Tag Archives: Jewish

The Surgery

Posted on June 13, 2026 by rachelmankowitz

            I had another oral surgery a couple of weeks age, a second attempt at a skin graft to ameliorate recurring infections around one of the zygomatic implants, after last summer’s attempt failed. I scheduled the surgery for after school was over for the year, so I would have time to rest and recover before having to deal with actual people again. We had to take a car service to the doctor’s office because I was going to be on anesthesia for the procedure and therefore wouldn’t be allowed to drive myself home, but Mom came with me for uneventful-ride-with-a-stranger and when we arrived Mom set herself up in the waiting room with a book to read and a sewing project, and the staff took me over to an exam room to prepare for the procedure.

“I stayed home. Thank God.”

There were a lot of Elton John songs playing over the speakers that morning, for some reason. Usually there’s a mix of music from the seventies and eighties, and very rarely from the nineties, but there was something comforting about hearing Elton John’s voice over and over, as if he was hanging out in the room with me and keeping me calm as they put the mask over my nose and started the nitrous and then poked my arms, endlessly, in search of a good vein for the anesthesia. I think there were three needle sticks before they finally believed me that the good vein is in my right arm. The last thing I remembered was the doctor saying, “she’s a cheap date,” and I wanted to stand up and tell him that’s not funny, but I was out. I woke up to instructions about where to hold the gauze to staunch the blood, and how to put pressure on the gauze with my tongue, and then I was taken to the recovery room, given a few envelopes of gauze, and the same aftercare sheet I’ve gotten for every procedure in that office, and sent on my way.

            Almost as soon as I got home, though, I realized that I was going through the gauze much faster than I was supposed to. I can’t remember if I’d ever used all of the gauze in the packet before, but this time my mouth was filling up with blood faster than I could change out the gauze, and blood kept pouring onto my shirt before I could fold up new pieces of paper towel to replace the gauze. I couldn’t speak through all of the blood and gauze and paper towel, so Mom called the doctor’s office for advice and they told us to come back in right away to get the wound cauterized. This day was getting expensive, with our third taxi ride in a row, but I had no choice, so I held a pile of paper towels to my face and stared out the window of the car, watching all the same houses pass by for the third time.

            Then I was back in the exam room and they were syphoning away the blood, and rinsing my mouth with salt water, and the doctor was pressing on the wound so hard it felt like his fist was going to push into my brain. My face must have still been numb from the earlier procedure, though, because even though I was uncomfortable and confused, I wasn’t in a lot of pain, and then the bleeding finally stopped and they washed my face, and gave me another sleeve of gauze, and sent me on my way again. One of the nurses offered me apple juice as I was leaving, but I was afraid to dislodge the gauze and start the bleeding all over again, so I promised I would drink something once I got home.

            Mom and I sat in the waiting room for the next ten or fifteen minutes, waiting for the notification that the car had arrived, and then we took the elevator down to the lobby to meet the driver in the parking lot. I felt sort of dizzy and clammy when I stepped out of the elevator, but I thought it was form getting back in touch with the heat of the day after living in the bliss of air-conditioning for hours (it was 80 degrees Fahrenheit in the real world), so I was sure I just needed to rest against the wall for a second and I’d be fine. I took a few breaths and stood back up and made it another few steps towards the glass doors of the vestibule, where I knew I would really start to feel the heat, but I had to find a wall to lean on again, and then I found myself sitting on the floor, which just seemed silly. I laughed at myself and pulled myself up again, feeling like I was getting a full day’s exercise in one go, but I felt really nauseous and found myself on the floor again. From far away, I could hear Mom asking me if I was able to move my arm, because it seemed that my arm was trapped in the doorway and sticking out into the vestibule, and she was worried I would get hurt, or that I would block someone from entering or exiting, I don’t know. I must have been able to move my arm out of the way, and I must have tried to get up again, but the next thing I remember is being flat on my back and hearing the sound of racing footsteps coming down the stairs. Mom had gone back up in the elevator to get the doctor, and it seemed like the whole team had come downstairs with him. I could hear Mom telling them that I’d fainted and hit my head, which was news to me, and I felt a cold compress on my forehead and an oxygen mask over my nose, and one nurse even had a little electric fan that she used to try and cool me off. They put my feet up on a chair at some point and I heard the doctor say that he’d called for an ambulance, and then there were even more people around me, lifting me onto a stretcher (it’s good that she’s wearing jeans, so we can lift her by her belt loops).

Then I was in the ambulance and they were checking my blood pressure and doing more needle sticks (at least three more tries before they found a vein they could use). Every once in a while, I was able to say something, like, that’s the bad arm, the good vein is on the other side, and I could hear the EMTs asking how old I was and saying, no way, she looks twenty-five (which lifted my spirits, I have to say). They put a neck brace on me, because of the fall I couldn’t remember, and I heard Mom tell them that I’d hit my butt first and then my head, so I was probably okay. They brought me to the nearest hospital, which was literally around the corner, and I remember being outside for a moment and then they pushed my stretcher into the emergency room and transferred me to one of the hospital stretchers, which were all sort of floating around the room, with some make-shift screens put up between them to allude to privacy. They checked all of my vitals again, and took the neck brace off, thank God (because at that moment the brace was causing the most pain), and I had to sign a bunch of digital forms, but I can’t tell you what they were, and then the doctor told me her plan: blood tests to see if I needed a transfusion and a CT scan to make sure I didn’t have a concussion.

            The original procedure had been at 11:15 that morning and we’d returned to the doctor’s office around 3:30 in the afternoon, so we probably got to the hospital around 4:30 pm. There was a nice lady in the bed next to me with an amputated leg who seemed to think I was up to making conversation, and then they gave me saline in one of the many holes they’d made in my arms, and I just stayed flat on my back because even lifting my head felt impossible.

            There was something about those few hours, where I could take in most of what was happening to me but couldn’t really make logical decisions, that felt revelatory. I’d forgotten that this state of being even existed, even though it was a very common state from my childhood, because, I realized, I’ve always read more consciousness and choice into my memories than was really there. I always thought I should have been able to understand things, and should have been able to make better choices, but lying there on the hospital stretcher, I realized how silly that was. The whole time I’d been in the lobby of the doctor’s building, falling and standing back up and falling again, I’d been so sure that I would be able to stand up and walk out to the car if I just tried a little bit harder, and each time I was wrong.

            At some point, Mom got a text from the oral surgeon, who had seen some of my early test results and wanted us to know that the reason my blood sugar was slightly elevated was because he’d put a steroid into my anesthesia cocktail, along with the Propofol and Versed, to extend the length of time the pain relief would last. And that was the first time in hours that I even remembered that I’d had surgery that morning and that half my face was still numb. Eventually, the saline started to do its job and they brought me some apple juice to drink and some disgusting orange Jello to try to shovel into my mouth and they tilted the bed so I could sit up like a human again and see what was going on around me.

Next up, they took me for a CT scan on my own personal stretcher, because they didn’t trust me on my feet even long enough to transfer me to a wheelchair, and I found my sense of humor returning, which was good because I could see my reflection in the elevator door and it was a lot. And then I was back in the Emergency Room, waiting for results. I remember thinking about all of the people I should be calling or texting, and just having no energy to even look for my phone. There was a basketball game, or maybe hockey, on the TV screen in the distance, but mostly I just listened to the conversations around me: the woman with the amputated leg really didn’t like her sandwich, and a woman with cancer arrived in so much pain that her not quite adult daughter had to speak for her, and there was a man with back pain who kept trying to stand up against the nurse’s advice, and a woman I couldn’t see who was angry about something I couldn’t understand.

            Once all of the test results finally came back, the doctor told me that the blood loss and the anesthesia, and having two serious procedures in one day, had caused a Vaso-vagal Syncope (AKA I fainted), and it wasn’t an uncommon response (which is what my brother had said a few hours earlier, when Mom texted him). I was discharged from the hospital after 11 PM, once the doctor was convinced that I could walk without falling down, and we called the car service yet again to take us home. I was starting to feel much better, and therefore much more aware that my poor mother had spent the whole day taking care of me, despite the fact that she was walking with a cane and sitting on a hard chair and really really really needed a nap. We both struggled with the walk from the parking lot when we got home, and I had to sit down twice to rest along the walkway. Our downstairs neighbor, a nurse, met us at the front door of our building and insisted on helping me up the stairs, and I don’t know why I kept arguing with her because I really needed the help. We’d called her earlier to ask her to check on Tzippy for us, and it turned out she’d been waiting up for hours just to see how I was doing.

            The left side of my face was still numb, but I dutifully ate a few spoonfuls of chocolate pudding, because it was at the top of my soft foods diet list, and then I made my way to my bedroom and fell asleep.

“I did not sleep, ever.”

            I hadn’t really believed in the fainting part of Mom’s story, to be honest, until I woke up the next morning and could feel the sore spot on the back of my head from where I’d hit the floor, and the pain from the actual surgery was starting to kick in as well. I looked over the aftercare sheet from the doctor’s office and took the recommended doses of Tylenol and Ibuprofen and made myself some very well smushed tuna with mayo. The pain in my mouth kept getting worse throughout the day, but I was sure the Tylenol and Ibuprofen should be enough to manage it, since the doctor hadn’t prescribed an opiate this time around, and I really didn’t want to bother anyone.

