Shpilkes is a Yiddish word that literally means “pins,” but has come to refer to “sitting on pins and needles,” or, feeling fidgety and nervous and needing to move.
When I teach this word to my students, I tend to liken it to the ADHD symptoms they see in so many of their classmates (because even the undiagnosed kids seem to have shpilkes by the end of a long school day, which is when they come to me). This time, I was sitting with a mixed age group of kids, from second to sixth grade, for our twenty-minute elective period at the end of synagogue school for the day, and we were all exhausted and ready to go home.
I gave them the option of sitting at their desks or on the floor, but most of them chose to sit at their desks, except for the one girl who chose to sit in my rolling chair, so I sat on the floor by myself. Whatever. As a warm up, I asked them to repeat the word “shpilkes” with me, over and over, because it’s just fun to say. We’d already done a session on Kvetching (complaining) before the holiday break, and I knew we weren’t ready to move straight to Kvelling (expressing joy at someone else’s accomplishments), so shpilkes was the next step on our Yiddish ladder.
“Kvelling sounds terrible.”
Once they’d giggled through the word a few times, I asked them if they had ever experienced having shpilkes themselves, or if they knew someone else who struggled to sit still, and they told stories about friends who couldn’t sit still, or couldn’t shut up, though no one was willing to jump in yet and admit that they themselves might struggle with sitting still. Then, one girl raised her hand shyly and said, I know someone who’s the opposite. She can get so focused on reading a book that she doesn’t hear what’s going on around her.
I asked if anyone else knew someone who could get so caught up, or if they’d experienced something like that themselves, and the stories kept coming. And then one of them asked, do you know the feeling when a song gets stuck in your head and you can’t get it out! Which led to an in-depth discussion of earworms and what causes them and how to treat them. One girl had developed a whole theory, saying that earworms are caused when you forget some of the lyrics to a song you like, so your brain just keeps repeating the song to try and remember the lost words. Her suggested treatment was to go to Spotify and listen to the song until the earworm crawled away in defeat, which, she said, worked every time.
Aren’t our brains fascinating?! I said, from my seat on the floor. By then, one of the students had joined me on the floor, because all this talk of shpilkes had reminded him that chairs and desks are confining and it’s much more comfortable to stretch out.
But, what about when one friend has shpilkes and the other friend has to deal with the consequences? Because, my friend keeps getting us into trouble when she talks in class, and she can’t help it, but we’re going to get kicked out and I really like that class.
To which one of the younger boys said, Yeah, it’s hard when you can’t understand why someone acts the way they do, even though you still like them and want to spend time with them. I’m paraphrasing, but only a little.
And with minutes left to go, and so many more stories to tell and hands raised and legs swinging, I asked them if they’d ever seen a show called Glee (a few of them had, actually. Streaming makes everything new again). Glee was a TV show about a high school glee club, where they often took two songs from different genres and mashed them toegther, and sometimes, not all the time, the mash-up allowed us to hear each song in a new way because of how the two songs spoke to each other. The kids didn’t even need me to hammer the point home. They already had their hands up with stories to share about their friends who are really different from them but make life so interesting.
Of course, my most literal student asked if I could supply examples, and I did try to find something from Glee on my phone, but the dismissal announcement interrupted me, and then we had to focus on listening to the walkie talkie calling out names one by one. But even then, more stories were spilling out, and each story reminded someone of another story, and another.
It doesn’t always go like this. My current regular class has so much collective shpilkes that it feels like we’re hiking through a tornado just to get from the beginning of a sentence to the end. But sitting on the floor, listening to the stories flow around the room, reminded me that they all have so much going on inside of them, and sometimes, if I’m very lucky, they will share their stories with me in a way I can hear them.
“I only get Shpilkes in the middle of the night, when everyone else is sleeping.“
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?
I’ve been watching videos in Hebrew for a while now, to practice my listening skills and to get a wider sense of Israeli culture, and one of the richest sources for short (2-15 minute) videos is Kan Digital, the online section of the public broadcasting channel in Israel. I have no idea how many of these videos actually end up on TV in Israel, but there are tons of them available on YouTube; along with a really great interview series by Orit Navon that delves into serious subjects (mental illness, living with disability, bullying, grief, having one Jewish and one Muslim parent), there are also videos by a variety of reporters/performers from different segments of Israeli society (religious and secular, Ethiopian and Russian, Israeli Arab, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, etc.), on a wide range of subjects, from serious, fact-based pieces on how Israeli elections work, to slice of life videos about working from home during Covid, to a dance video on how to choose a watermelon.
Orit Navon
Recently, I saw a video from one of the usually less serious performers/reporters (he did the watermelon video), where he’s sitting in what looks like a real therapy session, or a very close facsimile thereof, and both the reporter (Ehud Azriel Meir) and the therapist seem to be from the Religious Zionist community (roughly equivalent to Modern Orthodox in America – which you can tell from their crocheted kippot and casual clothes, as opposed to the more formal clothing and black hats worn by Haredim/ultra-orthodox). I’d seen a lot of videos from Ehud before; he did a whole series where he was supposedly sent to work with the Arabic language division at Kan to create educational videos about Jewish holidays and rituals, and each video in the series poked fun at all of the assumptions Jews and Muslims and Christians in Israel make about each other. It was silly and light, but also allowed for a pretty deep exploration of social conflicts Israelis grapple with on a daily basis. In general, Ehud’s videos are like this, characterized by humor and a willingness to show his own flaws and mistakes, but the video with the therapist had a much more serious tone than I was used to from him.
