t let me.
“No clothes!”
In the midst of my longing to dress up the dogs, I noticed a series of videos showing up in my Facebook feed starring a dog named Noodles. Noodles wears the most wonderful outfits, with chunky necklaces, and colorful glasses with beaded chains, and frilly shirts, and she has so many different hairstyles, and she just makes my inner little girly-girl swoon. The videos themselves are hilarious too: all about Noodles’ imaginary officemates and office politics, or that time she got drunk for her third (aka 21st) birthday.
So I scroll through Amazon for sweaters I wish Cricket would wear: sweaters with stripes and plaids and cables and ruffles and lace insets and skirts, and then I watch Noodles giving the camera side eye in her lacy blouses and braided hair, and for a few minutes I get to feel like the little girl I could have been, and maybe still am, deep inside.
There’s a little girl at my synagogue who has her own sense of style. One day she’s dressed like a widow from the 1920’s, with black netting around a small black hat on the back of her head, another day she’s a fluffy bumble bee, another she has pink hair and wings on her back. That’s not the kind of little girl I was, obviously. I was intensely conscious of how people looked at me and judged me, and more often than not I wore hand-me-down clothes from wealthier families, so I didn’t have a choice of what to wear. But when I see this little girl at synagogue, or Noodles on Facebook, or even Kevin in his hoodies, I imagine the joy I might have felt as a little girl, if not for the abuse. And seeing Noodles in her dresses and bows lets the little girl in me play dress up vicariously. And it’s wonderful! So watch out, Cricket. You may have to deal with more clothes sometime soon.
“Protect me, Ellie.”
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?
I’ve been in the same online Hebrew program from Tel Aviv for more than a year now, but each semester feels like a new experience, with new challenges. For the first session of this semester, back in late October, our new teacher spoke quickly and mostly in Hebrew, only clarifying a few words in English here or there, and yet, I was able to follow most of it. A year ago I would have been lost and intimidated and now I’m not. I’m still not fluent, but I’m much closer.
“Mazel Tov.”
One of the obstacles to overcome each semester is the renewed feeling that I’m the worst student in the class and have the least interesting life and the least impressive resume. My teachers keep telling me that I’m underestimating my fluency, but I’m the one inside my head, grasping around in the dark even for the words I thought I knew well. I do fine with homework and conjugations and vocabulary, but making conversation is hard enough for me in English, with all of my social anxiety, it’s that much harder in Hebrew, with the words endlessly trying to escape from my brain. Generally it takes me a few weeks to remember that everyone in the class is a flawed human being, just like me. I wish I could have mastered this lesson by now, but I guess I should be grateful that it eventually kicks in at all.
I’m still not sure what my goal is in studying Hebrew. Is it about going to Israel for a visit? Or just wanting to learn about Israel in more depth? Is the next step in my journey secular or religious, an activity, or more studying? I just don’t know.
“Don’t go anywhere without me, Mommy.”
This semester we’ve started to read Facebook posts in Hebrew, and other instances of natural Hebrew existing in the wild, to build our reading comprehension, but it has the effect of making me feel like an alien and uncool, now in two different languages.
One of the new things we’re doing this semester is that instead of watching one TV show from beginning to end, we’re watching single episodes of reality shows (not like “Married at First Sight,” which we watched in a previous class and that I keep trying to wash out of my brain), getting to hear different accents and different vocabularies with each show.
The first thing we watched was an episode of a show called “Makers,” where a team of creative craftspeople made new hearing aids for a hard of hearing singer, so she wouldn’t have to deal with so much static when she put her headphones on in the studio, and then they created a smart house set up for a pair of born-deaf adult twins who needed help knowing when someone rang the doorbell or when the alarm clock went off. They put light strips in every room, even in the bathroom, and programmed the lights in different colors for each alert: like the phone, or the door, or the sirens telling them to find shelter when rockets came from Gaza. And for one of the sisters who struggled with getting up on time, they attached a light fixture to her alarm clock that gradually grew brighter the longer she ignored it, and then if she was still sleeping, a fan would go on and blow in her face to finally wake her up.
Makers
We also watched an episode of a show called “On the Napkin,” about Israeli chefs, and the episode we watched was about a Japanese cook in Israel, married to an Israeli man for forty years with three adult children, and now she’s serving homestyle Japanese dinners in their dining room/restaurant every night, sourcing tofu and mushrooms and greens from nearby farms.
But the story that really got to me was from a show called “The Recording Studio.” The episode we watched was about a twelve-year-old autistic boy who wanted to record a song for his longtime teacher’s aide. His parents came with him to the studio, but he explained everything himself, telling the host of the show that his aide was so special to him because she’d spent years teaching him how to relate to his non-autistic classmates, teaching him how to speak their language so that he could live in their world and make friends. He said that it would take a degree in psychology to learn the autistic language, so he had to be the one to learn how to understand them. During rehearsals, he not only played piano and sang, he also made sure to communicate as clearly as possible with the host and musicians about what he wanted, and confronted them when they were making assumptions about what he could and couldn’t do, or which truths he could and couldn’t handle.