            I was still very disoriented, and exhausted, so I had a lot of time to think over the next few days and I kept reliving those few moments in the lobby of the doctor’s building, and wondering what would have happened if Mom hadn’t been there with me. I would have been just as helpless, but no one would have been there to fill the gap between what I could do for myself and what needed to be done, and that gap was starting to look really vast. And now that I was remembering all of those times as a kid when I couldn’t help myself, and no one else was around to fill the gap, I realized that instead of feeling the grief and helplessness of those moments, I’d filled the space with self-loathing, as if yelling at myself to try harder would suddenly make me capable of doing the impossible. There’s something so terrifying about that space, where there’s nothing I can do and no one is coming to save me, and my mind chose to deal with it by pretending I was wrong, telling me that if I could just push myself a little bit harder, be smarter, older, stronger, taller, healthier, whatever else I was not, then I would be okay.

            But now, seeing myself over and over on the floor in the lobby of the doctor’s building, and realizing there was nothing I could have done, was an incredible relief; as if I was patting my younger self on the head and saying, see, you didn’t do anything wrong, and here’s the proof: when people knew you were struggling and were able to be of help, they came running. I remember being told as a kid that life isn’t supposed to be fair, and thinking that that was just nonsense, because of course life is supposed to be fair, and therefore if I’m not getting the help I need then I must not deserve it. That makes the world make sense. That makes the math work. But maybe the math doesn’t add up in real life. Maybe, more often than not, the gap between what I need and what I get is left unfilled, not out of intentional malice or because it’s what I deserve, but just by chance. Which is terrifying.

            Anyway, I spent the rest of the week resting and recovering, thinking deep thoughts, eating soft foods, and wondering why the Tylenol and Ibuprofen didn’t seem to be doing very much. And then, exactly a week after the initial surgery, I woke up at three thirty in the morning to the taste of blood in my mouth. I put pressure on the wound right away, just like they’d done in the doctor’s office, and I looked up excessive-bleeding-a-week-after-oral-surgery on my phone and tried to feel reassured when it said that if I kept pressing on the wound and stayed upright, the bleeding would eventually stop. Mom got up to sit with me and after forty-five minutes or so, the paper towels I kept stuffing into my mouth started to be less and less soaked in blood, and I was finally able to take some pain medication, and a few deep breaths. Mom went back to bed, but I stayed on the couch in the living room and kept pressure on the wound, just in case. And then, around six or seven o’clock in the morning the bleeding started again. I went through four rolls of paper towels trying to staunch the blood and I finally texted the doctor’s office and was told me to come in as soon as possible. I woke Mom up again and she called the car service, again, and we made it out to the parking lot somehow and arrived at the office sometime around 8:30 am. But, after getting myself out of the car and thanking the driver and closing the car door, I couldn’t take another step. The nausea and dizziness and this strange weakness in my legs were overwhelming. Mom went inside to get help and I sat down on the sidewalk, trying to scoot along the ground to get a few feet closer to the front door, and then the doctor’s assistant arrived with a tech and a wheelchair, and they brought me inside and up to the exam room.

“What the F&%# is going on, Mommy?!”

            The syphoning began again, and it was as if the intervening week hadn’t happened. The doctor was probably in the middle of another surgery when I arrived, so his assistant was in charge of assessing the situation and she gave me fluids through an IV and put me on the nitrous again. Somewhere along the way I heard her telling the doctor, “she’s a faucet,” probably in response to his endless requests for updates while she was busy trying to keep me from drowning in my own blood. Eventually, the doctor decided to cauterize the wound without anesthesia, so he could see where the blood was coming from, he said, and the pain was extraordinary. I was screaming and crying openly and my hands and feet and bottom lip started to go numb, and the doctor said I was hyperventilating and needed to focus on breathing out through the mask more than breathing in and I would have slapped him if I’d had any strength at all. At some point the doctor was standing in front of me and asking if I wanted to go to the hospital and of course, I said no, and then, finally, the anesthesia must have kicked in. I don’t remember losing consciousness but everything became sort of fuzzy. A nurse and a tech stayed with me, changing the gauze religiously until the bleeding had completely stopped, massaging my hands when they went numb again, checking on mom and letting her know I was okay, even bringing her pretzels and coffee in the waiting room.

            Before running to help with the next procedure, the doctor’s assistant told me to stick to a liquid diet for the next few weeks, drinking a lot of Ensure and smoothies to keep my calories up, and I wondered why she was telling me that now, instead of a week earlier. I made a point of asking when I should go back to rinsing with the medicated mouthwash in case the vigorous (recommended) rinsing was also part of the problem, and she said, definitely not today. They transferred me back to the wheel chair and then wheeled me to the waiting room to sit with Mom until the car service could arrive, and then the nurse took me downstairs in the wheelchair and made sure I was safe in the back seat of the taxi before walking away.

            The lesson this time around seemed to be that both me and Mom needed to work on asking for help sooner, and not worrying so much about bothering people, so even before we arrived back home Mom had texted the maintenance man at our co-op to ask if he could bring her rollator down from our apartment (it was actually her sister’s rollator, offered just in case she might need it). I was barely able to stand up long enough to transfer from the car to the rollator, even with help, but it was an incredible relief to find myself sitting on the rollator seat while our maintenance man pushed me all the way around the parking lot and up the walkway (I tried my best to hold my feet up off the ground, so they wouldn’t act as brakes), and we even zoomed along for the last bit, reminding me of childhood visits with Grandpa, driving along in his convertible with the wind in my hair.

And then I was sitting in front of our building, unable to stand, let alone to climb the two steps up to the front door, and forget about the twenty steps up the stairs to the apartment. My downstairs neighbor, the nurse, was home in the middle of the day, fortuitously, and she looked at me and looked at Mom and offered to drive us to the hospital. But I didn’t want to go. I thought, maybe I could just sit there for a few hours until I felt stronger, but my neighbor was dubious and said I’d be safer in the hospital, where they would probably want to give me a transfusion. When I finally accepted that I had no choice – my feet were not walking themselves up those stairs – I also realized that I couldn’t even make my way back down to the parking lot and into my neighbor’s car, so we called for an ambulance.

The maintenance man went to meet the EMTs in the parking lot and brought them to the backyard, where I’d been resettled in the shade, with a bottle of water and a box of tissues (I can’t even tell you how lucky we are in our neighbor and our maintenance man). There were two or three EMTs and they transferred me onto a stretcher and rolled me down to the ambulance, and then the one who looked like a cross between Harry Styles and Harry Potter started the assessment. He couldn’t have been much older than my nephews, and he had tattoos down both arms like Harry Styles, but he had a reassuringly sweet smile and I was pretty sure the bangs on his forehead were covering a lightning shaped scar. He took my vitals, including an EKG, but he didn’t try to put in an IV for fluids this time. My arms were already black and blue from all of the needle sticks the week before, and then again from that morning, so he might just have left it for the nurses to manage later in the ER, when I wasn’t so much of a moving target.

            We went to a different hospital this time, closer to home and with a much bigger emergency room, and the EMT parked me in the entrance hallway and reported my history and vitals to the nurse in charge, and she put two bracelets on my arm, one with my name and birthdate on it, and one in bright neon yellow that said “fall risk.” Pretty quickly they moved me from the assessment hallway to my new parking spot at the end of another hallway, and I started to meet a lot of nurses and techs and doctors. My sense of time was all over the place, but I remember a lot of blood being taken, and I remember drinking apple juice and worrying that the bleeding was going to start all over again.

            The ER doctor asked a cardiologist to consult at some point, and he pulled the skin under my right eye (checking for hidden aliens?) and looked at my blood test results and said I’d probably lost half my blood volume and would need a transfusion. Which meant that the needle sticks had to start again. One nurse even got out the ultrasound wand to try and locate a vein before sticking me three more times, but the pain was excruciating and she still couldn’t find a good vein. Eventually the next nurse, or the one after her, found a usable vein on the back of my right hand, and then she taped the needle in place three times so it wouldn’t move even in an earthquake. By then they had decided to keep me overnight for observation and I sent Mom home to rest (one of the nurses had even brought her a tuna sandwich and some gingerale along the way). More blood was taken (no wonder I needed a transfusion!) and they checked my blood pressure a thousand more times and gave me more apple juice, and I spoke to my brother on the phone and he told me that when they gave me the transfusion, I would be able to hear the memories of the blood’s owner (he reads a lot of sci fi), so I was looking forward to that.

            Mom had reached out to the executive director of our synagogue (one of her favorite people on the planet) so I got a call from one rabbi and texts from the other. I still couldn’t walk, or really stand on my own, but my sense of humor had returned somewhere along the way, and I was taking copious notes in my tiny notebook, and at some point they started the actual transfusion, and then at nine or ten o’clock they transferred me to a semi-private room deep in the ER, where I could watch TV and, to my surprise, was able to fall asleep.

            They woke me up around five or six the next morning and the first thing I noticed was the pain. Whatever anesthesia the oral surgeon had given me in his office the day before was finally starting to wear off, but the nurse needed a doctor’s approval before she could even give me an Ensure, let alone a Tylenol, so it was a few more hours of sitting and waiting in pain while they gave me more fluids through the IV.