Ehud Azriel Meir
The therapy session starts with Ehud’s feelings of guilt at wanting to vote for someone other than the Religious Zionist candidate in the coming election. He believes that if he votes for “the other” candidate, he’s not only letting his own side down, he’s letting the other side win (though in Israel’s multi-party system there are always more than two options). This led to a discussion of the moment he started to feel some alienation from his own political party, which is also his religious community, way back in the 1990’s, when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. Before the assassination, Ehud, as a teenager, took part in a lot of the demonstrations against Rabin’s push for the Oslo Accords. He and his fellow Religious Zionists believed strongly that the accords would lead to more terrorism rather than to peace, and they were loud and vehement in their opinions, calling Rabin a traitor and a murderer. And then, Yigal Amir, also a Religious Zionist, shot and killed Rabin at a peace rally.
For Ehud, Rabin’s murder was a moment of awakening. It truly devastated him that this man, who was like a father to him and to the country as a whole, had been killed by someone on “his side.” He had never considered the possibility that people were taking those screamed epithets literally, but when he and his friends tried to go to the vigils to mourn Rabin with the rest of Israel, they were turned away. And, still today, he resented that the secular Israelis blamed him for Rabin’s death, and he felt like it would be disloyal to his own group, and to himself, to vote with them on anything, even when he agreed with their policies.
The therapist pushed Ehud to acknowledge that his strong feelings around all of this might mean that he did feel somewhat responsible for Rabin’s murder, and that maybe he was uncomfortable in both the Religious and the secular worlds because he was still trying to avoid facing those feelings of guilt. Ehud bristled at that idea, but the therapist persisted, suggesting that in order for him to be at peace with having one foot in each camp, he needed to wrestle with the ways he himself believed that his actions long ago may have done harm, and to acknowledge that no matter how much he treasured his identity as a Religious Zionist, that wasn’t all of who he was.
There was something really powerful for me in watching this usually very un-serious guy, now grumbling and uncomfortable, being willing to share his discomfort and uncertainty with the public, in case it might do some good. And his internal conflict resonated with me too, even more so because he used the words Gam ve Gam (Both/And) to describe his feeling of being both a Religious Zionist, and something else as well.
Whenever I start a new semester of online Hebrew classes, I’m asked if I prefer my name to be pronounced the English way or the Hebrew way, and I always say Gam ve Gam, both because I grew up going to Jewish day schools where half the day I was one and half the day I was the other, but also because the feeling of having different parts of me that fit in with different groups is a big part of my everyday life. It can be really hard to live in the Both/And. I’m never sure if I should stand with one foot in each camp, or hop from one side to the other, or stand in the middle all by myself. More often than not, I feel like I have to hide parts of myself, or act in ways that feel wrong to me in order to fit in.
“I like both chicken treats AND Greenies.”
Watching this video reminded me of the traditional Ashamnu prayer that we say during the Jewish high holidays each year, where we pound our chests and admit to all of the possible sins that may have been done by a member of our community. That level of exaggerated responsibility has always bothered me, because I work so hard to make sure I do no harm, and it doesn’t seem fair that I should have to take responsibility for Joe Schmo over there who couldn’t care less who he hurts. It’s not even clear which community the prayer is referring to: does it include all Jews? All Jews on Long Island? All human beings on earth?
But now I wonder if the prayer is trying to get at the collective guilt we tend to feel when someone from our own political party, or tribe, or family, does something wrong. Even if we are not directly responsible for an evil act, we may have played a role in creating the conditions for that evil act to take place; or maybe our strongly held beliefs led us to encourage someone in the direction that led them astray; or maybe we were silent when we knew we should speak up, because we were afraid of being kicked out of the group; or maybe we felt responsible simply because outsiders told us that we were responsible, because they see our group as a single entity rather than a collection of individuals.
Once a year, this prayer gives us the opportunity to acknowledge those complex feelings of communal guilt, and reminds us that we need to recognize the impact we can have on the people around us, whether we intend that impact or not. And maybe most of all, the prayer reminds us that even when we disagree with our fellow community members, and speak up against them, we are still part of that community and that community is still a part of us.
I had a Creative Non-fiction teacher back in graduate school who told us that in order to write a good essay (for her class, at least), we needed to write about two seemingly unrelated subjects at once. For example, if you’re writing about pizza, you could also write about existential philosophy; or if you are writing about fashion, you could also look back at a memory from a childhood dance class, or a nature walk, or a chess game. Because, she said, the most interesting material comes from the way those two unrelated topics brush up against each other and create something new. And I think that’s true of more than just a good essay. When I live my life in both A and B (and often in C and D and E as well), the friction that comes from those mashups creates a lot of sparks, and what would our lives be like without all of those sparks to help light the way forward?
“You said pizza. I didn’t hear anything after that.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
Over the past year or so, I’ve been listening to an English language podcast by Sruli Fruchter (formerly the editor of The Commentator at Yeshiva University, now a rabbinical student in Jerusalem) as part of an educational platform called the 18Forty Project, which asks the same 18 questions (basically) of forty diverse Israeli thinkers. The goal of the podcast is to give the English-speaking world a wide and thorough understanding of where different groups in Israel stand on the issues of the day (politically, ethically, religiously), and it is a potent reminder that Israel is a democracy, rather than an autocracy; which means that all of the people have a voice, as opposed to most countries in the Middle East, where the leadership of a country (like, say, Iran) can be laser focused on one goal for 40 years (like, say, destroying Israel). These interviews also make it clear that democracy is messy, and full of compromises and disagreement, and it isn’t always rational, or linear, as we have clearly experienced in America’s democracy as well.
