Tag Archives: God

God as a Metaphor

Posted on February 15, 2025 by rachelmankowitz

            A few years ago, Rabbi Toba Spitzer came out with a book called God is Here: Reimagining the Divine, which delves into the metaphors we use to help us discover God. I haven’t finished reading the book, so don’t tell me how it ends, but what has stood out for me so far is how we rely on metaphor to give us a sense of who, what, and how God might be, just like we use metaphors to help us understand emotions and ideas that we can’t describe in any other way. These metaphors are often treated as literal descriptions by many religious people, as if we are watching a play about the world and God is playing all of the roles. And, to be honest, I don’t believe I can know God with any certainty, or that God is literally an anthropomorphic being. But there are metaphors for God that reach me on a deep level, and that seem to help me tap into the “God energy” within myself and/or in the world around me.

            The Toba Spitzer book has been sitting on my shelf for a while, filled with sticky notes and other place markers, because it is too rich to read all at once, but it came back to mind recently while I was listening to Ishay Ribo, a religious Israeli singer who has become very popular among religious and secular Israelis, and Jews around the world, for singing popular music that is full of metaphors for God, with lyrics that are often pulled directly from traditional Jewish prayers. It is surprising, and also not surprising, that his music has crossed over into the secular world, among people who would say that they are agnostic at best, and would scoff at the idea of an anthropomorphic God who actually intercedes in our lives. And yet, the music has meaning and power for them too. Why?

             I’ve always heard these metaphors for God in Jewish prayer: God as nature – wind, rain, tides, sun, moon, trees. God as warrior. God as provider. God as lover and beloved. God as teacher. God as judge, magistrate, accountant, social worker. God as rock, redeemer, savior. God as breath, spirit, life itself.

            But what I realized as I listened to these metaphors as they are used in Ishay Ribo’s songs, is that the metaphor is really about the nature of our relationship with God, rather than a way of describing God him/her/itself. If God is a Shepherd, then we are the wayward flock. If God is a king, then we are the dependent subjects. If God is a mother, we are her children in need of comfort and nurturance and protection. If God is the teacher, we are the students, looking for knowledge and wisdom. If God is the doctor, we are the patients in need of healing. The metaphor for God that we find most meaningful in any instance will depend on how we see ourselves in that moment, and what we are longing for that we can’t find elsewhere.

            I decided to do a deep dive into some of the songs, or at least use Google Translate to see what I’ve been singing along to all this time, and I found a lot of familiar metaphors for God. In one of Ishay Ribo’s songs, Tocho Retzuf Ahava (He is filled with love), he says of God: “He never turns a blind eye from the sheep of his pasture,” meaning, we are the wayward sheep longing to have someone keep us safe from harm, and especially from our own mistakes, like a shepherd would do with his flock. In another lyric, he sings, “Even when we’re broken vessels, we are still his precious vessels,” which really resonates for me. Whether we are thinking about God or not, the deep need to feel loved and cherished, especially when we feel broken, is something we all share. And then there’s the magic of God, or the alchemy ascribed to God’s power: “In the future [God] will give glory in exchange for ashes, the oil of joy will replace our grief, a shroud of glory will replace a heavy spirit.” Who doesn’t want to believe that God, or fate, or someone, will eventually step in and make things better. You don’t have to believe in God in order to long for that spark of hope when you’re feeling hopeless.

            In his song, LaShuv HaBaita (To Return Home), Ishay Ribo sings: “The time has come to wake up, to leave everything, to overcome, to return home,” and though I know, intellectually, that he is referring to a return to God and Jewish practice, the metaphor of returning home has power for me anyway. And the idea that, “Even if we’ve done something wrong, he forgives and pardons,” feels like a prayer for how the world, or our loved ones, will respond to us. And, “He reaches out a hand to help, and gives, with mercy, the power to correct and fix ourselves and return to him.” I don’t have to believe in an all-powerful God to be comforted by the image of someone who will help me help myself. And I don’t have to see that help as coming from God. I can replace God with friends, teachers, parents, and mentors, in my mind, and be just as comforted.

