Tag Archives: Jewish

The Memory of Kishinev

Posted on February 10, 2024 by rachelmankowitz

            On October 7th, 2023, when I started to see media reports of the Hamas attack on southern Israel, I was at a loss – I had no frame of reference for what I was seeing. I knew this was something different from previous terrorist attacks or rocket strikes, but I didn’t know what to compare it to. Early on, I heard some people reference the surprise of the Yom Kippur War, because the fiftieth anniversary of that war had just passed, but those comparisons faded quickly. Then there were the voices calling October 7th Israel’s version of September 11th, but 9/11 didn’t involve hand to hand combat, or rape, or children, and, fundamentally, the world wasn’t as horrified by October 7th as they were by 9/11. And then people said, over and over again, that this was the worst loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust, as a way to capture the overwhelming shock and grief of the attack; but comparing October 7th to the prolonged and systematic killing of six million Jews (and many millions of others), over the course of years, and across many borders, just didn’t seem helpful to me, and didn’t offer me any idea for how to cope with the horror, or how to respond to it.

            And then the word pogrom started to be used, but it didn’t resonate for me at first, either. The word pogrom came originally from Russian, meaning “to destroy, to wreak havoc, to demolish violently,” but historically it has referred to acts of anti-Jewish violence perpetrated by civilians and supported by the military, in Eastern Europe, between about 1880 and 1920. And, at least in my mind, a pogrom was supposed to be about the dangers of being a minority in a world where the majority hates you. Except, for a lot of Jewish people, and not just Israelis, this did feel like a pogrom, and I wanted to understand why.

            The thing is, while Jews are the clear majority population in Israel, they are surrounded by an Arab world that is majority Muslim, and the Palestinian cause has often been supported financially, politically and militarily by the surrounding Muslim countries, so the question of who is in the minority and who is in the majority depends on how closely you focus in or how widely you zoom out.

Some Jewish media outlets mentioned the 1903 Kishinev pogrom in particular, early on in the coverage of October 7th, so I decided to do more research to see if I could understand the comparisons.

            The Kishinev pogrom took place on April 19-21, 1903, Easter day, in Kishinev, then the capital of Bessarabia in the Russian Empire (now Moldova). The attacks began after church services on Easter Day, which was also, maybe more significantly, the last day of the Jewish holiday of Passover. During the pogrom, 47 to 49 Jews were killed, 92 were severely injured, 700 houses were damaged, hundreds of stores were pillaged, and 600 women were raped; while the police and army did nothing.

            Leading up to the attacks, the most popular Russian language newspaper in Kishinev was regularly publishing headlines like: “Death to the Jews!” and “Crusade against the hated race!” So that when a boy was found murdered in a town twenty-five miles away, and a girl committed suicide by poison and was declared dead at a Jewish hospital, the newspaper had a ready audience for its insinuations that both children had been murdered by the Jews so that their blood could be used to make matzo for the coming Jewish holiday of Passover (a bizarre blood libel that keeps coming up throughout history to incite violence against Jews, despite the fact that matzo is made of only water and flour, and blood is strictly forbidden in Jewish dietary laws).

            On April 28th, the New York Times reprinted a Yiddish Daily News report smuggled out of Russia that described the pogrom:

“The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, ‘kill the Jews’ was taken up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep…babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded.”

            Many pogroms had taken place before this one, but the graphic descriptions, and especially the photographs, of the Kishinev pogrom were sent around the world and made a deep impression, especially on American Jews who began organizing financial help for the Jews of Kishinev to emigrate to America and Palestine. The danger to the Jewish population of Europe was convincing to most people, though the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time tried to deny that the attacks had anything to do with anti-Semitism, blaming it on Jewish moneylenders upsetting the local peasants with their corrupt business practices.

But even more than the news reports and the photographs, the biggest impact the Kishinev pogrom would have on Jewish history came in the form of a poem.

Chaim Nachman Bialik, a journalist, poet, and publisher, was commissioned by the Odessa Jewish Historical Commission to travel to Kishinev and collect testimonies from the survivors of the pogrom. Bialik, who later came to be seen as Israel’s national poet, with his poems taught across the Israeli school system, was an early advocate for Zionism and the need for a new kind of Jew, a stronger, bolder Jew who wouldn’t be so vulnerable to antisemitism.

As he walked through Kishinev and listened to the survivors of the pogrom he began to form an idea for a long poem in Hebrew that would be published in 1904, meant to wake Jews up to the impossibility of life in the diaspora, called “In the City of Slaughter.”

            “Do not fail to note, (he wrote)

In that dark corner and behind that cask,

Crouching husbands, bridegrooms, brothers peering through the cracks,

Watching their wives, sisters, daughters struggling beneath their bestial defilers,

Suffocating in their own blood,

Their flesh portioned out as booty.”

Bialik’s vision of the diaspora Jew’s weakness, and his willingness to blame the Jewish men for the rapes of their wives and daughters, became a rallying cry to find a place where Jews could be in the majority and therefore able to defend themselves. He, significantly, left out any references in the poem to the fact that local Jews had tried to defend themselves, but had failed because police dispersed those Jews attempting to defend Jewish homes and businesses, while allowing the rioters to go unchecked (Russian courts later used those attempts at self-defense to suggest that it was actually the Jews who struck first, and were therefore responsible for the riots that killed them).

But even if Bialik had acknowledged those attempts at self-defense, the lesson would still have been the same: life in the diaspora, in the minority, isn’t safe.

“Of murdered men who from the beams were hung,

And of a babe beside its mother flung,

Its mother speared, the poor chick finding rest

Upon its mother’s cold and milkless breast;

Of how a dagger halved an infant’s word,

Its ma was heard, its mama never heard.”

As a modern day Jew living in America, when I read this poem I got really angry, at Bialik, for the way he blamed the victims of the atrocity. It felt like identification with the abuser, in today’s therapy speak, but at the time it was galvanizing and convinced a lot of people that Zionism was the only answer for Jewish survival.

            The word diaspora is often used as a stand-in for the Hebrew word Galut, which means “exile.” The idea is that after the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem, in 70 CE, God exiled the Jews from the land of our ancestors, for our sins. This is how we are supposed to see our lives in the diaspora, as outside of God’s favor. But we don’t, or, I don’t. (This belief that we are in exile because that’s how God wants it, is why certain Chasidic groups are anti-Zionist. They believe we have no right to return to Israel until God brings us back there, in the time of the messiah). The Zionist cry was, let’s not wait for God’s permission to go home anymore, let’s not wait for the messiah, because if we wait too long we will be annihilated.

            There was actually a second pogrom in Kishinev two years later, killing nineteen Jews, as part of a huge wave of pogroms across the Russian Empire during which 200,000 Jews were murdered in an estimated 600 different attacks on Jewish communities. But it was the first Kishinev pogrom that was remembered, and Bialik’s interpretation that lingered.

Interestingly, at the same time that Bialik was teaching the Jews about the power of a poem to inspire action, Pavel Krushevan, the publisher of that Russian newspaper in Kishinev that had incited the pogrom in the first place, had also learned an important lesson: incitement works. Within months he had published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fictional account of Jewish leaders plotting to control the world, presented as if it were true. This book later spread around the world, teaching anti-Semitism to an ever wider audience. Hamas even refers to elements of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in their charter.