The first few interviews I watched/listened to on YouTube were with Israeli journalists I knew from other venues (Haviv Rettig Gur and Yossi Klein Halevi), and I found the questions interesting, even if the answers were familiar, so I decided to look for more interviews with less well-known (to me) figures. The interviews don’t exist in a time vacuum, so an interview that took place early in the war with Hamas will have a different vibe than one that happened after the 12-day war with Iran, but because of the consistent format (those eighteen questions) you can get a pretty solid idea of where each of these thinkers would land, independent of when you meet them. Some of the 18 questions include: Is Zionism still necessary now that the state of Israel exists? Which is more important for Israel: Judaism or democracy? And, how have your views on politics and religion changed, if at all, since October 7th?
What happened for me, over time, was that I came to trust the format, and the interviewer, despite the fact that he looks a lot like my oldest nephew (aka very young), or maybe because he seemed so familiar, which allowed me to go with him in his curiosity as he interviewed Israeli voices further and further from the center. There was one interview that stood out for me, with Rabbanit Shani Taragin, who is part of the settler movement. This woman, voicing her sincere hope that as a result of the current war she and her family will be able to return to Gaza, is far outside my comfort zone as a progressive American Jew. She and her family lived in Gaza before the disengagement in 2005, when the prime minister at that time, Ariel Sharon, following the advice of Israel’s international friends (especially The United States) ordered the Israeli army to remove all Jewish presence from Gaza, from the Israeli army bases down to the Jewish bodies buried in the ground. The goal of the disengagement was to hand over control of the Gaza strip to the Palestinians, in the hope that creating distance between the two communities would lead to peace. Unfortunately, Hamas quickly took over (through a combination of elections and killing of the opposition) which has led, clearly, to the opposite of peace.
It is practically dogma that the biggest obstacle to a two-state solution, and therefore to peace between Israel and the Palestinians, is the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories (in Gaza, before 2005, and in the West Bank/Judea and Samaria still today). This has been accepted wisdom for a very long time, even though the first small settlements only started after Israel won the 1967 war and the hoped-for land for peace deals with the surrounding Arab countries failed to take place (the answer from every Arab country at that time was a firm no, to any deal, of any kind). Because of the lack of a peace deal, Israel remained in control of the land, and allowed some Jewish people to settle there; some wanted to return to the property they owned before the 1948 war, and some wanted to create settlements to reinforce security for the borders of official Israel, and some saw the land as an essential part of greater Israel as described in the Hebrew Bible and believed that it was God’s will that they should live there.
“Oy.”
Eventually, after the peace deal with Egypt, which traded the Sinai desert for peace (and specifically did not include the Gaza strip, at Egypt’s request, even though Gaza had been under Egyptian control from 1948 to 1967), when negotiations began with the Palestinians themselves (rather than with the surrounding Arab countries), the Jewish settlements in the territories became a sticking point, among others, in the discussions of a two-state solution. The other big obstacle to peace was the fact that Hamas, and other Palestinian groups, refused any offer of peace that allowed Israel to continue to exist, and used terrorism to disrupt the attempts of more moderate Palestinians to make peace with Israel. Hamas is not alone in its belief that Israel shouldn’t exist, and that the land from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean Sea belongs to the Arabs; it’s one of the slogans repeated often at pro-Palestinian demonstrations, though when translated into English it changes to “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
So, is it terrorism, or is it the settlements that prevented peace? Or something else? There is so much history here, and so much dogma, and so much misinformation and confusion, that it is all very difficult to untangle and absorb. And given all of the bad feelings about the role of the settlements in preventing peace, the idea that I would have been willing to sit down and listen to someone from the settler movement, for more than an hour, with an open mind and even compassion, was hard to imagine. But Sruli Fruchter’s gentle style, and his patience and respect, in this interview as with all of the others, allowed me to hear this woman’s often thoughtful and surprising answers. And listening to her opened a door for me, to read more articles and listen to more interviews, from Israel Unpacked and The Times of Israel and Haviv Rettig Gur, that went into more depth on the settlements and helped me to understand that there are many different groups under the umbrella of “settlers,” most of whom are non-violent, and many of whom are left wing and even secular, often living in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) because property is more affordable there than elsewhere in Israel. The more violent segment of the settler movement, sometimes known as The Hilltop Youth, many of whom are part of the community that was forcibly removed from Gaza by Israeli soldiers 20 years ago, aim their anger and violence not only at the Palestinians but also at the Israeli soldiers who come to intervene. It gets even more complicated, because sometimes the settlers are responding to genuine acts of terror by Hamas or Islamic Jihad, and sometimes they are punishing whole villages for the acts of a few, and sometimes they are just attacking for what looks like no good reason (I’m sure they have their own reasons for who they target, but it looks chaotic from the outside). And, some Israeli soldiers sympathize with the Hilltop Youth and take the side of the settlers instead of protecting the Palestinian civilians, even when the settlers are clearly in the wrong.
Suffice it to say, the gap between the Hilltop Youth and this woman being interviewed by Sruli Fruchter, is vast, and yet, before listening to her, I would have assumed they were one and the same. And even though listening to her didn’t change my opinion about the danger of allowing Jews to resettle in Gaza, it helped me to have more compassion for the people who hope for that with all their hearts, and to have more understanding of why this conflict is as complicated and intractable as it has become.
These interviews also allowed me to hear from Arab Israeli thinkers and activists, and far left Jewish voices, and right-wing rabbis, and historians, and former peaceniks who are now hawks, all of whom disagree with each other, vehemently, about what constitutes reality and what Israel needs to do to reach peace. I think these voices were chosen because they could do the best job of advocating (in English) for their particular points of view, so that we could have a better idea of what the war of ideas in Israel actually looks like, rather than hearing from people who just scream epithets at each other (which is as large a feature of Israeli politics as it is in America), which would set up each argument as a straw man that could easily be knocked down.