            The older rabbi from my synagogue came to visit around ten or eleven that morning, and the younger rabbi texted to check up on me and asked if I’d like to be added to the Mishaberach list, so people could pray for my well-being at Friday night services this week, and I surprised myself by saying yes to that for the first time in my life.

The cardiologist came in to check on me at some point, and had my blood pressure checked in three positions, lying down, sitting and standing up, before ordering more fluids. And, finally, sometime after noon, the cardiologist cleared me to go home. It still took a while before they could remove the IV – which was really well taped in place and therefore hurt like hell when it came out – but Mom was able to get a lift from yet another generous neighbor, and the nurse walked me out of the emergency room for pick up. When I sat down on a bench by the front circle where patients were supposed to be picked up, I realized that I was finally walking on my own power for the first time in twenty-four hours, and then I saw the car and didn’t quite sprint across the parking lot to get into the backseat of the car, and finally, we went home.

            I slept for a long time that afternoon, after filling up on Tylenol and Ibuprofen and Ensure, and when I woke up Mom told me she had called the doctor’s offices asking about pain management, so I guess I must have mentioned the pain to her, but she hadn’t heard back yet, so I took more Tylenol, drank another Ensure, mixed with Fairlife Chocolate Milk to make it more  palatable, and went back to sleep.

            The next morning, the pain was so bad that I couldn’t even drink the Ensure, so I texted the doctor’s assistant and she had the doctor call in a prescription for Percocet and Mom was able to get a lift to CVS to pick it up for me.

            The Percocet did its job, so it was a few days before I realized that I didn’t have my hospital notebook anymore (I was sure it was sitting safely in my pocketbook waiting for me, but I must have lost it among the sheets of the hospital bed at some point), and I felt stupid, because the nurse had specifically asked me if I had left anything behind when I left the ER, and I didn’t think to check for the notebook. But I drank more Ensure and got to work reconstructing events to the best of my ability, though to be honest, everything from the midway point of this essay onward is just a guess.

            As you can imagine, I have some notes for my doctor about what to do differently next time around (on someone else, because I can’t see going through this again, even if this procedure was as unsuccessful as the last one). I still worry that I’m going to wake up with a mouthful of blood in the middle of the night, but so far everything has remained intact.

I’m not sure what lesson to take from all of this, to be honest. I was hoping that writing it all out would give me some clues to bigger life lessons, but for now I’m just grateful that there are so many kind people in my immediate vicinity, willing to go out of their way to help me. Though, I think Tzippy has been taking her own notes on the whole ordeal, so she might be ready to share her life lessons any day now. Fingers crossed.

“I have absolutely nothing to say.”

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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The Wandering Tzippy

Posted on June 6, 2026 by rachelmankowitz

            I don’t remember when Tzipporah started to run out of the room each time I sat down at the computer, maybe sometime in February or March, after that one time when I tried to bring her to my zoom Hebrew class and she knocked my juice onto the keyboard in her desperate attempt to flee. She’d already made it clear by then that she didn’t want to come to Bible study sessions on zoom either (Ellie used to love to sit on my lap and watch the rabbi make faces on the screen), so any sign of the computer moving, or me moving towards the computer, made Tzippy very nervous.

“Computers are dangerous.”

But, more recently, I realized that Tzippy was also leaving the room when I wasn’t sitting at the computer. I’d be on the couch, minding my own business (staring at my phone), and suddenly she had somewhere else to be, often running straight to my bedroom to pee on the exercise mat. Or, apropos of nothing at all, she would leave the living room just to get a drink of water or to sniff something in the hallway or even to pee on the actual wee wee pad. For most of the year and a half that she’d been living with us, she’d refused to leave her bed as long as I was in the living room with her, often waiting hours and hours before daring to pee or to look for her dinner, but suddenly, she was free.

            I can’t find any reliable patterns in her new behaviors, though. Sometimes she still sits in her bed and stares at me like I’m a bomb about to explode, and sometimes she casually walks into the hallway for a snack in the middle of Murder, She Wrote. Sometimes she steps out of her bed at random to take a long stretch, before starting her next nap, and sometimes if I even look in her direction she runs for her life. And I really don’t love that she’s going to my room to pee (though at least she’s peeing on the rubber mat instead of on the rug, so it’s easier to clean), but there’s something about this new wandering version of Tzippy that’s fun to watch. It feels like we’re on season two of a really good TV show and even though I’m not sure where the story is going, I’m already fascinated by the plot twists. And, honestly, I can’t wait to see what happens in season three!

“I’m still the star of the show, Mommy.”

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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The Crowd

Posted on May 23, 2026 by rachelmankowitz

            Lewis Capaldi is a Scottish singer who came up on my YouTube feed because he is One Direction-adjacent, as the best friend of one of the One Direction band members, Niall Horan. But I’d heard his songs before, and loved them, without ever having heard his name or recognized his face. If you’ve ever heard his music on the radio (Somone You Loved, Wish You the Best, Before You Go) you could be forgiven for picturing him as one of the many thin, dour, male singers from Britain who have been singing sad songs to us for a while now. He is, instead, kind of small and chubby, with unruly reddish hair and a constitutional inability to be serious in interviews. His music is full of heartbreak and his voice is soulful, but his personality is laugh out loud funny, blunt and silly. He is, maybe, the anti-Harry Styles, wearing random, ill-fitting clothes, never combing his hair, and saying pretty much whatever comes to mind. He told a story in more than one interview about the time he drunk dialed Harry, who he did not know, and possibly sent him an embarrassing video, though he has no recollection of which video he actually sent.

Anyway, I love his songs, and his interviews are endlessly entertaining, so I fell into a mini-Lewis Capaldi-shaped black hole on YouTube recently, which led me to the Glastonbury story. In 2023, Lewis Capaldi was singing at the Glastonbury festival when he was overcome with tics and exhaustion and panic and couldn’t finish his song, and in response, the audience sang the rest of the song for him. Anyone watching that video can see the love the crowd feels for him and the way they tried to hold him up and let him know that he was okay, but in interviews, later on, he said that for him the experience was humiliating and frightening. He’d been diagnosed with Tourette’s sometime before then, but he wasn’t managing his health very well and his anxiety was through the roof and it all came down on him that day on the stage at the Glastonbury festival, forcing him to take a long break from performing in the aftermath. He spent two years working hard in therapy, finally, and then in June 2025 he made a surprise return appearance at the Glastonbury Festival to sing the song he couldn’t finish two years earlier, and to debut his new single, Survive, which directly addressed his mental health issues. I’ve watched both videos multiple times, of the crowd singing for him when he could barely stand, and the crowd singing with him when he returned, and it’s inspiring to see how a group of strangers can come together and show so much love and support to one small human being in trouble.

“I don’t like strangers.”

But, at the same Glastonbury Festival, in 2025, on a different stage, a British punk band called Bob Vylan led the crowd in chants of “Death to the IDF,” and it aired live on the BBC. It surprised me that so many people would even know that the Israeli army is called the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), but it truly scared me that they would chant for the death of the citizen army of the only Jewish country in the world. I don’t know what would have happened if the band had chanted “Death to America,” like they do in Iran, and now in some protests in the United States, but I think someone at the BBC, or someone in the crowd, would have been shocked enough by that to intervene. As it was, the band finished its set, filled with many other antisemitic statements and crowd chants against Jews and Israel, and it was only later that politicians spoke out and questioned why it had been allowed to air given that an Irish Hip Hop band called Kneecap, with a reputation for antisemitic and pro-Hezbollah messaging, had been pre-empted (Kneecap was later invited to perform at Coachella where they displayed large screens saying, among other things, “Fuck Israel”).

            At this moment in history, for any number of reasons, it has become socially acceptable to brand people who support the existence of a Jewish state (Zionists) as evil, and to call for the deaths of Jews, again. And I don’t know what to do with these two wildly divergent images from the same music festival – one where people were moved to generosity and kindness by empathy and one where people were moved to hatred of people they don’t even know by a catchy chant.

Historically, Jews have been an easy target, because there are so few of us, and yet we seem to make an outsized impression on the world and that must mean we are doing it in nefarious ways. But after the Holocaust, there was a long period of time when the crowd seemed to agree that Antisemitism was socially unacceptable, and if criticism was going to be aimed at a particular Jew or a particular government official it would both have to be substantiated and clearly delineated from some kind of blanket statement about the evil character of Jews and Israel, but the crowd seems to have changed its mind again, or some crowds anyway.    

            Emotional contagion is a real phenomenon. When you are part of a large group of people and they are all doing or saying the same things, it can be really difficult to do something different. There’s the peer pressure of it, which might make you scared to express something the rest of the crowd won’t like, but there’s also a chemical reaction that seems to happen in our bodies when we are in large groups and the impact is definitely heightened by music, which is probably why so many people are willing to spend so much money going to live concerts, despite having so much music available on other platforms for free. I’ve felt it hundreds of times, where just singing along with other people has made me feel more connected to them and somehow to the universe overall. We automatically look to the people around us for how to interpret the world, whether we realize we’re doing it or not. In Kindergarten, we look at what the other kids are eating for lunch, or what they’re wearing, or how they’re responding to the teacher in order to figure out what’s considered “normal.” And even after we’ve absorbed those norms, we still look for cues in our environment to help us interpret what we are seeing and feeling. For example, if I’m walking through the mall and hear what sounds to me like machine gun fire, but no one else is reacting, I will probably try to find any other way to interpret what I heard (a video game, a truck backfiring, loud music) before I’m willing to trust my ears. The opposite is also true. Even if I don’t hear or see anything threatening, if people around me start to scream and run I will get frightened and start running long before I ever have the chance to find out what caused their fear and decide if the cause is legitimate.