            As I continued to read Bialik’s poem, and the details of the Kishinev pogrom itself, it became clear that even though some of the circumstances of a pogrom didn’t fit what happened on October 7th, many of the victims of October 7th felt the same powerlessness of the Jews in Kishinev, in large part because of the failure of the Israeli government to prevent the attacks,  or to intervene to protect them in time, and, all over again, the lessons of Kishinev, especially the need for muscular self-defense, were back in the forefront of people’s minds.

            The most penetrating message of the poem, for me, is Bialik’s anger at the Jews of Kishinev for not being angry enough.

“Turn, then, thy gaze from the dead, and I will lead
Thee from the graveyard to thy living brothers,
And thou wilt come, with those of thine own breed,
Into the synagogue, and on a day of fasting,
To hear the cry of their agony,
Their weeping everlasting.
Thy skin will grow cold, the hair on thy skin stand up,
And thou wilt be by fear and trembling tossed;
Thus groans a people which is lost.
Look in their hearts, behold a dreary waste,
Where even vengeance can revive no growth,
And yet upon their lips no mighty malediction
Rises, no blasphemous oath.”

            The story of Kishinev, and the shame of it, had largely faded from the minds of American Jews by October 7th 2023, to the point that I don’t think it was even mentioned at my orthodox Jewish high school, where we studied Jewish history as part of our daily coursework, because it didn’t resonate for us, here, where, even now, despite growing antisemitism, and incidents of horrific violence, we feel at home in the diaspora. We feel safe. But in Israel, where the philosophies of Bialik and the other early Zionists are well-known, and where the population is largely the descendants of refugees from the diaspora, or the relatives of those who did not survive, feeling safe is more elusive.

            To many, and maybe most, Israelis, the horror of October 7th was that even the new, strong, brave, well-armed Jew couldn’t prevent a Kishinev. And if the New Jew wasn’t enough, what would be?

            Interestingly, while many Jews continue to see Israel through the lens of the Holocaust, and the pogroms of Eastern Europe, the Arab world has been taught to believe that these things never actually happened. Mahmoud Abbas, the “moderate” President of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, has consistently misrepresented, minimized and even denied the Holocaust. He has said that Hitler killed European Jews not because of anti-Semitism but because of the Jews’ “social functions” in society, such as money lending (just as the Russian Ambassador to the United States had said about the Jewish victims in Kishinev). In his doctoral thesis, written at a Russian University, Abbas argued that the Zionists had even colluded with the Nazis, agreeing to the extermination of the Jews of Europe in order to convince the world of the necessity for a Jewish state in the land of Israel. He has said that it’s possible that 6 million Jews were killed, but it’s also possible that it was less than a million. And, while he’s denying and minimizing the Holocaust on one hand, he’s also accusing Israel of committing “fifty holocausts” against the Palestinians on the other hand. And he’s not alone. Holocaust denial is rampant and normalized in the Arab world, where Mein Kempf and Protocols of the Elders of Zion have been widely published, and using the language of the Holocaust against Israel (calling them Nazis, accusing them of genocide, etc.) continues to be a common rhetorical tool.

            And the thing is, if you’ve been raised to believe that the Holocaust was at the very least exaggerated, if not created from whole cloth, for the sole purpose of stealing Palestinian land in 1948, no wonder you would hate the Jews and think Israel has no right to exist. The fact that these ideas are so easily disproven is maddening. The Holocaust was minutely catalogued by the Germans themselves, similar to how Hamas documented the October 7th massacre with their Go-pros, and yet many Palestinians, and some of their supporters in the Arab world and in Europe and America, have even said they believe that October 7th was not only not as bad as it has been portrayed, but that it was perpetrated by the Israeli army itself.

            The Kishinev comparison has been helpful for me in a lot of ways, especially in understanding the Israeli certainty that the right response to the attacks was overwhelming force, but there’s one overriding reason why the analogy doesn’t fit: the hostages. When Hamas militants and their civilian supporters took hostages back to Gaza with them, specifically to instigate a bloody ground war with Israel in order to turn world opinion against the Jews, they also, intentionally or not, created a double bind for Israelis that would create a whole new kind of horror; the choice between saving the hostages, by ending the war now and releasing all terror suspects along with all of the other Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, versus continuing the war so as to prevent future attacks and to prevent future hostages from being taken, is an impossible one.

            The horror of knowing that so many hostages are still being kept in the tunnels of Gaza, and that the world stopped thinking about them a long time ago, is unbearable. It can’t be understood by a comparison to any other event; it refuses to be categorized or contained or ignored.

            So here we stand, with the Palestinians in a constant state of Nakba, or catastrophe, ever since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, believing that their land was stolen by vicious invaders who constantly lie about their origins and intentions, and Israelis constantly afraid of another Kishinev and, inevitably, another Holocaust.

I don’t know how we move past these narratives to help us see a new way forward, but maybe a new poem could be written, one that addresses the narratives of both peoples, or rather of the many different people within the larger mosaic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and maybe that new poem could imagine a future where something other than violence prevails. I wouldn’t know how to write that poem, or who might have the skill and perspective and confidence to try, but I’d like to believe it will be possible. One day.

The City of Slaughter https://faculty.history.umd.edu/BCooperman/NewCity/Slaughter.html

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Tu Bishvat, the New Year of the Trees

Posted on January 27, 2024 by rachelmankowitz

            Tu Bishvat is a Jewish holiday marking the New Year of the Trees, and this year it took place from sundown Wednesday January 24th to sundown Thursday January 25th. In ancient times, Tu Bishvat, or the fifteenth day of the Hebrew month of Shvat, was simply the day set aside as the birthday of all trees born in that year. This was important information to have, because it was forbidden to eat from a fruit tree in the first three years of its life, and in the fourth year you had to bring the fruit of the tree the Temple in Jerusalem. Only in year five did the fruit belong to the farmer.

            Trees have always been important in Judaism: like the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the story of the Garden of Eden, or the Torah itself (the Hebrew Bible) being referred to as a tree of life. I read recently (on Ritualwell) that in ancient Israel a tree was planted when a child was born, and as the child grew he or she would care for their tree and then eventually use its branches for their wedding canopy. Even the Rabbis were tree-centric, with a quote from Rabbi Eliezer saying,    “When a tree is wantonly cut down, its voice rings from one end of the earth to another,” which makes me think of my Pawpaw tree, which really did seem to set off communal keening among all of the trees in our backyard when it was cut down, and then sent out saplings to take its place.

Poor Pawpaw
Pawpaw saplings

            But it wasn’t until the 16th century that Isaac Luria (a Kabbalist, or Jewish mystic) and his followers in Safed transformed Tu Bishvat from a date on the calendar into a festival celebrating the fruits of Israel. They believed that the spark of the divine was as present in trees as it was in people, and they believed that eating the fruits of those trees would release the divine sparks into the world (I’m pretty sure they did not use the same technique for releasing the divine sparks from people. We have our demons and dybbuks and Golems, but as far as I know cannibalism has never taken off in the Jewish tradition).

            The Kabbalists, being good obsessive compulsive Jews, decided to create a Tu Bishvat Seder, modeled on the Passover Seder, to celebrate four types of fruits (and four glasses of wine to go with them). There are many different versions of the Tu Bishvat Seder, but this is one of them: The first fruit is one that is hard on the outside and soft on the inside (like almonds, walnuts or coconuts), and they can remind us of the protection the earth gives us, or the ways we keep ourselves separate and protected from one another, hiding the divine spark within; the second fruit is soft, with a pit in the center (like olives, dates, peaches or cherries) and they can symbolize the spiritual strength within each of us, or the potential inside of us that has not yet been tapped; fruit number three is soft throughout and completely edible (like figs, grapes, blueberries and raspberries) and I’m not sure what mystical significance they have, but they are certainly yummy; the fourth fruit has a tough skin on the outside and sweet fruit within (like mangos, bananas, avocados and pawpaws) and they are all about the mysteries of our world and our hunger to uncover the juicy secrets.