I am still confused, for myself, about what’s true, and what will or won’t work, and what’s fair, but I feel like I have a much better grasp on the range of opinions involved, and the actions that have been tried and have failed, and the hopes and prejudices that keep people engaged in the fight, than I ever had before.
I’m not imagining that many people who read this blog post are going to watch or listen to all forty hour-plus-long interviews, but maybe one or two of them could spark someone’s curiosity and create a little more bandwidth for the understanding that this conflict cannot be solved, or judged, in a hashtag.
I’m also hoping that the 18Forty Project decides to keep going with these interviews, maybe reaching even farther afield to the non-Israeli figures who are intimately involved in the discussions and would play a role in any potential resolution of the conflict (though I feel pretty protective of this nephew-look-a-like, so I don’t want anyone sending him to places where his safety would be at risk). For now, since the forty planned interviews have been completed, Sruli and his team have been creating something like mixtapes, a collection of a tapas platters of different voices on specific questions, cut and pasted from the already existing interviews. It’s yet another way of opening a door, so that if you watch one of the collections and hear a voice that captures your attention, you can then go and watch the whole interview and learn more.
There are a bunch of interviews that I want to go back and listen to again myself, either because I fell asleep halfway through (don’t judge, I usually listen to these at bedtime when I can’t keep my eyes open but still need something to crowd out the silence), or because there was so much to take in that I couldn’t absorb it all in one session. There were also a few interviews that I gave up on halfway through, for any number of reasons, and I may have to push myself to sit through those again as well, just to be fair. We’ll see.
“Oy. Again.”
Some links from the series, if you’re interested in dipping a toe in:
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?
So, I finished writing a novel. It’s called Hebrew Lessons, and it’s a love story between an American Jew and an Israeli Jew, including all of the cultural divides that have to be overcome, or can’t be overcome. I’m really happy with the story, and my Beta readers gave it a thumbs up, but now that means I have to go on the agent search again, and I’m dragging my feet. The publishing world has not been an especially welcoming place for me, and I’m dreading the rejection, and the critiques, and the roller coaster of hope and disappointment that I went through last time, with Yeshiva Girl.
But before I can even get to all of that, I have to sit down and write a query letter, and a plot summary, and research potential agents, and my brain is not letting me go there. I’ve come so close to acceptance by the literary world, but never close enough, and there’s no guarantee that this time will be any different. Part of me wants to just self-publish the novel and maybe get a few nice responses and leave it at that. Another part wishes I could hand the book off to someone else – to query agents and write a synopsis and copy edit, etc. – and move on to writing the next novel. But I’ve worked hard on this novel, and I want to give it the best chance to be read, and loved, if at all possible.
I wish I had the self-confidence to send my work out as consistently as other people seem to be able to do, but it takes me a long time to recover between bouts, and each small step feels like hiking a mountain range. Even the tiny steps I’ve already taken to research the changes in the marketplace have been overwhelming; there has been an explosion of critiquing sites, and self-publishing companies, and writing and publishing blogs with wildly contradictory advice that have appeared since the last time I investigated all of this, and it feels impossible to figure out what’s legitimate and what’s a scam, what’s necessary and what’s irrelevant.
I don’t understand how other authors make their way through all of this chaos, but then again, the publishing world has never really made sense to me. I’ve never been able to understand the rules of the business of writing: the very specific categories each book needs to fit into, or why one author gets lauded and another can’t even get published. Despite years of effort, the mysteries of the publishing world are still mysteries to me, and yet, I can’t stop being a writer and I can’t stop wanting people to read my work. Believe me, I’ve tried. So, I guess I’m diving back into the deep, dark, possibly shark-infested waters.
Wish me luck!
“Did you say sharks?!”
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?
Sometime over the winter, one of the rabbis at my synagogue announced that there would be a week-long volunteer trip to Israel in August, for teenagers and adults, and, oh yeah, they were applying for a grant to subsidize half the cost of the trip.
That was all the information available at the time, but I already knew I wanted to go, desperately. I fought against the loud voice in my head telling me that going to Israel during the hottest month of the year, and volunteering, most likely outdoors, would be impossible for me, because the idea of going to Israel with people I knew, and being able to learn more about the situation on the ground, and to be of use, at an affordable price, just seemed like the answer to a lot of my prayers.
So, I started to prepare myself. I wrote out a long list of what I’d need to bring with me (meds, sunblock, water bottle, adapters for the electricity, sim card for the phone, a week’s worth of clothes, Icy Hot patches, extra pain meds, etc.), and I wrote through all of the reasons not to go (fear of the effect of the heat on my autoimmune symptoms, fear of being lonely, fear of pain and exhaustion, fear that something would happen to Mom or Tzipporah while I was gone, fear that I would be too shy to use my Hebrew, fear of feeling bored, or trapped, or disappointed, or confused, etc.). And then I wrote out as many ideas as I could think of for how to deal with those fears.
“Wait, what’s going to happen to ME?!
But despite all of my efforts, I couldn’t plan for the trip until I knew exactly what the trip would entail. So, I reached out to the rabbi with my concerns (how much time would be spent outdoors, would the volunteering activities be things I could actually do, would there be rest periods for recovery, etc.), and she sent me the planned itinerary, with the proviso that, because all of the volunteering locations were small and relatively new, there wouldn’t be any room for adaptations.