            I watched an interview with Ishay Ribo on YouTube recently, in Hebrew and without subtitles so I may have misunderstood, but the message I took from it was that he knows his music is reaching more than just believers in God and or orthodox Jews in particular, and that that’s intentional. The words he sings are meaningful to him because he’s using the language that comes most naturally to him, but he is expressing universal experiences of doubt, pain, anger, hope, longing, and joy. And if you want to call all of that God, fine, and if not, that’s fine too. To be fair, Ishay Ribo probably wouldn’t say it that way, exactly, but I think he would agree that it’s the connection between human beings that holds so much power in his songs, and in his singing.

If the energy that connects us is God, or just our own energies radiating outward, what does it matter, as long as we are, eventually, connected? These metaphors have lasted millennia and have held power for the people who have used them, because they help us to describe parts of our internal landscape that are otherwise left in shadow. The metaphors allow us to see and feel and talk about states of longing and pain and hope that otherwise are left unspoken, and that is why they are so healing.

It’s true that, at times, when I sing along to these songs, or take part in Jewish prayer services, I will notice a line about God as father or God as Shepherd and roll my eyes a little bit at the idea that God would literally be any or all of these things. But most of the time, I just close my eyes and feel deeply heard, and comforted, and seen. And I’m not alone.

Ishay Ribo and the Solomon Brothers, LaShuv HaBaita in English and Hebrew: https://youtu.be/WZ6HvzFh7js?si=F6AIRcWu1XOf3smL

Some of Ishay Ribo’s songs in Hebrew:

HaLev Sheli: https://youtu.be/6U_5KhaH6IM?si=Hl_wcxj0TVhKrMCR

LaShuv HaBaita: https://youtu.be/Y30pfWIQfoo?si=Ly0Wz1qWrltC5dzY

Tocho Retzuf Ahava: https://youtu.be/fQRgX3ivUKU?si=YcFnd-2El0GIzqpj

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?

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Jezebel and Polytheism

Posted on May 1, 2021 by rachelmankowitz

            During my search for something in the Hebrew Bible to write a Midrash (AKA biblical fan fiction) about, I realized that I haven’t read the book itself closely enough yet to know how I want to re-write it; I’m still grappling with what these stories were meant to teach me in the first place. I have to remind myself that the goal of the Hebrew Bible is to convince the reader to believe in one god, Yahweh, rather than to tell the absolute truth, and therefore, anything that detracts from belief in that one god is characterized as evil, even if, in our modern view of morality, it isn’t evil at all. Given my cursory understanding of history, it seems like women were given more power and authority by the polytheistic religions that came before, and were then put down by monotheism. And I don’t understand why that was a necessary part of the transition to a One God system, or if it was.

“Girl Power!”

The story of Jezebel, in the book of Kings, focuses on this transition from a female-friendly polytheism to a male-centric monotheism, and it portrays foreign women, and the worship of any God other than Yahweh, as evil. And we have taken this portrayal of Jezebel as fact, because the Bible says it’s so. But is it?

            I know that many modern women have tried to find redeeming value in Jezebel (I did that myself by naming a protagonist after her), but I was willing to believe that she was as wicked as advertised, because I think there’s value in recognizing that women are capable of unforgivable harm; that you don’t have to be a man to be evil. Except, often in the Hebrew Bible, what the evil women are accused of seems more like rebellion, or a different opinion, than true evil.

Jezebel was a priestess of Baal and the daughter of the Phoenician king, and she was married to Ahab, the king of Israel, in a political alliance. She was raised with her own gods, including Baal and Astarte, and did not switch over to Yahweh when she married Ahab. Why? Because she came from a place where both male and female gods were worshipped, and when she married and moved to Israel there was only one, lone, Male God, and, not surprisingly, she didn’t appreciate the change.

“Me neither.”