            The four cups of wine for the Tu Bishvat Seder are drunk in a specific order and in varying shades of red, pink, and white, to represent the cycle of life and the four seasons, but just like on Passover, you can get away with varying shades of grape juice, in case you need to drive home afterwards.

            When I was in elementary school they never mentioned a Tu Bishvat Seder to us, but each class got a tray of fruits and nuts common in Israel, especially carob, which was almost impossible to eat but traditional, because it was one of the few fruits from Israel that could make the long trip to the European shtetls of my Ashkenazi ancestors without spoiling. Oranges and pomegranates were much harder to get.

A Tu Bishvat spread (not my picture)
Carob (not my picture)

Tu Bishvat changed again in the late 19th century, when Jews were able to buy land in Palestine (because the Ottoman Empire ended its ban on selling land to Jews), and European Jews established agricultural settlements and planted trees to re-green the land and plant deep symbolic roots. The Jewish National Fund was established in 1901 to buy property in Palestine, and Tu Bishvat tree planting ceremonies became an annual event.

            Today, Tu Bishvat is celebrated in all of those ways, but also as a Jewish Earth day: a chance to celebrate nature and learn how to take care of the earth. It’s celebrated in Israel as a full holiday, with tree planting ceremonies and special ecological awareness programs and, of course, lots of food.

            Recently, some of the families whose loved ones were killed by Hamas at the music festival in southern Israel on October 7th joined with the Jewish National Fund to plant trees on the concert site. Around a thousand people came together to plant 200 seedlings, both to celebrate Tu Bishvat, but more importantly to try to bring new life, and hope, to land suffused with death. And so the meaning of the holiday continues to grow and change, as we change.

            When I asked my synagogue school students why we would have a special holiday to celebrate the birthday of the trees, they said that it would be very difficult to keep track of the birthday of each individual tree, remembering to send a card or bake a cake, so having one day to celebrate all of the trees is much easier. They took for granted that, of course, you should celebrate trees; that wasn’t even a question.

            We also talked about why now? Why celebrate trees in the middle of winter? I told them that the date had been chosen because it was the end of the rainy season in ancient Israel, a propitious time to plant a tree in rich soil, but, really, maybe celebrating trees in winter, when they are at their most naked and vulnerable, and least beautiful, is the perfect time to throw them a party; just like we celebrate light in December when the days are at their shortest and the dark of night feels endless.

            And maybe we can learn from this idea of celebrating trees when they are at their most fragile, or light when it is most rare; maybe that’s why we should keep praying for peace even when it seems most impossible. We need to believe that spring and light and peace can return in order for our faith to sustain us through the hard times, and through the hard work that needs to be done to reach peace.

            My students have decided that Tu Bishvat should be celebrated by hugging a tree, or singing it a song, or knitting it a sweater to survive the coldest days, though I’m still a fan of eating as celebration myself. Let’s hope the trees feel all of our love this week, and that God hears our prayers, and that we all hear each other and our hopes for a peaceful future.

Pawpaw tree in summer

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Hope for the Future

Posted on January 20, 2024 by rachelmankowitz

            (A Note: A wild bird – a Junco – visited for a few very cold days recently and read the hard copy of my essay before publication, leaving a few responses)

“I have a few notes.”

            As the nature of Israel’s war against Hamas changes, becoming more targeted and with fewer soldiers on the ground in Gaza, the conversation in Israel has been moving to the question of what happens the day after the war ends. (Of course there are a hundred other conversations going on at the same time, but my brain can’t process all of it. I can’t make sense of a genocide charge at The Hague, or continued terrorist attacks in Israel, or ongoing calls for Israel to stop fighting even as rockets are being fired at the north and south of Israel and the Houthis are firing on ships in the Red Sea. So, for now, I’m trying to focus on something hopeful.) Recently, I was able to watch a zoom call from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association called Holding on to Hope, which hosted leaders from three different Israeli organizations who have been working towards peace and coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians.

            One message that came through consistently from these leaders is that the efforts that are most successful are the ones that address self-interest, rather than arguing for peace from a selfless altruism. Another theme was that what happens in Gaza impacts Tel Aviv, in terms of health, and air and water quality, as well as violence, and there are no walls high enough to change that.

“Walls? Pfft.”

One of the organizations on the zoom was a joint Jewish and Arab school in Israel called Hand in Hand. The public school system in Israel separates out Arabs and Jews into separate schools, in large part as a gesture to allow Arabs to maintain their own culture and language and not have to study Jewish subjects, but over time this separation has widened the divide between Jews and Muslims and Christians in Israel. The Hand in Hand schools bring these children together to help them learn to understand each other’s narratives and grapple with how to move society towards coexistence. There are six Hand in Hand schools in mixed Arab and Jewish towns so far: in Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa, Kfar Saba, Wadi Ara, and Galilee. And the schools also work at building connections among the adults in the surrounding community.

            The representative of the Hand in Hand schools on this zoom was a Palestinian citizen of Israel, with a background in film in particular and the arts in general. His sense of hope for the future came from his belief that education is what will create the next generation of leaders, able to speak each other’s languages and understand each other’s cultures and see each other as companions on the same journey.

“A feather in feather school would be nice.”

            Coincidentally, I recently read about a new Israeli TV show (not yet available here) set in a Hand in Hand school (or something like it) in Jerusalem. The review I read in Kveller suggested that, because it’s a comedy, it often wraps up complex issues a little too quickly, but the fact that it can represent those complex issues in an entertaining way could make a big difference in what people begin to see as possible in the future.

            The second organization represented on the zoom was Standing Together, a political action organization that brings together Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, and secular and orthodox Jewish Israelis, to work on issues on which they have common cause, as a way to build consensus and community so that over time they can begin to work together on the bigger battles yet to come.

            I’d seen a previous zoom, earlier in the Fall, that focused entirely on the Standing Together group, but I found it alienating, maybe because it was so soon after October 7th and everyone’s emotions were still so raw. This time around I heard a lot more acknowledgment of the pain and fear of both Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, and ideas for how to bring both peoples to the table in order to create a sustainable peace.

            The third organization represented on the zoom was completely new to me, called A Land for All (previously called Two States, One Homeland). It’s a think tank made up of Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Palestinians from outside of Israel, to problem solve the nitty gritty policy issues necessary for peace. The basic idea that they’ve come up with is a two state confederation, where a Jewish State and a Palestinian State live side by side, with open borders and some joint institutions. The specifics of the proposal weren’t discussed in this zoom, but the idea that some people are ready to sit together and seek workable plans for a peaceful future is encouraging.

            Except, with Israel being accused of genocide at the International Court for Justice, and Hezbollah and the Houthi rebels attacking from the north and from the sea, and hostages still being held in Gaza, I don’t know how many people within Israel are up to hearing any of this right now, which is probably why this was a zoom for American Jews.

A final peace deal between Israel and a Palestinian state has been so elusive, in part, because the two sides can’t even agree on the preconditions for sitting down to talk. Palestinian leadership wants all new Jewish settlements in the West Bank stopped, and preferably for all of the existing ones to be removed as well, as a precondition for discussing peace with Israel. And Israelis have wanted reliable promises that the terrorism will stop before they discuss the settlements, let alone final agreements on where the borders of a future Palestinian state should be. Many Palestinians and their supporters seem to believe that terrorism is the only way their voices will be heard, by Israel and by the world at large, but every terrorist attack has pushed the Israeli public further away from any belief that peace is possible, and therefore from any willingness to make difficult compromises for that unreachable peace.