And it looked amazing! They would barely be staying in one place for more than a day, traveling to the north and the south and in between, meeting people who were rebuilding in the north after a year of bombing from Hezbollah, and meeting Israelis of all religious backgrounds working to help each other, and meeting families of those who were killed on October seventh, and families of hostages, and Palestinian citizens of Israel, and helping rebuild the agriculture sector in the south that was impacted both by October seventh and by so many men being pulled into the army reserves and out of the fields. There was one afternoon set aside for potential beach time, but other than that, free time didn’t exist.
I was in awe of the opportunity to meet so many different people working in so many different parts of Israeli society, and the more I read, the more I wanted to go. But no matter how I tried to move things around in my mind, and research all of the sites and turn the pages this way and that, it became clear that I would barely survive day one, let alone a whole week. Except, a big part of me was still in denial, imagining that if I just spent the next few months in physical therapy, and had a miraculous recovery from all of my health issues before August, and maybe found myself a full-body airconditioned suit to wear, I’d be okay.
The tour guide who would be leading the trip (and who had been leading bi-weekly zooms for us since October seventh, to help us understand how Israelis were reacting to the Hamas attack and the ensuing war), came to the synagogue for an in-person visit leading up to registration for the trip. I sat in the sanctuary and listened to his impassioned thoughts on the current political turmoil in Israel, and the moral quandaries of the war, and the grief and anger around the hostages still trapped in Gaza, and the communal efforts to support those who were struggling, and I could envision myself in Israel, marching for the hostages, and marching for democracy. In my imagination I could walk for miles, in the heat, singing and calling out at the top of my lungs, even though I’ve never been able to do anything like that here at home.
At one point in the evening, when I was sitting next to the older rabbi from our congregation, who had either led or participated in every previous synagogue trip to Israel, and who had marched in many protests over the years, I told him how much I wanted to go on this trip, and he told me that he would not be going because it would be too much for him. “But, but doesn’t it look amazing?!” I asked, and he shrugged and said, “You can’t do what you can’t do. There will be other trips.”
And the bubble burst. I knew he was right, and that he was speaking as much to my situation as to his, whether he meant to or not. Of course I couldn’t go on this trip, and it felt awful to have to know that; just like it feels awful every time I have to accept a reality I don’t like. You would think I’d be more practiced at handling disappointment by now, but I suck at it every single time.
I still made a point of applying for a new passport though (after years of putting it off), just in case, and I kept my packing list and my research on the different volunteering sites, and I continued to add hundreds of Israel-related videos to my YouTube watchlist to fill out my understanding of the culture and the people. One day, hopefully not too far in the future, the right opportunity to go to Israel will come up, and in the meantime I will keep doing the work I am capable of doing so that I’m ready to go when the time comes.
“Puppy, cover my ears!”
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?
One of the things I have had to learn how to do since I started teaching in the synagogue school is how to improvise. You never know what mood the kids will be in after a long day at public school, or what changes will come up in the outside world, or in our own worlds, and really, there has been a lot of change in the Jewish world over the past six years. Each year, there’s also the reality that a different group of kids will have different interests and different abilities and limitations, and I have to adapt my plans to fit what works best for them.
“Do you know what works for me? Chicken.”
It has turned out that, this year, the one thing all of my students seem to love is performing; and while some of them like to sing, or dance, or tell jokes, they all like to act. I discovered this mostly by accident one Sunday morning, when one of my most energetic and curious students looked at the day’s quote from Leviticus, and dropped her head onto her desk and asked, “Why are there so many words in this book? What happened to all of the stories?”
And she was absolutely right. Other than an interlude wherein two of Aaron’s priestly sons are killed for, um, inappropriate practices in front of God (which I did not share with my students, for obvious reasons), most of Leviticus is made up of a list of laws: fascinating and complex laws, divisive and bizarre laws, laws that only applied in the past and laws that can still serve us well today. And all of that can definitely lead to interesting discussions and many stories shared from their own lives, but it’s true, there aren’t many good stories in the text itself. So I, literally, tossed my lesson plan aside and asked her and her classmates which stories they remembered learning the year before, when they studied the book of Exodus, or the year before that, from Genesis. It became clear that though they remembered a lot of details, they tended to assign them to the wrong stories and often had no idea of the order of events (was it Moses who put all of the animals in the ark? And then he split the sea and ate an apple, right?). Instead of correcting them, I thought it would be more fun to have them act out the stories, one scene at a time, from the beginning.
By the time the bell rang for the end of class, we were halfway across the sea of reeds (with Moses) and each student had played at least three roles (God, Isaac, and the dove, or Noah and God and Leah, for example). And it was fantastic! And exhausting. We had to drag ourselves through the rest of the activities of the morning. But the following week, they begged to do more of Genesis or Exodus, which was, as you can imagine, unusual. I did my best to add more acting into my lesson plans after that, though I had to argue for the value of singing, dancing, drawing, and writing, as well.
And then, as a gift to the synagogue school from a generous congregant, we had a visit from a Jewish improv group, called The Bible Players (https://www.thebibleplayers.com/). They came for our last school day before Passover and worked with every possible age group. First they worked with the teachers, so we could learn how to lead some of the improvisations ourselves and adapt them for different holidays and lessons (they also gave us a packet full of every activity they’d done with us, and plenty more that we didn’t have time to try), and then they worked directly with the kids – getting them to play different characters, and mirror each other, and laugh and imagine and be brave and play. By the end of their time with The Bible Players, my otherwise sarcastic, eye-rolling students were glossy-eyed with joy and asking when they would be able to do it all again. How about tomorrow? Could we come back to synagogue school tomorrow and do it again?!