            This crowd effect has been active on social media for a while now, creating consensus around extreme views in part because being in a virtual space with like minded people starts to make it feel like the whole world is in agreement, but now it is moving out of the dark. Last week, there was an op-ed in the NY Times by Nicolas Kristof, where he repeated old, debunked claims from a Hamas-linked NGO that the Israeli army is training dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. He put this claim into an opinion piece that included information from various different sources, some substantiated, many not, without distinguishing between the two. And while, ideally, everyone who read the article would recognize that this was sloppy reporting and choose to get their facts from somewhere else, this was published in the NY Times, instead of in some dark corner of the internet, and there are still a lot of people who believe that if something is printed in the NY Times it must have been thoroughly vetted and therefore it must be true.

I don’t know when we reached the point where people are willing to believe almost any evil of Israel, without substantiation or logic, but that seems to be where we are. My therapist, a Jewish woman in New York, believes that Israel is intentionally murdering women and children, and refuses to listen to any argument or context that could dissuade her. When I dared to ask her for the source of her belief, she got angry and said, “I know what I feel and you are not going to convince me of anything.” She didn’t want to hear about Hamas or Hezbollah or Iran. She didn’t want to hear that Israel is a Democratic country and not a monolith and that elections are coming up that could take Netanyahu out of office, or that Israel’s own media and government watchdogs have been calling out abuses against Palestinian prisoners and trying to hold individual soldiers accountable for inhumane behavior on the battlefield. She equated Netanyahu with Donald Trump, as if they were basically the same person and have equal power in the world, despite the fact that one is the prime minister of a tiny country in the Middle East and one is the president of what is still the most powerful country in the world. And this is a smart, educated person, who is Jewish and knows many Jews. I can’t even imagine what someone with no direct knowledge of Jews could be led to believe.

And honestly, I think this is how the Holocaust happened. Regular people in Germany were led to believe that the Jews were uniquely evil and that if they could just get rid of those evil Jews (and the homosexuals, and the crippled, and the Romany), they would be a successful nation again. It was simplistic and non-factual, but it felt true and it carried them into a war against half the world that killed and displaced millions. We like to tell stories of World War Two as if it was obvious to everyone, all along, who was good and who was evil, who was right and who was wrong, but it’s important to remember that the Germans, and even the Nazis, did not think they were the bad guys. They believed they were right. Many Germans, and many others, truly believed that the Jews were the problem and therefore the only righteous thing to do was to eliminate them.

I will leave it to other people to discuss the complexities of Israel/Palestine, because there are many other people who are better at it than I am (Haviv Rettig Gur is a current lifeline for me), but it feels like we’ve already bypassed the actual politics involved and are barreling towards an inevitable conclusion that can’t be stopped. And, really, it’s hard to ignore the signs when the crowd starts to shout for the death of my people, again. And it scares the shit out of me.

“I need another blanket, Mommy.”

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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This Passover

Posted on April 4, 2026 by rachelmankowitz

I only noticed that Passover was coming because I had to teach The Four Questions (Mah Nishtanah) to my students to get them ready for their family Seders. Other than that, I let all of the signs pass me by, like the shelves of Passover food at the local grocery store and the cloud-like “Mannah from Heaven” dangling from the ceiling of the social hall at the synagogue. I was not in the mood for any of it this year, honestly, with all of the doctors’ appointments (mine and Mom’s), and all of the news. I felt like my brain was already full and could not take in one more thing.

Given that, by the time the first Seder came around, and I realized that I had nowhere to go, I wasn’t really upset. I hadn’t downloaded a new Hagaddah, or planned new recipes, or found new songs to sing. I was just waiting for it to be over. Unfortunately, both synagogue school and my Hebrew classes took Passover off, so I went from feeling like I was too busy to breathe to being surrounded by silence.

“What’s wrong with silence?”

We are always invited to a Seder at my brother’s in New Jersey, but it’s a long drive back and forth and neither Mom nor I were up to making the trip, though I really like the way he hands out different Haggadot (The Harry Potter Hagaddah, a cartoon Hagaddah, a Haggadah with ten commentaries on each page, etc.) so that everyone at the table has a different way of seeing the Seder, and the arguments commence. My ideal Passover celebration would probably be a model Seder with the synagogue school kids, so we could walk them through all of the props on the Seder plate in real time, like the shank bone and the roasted egg and the Matzah and the horseradish (Maror), and find new ways to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt that really speak to them.

Just a note, by the way: on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, they made a joke about how Christians get to eat chocolate eggs for Easter and Jews are stuck with a shank bone – and it was a funny bit, but misleading. The shank bone is a prop on the Seder plate; you are not supposed to eat it. If someone at your table, other than the dog, has been gnawing on the shank bone, something has gone very wrong.

I grew up in a house that took Passover very seriously. We spent weeks preparing: cleaning the whole house, removing all signs of leavened bread, changing the dishes for the week, and filling three shopping carts with food. If you spend any time with religious (or even not that religious) Jews during the week of Passover, you’ll notice a heavy emphasis on eating – both because people get bored spending a week at home with their families and because trying to avoid any particular food can make you obsessive about the food you are still allowed to eat – as any dieter will to tell you.

            The fact is, I really like the idea of Passover, with the emphasis on storytelling and music and food and the symbolism of freedom and slavery. I could spend my whole life learning about the Exodous story and never be finished, so it bothers me that I don’t have time to teach my students all of the things I know about the holiday so far. I’m lucky if I can teach them how to sing the Four Questions and throw in some tidbits about the Ten Plagues and a little something about matza ball soup. This year I made them a Passover Madlibs to try and get as much of the story in as possible and maybe get them curious to learn more. In their rewritten version of Passover, they would have us drink 72 glasses of wine (instead of 4), and eat McDonald’s (instead of Matzah), and our ancestors would have faced landslides and tornadoes and chicken pox instead of the usual ten plagues.

            The emphasis on teaching children The Four questions is just because that’s the one thing the kids are supposed to know about Passover ahead of time, and it’s a way to encourage them to ask more questions as the Seder goes on. So they start with the most obvious question – why is it that on every other night we eat mac and cheese or pizza for dinner but tonight you’re giving us a bland cracker and a knob of horseradish? – and that gets them thinking of the next set of questions they might have, like: why were there ten plagues? Did the plagues really happen or are they a metaphor? Why would God allow regular Egyptians to suffer in order to convince Pharoah to let the Israelites go? Why is this holiday celebrating freedom so bittersweet? Where are the happily-ever-after stories we’re used to from Disney?

The goal of the Passover Seder isn’t to come up with definitive answers, it’s to make space for questions, and to slowly help us get used to the idea that life will be filled with a lot of questions that don’t have simple answers; and if you can drink some grape juice and jump around like a frog or spray your parents with salt water along the way, it goes down a little bit easier.

And now that I think of it, maybe this is my Seder this year, this essay. It’s not the traditional format, and there’s no shank bone or horseradish (Thank God), but it’s full of the things Passover is about: questions, complaints, stories, and food. Next year in Jerusalem!

“Where’s that bone you keep talking about?”

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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Lockdown Drill

Posted on March 28, 2026 by rachelmankowitz

            We have a lockdown drill every year at the synagogue school, mostly so the teachers can figure out where the safest and least visible spot is in their classrooms, because the kids are already experts. My first year as a teacher, I had to rely on my students to tell me what to do when the lockdown drill was called, and they calmly led me to my desk, where we all huddled under and behind it in the dark until we got the all-clear. My noisy, wild first group of kids turned silent and serious while they waited for the all-clear, and then quickly reverted to their usual chaos right after. 

            The next year, during Covid, I ended up in a random classroom with older kids I barely knew, and we all just hit the floor, each hiding under our own desks, whispers and giggles erupting all over the place. The police officers gave us a thumbs down on our attempt that time, mostly because we were completely visible through the glass wall into the garden. Somehow, we were supposed to have known to squeeze into the closet in the corner, or the cabinet under the sink. I never had to teach in that classroom again.

            Eventually, I got my own classroom, and a clear plan for where and when to shelter in place. By then the Squirrel Hill synagogue shooting had happened, and we finally understood that these drills were not just pro forma – synagogues were targets. There’s a blind corner in my classroom where you can’t be seen from the door or windows, so if I move some desks out of the way we can all huddle in that corner and wait it out.

“I think I’d be good at lockdown drills.”

            I remember having a discussion with my students, maybe five years ago, about an isolated antisemitic incident at a local public school; I don’t remember if it was a Swastika painted on the wall of the school, or something similar, but most of the adults in the neighborhood were willing to treat it as a learning opportunity for the offender. My students saw it differently. They were angry, and frightened, and had a lot of stories to tell me about similar incidents that had flown under the radar, and they needed to talk through the implications of seeing obvious signs of antisemitism in their usually friendly and welcoming environment. I mentioned it to the other teachers and to the clergy at the time, but they were mostly of the same mind as the parents, doubtful that antisemitism was really a problem in a world where racism against black people was exploding in the streets. But I guess Generation Alpha saw something coming, and now it’s here.