            When I discussed the concept of peace recently with my synagogue school students, they weren’t thinking about Israel or even peace between countries, instead they looked at peace through the lens of family life, saying that there has to be a lot of room within peace and coexistence for disagreement, and even some bloodshed (their point of reference was fights with their siblings, so, hopefully not too much blood). They spend a lot of their time working towards peace in their daily lives, managing disputes with their friends and family, dealing with hurt feelings, and learning how to compromise, but all of that feels possible for them because they know they are safe in their homes and that people care about them and are listening to them.

            In all of the coverage on the news, and in all of the opinion articles that I’ve read and international voices I’ve heard, no one has offered a workable plan for peace that addresses what is actually happening right now. No one has come up with a way to disempower Hamas and destroy the tunnels without causing unacceptable damage to the structures and the people above ground in Gaza. In fact, the UN refuses to call Hamas a terrorist organization, and since Gaza is not considered a state and has not signed agreements to follow international law, they can’t be held officially responsible for their actions, but Israel, which is an acknowledged state and has signed these agreements, is being brought to The Hague for fighting back against Hamas. The international community has not addressed this invisibility of organizations like Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthi rebels, who are acting as proxies for Iran’s interests in the Middle East, and Hamas has taken full advantage of its political invisibility to press its war against Israel, which certainly didn’t start on October 7th.

The fact that Israel is under attack from, basically, all sides, has not changed the rhetoric around the world that has portrayed Israel as a lone menace in the Middle East, causing all of the trouble.

All three of these Israeli organizations are working towards long term goals that will require consistent commitment and ongoing efforts and will not be put in place within the next few months, but the world, and the combatants on both sides, are too impatient for that slow growing peace process, and the extremists on both sides keep taking advantage of that impatience and offering apocalyptic solutions that will only work for one side or the other. Every time I watch the news I hear this ticking clock, and the absence of hope, but I know there are people out there who are thinking and breathing and working for peace, and that’s what I want to hear more about, because that’s where a livable future will come from.

A Land for All – https://www.alandforall.org/english/?d=ltr

Hand in Hand – https://www.handinhandk12.org/

Standing Together – https://www.standing-together.org/en

“Hope is the thing with feathers, right?”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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When Heroes Fly

Posted on December 30, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            I decided to rewatch When Heroes Fly, a fantastic one season Israeli drama (with English subtitles), because I found out that it was about to leave Netflix in January. The first time I’d watched the show was for my online Hebrew class, almost two years ago, with Hebrew subtitles, but it was so vivid and powerful that I understood most of what was going on, despite missing a few words here and there (and everywhere).

            When Heroes Fly follows four guys in a reserves unit who lose their leader in war. Each one deals with the loss, and the trauma of war, in a different way, but the main character, Aviv, truly falls apart. He’s away getting help when his ex-girlfriend, Yaeli, goes on a trip to South America that he was supposed to go on with here, and, it seems, dies in a car accident.

            The mystery that has to be solved, years later, is whether Yaeli actually survived the accident after all, and if so, where is she, and does she want to be found? That’s the frame of the show, but the real drama is in how each of these four men work through their past mistakes and confront themselves and each other.

            What got to me the first time I watched this show was how completely Aviv’s character resonated for me – his inability to heal, despite so much effort and time, and his self-loathing, and how others judged him for being such a mess. His physical expressions of depression and self-loathing, and that sense of truly falling apart – that was me. Even two years ago, after a lifetime of therapy, it all still felt deeply true for me. And yet now, despite grieving both of my dogs, and still having “issues,” and still feeling frightened and incapable at times, I don’t feel that wracking whole body depression anymore. It’s been receding for a long time, but until I watched this show again I didn’t realize how long it’s been since that was my daily, and then weekly, and then monthly experience of life.

            Another thing I relate to, deeply, in this show is how much these friends need each other and yet can’t quite connect or hear each other through the fog of their own trauma responses. We want to believe that if we try hard enough and love hard enough we can fix anything, but sometimes our need to help is the problem, stopping us from seeing the real person in front of us who is in so much pain.

            A new character is introduced late in the series, an Israeli detective with her own deep trauma who has to find the four men and Yaeli as part of a larger case. But she isn’t cut off from her pain, or completely lost in it, she’s strong and broken at the same time. I want to be this woman, this strong, capable woman who is also deeply attached to herself and to reality. I get the feeling that a lot of people think I already am this women. I’m not, yet, but just seeing her on screen makes it seem more possible.

            But the biggest revelation for me in watching this show now is the impact of collective trauma, which goes beyond each individual’s experience of trauma, when they are all experiencing the trauma together. As an American Jew I can try to take an “objective” view on the current war, because my family isn’t running to shelters at any moment as rockets fall, and I’m not grieving a loved one who died in the massacre or was taken hostage, and no one in my family is a soldier in this war, risking their life every day. I am Jewish, but as an American Jew I have the privilege of not feeling the depth of the collective trauma that is tormenting Israelis, and Palestinians, as they try to figure out what happens next.

            When I watch the news and do my deep dives into the history to try and understand what I’m seeing, I still find much of it incomprehensible, because I can’t see it through their eyes; I can’t feel it in my body and know the darkness that prevents clear sight on things that, from here, seem obvious. I keep trying to understand anyway, and I try not to judge the decisions and opinions I can’t understand, because I know that people who are not under the influence of trauma think a lot of things should be possible that people within the trauma can’t fathom and can’t choose.

            Interestingly, while the English title of this show is When Heroes Fly, which suggests that these four men are clearly heroic, as if they are morally unambiguous and selfless and always know what to do, the title in Hebrew is For Her Heroes Fly, suggesting that heroic behavior has to come from somewhere, from some internal motivation, beyond the theoretical goodness and righteousness we keep expecting from our heroes. These are not men with infinite courage and a willingness to die for a cause; these are men who are willing to fight for the people they love.

            People want to believe that Israel only has a right to exist, that Jews only have a right to exist, because we are supposed to be a beacon of light to the nations; and some Jews try very hard to live up to that ideal, but most of us are just people, like everyone else. Requiring Israel to meet standards of behavior that no one else can live up to is unfair and inhumane.     No one gets through wars unscathed, and Israel has had to face war after war, and then terrorist act after terrorist act, throughout her short existence. Israeli soldiers, like all soldiers, are capable of mistakes in judgment and tactics and behavior. When three hostages were accidentally killed by the IDF, Israel had to deal with that reality, because Israel itself has inhuman expectations of its soldiers and its military, just like the world at large seems to have. Israel, this tiny country, with soldiers culled from all walks of life, drafted into service as teenagers, is meant to be a perfect military machine, capable of fighting tunnel warfare without making mistakes and hurting non-fighters, even when the Hamas fighters wear civilian clothes and embed in civilian neighborhoods and buildings. The Israeli soldiers who killed those three hostages, and the soldiers who have killed Palestinian civilians when aiming for Hamas, are all going to have to live the rest of their lives with that burden of guilt and failure, not out of choice but out of necessity, because they have to fight for the survival of their tiny country. The trauma that results will last a lifetime, and will alter everything that comes next.