And, of course, part of me was sitting back and saying, hey, what about me? Am I not fun? Didn’t I come up with exciting, enlightening, and innovative activities all year long? But a larger part of me was already looking through the packet of activities and planning how to add them into my lesson plans. They had taught us an especially effective clapping game to get the kids to quiet down that I intended to practice right away.
The reality is, my next class of students may not love acting in the same way, and not every activity will work out, nor will I be able to match the level of enthusiasm and buy-in of the Bible Players, but they taught me something I’ve been struggling to embrace on my own: not only are we always improvising, but as teachers, we are at our best when we are improvising. In fact, if we know 100% what we’re going to do next, in class or in life, we are going to be bored, or bore everyone else. Learning needs to be exciting, and engaging, and interactive in order to work.
I wish I could say that I am always ready to try something new, and always eager and open to new challenges, but I am really not. I move towards change reluctantly, and with as much side-eye as any of my students. I was exhausted the day the Bible Players came to teach us, and annoyed, and shy, and wishing I could just go home and take a nap. It wasn’t until I saw how much my students loved what they were doing that I started to open up and embrace the possibilities. Though, of course, when I tried the really effective clapping game, after the Passover break, it did not work at all, and a couple of the girls made sure to tell me that, “that was so two weeks ago.”
To be honest, I am really ready for summer break. I am exhausted in every way. I have a lot of students this year, and they are all challenging and fascinating and full of energy and full of piss and vinegar, and they take pretty much all of my energy in every class. My one week off for Passover did not even begin to remedy the bone-deep fatigue that has set in, and yet, I’m still revising lesson plans to finish out the school year, and I’m still excited to try new things and see how they go over, and I’m still looking for new skills to learn so I can give my next batch of students more of what they need. It’s intoxicating to always be learning, and growing; and being in the classroom is like a whirlwind that I get caught up in every time, whether I mean to or not, and whether my body can sustain the effort or not.
So, I will gratefully take my summer to recover and recharge, and then I will try it all over again next year, with the next class, improvising every step of the way, and hoping to get things right at least as often as I get them wrong.
“Is it nap time?”
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?
I don’t understand all of the people who were able to clean their houses top to bottom, switch over to Passover dishes, AND cook for 18 to 20 people, all before vacation even started. It makes no sense to have vacation during Passover if the house needs to be cleaned for Passover. There was no way I was going to have the energy to do spring cleaning (going through every cabinet, vacuuming every corner and under every piece of furniture, etc., etc.) when I was also working and trying to live up to my regular commitments. It was only when I got a week off – during Passover – that I had the time and energy to even start cleaning.
This is clearly a holiday for people who are more organized, and more energetic than I have ever been, or for people who can afford to go to specially prepared Passover hotels, where families can spend the whole week away and never have to clean their houses for Passover in the first place.
Having a week off from teaching allowed me to notice all of the things I had left undone during the school year, of course. And I finally forced myself to go through my drawer-of-papers, and realized that I hadn’t opened the damned thing since before Covid, except to shove more papers into it. Tzipporah stayed in her bed in the living room to avoid all of the chaos, and dust, and grumbling noises.
“Puppy, save me!”
I managed to look through all of the clothes in my closet that don’t fit, but might someday, and the medical test results that were supposed to be edifying but weren’t, and all of the lesson plans that I didn’t have a chance to try for one reason or another, and it has been exhausting to look through all of the work I’ve done over the past few years, without much sense of accomplishment or progress to show for it. I tend to think of myself as lazy, because I haven’t reached the goals I’ve set for myself (successful author, diagnosis and treatment for medical issues, overcoming mental health difficulties, etc.), but the piles and piles of evidence tell me that I’ve worked very hard, no matter how little it shows in the outside world.
The heavy emphasis placed on Passover cleaning, or more specifically, cleaning out all of the random crumbs of bread and other leavening that have landed in the corners of our homes, belies the fact that the real purpose of Passover is to celebrate the exodus of the ancient Israelites from Egyptian slavery. The goal is to tell the story, in detail, and thereby to remember that it is possible to get out of the narrow places we are trapped in today and find true freedom. This is always a meaningful lesson, but especially right now in the United States, where our promised land is starting to feel a lot more like ancient Egypt. But even before this particular moment in history, I felt like even though I had escaped the narrow place of my childhood, my own personal Egypt, I am still wandering in the desert; and if God plans for this wandering stage to last forty years, like it did for my ancestors, then I still have a lot of wandering left to do.
Unfortunately, as my rabbi often tells us, the reason for the forty years in the desert was for the generation who had experienced slavery to die out, so that only those who had been born into freedom would enter the promised land. I worry that maybe that will be the case for me too, that the closest I will get to the promised land is these years of wandering and seeing that hope just over the hill, out of reach.
I look at Tzipporah, named after Moses’s wife in the Passover story, not incidentally, and I think she is in the same place as me; she is no longer in the narrow place (the puppy mill), but it seems to me that she is still wandering through the desert, trying to figure out how to feel free.
But now that I think about it, the story we read at the Passover seder each year isn’t really about entering the Promised land. In fact, we end each seder hoping to be in Jerusalem next year; meaning that, no matter where we are in our lives, or in the world, we have not yet reached the promised land. Maybe the real lesson is that everyone will find themselves in a narrow place, at some point in their life, and will need hope and help in order to escape, and even then, that exodus will feel much more like wandering in a desert than like reaching a promised land. And that’s okay. Because the process of standing up for our rights, and believing that we deserve better, and then wandering in the desert, in confusion, trying to figure out how to be free, is the point of the journey. And we go through the Passover seder every year as a way to teach ourselves that the wandering itself is meaningful, and worth all of the effort. No matter how much we might wish for an easier ending to the story.