            The biblical authors don’t like that her husband, the king, builds a temple of Baal, rather than forcing her to worship his national God. They accused her of interfering with the exclusive worship of Yahweh among the people of Israel and bringing in her own gods, as if that is her main crime. In one parenthetical sentence it says that Jezebel has been killing off the prophets of Yahweh, so she may also be a murderer, but there’s no explanation for why she’s doing it, or for how she would have the power to do so without the King’s okay.

            Her crimes seem to be: being a powerful woman able to hold her own against men, and being a polytheist instead of a Yahwist. Her own morality and use of power are questionable, but not more so than her husband’s or other kings of Israel. In fact, King Ahab is considered one of the worst kings of Israel. He reigns for twenty-two years, and the Bible says, he did what was displeasing to God even more than his predecessors.

The prophet who speaks up against Jezebel and Ahab in the Book of Kings is Elijah, and he asks the Israelites how long they will keep hopping between Yahweh and the other gods. His fight is with Polytheism and with the temptation to worship other gods. Elijah and the prophets of Yahweh fight the prophets of Baal and win, and then Elijah kills all 450 prophets of Baal. So Jezebel is evil for killing the prophets of Yahweh, but Elijah is pure for killing 450 prophets of Baal? Doesn’t that make both of them killers?

Elijah confronts King Ahab and predicts that he and all of his heirs will be destroyed, and that dogs will devour Jezebel. Eventually, the King is killed in battle, and his sons become kings for short periods of time each and then they die too.

            We finally return to Jezebel in chapter nine of the second book of Kings. She is sitting in her room in the palace, putting on her makeup, when the new king arrives and has Jezebel thrown out of the window by her eunuchs. He drives over her body with his chariot, and she is devoured by dogs, as the prophecy foretold.

“Eeeeew.”

But is she being punished as a murderer? Or for worshiping foreign gods? For me, it matters.

            Polytheism is the worship of multiple gods, often assembled into a pantheon of gods and goddesses representing forces of nature and ancestral principles. Sometimes these gods are seen as completely separate individuals, and other times they are seen as aspects of a single god – which resonates with how God is portrayed in the Hebrew Bible. God is given many names in the Hebrew Bible –  Yahweh, El, Elohim, El Shaddai, Tzevaot, Yah, Adonai, etc. – and many attributes – healer, merciful, warrior, infinite, strong, omnipresent, shepherd, righteous, Rock of Israel, etc. Possibly the variety comes from so many different authors, but, conveniently, absorbing the names and attributes of the surrounding gods helped the biblical authors to convince the Israelites to stop worshipping foreign gods; if you prized strength or mercy or healing or war, you could find any and all of those qualities in the one god, like in a big box store.

            Polytheism is actually a more comprehensive way of depicting the multiple aspects of the self, and the contradictory nature of the universe. Monotheism attempts to determine what is good (loyal to God) and what is evil (antagonistic to God), and tries to explain how all of our different qualities can exist within a single person, or a single universe. But that doesn’t mean that the particular forms of monotheism that we believe in are right, or lead to more moral behavior in human beings. If anything, Monotheism encourages more black and white thinking, ignoring the grey areas, and giving in to totalitarian leadership systems, whether they strive for actual goodness or not.

            Jezebel’s role in the story is to play the straw (wo)man, that Elijah, as God’s representative, is able to tear down. But even a surface level reading of Kings tells us that Elijah’s behavior is no more moral than Jezebel’s, no more compassionate or reasonable or just. Elijah wins because he backs the protagonist of the book: Yahweh.

“Where’s MY book?”

            So where does that leave me? Why do I believe in one God rather than many? Do I believe in the Yahweh portrayed in the Bible, or a more modern iteration that my ancestors wouldn’t recognize? Can I find fault with the Hebrew Bible and still look to it for guidance?

            I think the lesson I learn over and over is that this book is the memoir of a flawed people, groping towards a vision of God and community that will be able to sustain them and help them find peace. But, clearly, the Hebrew Bible is not always meant to be taken literally; even great rabbis have understood this. This book is not the last word on morality; it’s a starting point.