We, on the outside of all of this, can have whatever hopes and dreams and judgements we want, but it is the people on the ground who will have to make it happen, and that means we have to accept who they are and what feels possible to them, as they carry this war, and every previous war, with them into the future.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Our Israeli Tour Guide

Posted on December 23, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            Since the Israel/Hamas war started, our congregation has looked for as many ways as possible to help us express all of our mixed feelings and get educated about what’s going on and how it impacts our Jewish lives in the United States. Recently, since tourism has all but stopped in Israel, the Israeli tour guide who led the synagogue’s last few trips to Israel has been doing zooms for us once a week, way too early on Sunday mornings, to give our congregation a connection to an Israeli point of view.

            The Israeli tour guide knows a lot of my fellow congregants from the trips, and they know him, but he was mostly a stranger to me. Except, when he saw my name on the screen he said he almost cried, because his mother’s family were Mankowitzes too. I have no idea if we are actually related, because I’ve found a few different Mankowitz families on Facebook over the years who have been scattered around the world, but it was nice to feel that connection. I’ve never been able to afford to go on our synagogue’s trips to Israel, but I’ve seen pictures and heard stories and felt the pangs of jealousy.

            One of the first things our tour guide told us was that, despite the danger he and his children and grandchildren face in Israel right now, he is grateful not to be in the US or Europe, where anti-Semitism has been making a roaring comeback. Instead, he’s surrounded by people who understand the existential threat to Jewish life, and the danger of living in such close proximity to a terrorist organization, and he doesn’t have to explain his complex feelings of grief and anger and empathy and fear, because his neighbors are feeling all of the same things.

            They can see the same things we are seeing on social media, where some people are calling Hamas “freedom fighters” and denying the reality of rape and murder on October 7th. They too are hearing the UN be unwilling to condemn Hamas, and the International Red Cross say they can’t do anything to check on the wellbeing of the hostages in Gaza. And they can see Hamas’ lies being taken as truth by so many, even after evidence to the contrary has been presented, both by Israel and the United States government. And just like us, they are hearing Jews being called Nazis and vermin and being accused of genocide, and seeing huge protests calling for ceasefires, even during the temporary ceasefire, where people who have to know that Hamas will never stop attacking Israel are demanding that Israel stop fighting back.

            The recent accidental killing of three hostages by the IDF, who mistook them for terrorists despite waving white flags, broke so many hearts in Israel and opened the door, a crack, to questioning the tactics of this war and if it will really bring the hostages home. Though I don’t know if the Israelis are questioning the efficacy of the airstrikes the way Americans are.       I saw a report that said more than half of Israel’s airstrikes were made with “dumb bombs,” and I’m not a military expert but I assume that means that US critics believe Israel could be using “smarter” bombs that are able to be more carefully targeted and less likely to cause civilian casualties and collateral damage. If that’s true, I want to know why the IDF has chosen the strategy they’ve chosen. If they are capable of limiting collateral damage, why wouldn’t they do that? If they’re not capable of limiting collateral damage, why are their friends suggesting it’s possible?

            I want to believe that the Israeli military is doing everything possible to limit civilian deaths and injuries, because I see them warning civilians to leave targeted buildings, and setting up safe escape routes, and bringing in humanitarian aid. But then why are whole families dying in Gaza? And journalists? And aid workers? These are my questions, and I don’t have the answers. Part of the problem is that there are no international journalists in Gaza right now. There are Israeli journalists embedded with the IDF and there are Gazan journalists, but none of the images coming out of Gaza show Hamas militants, and certainly don’t show Hamas fighters in the act of fighting. It’s as if they are invisible. And maybe they are, because they are in the tunnels, but the images from this war are incomplete, and the reporting of facts is incomplete and that leaves a lot of people retreating to their safe corners and believing what they want to believe is true, rather than being able to judge for themselves.

            The almost unanimous calls for ceasefire from the United Nations General Assembly, despite the fact that Hamas refuses to return the rest of the hostages and has never stopped sending rockets into Israel, and has been stealing humanitarian aid and preventing the escape of civilians, confuses me. Is the rest of the world ignoring the existence of Hamas and seeing Israel invade Gaza with only civilians as their targets? Because if that’s what people believe, I can understand why they would demand a ceasefire from Israel alone. I just don’t know why the world would believe that.

            With all of the noise in the outside world, our once a week zooms have been a respite. Our tour guide has children serving in the army, and so do most of his left-leaning friends in Israel, and he has grandchildren who could easily have been killed or taken hostage on October 7th, but he remains a progressive, believing in equal rights for Arabs and Israelis, and women and LGBTQ people. But his liberal point of view is informed by his service in the Israeli army and his knowledge of the many peace deals that have been attempted and have fallen apart over the past seventy five years.

            He is as frustrated as we are by the settlers in the West Bank who keep attacking Palestinians, and he is as disillusioned as we are, no, more, by the current government of Israel and its anti-democratic leanings. He, like so many Israelis, has dreamt of peaceful coexistence with the Palestinian people for so long, looking for reliable partners to live side by side with, but they know that that has never been the goal of Hamas or Islamic Jihad.

            So I dutifully set my alarm clock each Saturday night, and try to remember to brush my hair in the morning before logging onto the zoom, and I listen to our Israeli tour guide lead us through the latest events in the news and how Israelis like him are experiencing them on the ground: like the incredible relief of seeing the first hostages come home; and the joy of finally being able to laugh again, even for a moment; and the horror of the IDF accidentally killing three hostages; and the frustration when the hostage negotiations broke down; and the reassurance of knowing that so many Israelis are working together to take care of the evacuees from the north and the south of Israel who had to leave with barely the clothes on their backs amidst rocket fire from Hamas and Hezbollah. 

            Recently, a young college student from our congregation came to the weekly zoom to tell us what it feels like to be a Zionist on campus who is also sympathetic to the pain of the Palestinians. She said that everyone on campus seems to have chosen sides and if you are not completely in one camp or the other it can be very lonely, but she has friends in every group and is doing her best to see the complexity of the disagreements and hold onto her empathy and connection even when those emotions are overwhelming. We were all crying, listening to her, but also feeling really hopeful because her ability to hold on to her own identity and point of view while also respecting and even loving people who disagree with her is a powerful thing.

There’s this funny thing about Israelis where it seems like everyone calls everyone else by their first name, or by their nickname, whether they know each other or not. Everyone is “brother,” and all of the hostages belong to everyone’s families, even when some members of the family, like Bibi, are deeply infuriating and would never be invited to Friday night dinner. And I have to admit that I don’t feel that way about the American Jewish community; we are much more spread out and divided than Israelis, or at least that’s how it feels to me. But I keep looking for ways to connect, and to feel less alone with my grief and fear and confusion over what’s true and what’s possible in the future. My hope is that the large majority of American Jews who both care about Israel and about liberal values can find a way forward, together with non-Jews who care about the same things.

As always, there have been a few articles and videos and songs that have given me hope:

            Identity/Crisis: Believe Israeli Woman https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/identity-crisis/id1500168597?i=1000639057794

                An Interview with a Druze/Israeli Reporter www.israelstory.org/episode/riyad-ali/

      An Arab Israeli survivor of the October 7th attack: https://www.facebook.com/share/yjXk5jQtd33ZWhkA/?mibextid=WC7FNe
            Three Children Released From Hamas Captivity Are Reunited With Their Dog               https://youtu.be/_HqWdRwiv4Y?si=payDYwDNzfQGaHdO
            Matisyahu’s One Day: https://youtu.be/WRmBChQjZPs?si=m4PG---Zhwleg9wI
            Matisyahu’s One Day sung by 3,000 Muslims and Jews in Haifa, 2018: https://youtu.be/ZPBjAfmgC-g?si=GOvgbBNIyqf-jYLg
Ellie, forever in our hearts.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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On the Coverage of the War in Israel and Gaza

Posted on November 4, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            I have been trying to write my thoughts on this for weeks, but I’ve been afraid of getting things wrong, or of bringing down anger from any and all directions. I have a fourteen page draft of a blog post that seems more like a thesis than a personal essay, but I’m not an expert on the history of Israel, or military tactics, or academic jargon, or even anti-Semitism; I care about those things, and am impacted by them, but other people will do a much better job of holding forth on those subjects than I ever could.