            Over the years since the Squirrel Hill shooting, the (newly formed) security committee at the synagogue sought out grants to put in security doors, darkened windows, bollards to prevent car rammings, and, of course, security guards. And we’ve been lucky, because our local police department is knowledgeable and proactive, and there’s often a police car or two in our parking lot during the day. But the danger keeps growing. When we had our first professional development of the year, back in September, we had to practice yet another kind of drill; instead of sheltering in place, we had to practice escaping from the building and gathering at a safe distance, like a fire drill on steroids. It turned out that the only place nearby that would agree to host us in case of such an emergency was a church far down the road. Locations much closer to our building had been asked, consulted lawyers, and said no. I’d like to believe their reasons were practical – they didn’t have enough space for all of us, they didn’t have enough parking for all of the parents to come and get their kids afterwards, they didn’t have adequate security to ensure our safety – but all of those things were also true of the church that did agree to host us. The walk we took that day, talking the whole time about how we would guide our students along the side of the road and keep their attention off the danger, was exhausting and sobering. And then came the attack on the synagogue in Michigan, where they had put in all the same security measures as we did, and then the Hatzalah ambulances outside of a synagogue in London, and attacks on synagogues in Belgium and Toronto and on and on. Doing a lockdown drill is already overwhelming, but watching the news lately made me even more nervous than usual about our upcoming drill.

            As expected, my current class struggled with the silence aspect of the lockdown drill. They took me seriously when I checked the hallway and locked the door and turned off the lights, and they followed willingly when I led them to the blind corner, each finding a comfortable spot on the floor, but they started to crack themselves up almost immediately, and every attempt I made to distract them made them laugh louder (I am, clearly, hysterical). Luckily, we were far enough away from the door and still quiet enough to not get in trouble with the police officers who were walking through the building, checking that our classroom doors were locked and that no one could tell we were hiding inside. My job, as it was explained to me, was to keep the kids quiet so that an attacker would skip our classroom and move on to the next classroom, or the next, but I know all of the teachers and students in those classrooms too. It’s hard to feel any sense of relief or accomplishment in getting a thumbs up on a job well done when I know that our safety could mean that someone we care about becomes the next target. But the kids came through the drill unscathed. They especially liked that it prevented me from actually teaching them anything. They are experts at deflecting my lesson plans as it is, so getting help from the police made them even happier, and they went on with the rest of their day without showing any outward signs of trauma.

            We don’t spend a lot of time talking about these threats with our students, or about the current war with Iran, partly because we have too much to teach and too little time as it is, and partly because our directive is to focus on Jewish joy as much as possible and let the parents decided how much of the danger to share with their kids at home. But the threats still exist, whether we talk about them or not, and lately I’m feeling it.

“Don’t worry, Mommy. I’m learning how to be a guard dog.”

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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The Chatting Class

Posted on March 14, 2026 by rachelmankowitz

            The goal in my new online Hebrew class is to get us to talk as much as possible, and one of the exercises we do a lot is a game called Ze Mazkir Li (That reminds me…), where the teacher or someone else starts telling a story, something mundane like what they ate for breakfast yesterday, and as the timer gets closer to zero someone else has to interrupt with “that reminds me,” in order for the clock to start over again. The idea is to push us to speak up, even when there’s nothing profound to say, and to teach us to listen carefully enough to our classmates to know when to jump in. I almost never volunteer when we play this in class, until the teacher insists, but when we were assigned the game for homework, I did a little better. I was paired up with a young Muslim woman from Jerusalem, and we sent voice messages back and forth, about the chocolate cake her sister made, which reminded me of my chocolate chip cookie recipe, which reminded her of how little she likes to cook, or clean, which reminded me of how little I like to cook and clean too.

“Me too!”

            We do all kinds of games like this in class, and some are more fun than others. For example, the teacher will share a picture on screen and call on someone to describe what they see (usually something very silly), or he’ll announce that he has an “unpopular opinion,” like, store-bought baked goods are better than homemade, and we’ll start to argue, or he’ll ask for advice, like, how do I learn how to cook after many failed attempts, and everyone shares their ideas. He generally stops each speaker at thirty seconds, both to limit the stress each of us is under to come up with something brilliant to say, and to make sure everyone gets a chance to talk. But instead of saying “Stop,” when someone has talked enough, he says “Avocado,” to make it a little softer. The power of “Avocado” was obvious from the first day of class and is probably the biggest difference between Fluency and every other level I’ve been in, because everyone gets the chance to talk and no one (including me) can hide in the background.

            This class, the format of it and the teacher running it, is so much more fun and productive than my last class, even though we aren’t trying to learn new vocabulary, and even though I still feel self-conscious every time I’m called on. The goal is to get us to use the words we already know and to, eventually, talk without thinking. It’s challenging, and often uncomfortable, but I can see that I’m talking much more in this class, and I’m getting to know all of my classmates, instead of just the extroverted ones.

            To be fair, I did skip one homework assignment so far. We were supposed to record videos of ourselves doing some kind of household chore and speaking Hebrew at the same time, and even if I could have handled the pat-your-head-and-rub-your-stomach complexity of the task, I couldn’t make myself record a video. I can’t explain why that’s my limit, since I spend an hour and a half on screen during each class, and I don’t mind doing (short) voice messages for homework, I just know that trying to do a video paralyzed me. And the teacher won me over by not making a big deal out of me being the only one who didn’t do the homework that day.

            The lucky thing is, we never stay very long on any one exercise, so even if something is particularly difficult for me, I know it’ll be over soon. My favorite activity, by far, is listening to songs and learning the lyrics – literally repeating the lines over and over again and then being tested to see if we can remember the words hidden behind black boxes on the screen. I love that there are still so many Israeli songs I’ve never heard before, and that each one gives me a new window into what life in Israel is, and was, like, but most of all, I like the break from having to come up with something to say.

            One of the most difficult things we’ve done so far was watching an animated video and taking turns narrating the events on screen. The action went so fast and I was missing so many words to describe what was happening in the story that I felt like I was hopping and flipping and ducking my way through my thirty seconds. It helps that these exercises are difficult for all of us, though, so we can commiserate when words fail us, and happily toss the hot potato to the next poor soul when it’s their turn.

            The surreal part of all of this, of course, is that our zoom classes are taking place while half of the people on my screen are receiving missile alerts on a regular basis, including our teacher. At the beginning of each class the teacher has to remind the students in Israel that safety is the priority, so if they get a missile alert, they should close their computers and go straight to a shelter, and then he tells the rest of us that we can stay on the zoom and just keep chatting until the alert is over. We’ve only missed one class session so far, when the missile alerts first started, and the teacher hasn’t had to run out of class, yet, but we’re learning the most Israeli lesson of all: just keep putting one foot in front of the other, and make it into a dance if at all possible. It also helps that we avoid discussing politics and focus instead on the very serious subjects of snacks and music and nature and movies. The light tone of the class is also what makes it possible for us to meet people we’d never have had conversations with anywhere else, and to find out that we have a lot in common. One of my best friends in class is a Christian nursery school teacher in Germany, who decided to learn Hebrew after falling in love with the language on a vacation in Tel Aviv, and the young Muslim woman I was paired with for the homework assignment fits right in, with stories about how her family celebrates Ramadan and how she leaves most of the food prep to other family members, thank you very much.

            I can’t promise that I’m making great strides forward with my Hebrew, but I know I’m in the right place for that progress to happen, and most likely I will be too busy arguing over which Star Wars movie is the best one to even notice when the words start to flow more smoothly. It’s still not easy, and I still hear the nasty voice in my head telling me how stupid I am and how much money and time I’m wasting, but that voice tends to get drowned out by all of the voices from class arguing about the best way to cook a hard-boiled egg.

“Now I’m hungry again.”

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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The Hebrew Break

Posted on February 21, 2026 by rachelmankowitz

            I was really discouraged during my most recent online Hebrew class; most of my fellow students were more advanced than me, and much more confident, and I struggled to keep up with the discussions and the homework and even getting to class by the end of the semester. When my teacher suggested that I sign up for a fluency class next, instead of continuing at my current level, I agreed in the hopes that a class focused on speaking (instead of on learning new vocabulary) might be the right next step for me. But it was a relief when I found out that I’d have to wait two months for the next fluency class to start. I’ve also found lots of excuses to skip weekly Hebrew practices, and I haven’t really looked over my notes from the last class, which, honestly, might as well have been in Greek.

“I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

            I keep wishing that language acquisition – and all learning, really – could be more straight forward for me: read A, write B, take tests C, D, and E, and then you know it. But even back in school, when that was the dominant learning model, it didn’t actually work for me. I could get straight A’s in class, or spend months writing a paper on the symbolism of birds in hieroglyphics, and I would still forget most of the material by the next semester. I was surprised by how little math I actually remembered from high school when I took the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) ten years later. I had to re-learn all of the math from scratch, and quickly forgot it all again when the test was over. Tests always seemed arbitrary to me, like I was being judged on my ability to guess what this or that particular teacher wanted from me, rather than being tested on my actual mastery of the material.