When his aide finally came into the studio, he hugged her and introduced her to all of the musicians, and then he sang the song with the band, and his teacher and his parents were in tears. It was so clear that she really had set him free from a lonely place, and that she had taught him how to relate to other people and feel connected to them, while still being himself.
Sometimes, out in the real world, I feel like that autistic boy, trying to translate all of my thoughts and feelings into a language other people can understand, and wishing they could speak my language instead, whatever that is. So maybe that’s why I am so drawn to learning languages in the first place, and why I’m working so hard to learn Hebrew in classes full of other people with their own internal languages and stories to share. Hearing about the countries they live in (Israel, Holland, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Poland, America, Croatia) and the reasons why they want to learn Hebrew (planning to move to Israel, already living in Israel but wanting to speak the language, discovering a Jewish identity, trying to make peace with a Jewish childhood, wanting to talk to Israeli grandchildren, joining an Israeli dance company, or, very often, marrying an Israeli), helps me to feel hopeful that one day I will find the words to say what I mean and, in the meantime, other people will work hard to understand me, just like I work hard to understand them. And the hard work feels worth it, whether I become fluent in Hebrew or not, because the process itself is helping me create connections all over the world, and in my own brain, to help me understand myself.
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?
One of the most painful things I can hear from my students is “I’m bored.” I can work with “I don’t understand,” or “I don’t like to draw/read/write/sing/play.” But “I’m bored” feels like a condemnation of my ability to be the fun teacher.
And I hear it all the time.
“That means you’re boring.”
So, okay, that’s clearly one of my own issues. I want to be loved. I want to be the favorite. I want to be the teacher everyone thinks back on as the best, most insightful, blah blah blah. And I do need to work on that.
But there might also be something going on with the students, something I need to help them work on. Because, first of all, walking into the class and saying “I’m bored,” as if the teacher is supposed to keep you entertained from the word go, with never a blank moment, is just not possible, let alone good for you.
Some people say that kids have become more entitled, more used to having things done for them and given to them, and more used to having access to passive entertainment and whole worlds of TV and video to keep them from being bored. But I’m wondering if there’s more to it.
I wonder if, for some of the kids, “I’m bored” means, I really need to be distracted from the low grade depression and anxiety that I live with on a daily basis, because I don’t see it letting up anytime soon. Or, I need you to keep me entertained because I feel under-loved and I equate your constant attention and energy with love. Or, what I really am is tired, overwhelmed, hungry, sad, or lonely – but no one responds when I say those things.
I remember being bored as a kid. I remember sitting in my bedroom on the weekends and not knowing how to fill my time when I didn’t have homework or a play date or something to read or something to watch on TV. We didn’t have smartphones and 24 hour TV and internet back then, so I really was left to my own devices if Mom was busy (and she was always busy keeping those plates spinning).
“Is plate spinning fun?
But looking back, I was a kid with a lot of internal resources and interests, so it’s unlikely that I was legitimately bored. I was much more likely to be depressed, lonely, sad, angry, frightened, hurt, etc. I just assumed that the name for my problem was boredom. I would gladly do math homework or read social studies or do chores around the house, just to avoid having to sit with my own feelings for long enough to feel bad.
And then, when I first started going to a commuter school for college, my classes were all packed into two days a week, because I couldn’t drive so I had to be dropped off in the morning and picked up at night, and I had classes starting at nine in the morning and ending at five or six at night, except, there was an hour and a half break in the afternoon with nothing to do and nowhere to go. If I’d been at home during that hour and a half it would have been fine; I could read, or exercise, or watch TV, or do my homework, or go for a walk, or whatever. But trapped on campus, in full view of other people, I could barely concentrate and I felt like there was a video camera on me at all times, judging my use of time, my personality, my outfit, my food intake, and on and on and on. That’s what I think of when I think of boredom: that overwhelmed state where I think I need to be accomplishing everything at once, and yet I can’t concentrate for five seconds at a time. But I don’t know if that’s what the kids are feeling.
Sometimes when my students say they’re bored, I think what they mean is that they resent having to be at synagogue school, and I know this because when I ask what they’d rather be doing they say, sitting in front of the TV at home, with the dog, eating pizza. And I wonder if what they’re actually saying is that they feel overstimulated and need a break from being productive and social. School, by its very nature, requires them to be both.
Or maybe some of my students are bored because they really do need more of a challenge, or because they need activities that are better tailored to their specific abilities and interests, or because they need more structure and guidance from me. I don’t want to assume that I’m not at fault. But sometimes I have to accept that the task we are working on in class may be less exciting than they want it to be, but is still necessary. There are certain prayers they need to learn, and lessons from the Hebrew Bible, and that just may not be something they value at this point in their lives.