“Don’t look at me.”

            What I can write about is how it has felt to watch the news lately, and be on social media, being told by so many people what I should think, or do, or say in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th, a day after the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur war. I don’t believe that Jews, or Israel, should be immune to criticism; I also don’t believe that Hamas is anything but a terrorist group (calling them a liberation group suggests a real misunderstanding both of their mission and of how they have governed Gaza for the past decade and a half). What I know for myself is that hearing about the massacres on October 7th made me worry about family and friends in Israel, but watching the gradually more toxic responses around the world, and especially on American college campuses, has been frightening. I thought for sure that the chants of “from the river to the sea,” which is a demand for the eradication of the State of Israel and its current population of more than eight million Jews, plus two million non-Jews, would convince people that this pro-Hamas reaction is morally wrong, but that hasn’t happened. I thought it was the norm to recognize the difference between Hamas and Palestinians in general, and that everyone knew the difference between Israelis living within the internationally accepted borders of Israel (like the ones who were massacred and kidnapped), and Jewish settlers in the West Bank, but no. In fact, a lot of the terminology being thrown around about Israel (colonialist, apartheid, genocide) has become mainstream in a way I never expected. Social media is powerful in creating false narratives, and even more successful in advancing partial narratives that are misleading.

            An enormous number of Israelis who spent the past year protesting against Benjamin Netanyahu’s far right government and its attempts to peel away layers of democracy are now fighting for their country’s survival, both in the military and in thousands of volunteer efforts to help the survivors from the south, who had to escape Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets, and evacuees from the north, escaping Hezbollah rockets. I am proud of how quickly Israelis were able to find their way forward, and worried about the choices of the military and the government, and frightened by the lack of critical thinking and journalistic ethics that seem to abound right now when facts would be really helpful. I am proud of the Haredi (ultra-orthodox) Jews in Israel who are joining the army for this war, despite a very contentious law that allows them to avoid military service in favor of study, and I’m angry at some Jewish settlers in the West Bank who think they have a religious right to hurt their Palestinian neighbors.

            But I can’t fix any of those things. I cannot vote in Israel, and I can’t call every reporter who takes Hamas’ word without evidence and remind them that that’s just stupid. I can only be here, living my own little life in New York, and sending prayers to my family and friends who really need it right now.

“I pray all the time, Mommy.”

            At my synagogue, on Long Island, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about how we find comfort right now, since that’s really all we can control. We’ve had speak ups, to share our grief and confused feelings, and vigils, for the survivors and the dead and the missing and all those on the ground who are still in danger. One of the rabbis from my synagogue joined a group of New York rabbis for a short trip to Israel, to show solidarity and to learn more about what’s going on. I think, right now, many American Jews, because we are further away from the danger and, in most cases, experiencing less direct trauma, are wishing for ways to reach peace. But we, I, have no idea what the military realities are, and what it will take to make Israelis safe again. I refuse to tell Israel what they should do, though, of course, I have questions.

            I have a lot of trouble with people who equate the horror of a massacre perpetrated on civilians and a war conducted, or at least trying to be conducted, under the set rules of war.

            My focus has been on finding podcasts and articles that can help me understand more of what it feels like to be in Israel right now, so that I can be more empathetic, and to reassure me that Israel is a real place and not this cardboard cutout of evil that often gets portrayed by Pro-Palestinian activists on American college campuses.

            Israel Story, a great podcast in English that shares stories from all segments of Israeli society, has been posting short interviews with Israelis in different sectors during the current war. In the past, Israel Story has covered many Palestinian stories with empathy and clarity, humanizing and coloring in details of lives we often don’t get to hear about. The archives are full of those stories, but right now the most powerful of the short interviews I’ve heard was with a father who rescued his teenage son from the music festival in the South of Israel after the massacre had begun. www.israelstory.org/episode/sivan-avnery/                I’ve also been listening to podcasts from a school in Jerusalem called the Shalom Hartman Institute which has done a lot of work bringing together religious and secular, American and Israeli, and finding ways to have difficult conversations that are productive and even inspiring. I also watched a webinar interview with Yehuda Kurtzer, the president of the Institute in North America, that addressed what it feels like in Israel right now, and how liberal American Jews are dealing with the current news environment. https://youtu.be/Glia_tSZqmo?si=g3Fr8T4XR_D7Qkwk

            I go to the Forward and the Times of Israel and the Atlantic for articles that help me understand the issues involved. Here are links to two of the many articles that I’ve found helpful: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-is-israel-being-blamed-for-the-hamas-massacre/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/gaza-hospital-explosion-misinformation-reporting/675719/?utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

            I go to Kveller and Nosher and My Jewish Learning for a break from the news and a chance to remember that there is still Jewish joy and silliness, and comfort food, and so much to learn about being Jewish that has nothing to do with politics or war.

            But most of all I go to music. I have a ridiculously long Israeli music playlist on Spotify filled with music from Ishai Ribo and Hanan Ben Ari and Yuval Dayan and Keren Peles and Jane Bordeaux and Ofra Haza and Arik Einstein and David Broza and Hadag Nachash and Hatikva 6, and I keep finding more musicians and more music to remind me that there is more to Israel than this war.

Hanan Ben Ari – https://youtu.be/z27MZP_4P_U?si=uu7wqn1pEn6cRdd8

Ishai Ribo – https://youtu.be/7mmu6EzLZfM?si=egySHSIHEU0ckn7t

Jane Bordeaux – https://youtu.be/5t59s1sa1oc?si=o2XozKDDdpCiaSFA

Yuval Dayan – https://youtu.be/V4qsi4V-NFY?si=FqlWyWA40AIKhBYA

            So that’s where I’m at right now. I’m still trying to write out my thoughts on the war itself, and the history that led to it, mostly for my own clarification, but the rest of the time I’m taking a lot of deep breaths, and listening to voices across the spectrum, when I’m up to it, and listening to music when I’m not.

            I wish everyone Besorot Tovot, good news to come, and comfort and understanding until that time comes.

“Paws crossed.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Why Don’t I Wear a Tallit?

Posted on September 30, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            Over the Jewish high holidays I noticed all over again how many women in my congregation wear a tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl. I grew up at a time when it was rare for women to wear a tallit, and rare for women to become rabbis and cantors, though there were some. At summer camp there were one or two women who wore a tallit (and a kippah and tefillin), but they were outliers. I had my Bat Mitzvah at thirteen and led the service and read from the Torah, but I wore a nice dress, blue I think, and no tallit.

“When do I get to have a Bat Mitzvah?”

            A tallit, or Tallit Gadol, is worn over the shoulders at morning prayer services (and one evening service per year, on the eve of Yom Kippur), as opposed to the tallit kattan, worn by boys and men under their clothes. There are fringes at the four corners of the tallit, called tzitzit, each made of eight or so strings held together with four knots, with one blue thread. Most synagogues have extra tallitot (the plural of tallit) and kippot (the plural of kippah, or skullcap), outside the sanctuary for those who don’t have their own.