Over time, I’ve tried to approach learning in a more comprehensive way, coming at it from as any different directions as possible in order to build solid connections in my brain that might last longer than a moment, but I’m still struggling. I know I’ve learned a lot of Hebrew over the past few years, but I feel like crap for not being confident enough to speak much when I was in Israel, and I feel stupid for needing more classes. I’ve never been able to figure out the best way for my particular brain to learn, so most of the time I feel like I’m making do with methods that are built for a brain that isn’t mine; like trying to use lefty scissors as a right-hander, or trying to paint with a toothbrush. I wish I knew for sure what would help me get to the next level, in Hebrew and in everything else, but all I can do is guess at the right path forward and take a leap.

So tomorrow, I’m going to my first fluency class. It will probably take me a while to warm back up after my break, and I’m sure I’ll be anxious and self-conscious all over again, staring at my face on screen and wondering who that alien might be, but hopefully something in the new format will help me find the words when I need them, or at least calm my anxiety when I can’t think of anything to say. Fingers and neurons crossed.

“And paws too.”

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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Singing Through the Winter

Posted on February 7, 2026 by rachelmankowitz

            After almost two months of singing practice with the Simply Sing app, I’m not sure if I’m getting any better at it, but I’m still enjoying the process. I like learning new songs; branching out from Brandi Carlile’s famous “The Story,” to some of her less well-known songs (that are just as hard to sing), and singing along with Nat King Cole and Selena Gomez and Vince Gill, as if we’re all just hanging out and hiding from the snow together. I’m finding that I know a lot more songs than I realized, so that even when I choose a song whose title and singer seem unfamiliar to me, half the time I’ve actually heard the song before and just didn’t know what it was called. It’s also been interesting to see which kinds of songs are easier to sing, and which ones are more challenging for me. I knew I would struggle with songs that go from very low to very high, or songs with notes that are held forever, but I didn’t realize just how hard it would be to sing a Taylor Swift song, most of which are so crowded with lyrics that there’s barely room left to breathe.

“I like to sing, too. When I’m not freezing.”

It became clear early on that the two minute warm up on the Simply Sing app wasn’t enough, so I usually go to YouTube for vocal exercises first. Sometimes I’ll mix and match a few short videos from the Dots Singing collection: one breathing exercise, and maybe one just humming, and then one for chest voice and one for head voice. And sometimes I’ll do a full warm up video with one of the voice teachers (Kathleen Hansen is fantastic!). My favorite exercise so far is “straw phonation,” because it’s all about blowing bubbles through a straw. You fill a glass of water a third of the way up, and then you put in your bendy straw and blow bubbles and sing through the straw. Straw phonation is part of the SOVT (semi-occluded vocal tract) family of exercises that have become very popular, where the goal is to keep your mouth partially closed while singing to “create back pressure on the vocal folds,” though I don’t know what that actually means. They say it helps make singing less taxing on your voice and makes the tone clearer, but it’s also just fun. The other SOVT exercises include lip trills (blowing air thought partially closed lips to create vibrations); humming; and singing on Z, V, or NG sounds. And for me, the most difficult one is the lip trills. Some people do them like blowing raspberries, with your tongue between your lips, but ideally the tongue stays in, and every time I tried to do the lip trills at the beginning all I got was air, no vibrations. Finally, I went looking for some how-to videos and found a method that worked for me: holding up the muscles on either side of my mouth as I try to do the trills. I don’t know why it works, but it does. I’m not sure if all of this is helping me breathe more efficiently, or sing more clearly, but it’s certainly entertaining.

Lip trills: https://youtu.be/mWw3cjRLrrY?si=M1tRdCoxrvx5SOmp

Humming exercises: https://youtu.be/ElDCTulc96w?si=PJLP1TW_BzO8tm57

Vocal warm up: https://youtu.be/uGnhla2dowg?si=xwNaKETmGKLkH6SQ

            While I was back on YouTube looking for vocal exercises, and still watching Glee videos, I came across a voice teacher who has reaction videos to Glee, and to many other singers as well, where she explains how the singers create the sounds they make: like the “vocal fry” that Brittany Spears made popular, or the breathy quality so popular right now, or the rounded tones of musical theatre. She gets into a lot more detail than I’d ever heard before and it’s also just fun to hang out with her and listen to music together. She’s introduced me to singers I’ve never heard of before, like Dimash, who has a seven-octave range, including notes you can’t find on a piano. I can’t actually mimic the skills she’s describing in her videos, but it’s nice to have these usually invisible things explained in clear language.

The Singing Scientist watches Dimash: https://youtu.be/02gvDy61GhQ?si=jn7hjMZctK_KxG-T

The Singing Scientist watches Glee: https://youtu.be/Z9xz6sy2TPg?si=5Rc5AjBrybJ7vqtn

            I’m still using cheap plastic straws for the straw phonation exercises, instead of a set of the fancy metal straws I keep seeing in Facebook ads, and I haven’t splurged on a voice mister, or a head set that makes it easier for you to hear when you’re singing off key, yet. And I’m still not up to interacting with a live human teacher, and having my voice judged and critiqued, because I’m pretty sure I would shut down in response. But I’ve noticed that my inner critic is finally getting some perspective, because as I watch the American Idol auditions, I’m not comparing my voice to theirs or wishing I could do what they do; I’m just enjoying the music and looking for songs I’d like to sing. And I don’t feel like a failure, anymore, for not wanting to sing on a big stage or be a professional performer, because I know that wouldn’t make me happy. I would love to get to the point where it’s not so hard to manage the transition from chest voice to head voice, though, and I’d love to become more comfortable with sight singing, so I could learn songs more easily. But most of all, I want to chip away at the tension that closes around my throat and keeps me from singing the music I really want to sing.

            Pretty soon, I’ll be back in choir rehearsals, to prepare for the Women’s Seder at my synagogue, and I’ll see if the usual notes are easier to hit, or if I’m still running out of air too fast, and if I feel less self-conscious when I sing in public.

In the meantime, it’s still freezing cold outside, and I leave the house only reluctantly and with a bad attitude. But I do enjoy singing along to my Spotify list of Israeli music in the car and taking short breaks to complain about my fellow drivers, or the ridiculous snow formations on the side of the road. It’s the little things that bring me joy.

“Greenies bring me joy!”

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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Simply Sing

Posted on January 3, 2026 by rachelmankowitz

            On the final night of Chanukah, during the communal candle lighting ceremony on Zoom, my rabbi asked us to think about what light we might want to bring into the New Year, and I already had an answer: I want to sing more. I tend to sing alone in my car at this point, but he didn’t specify that the light had to be for other people.

“Mommy! We are not outdoor people!”

I’ve been thinking about singing more since choir practices over the summer, when I noticed that I was struggling to make it through each session, always running out of air too soon. But I couldn’t figure out how to make myself sing more, when there were so many reasons why I didn’t feel comfortable doing it. And then I started bingeing Glee videos on YouTube, which led the algorithm to send me all kinds of videos about singing, and somewhere along the way I saw an ad for an app called Simply Sing, offering me a one-week free trial, and I decided to try it. To be honest, I expected it to be a dud, but I hoped that it would at least encourage me to sing a little bit each day and start to build a habit.

This is what the icon looks like on my home page

I hid in my bedroom and took the fan out of my window for my first practice, just in case someone could hear me. The first thing the app wanted me to do was to find my vocal range. They told me to hum my lowest note, and read something in my regular speaking voice, and shout to get someone’s attention, and once the math was done the app had decided that I was, of course, an alto, which felt judgy. Back when I took voice lessons in college, my teacher told me that I’m a mezzo soprano, with an extension, but that was after a lot of practice, and this was after a couple of shouts and buzzes, so I tried not to feel like I’d fallen too far behind.

            The next task was to try a warm up: two minutes of singing the same short phrase over and over, gradually going a step higher each time. It was actually fun, and the female voice telling me what to do was encouraging, so I kept going. She told me to choose a song to learn, and sent me to a list of recommended songs. There were locks next to all of the songs that were above the Basic or Easy levels, but there were still plenty to choose from. I think I started with Every Breath You Take (the Police), or Give Me One Reason (Tracy Chapman), songs that were already familiar. The next thing the app told me to do was to sing the lowest and highest parts of the song, to see if they fit comfortably in my range or needed to be adjusted up or down. I earned points for finding the right key for each song, and then I earned points for reading the lyrics out loud, which was much more embarrassing than I expected it would be; maybe because lyrics rely heavily on their music to make them make sense.

Then it was time to learn the whole song, except, they didn’t show me the music, or break the song into manageable pieces, or coach me through it, they just had a vocal track playing, and the lyrics placed higher and lower on the screen to show their relative pitch. I could go over each song a hundred times if I wanted to, and change the key each time, but I could only earn points for one run-through, and one attempt at singing the song on my own with the vocal track muted. It felt kind of like doing Karaoke, and it bothered me that I didn’t earn more points for practicing more, and it bothered me that I couldn’t see the actual notes (so I could go and play them on a keyboard, at my own pace). The app did grade me on how closely I matched the notes and the rhythm of the song, though, which was something. And the collection of songs was good enough, especially as I earned more points and opened the locks next to more and more of the songs.

screenshot from the app
screenshot from the app

            I wasn’t learning everything I wanted to learn, but I was practicing at least thirty minutes a day, much more than I would have done on my own, so I decided to sign up for a one-month subscription after the free trial ended. The gamification of the app meant that as I earned more points, I could access new lessons: singing in chest voice, and singing in head voice, correct breathing technique, and pacing, etc. Too quickly, though, I ran out of new lessons to earn with my points, and I finished opening all of the locked songs, and the app stopped counting my points altogether, meaning that the gamification part of the experience was mostly over.