“I’m shocked.”
I keep reminding myself that just because boredom was a sign of toxic things in my own childhood, that’s not necessarily true for my students. A little bit of boredom can be a spur to creativity, or at the very least be a manageable annoyance. But I feel bad when they seem bored, or distracted, or annoyed by what we’re doing in class, and it doesn’t feel safe to just let it go and assume it’s healthy or manageable boredom when it could be a sign that they are in pain or that I am failing them as a teacher.
I remember, years ago, when my cousin’s son came to visit from France with his grandmother. He was five years old and learning English but still very French. We were sitting at a table full of adults and even though there was another child there, he was barely two years old and sitting at the other end of the table. And then there was me. I was twenty-three years old and not sure where I fit in. The five year old was sitting next to me and at one point he mumbled something under his breath in French that I couldn’t quite hear and I asked him to repeat it, because I was curious, and because I wanted to see if I could understand his French, but then he told me, louder, and in English, that he was bored. Immediately, his grandmother, sitting across form us, corrected him, saying that in French the term is reflexive, which is more correct, because youmake yourself bored. And I got really annoyed and said, no, he’s bored because he’s five years old and sitting at a table full of adults speaking in a foreign language, talking about things he doesn’t understand or care about, and he needs something age-appropriate to do so he can feel engaged. I hope I said it a little less aggressively than that, but I was remembering so many times when my needs had been ignored, and it just pressed my buttons. And then, of course, I was volunteered to take him, and the toddler, into the living room to find toys to play with. The five year old, of course, complained that what he really wanted was to watch TV, and not to play with some baby, but at least he was smiling when he said it, and he wasn’t complaining about being bored anymore.
That experience taught me that sometimes boredom is about not feeling heard, and not feeling like you are being taken into account, and I try to keep that in mind with my students. But it’s hard to balance everyone’s feelings at once, especially when most of them start out angry that they have to be at synagogue school in the first place, and nothing I say can convince them that learning Hebrew is more fun than watching TV and playing with their dog while eating pizza. Weird.
“We want pizza too.”
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?
This past summer was very difficult, with Mom’s two surgeries and one of my own, and it became clear to me that my reluctance to ask for help when I needed it – or even to accept it when it was offered – made things much harder than they had to be. I know that there are people in my life who would be happy to help me, and who have offered to help many times, but I always say something like, no, I’m fine, thanks anyway.
“Sure you are.”
I knew some of the reasons why it was hard for me to ask for help: it’s embarrassing to try to explain what I need versus what other people expect me to need; I’m afraid of being judged for the things I can’t do; I don’t believe I deserve help; I’m afraid of what I will owe in return; I often have no idea of what kind of help would help me; and, often, what I really need is so much bigger than what people can give me: I want to feel safe and loved; I want to pay off all of my debts; I want to be healthy and have the energy to go to work more often; I want to be published by a major publisher; I want a house with a yard, and ten dogs, and a horse; I want children. And if I can’t have what I really want, whatever I get instead ends up feeling disappointing, no matter how kindly and generously it is given.
So, I said no to the offers of help this summer, whether they were offers to make meals, or give rides, or just be a supportive listener; even though I was terrified while Mom was in the hospital, and for the first few weeks after she came home. I worried that she would die, and then I worried that something would go wrong and I wouldn’t know how to help her, and then I worried that something would break in the apartment and I wouldn’t know how to fix it. Through all of it, I just kept saying, No, I’m fine, thanks anyway.
I’ve been practicing my asking-for-help skills with Mom for years, because she always wants to help me and never judges me for being needy. And I’ve learned that when what I ask for is impossible (aka, take out your magic wand and fix everything, Mommy), she will search for ways that she can help that I couldn’t have thought of myself. And more often than not, that help is what gets me to the solid ground I need in order to take the next small step by myself. But that practice hasn’t translated very well into asking for help from other people, maybe because I don’t trust them to help without judging me.
“I will always judge you.”
When I told my therapist about this essay, she told me that I was conflating two kinds of help: practical help and emotional support. But for me, those two things have to come together or else neither one really works. Emotional support feels empty without some kind of practical help that gets me over the void in my own abilities, and practical help feels unsafe and alienating if it’s not accompanied by emotional understanding and sympathy for why I need help in the first place.
To be fair, to me, I’ve gotten better at asking for help than I used to be, and to be fair to other people, there have been plenty of times when I have received meaningful help, without being talked down to or treated like a lesser being. But I never expect it to go that way.