If seeing the Hebrew Bible this way makes me a Jezebel, so be it. I’m in good company.

“Do you mean us?”

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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Life in the Absurd

Posted on April 3, 2021 by rachelmankowitz

            Out of the blue, one evening, Mom got an email about a pop-up vaccine site taking people over 65, and she called and got an appointment for the next morning. And then, after she’d gotten the vaccine and scheduled her second shot, she felt so guilty that she’d gone without me, and that so many of the sites on Long Island were reserved for older people and not for essential workers or teachers, that she started obsessively watching for new sites, and nagging me to do the same. I didn’t enjoy having to jump onto the computer each time she saw a hint of a possibility of an appointment for me, especially because they all turned out to be nothing. But then, three weeks later, an email arrived saying that there was a site taking people over 60 and teachers, from our town. She emailed back and got me an appointment for that evening.

            The only problem was that I was still at synagogue school, where I was so overwhelmed with the laptop and iPad (to teach the remote kids), while also corralling the in-person kids, that I didn’t think to check my phone. By the time I got home Mom was standing in the parking lot, waiting for me. She yelled through the window of the car that I had an appointment, and I screamed back, for what?

            The Pharmacy was in a small strip mall two towns over, down a badly lit hallway and behind a non-descript door. It was some kind of specialist compound pharmacy, with one pharmacist and two helpers, and I was one of the last appointments of the day. I made sure to tell the pharmacist that I teach synagogue school, in case she wanted to disqualify me on the spot as not a real teacher, but she just nodded and asked where I teach, and then she told me that I was getting the Moderna vaccine, and stuck the needle in my arm. One of her assistants filled out a vaccine card and scheduled my second appointment, and then they sent me on my way.

            It took all of five minutes, and I had a hard time processing that I had really gotten the shot, even while holding an ice pack against my right shoulder. Two days later my left shoulder started to hurt, in the same spot as on my right shoulder. I tried to find a reasonable explanation for it, like maybe I’d been sleeping on my left side to protect the right shoulder, though that didn’t explain the pinpoint nature of the pain. But I was still wiped out from synagogue school, or from the vaccine shot, or both, and I couldn’t really think it through.

 The next day, which turned out to be the second windiest day of the year, I decided I had plenty of energy to do the food shopping on my own, even though Mom said it was too cold to go out and she and the dogs all gave me funny looks. Instead of wearing my hair in braids or a pony tail, which is what I’ve been doing since my hair got so Covid-long, I left it down, and it rose in a whirlwind around my face until I couldn’t see a damn thing. Then I went into the supermarket and filled my cart with everything on the shopping list, and only realized at the checkout that I didn’t have my pocketbook with me. I asked if they could watch my cart, melting ice cream and all, at the customer service desk, and then ran out to the car, hoping my pocketbook would be sitting on the passenger seat waiting for me. It wasn’t.

“Oy.”

I knew I had to drive home and find my pocketbook, but I was afraid someone would see me driving away and think I was a criminal of some kind, racing out of the parking lot. It was only when I’d pulled out into traffic, heart racing, that I thought to check under Mom’s cushion on the passenger seat, and of course my pocketbook was right there. I was relieved and flustered and had a hard time figuring out where to make my U-turn back to the supermarket. I parked in the same exact spot I’d just left and then ran out, forgetting my mask in the car, so I had to race back and find it on the floor, under Mom’s cushion, which I’d managed to toss into the air in my frenzied search for my pocketbook.

I tried to walk back into the supermarket like a sane, rational person and gracefully guide my cart from the customer service desk to the next open checkout lane, but there were no open lanes, except for the self-checkout. I hate self-checkout. I don’t understand how this is supposed to be more convenient when every time I try to buy a fruit or a vegetable someone has to come over and play with the machine to get it to recognize my broccoli. But I paid for all of my groceries and managed to put them in my reusable and refrigerator bags, piled to the top of the cart. As soon as I got outside, of course, the bag on top of the pile fell off the cart, and the receipt flew away in the wind, never to be seen again. By the time I got home I felt like I’d been through all of the Herculean labors, and fell into bed, exhausted.