But I still had a new warm up each day, and plenty of songs left to learn, and each day that I was able to get a practice done felt like an accomplishment. I kept putting more and more songs on my wishlist for the future: More Than a Feeling (Boston), The Story (Brandi Carlile), Defying Gravity (from Wicked). I was still closing my bedroom door, and taking my fan out of the window for every session, and I was noticing all kinds of problems with my voice that I couldn’t name, or ignore, but I tried to remind myself that the goal wasn’t to become a professional singer, just to enjoy singing again.

“I would really enjoy having more chicken treats.”

            In the meantime, I was still bingeing Glee videos on YouTube, hoping to be inspired by the fun they seemed to be having as they sang together, and trying not to compare myself to them, if at all possible. And then my Glee binge extended to watching Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff in Spring Awakening, and then Jonathan Groff and Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsey Mendez in Merrily We Roll Along, and then all of the Glee kids who’d ended up on Broadway (like Darren Criss and Alex Newell and Kevin McHale), not to mention the Broadway stars who had guest starred on Glee (like Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth) and then just Broadway stars in general, like Aaron Tveit and  Gavin Creel and Bernadette Peters and Christian Borle and Audra McDonald and on and on and on.

I worried that obsessively listening to amazing singers was going to discourage me too much, but I was still practicing every day, and each day when I opened the app, it made sure to tell me more of the benefits of singing: it raises your endorphins! It improves respiration and circulation! It encourages you to express yourself! It encourages you to sing with other people (fat chance)!

Of course, my old issues kept bubbling up: the competition theme (you need to be the best singer in the world in order to have the right to sing at all); the expert theme (you need to master sight reading and dynamics and vocal placement in order to even begin to practice effectively); the alienation theme (if you don’t fit in with other singers – and I was watching a lot of interviews of performers that made it clear I would not have been their cup of tea – then you have no right to sing); and, the waste of time theme (spending time on this, or anything else, with no hope of earning a living from it, is selfish and stupid).

My brain was swirling with noise, and I couldn’t figure out how to drown it out, but at the same time I was noticing that singing certain songs felt cathartic, even therapeutic, either because the words of the song expressed something I needed to say, or needed to hear, or because the music tapped into places in my voice that I couldn’t find on my own. Singing Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay with Otis Redding, felt like singing with a friend who really knew me. And I thought about an interview I’d seen with Jonathan Groff, where he said that a lot of the roles he’s played have been like therapy for him, helping him work through something that he wasn’t able to work out on his own.

But I was getting more and more frustrated by the limitations of the app, wishing there were more steps in the learning process for each song, and then more steps to help me figure out how to deal with all of the noise in my head. And I knew that I wasn’t ready to seek out live human beings for help, so I went to the app store to see if there might be other singing apps that could offer more support. So far, none of the ones I’ve found has been as good for me as Simply Sing, but I’ll keep looking. And there are always YouTube videos to teach me more breathing exercises and vocal warm ups and vocal techniques. And now I’m seeing ads from all kinds of voice teachers who specialize in posture or mixing chest voice with head voice, or building breath capacity; all things I want to work on, eventually.

These are all tentative steps, but I’m reminding myself that that’s how I started with Hebrew too, and with teaching and writing and therapy. All of the best things, for me, seem to be made of a long series of small, tentative steps, usually without having any idea where those steps will lead. So, I’m doing my best to take it one practice at a time, and I’m looking forward to finding out where these small steps might lead me.

“I’m not taking one more step, just so you know.”

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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My Israel Trip – Coming Home

Posted on December 27, 2025 by rachelmankowitz

            I slept well going into day eight of the trip, our official rest day in Modiin, and we took our time over breakfast, letting the day start slowly. Our first little excursion was to the ruins of the oldest known synagogue/temple found in Israel, basically because it was only a few minutes away. There were signs with a little cartoon character named Modi to guide us up to the site, and of course, I managed to trip over myself on the way. My legs just refused to fully come back online. We had to sit down to rest and recover once we got to the ruins, and I was appreciating how the remnants of the walls of the temple were so conveniently placed for sitting, when I heard people coming and turned to see a whole group of seminary girls walking up the path.

This is Modi

My friend asked if we should leave, but they invited us to stay and hear the presentation with them. In among all of the 19- and 20-year-old girls, wearing dark blue sweaters and long pleated skirts despite the warm weather, was one diminutive man in a long back coat, and yet this largely unassuming Chasidic looking man, wearing pants that didn’t quite meet his worn black sneakers, transformed into an old-time storyteller as soon as he started to speak.

The talk was all in Hebrew, and I was pretty sure I must be missing some important words at first, because it sounded like he was talking about a time capsule, or space aliens, until I realized that he was talking about the first Aliyah of the Ethiopian Jews to Israel in the 1980’s. I was still pretty sure that I was misunderstanding something, though, because I couldn’t figure out what the rescue of Jews from Ethiopia had to do with an ancient Temple ruin in Israel, but it turned out that he was comparing this very old community of Jews, who had been cut off from the main stream of Judaism for more than two millennia, to a time capsule that had allowed us to be teleported back in time to before the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem. Those Ethiopian Jews, who had trekked across the dessert for weeks in order to be airlifted out of civil war and famine in Africa, had maintained an ancient form of Judaism where they still had priests (called Kesim) instead of rabbis, and animal sacrifices, and didn’t celebrate Hanukah or Purim, holidays that were only added to the calendar in the rabbinic period.

I teach my students about the Ethiopian Jews every year, among other Jewish communities around the world, and especially about the difficulties they faced when they came to the modern state of Israel and had to prove their ancestry, and fight against the orthodox rabbinate in order to maintain their own ritual practices, but this was a whole different way of seeing them; not as poor relations being saved from famine, or as new immigrants struggling to fit in, but as a gift of memory and tradition that could strengthen our whole people’s awareness of the past.

The frame of the story did its job, and we were successfully transported back to ancient temple times, when this ruin was a sacred building, and the high priest, dressed in magnificent robes, was in charge of the daily sacrifices. I could almost smell the Reiach nichoach, the pleasing odor (kind of like barbecue) of the sacrifices, and see the grandeur of the temple, even though all I could really see was a stone floor, with broken walls, and a man in a too big black coat sweating in the heat of the day.

Our storyteller told us that this spot where we were sitting was, the experts were 90% sure, most likely the site where the high priest Matityahu, the father of the Maccabees from the Hanukah story, had served, and therefore the starting point of the rebellion of the Maccabees against Antiochus and the Syrian Greek army. These seminary girls had clearly been brought to this place, at this time, for a reason: to find a connection to the Hanukah story that they could feel deep in their bones and hold onto throughout the holiday, to the lighting of the last candle. And there I was, by accident, in a place that otherwise would have looked like just another pile of rocks to me, inspired right along with them.

There’s some queasiness around the story of the Maccabees for liberal Jews, like me, because they weren’t just fighting against outsiders, but also against the Hellenized Jews who welcomed a loosening of the strictures of Jewish practice. And yet, these images of Matityahu in his priestly robes and the sense of the history imbued in this place was palpable for me too. And then he broke the spell, and returned to being the shy, unassuming man in a sea of women, telling the girls that they could take the opportunity to pray in this holy space, or to read psalms, or to just stand and take it in. All of the girls seemed to have prayer books on them, stuffed into hidden pockets in their skirts, I guess, and they began to silently read and shuckle and pray with kavanah (intention), like they really meant it. The storyteller wandered off, though, to allow the girls some privacy to absorb, or create, the holiness they needed from the ruins.

My friend and I quietly left the temple, first to see the ancient Mikva (the ritual bath) next to the temple ruins, where they would have cleansed their bodies before entering this sacred place, and then following the little Modi signs back down the hill to the car. We could still see the storyteller in the distance, looking awkward and alone again as he paced back and forth, waiting for the girls to be ready to leave.

After that, we met up with my friend’s husband at a local café that specialized in Sabich (eggplant, hard boiled eggs, chummus, etc., in a pita), to continue my education in Israeli food, and then we walked along the main street of Modiin, stopping to look at all of the stickers to honor fallen soldiers. These stickers had been ubiquitous throughout my visit, at the train station, on store windows, on the walls of buildings, but until now I hadn’t known what they really were. My friend’s husband explained that each sticker, with a smiling picture of a young person and a quote, was designed by the families of the fallen soldiers, so that people could get to know their lost loved ones and share in the wisdom they’d lived and learned in their short lives. I’d known about the posters of the hostages, of course, the ones that got ripped down over and over in New York and that were no longer needed now that the final living hostages had been returned from Gaza, but I hadn’t known about the stickers.