I was reading a scene in a Rhys Bowen novel recently, where the protagonist had injured her collarbone and needed help carrying her bag up the stairs (needless to say, this was not the dramatic peak of the novel), and she wasn’t embarrassed, or feeling guilty, or trying to muscle through it. She just asked for the help she knew she needed and moved on. And I was gobsmacked! This otherwise unimportant scene stayed with me, because I kept asking myself how it was possible that she didn’t feel embarrassed, and didn’t imagine that she was exaggerating her injury, and didn’t see herself as a failure for needing support. I take all of those feelings for granted, as the cost of living, but wouldn’t it be amazing not to feel that way?
“I always trust you to help me, Mommy.”
I was almost done with this essay, I thought, when another facet of this fear of asking for help came up; one that I hadn’t recognized before: I had to reach out to my dentist, between appointments, because one of my bottom teeth was loose and causing a lot of pain. I’d been putting off calling her, telling myself that I’d just seen her recently, and she knew my situation, and there was no point in being dramatic about it, and the pain wasn’t so bad. But Mom, who knew how hard I’d been working on this essay, told me that I needed to ask for help, and I felt sufficiently scolded to push myself to reach out to the dentist. The dentist called me right back and said she wanted to fit me in for an appointment as soon as possible, because she’d been worried about that tooth since my last visit, and she already had a plan for removing and replacing it. I made the appointment and then grumbled to myself about the unfairness of life, and how annoying it was that she’d called back so quickly and already had a plan in mind. And I realized, that’s why I didn’t want to reach out to her in the first place: I didn’t want to know that my lower teeth were in such bad shape, so soon after the trauma of replacing the upper teeth.
I keep wanting to believe that asking for and receiving help will be some kind of magical elixir, where the pain disappears and life feels easy; that is often the kind of help I’m craving. But if getting help actually means having to face the harsh realities of life, the ones that I can’t handle on my own, then no wonder I’m reluctant to ask for help. Maybe putting off asking for the help I know I need allows me stay in La La land for a little while longer.
“I like La La Land!”
I have no idea how to overcome this desire to stay in La La land. Intellectually, I know that I have to, but I also know, deep in my body, that I’m not ready. I think part of my belief that I can’t get the kind of help I want from other people comes from knowing how hard it has been to give myself the compassion and support I need when I’m struggling. I figure, if I can’t give that to help myself, why should I believe that anyone else would be willing or able to give it to me?
“Oy.”
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?
I’m trying to get back to exercising, in small bites. For months, each time I tried to get back on track after a particularly bad flare, I would return to my previous exercise routine: forty-five minutes on the recumbent bike, twenty minutes of physical therapy exercises for my neck and upper back, and ten minutes of yoga stretches. And then I’d be exhausted and wouldn’t even think of trying again for another week. And then, when I was recovering from oral surgery, and I knew I didn’t have the energy for any of those things, let alone all of them, I just stopped trying to exercise altogether. But that didn’t work for me either. I started to feel stiffness and pain returning to my neck and upper back in ways I’d thought I was done with, and, even more worrisome, I was often out of breath just from walking the dogs. It became especially obvious when I had to sing for hours at a time with the choir, during the High Holiday services at my synagogue, and I’d have to skip notes here and there just to breathe. I’d noticed the breathlessness months before, too, when I was still able to do my regular exercise routine three days a week, but at least back then I could tell myself that I was doing something to fix it.
“Breathe like me, Mommy!”
So, I started with breathing exercises, two minutes a day, to gradually build back my breath capacity for singing. And then I went looking for some short exercise videos on YouTube, and I found a bunch of five and ten minute Yoga videos and re-found a five minute Tai Chi series I’d done a few years ago, and started with those.
The problem is, I get obsessive. I ended up spending hours searching for more videos, and thinking I should try all of them, instead of just sticking with one or two. And then I got overwhelmed by all of the videos that came up on YouTube, promising weight loss/tightened facial muscles/removal of all anxiety/release of all trauma, in minutes. I’m so vulnerable to those promises, because I hate how long it takes to make progress, and I hate how circuitous the route to healing has to be, and I hate how confused I get, and I hate how easily I can get off track until I can’t even remember which track I was on or why. But after watching a bunch of those videos I felt even worse about myself, because they were telling me that the effort I’ve put into healing has been wasted, and I could have done it all in a matter of weeks if I’d just bought into this or that program from the beginning.
“Oh please.”
And then I was watching an hour-long Yoga video and berating myself for not even trying to do all of the exercises and the noise in my head became extreme, and mean, and persistent, and exhausting.
And the reality is, I can’t do all of those things. And there is no magic cure for trauma or chronic illness. But I can do five minutes of Tai Chi, or five minutes of standing Yoga, and two minutes of breathing exercises, or even four. And I’m doing those things. And if I keep it up, I will be able to do a little bit more and a little bit more. And that is always how it has worked for me, and I know that, even if I hate it. So it’s back to small bites, for me, and one step at a time.
Harrumph.
“We like BIG bites!“
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?
rachelmankowitz 