“And they lived happily ever after…”
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?
I’m loving my new Hebrew class! The Purple level is much more challenging than the previous levels, but in a great way, with more interesting content and vocabulary and homework and conversations. The teacher is fantastic, not just because he knows how to do weird tech stuff like broadcasting announcements to all of the breakout rooms at once, but also because he’s able to keep track of all of our stories and quirks and make sure we are all seen and heard and made part of the flow of the class.
“But what about me?”
The only problem, if there is one, is that I am surrounded by classmates with much more Hebrew fluency than I have. But surprisingly, I don’t really mind. I thought I would prefer being at the top of a lower-level class, but instead I feel energized by how much more there is to learn, and how much more there is to look forward to.
The homework at the purple level is also a lot more fun. We used to just translate sentences, from Hebrew to English or English to Hebrew, to practice our new vocabulary, but in Purple we do something called Field Research, where we take three of the words we learned in class that day and look up blog posts or articles or memes using those new words, then screenshot and post them to our class WhatsApp group. Being me, I spend a lot of time searching, reading dozens of posts until I find something that makes me laugh, or cry, so not only is it fun, but it also forces me to read a lot more Hebrew than I otherwise would have.
My favorite homework, though, and the one that challenges me the most, is when we are given a random topic and told to record ourselves speaking off the cuff in a short voice note, no editing allowed. For now, I tend to talk around the holes in my vocabulary, as if I’m avoiding land mines, but my braver classmates jump right in and bring up new words for us to learn in the next class. We also get to know each other really well, from family stories, pet peeves, and random trivia that would never come up in the course of normal conversations.
Possibly because of the voice note practice, or maybe because I’m just like this anyway, I’ve been talking to myself a lot in Hebrew lately, telling myself stories from my day and then rushing to Google Translate with a list of words that I now need to know how to say in Hebrew. I am, at least, willing to be more adventurous in my Hebrew speaking when I am only talking to myself. Hopefully, one day, I will have the confidence to just start speaking in public, with no plan for where I will end up.
Somehow, we’re already halfway through this semester, and I am not happy about that at all. We have a short break for Passover, and then Holocaust Remembrance Day, Israeli Memorial Day, and Israeli Independence Day, which all come in a clump, and that will give me an opportunity to feel some of the impending grief at the loss of the class and then dive back in for relief. But I know that when this class really ends, I’m going to resent it. I already feel bad for our next teacher (of course, I’ve already signed up for the next class), because there will be a lot for them to live up to.
“I’d be a great teacher! You’d be barking in no time!”
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?
Starting in elementary school, and now in my online Hebrew classes from Tel Aviv, I’ve been learning Modern Hebrew, the version of the language spoken in Israel today, and it is much more my speed than Biblical Hebrew. The last time I studied Biblical Hebrew, if I ever really studied it, was back in high school, and for the most part I found it impenetrable. The text was most often translated by our teachers, including the six or seven commentaries we would read for each sentence. I mean, sure, if we’d had mysteries written in Biblical Hebrew, I might have paid more attention, but reading through the laws in Leviticus word by word, a sentence or two per day, did not capture my attention.
“Oy. Leviticus.”
But recently, I’ve been making a point of reading along in Hebrew, during Bible study sessions at my synagogue, as someone else reads the English translation out loud, and I’ve started to notice some of the differences between Modern Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew, and to understand why it was all so hard to understand when I was a kid. I’ll find myself reading along, mostly understanding the Hebrew words and feeling pretty good about myself, and then suddenly a word that is clearly in the future tense in the Hebrew will be translated into the past tense in the English, or a word that I was sure I understood from Modern Hebrew will be given an entirely different connotation, and I’ll be lost all over again.
Even though it’s all Hebrew, the gap between Biblical and Modern Hebrew is at least as wide as the gap between today’s English and Shakespeare’s, but probably wider. There were only 8,000 or so attested Hebrew words in the Bible, including words borrowed from Akkadian (used by the Assyrians and Babylonians) and Egyptian and Greek. Today, there are over 100,000 words in Modern Hebrew, including loan words from all of the different cultures Jews have lived in for millennia, including Arabic and English and German and Spanish and Russian and Persian and on and on. In the interim, along with the added vocabulary, the grammar, and syntax, and even pronunciation have also changed, by a lot.
Actually, Hebrew was only the spoken language spoken in ancient Israel until sometime before the Common Era, when Aramaic took over. And then, after the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem, in 70 CE, most of the Jewish population was scattered around the world, and each community spoke the language of their new homes. Biblical Hebrew was still used by the rabbis in their commentaries on the Hebrew Bible, though, and by Jews in general during prayer and study, and as a result, the word count of written Hebrew grew to 20,000 or so, including many words borrowed from Aramaic and other neighboring languages. And then the Medieval sages added another 6,500 words, while writing their own commentaries and sacred poetry.
Eventually, in the 1800’s, a movement to revive spoken Hebrew began, with some Jewish writers using Hebrew to write secular literature, instead of just keeping Hebrew in the study hall or the synagogue anymore. Eliezer Ben Yehuda codified this new version of Hebrew in the early 1900’s, and when the Modern State of Israel was created, Hebrew was chosen as the national language. And today, Modern Hebrew is evolving much more quickly, but it is still the same language. Some words that were used in Biblical Hebrew have been replaced in daily usage with new words in Modern Hebrew, but they still exist. You can even use the older words in your everyday life and be understood, but you will sound kind of like an English speaker reciting Shakespeare as you order your coffee.