When it was time for my friend’s husband to get back to work, we dropped him off and headed to the mall to find a bookstore. A friend of mine from my Hebrew classes had gone to Israel the year before, and one of her favorite souvenirs had been Agatha Christie books translated into Hebrew, so when we’d decided to stay in Modiin for the day a bookstore was one of the first things on my to-do list. We were waved through by the security guard, as we drove into the underground parking lot, and my friend explained that it was his job to make sure we weren’t bringing weapons into the mall. Given that he’d barely looked at us, and certainly hadn’t checked in the backseat or the trunk of the car, he didn’t seem to be doing a very good job.

Everything in the mall was relatively new, even the floors of the parking lot still shined, but once we got inside it was a mall like any other, with free standing escalators to torment me as we went up, up, up. I held onto the railings for dear life each time, keeping my eyes closed for as long as possible and breathing a sigh of relief when we returned to solid ground. But when I opened my eyes, I could almost believe I was back on Long Island, with the kiosks selling candy, and that one store that sells every kind of tea, and so many clothing stores with English names. The only way you could tell that we were in Israel was that some of the stores’ signs were in Hebrew.

And then we reached the bookstore. It had actually been a long time since my last visit to a bookstore, given my Amazon fixation, but books are addictive, no matter the language, and once I was inside my eyes glazed over. I could find classics of Israeli literature over here, and translations of American bestsellers over there, and board games and stationery and gifts here and there and everywhere. I started collecting hardcover children’s books (Curious George in Hebrew!) like they were candy, and eventually had to force myself to put a few back so I wouldn’t fall over from the weight of it all. On my way to the cash register to pay for everything, I finally found the Agatha Christie books in Hebrew and had to add a few to the top of my pile, of course. I don’t know what happened exactly; it was like a switch flipped in my brain and after a week of looking at all kinds of potential gifts and souvenirs and always thinking twice, I stopped thinking altogether and just kept grabbing things. My friend said it was the first time she’d seen me so happy the whole trip (which I hope wasn’t really true, but books do have a unique effect on me).

High from my purchases, our next stop was a bakery a few stores down, called Roladin, famous for its sufganyiot (the donuts that take over the country for Hanukkah each year), and I chose a bunch of different donuts, with various fillings and icings and toppings, to bring back to her family.

In the meantime, we picked up her husband and younger son, who had recently gotten his driver’s license. They have a crazy system in Israel, where you have to take an extraordinary number of driving lessons, from a professional, that you pay for, before you can even take the driving test, and then once you have your license, you still have to practice a certain number of hours with an adult in the car before you can qualify to drive on your own. So all week, my friend’s son had been begging his parents for any chance to practice driving, and I’d watched each of them return from these rides looking traumatized, but it turned out that he was actually a very good driver, much better at managing the roundabouts than I would have been, and he only struggled once, when his parents gave him conflicting instructions for how to correctly back up into their parking space.

We celebrated his achievement by cutting each of the donuts into five equal pieces, so we could each try every flavor. My favorite was pistachio, but that was expected, since pistachio reminds me of my grandfather and therefore always tastes best to me. Other favorites were the cookies and cream, and the caramel. After that, the kids had about ten more activities each, and I vegged out until it was time to have dinner and go to bed. I fell asleep listing all of the things I would need to bring with me on my next trip to Israel, and all of the things I now knew I could leave behind, and when I woke up the next morning, I realized that I’d automatically assumed that I would be coming back to Israel, soon.

Day nine started early, because it was going to be a long drive north to the kibbutz where their older daughter was doing her national service for the year. My friend had invited her husband along, mostly so that he could do the driving, but also because we were visiting their two oldest children, so, it only seemed fair. The further north we went, the more farmland and undeveloped land we passed, and the longer we went without seeing a McDonald’s sign. If getting to Caesarea by public transportation was inconvenient, getting to the kibbutz was pretty much impossible without a car, and my friend told me that a lot of the kids in the area hitchhiked, either standing on the side of the road with a hand out, or more often, using an app for Tremping. I was sure I’d misheard, because it sounded like she was calling her daughter a “tramp,” like, a loose woman, or like an old-time hobo jumping on cargo trains, carrying a stick and a dream, but it turned out that the Hebrew word Tremp comes from the German Trampen, and just means hitchhiking.

I can’t think of anyone I know in New York who would be okay with their kids hitchhiking, but in Israel it seemed to be considered normal, and my friend had had to adapt, to the point where her kids kept trying to convince her to stop and pick up random young people from the side of the road, to pay back all the rides that had been given to them.

When we arrived at the kibbutz, I finally met their older daughter again (the last time I’d see her was when she was a little girl, chasing my dog, Butterfly, around a field in Upstate New York, and happy to be chased in return). I’d seen pictures of her over the years, of course, but seeing her in person, and hearing her voice, was like flashing back to high school and seeing my friend as a young woman all over again; the same casual confidence, the playful glint in her eye, and a very strong tendency to give side eye. She had recruited one of older members of the kibbutz to give us a tour, and as he offered us fresh dates (the favored crop of the kibbutz), he showed us entrances to the old shelters, which hid underground rooms the size of a ballfield, and then he took us to a model of the original kibbutz layout, and told us stories about the early years. When my friend and her husband mentioned that they’d been dreaming about moving north, the old man made it clear that they don’t accept new members over age forty at this particular kibbutz, and I got a chance to see that my friend is still an expert at giving side eye herself.

The model of the kibbutz from its early days

We ate lunch at a small café at the kibbutz next door, and my friend’s husband said that he’d actually lived at this second kibbutz for four months when he first moved to Israel, and he could still hear echoes of the older members yelling at him to stay off the grass.

As we drove back to the first kibbutz to drop their daughter back at work, she leaned over and pointed out a mountain in the not-too-far distance and told me, “That’s Jordan.” Good thing Israel isn’t at war with Jordan, anymore, because there’s barely a breath between the two countries at that point. She also made a valiant effort to try to recruit me to convince her parents to stay until ten or eleven o’clock at night, so she could catch a ride home with them after work, but suffice it to say, her campaign was unsuccessful.

The date trees that are ubiquitous in this area
Jordan, not too far in the distance

Once she was safely offloaded, we drove further north to pick up their eldest at his school and then went to the more touristy kibbutz where his girlfriend worked, right on the Kineret (the Sea of Galilee). We sat outside, on all-weather couches, and watched the sun set on the water, listening to American eighties music and watching the Christian touring boats go out to see where Jesus had walked on water. I hovered in and out of the conversations around me, leaving father and son to compare German and Israeli beer, and mother and son to discuss family vacation dates, without my help. And then it was time to leave. We dropped their son off at the Moshav where he was living and headed south again, stopping once to pick up some barbecue for dinner (brisket and chummus and sauces in something like pizza dough, tasty but challenging to eat in the back seat of a moving car). I closed my eyes at some point, so the trip back to Modiin seemed much quicker than the trip north that morning.

One of the touring boats, at sunset on the Kineret

By the time we got back to their apartment, I had just enough energy left to take a shower, pack what I could pack, and get ready for bed. At some point overnight, I heard later, their older daughter had arrived, using the Tremping app successfully, and fell asleep in her younger sister’s room, since I was still occupying hers.

Everyone was very busy the next morning, so it was just me and my friend in the car on the ride to the airport. She came with me as far as she was allowed – which was a good thing, because I managed to trip over myself again trying to organize my bags. She made sure I was safely on the security line, and upright, before giving me a hug and heading off to manage the rest of the day’s activities.

I remembered to take my computer (which I had not used at all) out of my bag for the security check, and showed my electronic boarding pass and passport to everyone who asked, and then I wandered through the duty-free stores, filling the last few spots in my bag with packages of Krembos and baklava to bring home to Mom.

Once again, the staff rejected my electronic boarding pass at the El Al counter, but they replaced it quickly with a paper boarding pass, and then we had to wait on line while they hand checked everyone’s bags. I had a nice moment with the security guy, vibing over the Krembo packages in my bag (ayn al Krembo/there’s nothing like Krembo), but when I struggled to reclose my suitcase fast enough, he got snippy with me, telling me to drag my open bags to the side before trying to close them.  A nice older woman helped me repack my bags, and unruffle my feathers, and I made my way onto the plane.

This time, when the entertainment screen asked for my preferred language, I chose English, and managed to watch 14 of the 15 episodes of The Pitt to fill the 12-hour flight (more about that in another post, I think). It was a little after six pm when we arrived at JFK, and when I switched my phone back to its regular American carrier and texted Mom, she was already on her way with the car service (thank god, because if I’d had to navigate my way out of JFK on my own, after a 12 hour flight with no sleep, I would have curled up in a corner of the airport and cried).

The ride home was quick and painless, and Tzipporah was right there in her bed when I walked into the apartment, as if I’d never left. It was a relief to be back home, and back to my regular routines (laundry, food shopping, teaching, combing a reluctant puppy dog), but part of my mind was still back in Israel, wondering what everyone was doing, and which salatim they were having for Shabbat dinner.

Even a month later, I still feel like I have one foot on Long Island and one foot back in Israel, and I keep thinking of more places I want to visit on my next trip: like Haifa, and Mitzpe Ramon, and maybe next time I’ll have the emotional fortitude to visit the memorials in the Gaza envelope area for the people who were killed on October 7th, though maybe not. All I know for sure is that I want to go back. Not right away; I need to rest and recover first, and save up money for the next set of adventures. But soon.

“Bring me some Shawarma next time, and maybe I’ll let you go. Maybe.”

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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