Tallit Gadol (not my picture)
Tallit Kattan (not my picture)

            In Rabbinic Judaism, women are not obligated to wear a tallit, but Orthodox Judaism actually forbids women from wearing them, and growing up, this prohibition was front and center for me at my orthodox Jewish day school. The rabbis told us that men needed these reminders more than women did, and anyway, women would be too busy taking care of the children to get to synagogue for services on a regular basis. They explained the prohibition against women wearing tallitot as part of the prohibition against women wearing men’s clothes, which they took seriously in our school, where girls were forbidden from wearing pants. Despite my frustration with their patronizing logic, I still never thought of taking on the obligation of wearing a tallit myself.

            The female rabbi at my synagogue today, though, wears a tallit, and many women in our congregation wear not only a tallit but also a kippah, traditionally the men’s head covering. We’ve had generations of Bat Mitzvah girls and adult Bat Mitzvah groups at our congregation now, so that women of all ages have gone through the process of choosing their own tallitot to fit their personalities and feel welcomed as equal members of the Jewish people. I like so many of the women’s tallitot that I’ve seen, in pinks and reds and purples, with beautiful designs and embroidery, and I love the idea that women are seen as just as important as men to the maintenance of the community. I even have my grandfather’s tallit in a cabinet, because it matters to me, but I’ve never worn it, and I’m not sure why.

A Women’s Tallit (not my picture)

            Maybe it’s just habit, after years of not wearing one; or maybe it’s because of the obligations and commitment it represents, and I’m not ready to take that on; or maybe it’s my father. I loved my father’s tallit. It was the size of a beach towel, with thick black stripes and sterling silver squares covering the atarah, or yoke, of the tallit. It was like a huge tent that could be folded over at the shoulders to give him wings, or spread over his head so he could disappear underneath it into his own personal relationship with God. I think that any tallit I might try to wear, no matter how feminine, or light, would feel like draping the power of my father over my head, and I know in my bones that instead of making me feel safe, it would suffocate me.

A Sterling Silver Atarah (not my picture)

            There are so many things like this, still, in my life, so many relics of the past that I have tried to re-value and scrub clean of their old associations. I have overcome a lot of them, through hard work, but the prevailing notion that anything is possible and all wounds can be healed, just doesn’t ring true for me. Early on in therapy I truly believed I could have a normal life, eventually, if I just put in the work, but now I know that, for me, there are some milestones that will never happen, and some wounds that will never heal, and the scars will be a part of me for the rest of my life. So far, this inability to take on the yoke of Torah, the obligation of daily rituals like wearing a tallit, is one of those unhealed wounds. It’s still possible that, one day, there will be comfort in wearing a tallit of my own, where I can create my own cocoon of time with God, but I’m not there yet.

            But there is comfort in seeing so many women around me embracing their beautiful tallitot, and wearing them with pride and ease. On Yom Kippur, the longest day of the Jewish liturgical year, tallitot are worn starting from Kol Nidre, the evening service, through the next morning and afternoon and on through Neilah, the final service of the long day, at sunset. And multiple times during that long day we sing the Yevarechecha, the priest’s prayer, repurposed as a prayer for community. We drape our arms over the people on either side of us, many using their tallitot to wrap their neighbors and loved ones in a communal tent of peace. And it really is beautiful.

“I should have my own tallit, Mommy.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Rosh Hashanah

Posted on September 23, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            I was dreading Rosh Hashanah. I was already exhausted from the first week back teaching synagogue school, and I hadn’t even tried on my High Holiday clothes from the year before, just crossing my fingers that they still fit. I’d survived the two hour choir rehearsal in the midst of the crazy first week of school, but just barely, and I still had to go to the vet for Cricket’s fluids and Ellie’s heart meds, and do the food shopping, and at the last minute, we had to do three loads of laundry because Cricket had peed on everything, and by the time we were done I had just enough time to take a shower and get dressed in order to get to the synagogue on time.

“All your fault.”

            Almost as soon as I sat down in the choir seats, the senior rabbi came over to tell me I would be doing the second reading – a Mary Oliver poem about her dog. I hadn’t seen the rabbi in person in a while, because I’d been going to services online, so I guess this was his first chance to tell me that he wanted me to read this poem – though I do have email, and a phone. I mentioned that it would be difficult for me to get to the Bima from the choir seats, especially in between songs, and he turned to my mom and complained about how much people like to complain.

I didn’t know exactly when my reading would come up, just that it would be relatively soon. Maybe. And that I couldn’t say no.

The choir was busy for the first part of the service, rarely sitting down. I’d forgotten how much standing was involved in singing with the choir because we were allowed to sit during rehearsals, and then I heard the junior rabbi give the intro for the poem I was going to read, so I put down my music and scooted past Mom and found my way down the aisle and up the stairs to the podium, and I read about Percy, the loving dog who looks up at his person as if she is everything.

            As soon as I was done reading, I had to hurry back to the choir section for the next song, but I felt, in that moment, the reason why I kept saying yes – to singing, to rehearsing, to reading in public, to teaching and exhausting myself – it feels really good to be part of a community, and to be known. Because not only the rabbis, but many of the other people in the room knew why I’d been chosen to read that particular poem. And they knew that I sang with the choir and they knew that I taught in the synagogue school, and they knew my Mom and her photography and quilt work and asked after her when she wasn’t there. They may not all have known how hard it was for me to do all of it, but they saw me, and cared about me, and congratulated me, and it felt good.

            I always dread the high holidays, knowing the work involved and how self-conscious I’ll feel going up on the podium and dressing up and singing into microphones, and all of the extra-long services one after the other after the other. And I always forget how meaningful it is, and how satisfying it is, to be surrounded by so many people sharing the same experience.

            There are, of course, times when I feel like I don’t belong, and when I feel like parts of me are invisible. During the Torah service, for example, our community calls up groups of congregants for the honors instead of calling up individuals, and they’re all in life-cycle related categories: everyone who will be driving a car in the next year; everyone who is newly married or celebrating an important anniversary; everyone with a new baby or grandbaby.

            There are also categories that could apply to me; I’m dreading the time when I can go up for the first Aliyah on Rosh Hashanah, for those who have lost a loved one in the past year. But mostly I feel this otherness, endlessly, because to be a member of the Jewish community often means to focus on the family as the unit of measurement, and I don’t really fit. There’s no Aliyah for people who had to go to more than ten doctors’ appointments in the past year, or people who are pre-emptively grieving the loss of a senior dog, or people who want to do more with their lives, but can’t.

            In a way, I prefer the darkness of Yom Kippur: the focus on what has been difficult and painful over the past year; the focus on what we regret. It’s not that I want to revel in the pain, but there’s relief in knowing that everyone is sitting a second longer than usual with what went wrong, and what was missing, instead of focusing solely on the Instagram-ready celebrations.

            But I made it through the marathon of Rosh Hashanah services, even forcing myself out to Tashlich on the afternoon of the first day of the holiday, when our community has its dog-friendly service out by the water, where we sing and throw away our sins (even the babies seem to revel in throwing their sins, in the shape of bird seed, out to the ducks), and meet all of the canine members of the community who’ve been out of view, but still there with us in spirit, over the past year.

“I don’t mind napping while you go to shul.”