“I totally get it.”

            I’m pretty sure my life isn’t the only one falling into the absurd lately, but I like to tell myself that mine is the most absurd, just so I can feel like I’m winning at something.    

The fact is, everything has seemed nonsensical for a long time now, as if we’ve all been suffering from pre-Covid brain fog for years. There was that weird four year period when our president was a white supremacist, and then that year when people refused to wear face masks to protect them from a deadly disease. And then there were those news outlets that only believed in alternative facts. It was weird. Okay, it’s still weird. States are rapidly putting new voting restrictions into place, after what was deemed the most secure election in US history by the Republican in charge of cyber security. And US senators are proclaiming that they didn’t feel threatened by men with bear spray and flag poles attacking the Capitol police and setting up a gallows to hang politicians, but one little black woman knocking on a door in the Georgia Legislature clearly scared the bejeezus out of them.

“Humans are weird.”

            There are times when I believe that God is everywhere, and that the universe is a web of invisible circuits that bring us all together. And then there’s the rest of the time, when I still believe that God is everywhere, but I’m pretty sure the web of invisible circuits is broken, or at least rotting at significant junctures. Hopefully, once we’ve all been vaccinated we can start to do the work of fixing those connections.

To that end, I thought I’d share some new liturgical music from the musical director/composer/rabbinical student from my synagogue whom I’ve mentioned in the past (I make a short appearance in the choral section of the video.) The title of the song is HaRofei, which means the healer, and it’s based on Psalm 147. The lyrics alone are wonderful, but with the music and all of the voices and instruments he was able to bring together, it’s a stunner. https://youtu.be/fmsMljlUWok

“Where are the dogs?”

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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Emotional Contagion

Posted on March 28, 2020 by rachelmankowitz

There are no bombs falling, no explosions or fireworks. The world looks pretty nice, actually, and everyone I can see looks healthy, even with the face masks. There are no workers in Tyvek suits walking the streets spraying for errant Coronavirus droplets. At least, not yet. So, while doing the right thing, and staying home, I feel a bit silly. It’s hard to trust the experts on television instead of what I see with my own eyes. The President clearly struggles with this, too, but those images from Italy and Spain are hard to ignore (the horror stories on Facebook, about monkeys in Thailand starving for the bananas they used to get from tourists, and pets in China dying while their people went into quarantine, and dogs being euthanized because people believe – incorrectly! – that pets can spread the disease, are too much for me to take in).

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“People suck.”

I’m also feeling guilty because my life has not been disrupted as much as the lives of other people. And I feel guilty for being so comfortable with this social distancing thing, and I worry that I will revert to my old levels of isolation and not be able to get back out of it once the threat of infection is over.

Mom was getting cabin fever every day for the first week of the shut down, and looking for any excuse to go out and do “essential” errands, but by the second week she started to settle in and feel the pressure to stay home (from me, mostly). Now, she’s focusing her excess energy on gardening, and sewing, and sitting in on Zoom sessions at Noon each day with the clergy from our synagogue. Her biggest source of anxiety is my brother, who is an emergency room doctor. He’s been downplaying the risks he’s under, but at least he’s been in touch and letting Mom know that he’s still okay.

The more pressing contagion, for me, is being created on social media. There’s this idea that we should be making the most of our time at home, by writing novels, and learning ten languages, and reading hundreds of books, and virtually visiting all of the museums in the world. I don’t know how parents are managing the pressure to homeschool their kids, with every kind of free and not-free educational resource being advertised everywhere, with the implication that if their kids don’t do three years’ worth of school over the next three weeks they will fail life forever. Earn a Ph.D.! Build a robot! Learn how to make a Coronavirus vaccine in your own basement!