The most important discovery, for me, in researching Biblical Hebrew, was the Conversive Vav. This was the mystery that started the whole thing: how are verbs that are written in the future tense in Biblical Hebrew suddenly transformed into the past tense in the English. I found a bunch of long, drawn out, incomprehensible explanations for how the Conversive Vav is used, but suffice it to say that when it shows up it can change future tense into past tense and past tense into future tense. Like magic. In Modern Hebrew, if you find the letter Vav in front of a Hebrew word, it usually means “and,” and if you see something written in the future tense, it remains in the future tense, no hocus pocus allowed.
You can, of course, go much deeper into studying Biblical Hebrew, to the point where you can even date when the different books of the Hebrew Bible may have been written, or figure out which parts of each story may have come from a previous era and were then added into a more recent re-telling of the story. My rabbi is fascinated by all of this stuff, and I’m happy to let him do the work of figuring it out so I don’t have to.
I am not a linguist, or a grammarian, or even a very good speller, but I am fascinated by the idea that a language is a living thing, that changes as the people who speak it change. I still much prefer Modern Hebrew to the Biblical version, but I love that I get to visit my ancestors and hear their particular dialect each time I open the Hebrew Bible. Who knows what future generations will be able to learn about us when they read through our writings? A lot depends on what they will have access to: they could be reading non-fiction histories, or true crime, or young adult science fiction, or page after page of shopping lists from the height of the egg-price crisis. And what they read, and the way they interpret it, will determine who they think we were and what they learn from us.
I often wonder what the rabbis chose to edit out of the Hebrew Bible along the way, and why. I bet my ancestors wrote their own version of shopping lists, and wrote all kinds of other things the rabbis didn’t think we needed to know, for one reason or another. Just imagine, there could be a treasure trove of ancient Biblical fan fiction, or diaries of young girls complaining about the horror of animal sacrifices and all of the chores they had to do around the farm, all buried in a cave somewhere in Israel, waiting to be discovered. If anything like that comes up, I may have to rethink my resistance to learning Biblical Hebrew. Only time will tell.
“How many languages do I have to learn to live in this house?!”
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?
I am starting a new semester of online Hebrew classes, and I’m excited, but also anxious. I’ve been back in these classes since the summer, with renewed energy and purpose after a long break, and all of that effort has paid off, because I am moving up to Purple, the highest level. One of the things I love about Citizen Café, the school where I take my Hebrew classes, is that instead of offering three levels (beginning, intermediate, and advanced) like most language classes for adults, they are continually adding levels so that each student can start and continue in a class that is suited to their real abilities, without being too challenged or too comfortable. I cannot explain their color wheel, though, which starts with Red and Orange and, for now, ends with Purple, and makes stops along the way in Lime, Pink, and Turquoise.
I spent six semesters at the Indigo level, the second to highest level, where there are multiple semesters worth of content to help build vocabulary and fluency, but also a lot of repetition. During my sojourn in Indigo, I kept hoping that they would create a new level, between Indigo and Purple, so I wouldn’t have to keep going over the same material, or move up to the final level, which feels so, I don’t know, final, but no such luck. Eventually, my teachers decided that I was getting too comfortable in Indigo and needed to move up to Purple for a new challenge, and I agreed with them, but now I feel like I’m being thrown into the deep end without my water wings.
From what I hear from friends, purple level is a different animal. The content changes each semester, depending on what the students in each class are interested in, and there are people who have been at the purple level for a dozen semesters or more, to make up for not having anyone in their outside life to speak to in Hebrew. I’m one of the few students at the advanced levels at this school who has never actually been to Israel, let alone lived there, and I worry that I will be intimidated by my classmates who either live in Israel now or have visited many times in the past. At some point soon, I’m sure the school will figure out that if I belong in Purple, then there really should be at least one more level above Purple for the really advanced students. And then they’ll have to come up with a new color to add to their color wheel, like ultra-violet, or maybe chartreuse.
I’m sure that, originally, when they were teaching classes in person in cafes around Tel Aviv, they assumed their students would only stay for a few semesters, since they’d already done their official six months in Ulpan (when you move to Israel, you take a six-month Hebrew course subsidized by the government). They probably thought that all their students would need was some practice and fine tuning and then they’d be ready to get a job and continue to work on their Hebrew with their new Israeli friends, but the reality is that Hebrew is really hard to learn, and most Israelis are too busy, or too impatient, or too terrible at grammar themselves to be of much help. And most people want to be able to do more than just read road signs or buy cherry tomatoes at the Shuk, they want to be able to watch (and understand) the news, or read novels at the beach, or scream at their friends over loud music at a party and actually know what’s being said back to them. So, the school grew.
But something else also happened along the way. Once the school went online, during covid, they found out that they had a lot of potential students who didn’t live in Israel at all. Suddenly there were students from around the world who wanted to learn Hebrew before moving to Israel, or so they could speak Hebrew with their Israeli wife’s family, or chat with their grandkids over Zoom. And then there were people, like me, who wanted to speak Hebrew for a million reasons other than moving to Israel. There are a lot of us who are fascinated with Hebrew for reasons of culture, ancestry, community, connection, family and on and on, rather than just wanting to be able to navigate the bus routes from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.
I am still, usually, the only person in my classes who has never been to Israel, though. And hopefully, someday soon, I will be able to afford a trip, but for now, I’m doing my best to travel there in my mind, and on Zoom, and it is bringing me a lot of satisfaction, and a lot of joy, and just a little bit of crippling anxiety.
“I understand anxiety, new 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?
rachelmankowitz 