            I pushed myself to go to the outdoor service because I wanted Cricket to be there one more time. She’s never been the most outgoing or friendly dog, and she wasn’t feeling all that well on that day in particular, but I wanted her to know that she was still part of our community, still known and seen and loved.

            And even if it’s hard to live up to the work of being in community, even if sometimes it feels like more than I can do, there are also moments when it all comes together and my sixteen year old dog, and I, know we belong.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Missing Choir

Posted on September 9, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            It’s a summer ritual to have choir rehearsals at the synagogue to prepare for the fall Jewish holidays (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur), but I haven’t been able to get to most of them this year. I went to one rehearsal early in the summer, but then there was surgery and car issues and doggy doctors’ appointments and human doctors’ appointments and on and on. Choir rehearsals are always at eight o’clock at night, so even when I wasn’t sick at home or busy somewhere else, I was just too exhausted to drive out to the synagogue at night, in the heat. I finally got to a rehearsal this week, but the next one will be on the night of my first day back teaching synagogue school, and I don’t know if I’ll be up to it.

“We’re exhausted for you, Mommy.”

            I feel torn. I’ve worked so hard over the years to learn the music, and even harder to teach myself how to sing the alto part while the bases and tenors roar behind me. And being in the choir makes me feel like I’m part of the service instead of just following along. But, of all of the things on my schedule right now, choir is the only one I can realistically let go of; I can’t stop going to doctors’ appointments, or driving Mom or the dogs to their doctors’ appointments, and I can’t give up on teaching, both because it’s my only paying job, and because it’s the way I feel most useful in the world.

            But, I feel like if I drop choir I’ll be letting people down, and separating myself even more from my community. All summer long I was only able to go to Friday night services online, instead of in person, because I just didn’t have the energy to get dressed again and go out. But while everyone else was there in person, I was just watching whatever parts were visible on screen, and I felt the loss.

            My hope is that I’ll be able to get to the rest of the rehearsals, because I don’t want to keep losing things that matter to me, but I also need to be able to give myself a break when things are too hard. I’ve put in so much work to improve my life and my health and I’m hoping it will start to pay off soon. I especially have my fingers crossed that finally getting back into the classroom will bring me enough joy to help me get through everything else.

            With all of the chaos going on, I’ve been trying to focus on the things that are working: like revising my lessons plans and getting excited to teach again; and watching Cricket stubbornly insist on staying alive; and watching Ellie thrive on her new heart meds; and reading books and watching TV and listening to the birds. I’m trying to stop and appreciate every good moment that comes along, and not let the not-so-good moments bully the good ones out of the way. But it’s a battle.

“We’re helping, Mommy.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Azazel

Posted on July 22, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

My first experience with the word Azazel was as an epithet in Hebrew – Lech LeAzazel, meaning, “Go to hell.” I don’t know where I heard this, though most likely from my father. And I’m pretty sure I confused it with Azriel, the name of Gargamel’s cat on the Smurfs.

“Did you say ‘cat’?”

            Recently in Bible study we came across the Azazel references in Leviticus 16, where it describes the ancient version of Yom Kippur, as opposed to the 25-hour fast and pray and self-flagellate fiesta we have today. In this ancient ritual, two goats of equal size and worth are chosen, and then, by lots, one goat is marked for God, as a sacrifice, and one is marked for “Azazel,” to be sent into the wilderness.

The goat chosen to be sacrificed to God is a familiar ritual, especially in Leviticus where we’ve just learned, in extremely boring detail, how animals are chosen and prepared and sacrificed to God on the altar by the High Priest. But this sending of a goat “to Azazel” is something altogether different. And before the goat is sent away, the High Priest lays both hands on the head of the goat and transfers all of the sins of the Israelite people onto the goat, so that the goat can take the sins away from the community with him.

            In English we translate the “Azazel” goat as the “scapegoat.”

            One interpretation of the word Azazel is that it was the name of a Pagan God, the God who goes beyond civilization, and so this goat would be sent to a demon God that predates the Israelite religion. This seems unlikely, given the constant drumbeat of God as the only God in the Hebrew Bible. But this idea of a god-who-goes-beyond-civilization made me think about how our vision of hell isn’t other people, as Sartre would have it, but as a life without other people in it. And what we call evil, or the devil, is what happens when we stop valuing civilization or mutual responsibility. Hell isn’t a separate place, it’s a different mindset that people can fall into, one that takes them outside of the human social contract.

“What about the canine social contract?”

            The other, and more common, way of interpreting the word Azazel is as two Hebrew words stuck together – Az and Azel – meaning, “the goat” that “goes away.” In the Hebrew Bible itself, the scapegoat is only sent away, though later commentators say that the goat was not just sent into the wilderness but thrown off a cliff. The reality, though, is that being sent out of community would have been a death sentence in itself in the Ancient Near East, with no one to provide food or water or shelter, either for a goat or for a human being.

            Maimonides, a Medieval Jewish sage (1134-1204), makes sure to remind us that you can’t really transfer your sins to someone or something else, and that this ritual is symbolic; and of course it’s symbolic, but it is a powerful symbol because it taps into some of our deepest feelings and wishes. We want to imagine that our sins can be transferred out of our own bodies and into someone or something else. And we really want to be able to blame someone else for what we’ve done.

“It was her fault.”

            There’s a lot of resonance for me in this idea of a scapegoat, because my father actively tried to transfer his own feelings of guilt and self-loathing, from his own abusive childhood, onto me. And that transfer was emotional, intellectual, and physical in nature. He literally put his hands on me, but he also tried to convince me of my own guilt with his words. He did a very thorough job of it, so much so that many years later I’m still dealing with the aftermath of all of the pain and mistrust and guilt he transferred onto me and created in me.

            I think, usually, when we think of a scapegoat we think in more societal terms, like African American slaves being made the scapegoats of all of the self-loathing and guilt felt by their white enslavers, so that the “master” class could feel superior and divorce itself from any of the feeling of helplessness or guilt or vulnerability they were feeling in the new world. Or when Jews were scapegoated in Germany, and blamed for the economic crises in the country, to the point where Germans really believed that if they got rid of all the Jews their lives and their economy would flourish.

            But I’m really interested in this idea that we can transfer emotions or deeds through touch, the way the High Priest puts his hands on the head of the goat and transfers the sins of the people through his hands. We tend to dismiss touch as every day and meaningless: we shake hands with strangers, and hug our friends hello without a thought. Even sex, in our culture, is often minimized and treated as a sport or a casual pursuit. But the Azazel ritual recognizes that when we touch each other we literally or figuratively leave something of ourselves in the hands of the other.

            We rely on each other, for basics like food and shelter and protection, but also for human touch and connection. And if there’s anything this scapegoat ritual tells us, it’s that the worst thing that can happen to us, or that we think can happen to us, is to be sent outside of the community to survive alone. It’s not death that we fear most, but excommunication and isolation. Even today, when it’s much easier to move from one community to another, and to leave a family of origin behind in search of a family of choice, we still feel these cutoffs viscerally.

            I am still very sensitive to touch, very aware of it and resistant to initiating it. I don’t hug easily. I don’t even shake hands easily. And with my dogs, I can see how important touch can be in creating a shared emotion, in communicating love and security and care – or inspiring fear.

“We prefer love.”

            I wonder what it was like for the goat who was sent to Azazel, if there was a sense of freedom at first, before the reality of exile kicked in, or if he felt the burden of the sins on his head right away and understood his fate. I hope he didn’t understand. I hope that for as long as possible, he believed that he was the lucky one, the one who got away.

“I hope so too, but I’m skeptical.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?   

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