003

“I won’t be doing that, Mommy.”

I think people might be overestimating how productive this time at home can be.

The instinct for community seems to be strengthening though, even at my synagogue, where we are all about community building, all the time. This crisis has brought out even more awareness that we need each other; that we need to see each other. And it’s so important to us that we’re all learning how to manage Zoom – though a lot of the seniors forget to mute themselves, so while we’re trying to listen to the rabbi’s lesson on census taking leading to plagues in the ancient world, we’re listening to couples arguing about toast, or answering their phones. Sometimes I’m not sure they know they’re on screen, let alone audible.

Ellie and Cricket have been able to go to all kinds of synagogue services and committee meetings and Judaic classes now that synagogue is online, but they’re not sure what to make of it. Zoom, especially, seems to unnerve them.

067

“I am never unnerved. I am completely nerved.”

We’re posting our synagogue school lessons on the website instead of doing Zoom conferences with the kids, though the idea of being able to mute my students at will is certainly tempting. I didn’t realize how much I missed my students until a parent sent me a picture of her daughter holding up her class assignment. The sudden thought that I may not get a chance to see them again this year almost broke me.

Another issue during the shutdown has been the disorientation. Reality keeps changing every five minutes, after a phone call or a press conference, and I can’t process it fast enough. All I can do is eat my popcorn (I’m on a new version of Weight Watchers that allows unlimited air-popped popcorn) and watch the news. I’ve been listening to a lot of music too (Yo-Yo Ma is an incredible comfort).

The supermarket has been the most obvious sign of the apocalypse, with empty shelves where eggs and yogurt and chicken and pasta and frozen vegetables used to be. When did Almond milk become such a popular commodity? And frozen spinach? And oatmeal? The toilet paper thing has been disconcerting to everyone. I thought it was just a Facebook joke until I went to my local supermarket for my first Coronavirus-shutdown-shopping trip and saw the empty shelves between the tissues and the paper towels for myself. People are weird.

028

There’s some relief to being in a shutdown, as opposed to the state of confusion we were in for the weeks leading up to it, when we were getting mixed messages from the President and the doctors and the news and social media; the constantly changing research about who would be impacted, and which measures could work to slow it down, didn’t help either. It’s a relief to at least know what’s expected of me now, though I still worry that people are looking at me funny when I go to the supermarket without a face mask (where are people getting all of these face masks?!).

Most of the time I feel okay, and prepared, but then someone will say something that makes me worry that I’m not thinking far enough ahead, and the worst is yet to come, and people I know will die, and food will run out, and the financial hardships will last for years in the aftermath of all of this. People are really good at creating disaster scenarios that I’d never have thought of on my own.

IMG_0510

I’m worried for my brother and his kids. I’m worried for the elderly people in my life who are so vulnerable and so important to me. I’m worried about the impact the stockmarket will have on Mom’s retirement fund (an important source of income for our household). And I’m worried for myself, which seems selfish and petty when other people are in so much more danger. And I feel guilty, all the time, for all of my good fortune, and so terrified that it will go away.

I’m still angry that we didn’t get out ahead of this in January, when news from Wuhan, China was so devastating. And I’m angry that we didn’t have testing in place when other countries did, which meant that the virus was able to spread undetected for weeks, or months. I want to feel peaceful and Zen and accepting of my fate, and sometimes I do, but sometimes I really don’t. And it sucks.

IMG_0238

Acceptance is a myth, Mommy.”

My rabbi, who is hyper-rational and proud of it, was brought to tears seeing all of us on Zoom for his class about the concept of the Death of God after the Holocaust, because he does believe, as I do, in the I and Thou of God, the extraordinary Godness of community and togetherness, and how sitting in our separate homes we are still able to come together and learn.

Here’s hoping that as time passes, and the virus passes, we can catch joy and meaning from each other as easily as we catch fear. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?!

Fingers crossed (from at least six feet away).

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Or closer.

 

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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