After all of your thoughtful responses to my failed-mystery-writing-summer, I felt like a kaleidoscope that had been shaken back into place. What it boils down to: you don’t have to try to be someone more market savvy, or normal, but you do need to focus on getting your own particular stories written, whether they are fiction or non-fiction, whether the outside world is desperate to hear those stories or not, and stop letting the need to be acceptable cut you off at the knees. Because, really, what if we’re all more interesting than we’ve been given credit for? And what if expecting everyone to hit the same milestones at the same times and learn the same life lessons from our disparate lives is a misunderstanding of why we’re even here in the first place? What if the things that feel vulnerable and not good enough about me are the real things I have to offer the world and by trying so hard to fit in, or sound normal, I’m losing what’s special about me? What if by reading an endless supply of stories about the same successful, good looking, well-regulated people, we’re getting only a tiny speck of the wisdom the world has to offer us?
I don’t completely buy this vision yet, to be honest. I’m still too aware of the American ethos that everyone should be ruggedly independent and capable of surviving by ourselves in the wild; every man is an island, etc. But I’ve never actually been able to live like that. I’ve always needed help to get from point A to point B, and the only real variable is whether I ask for the help I need, or fail to ask for it. And maybe that’s normal. Maybe most people are just putting on a shiny gloss and pretending at normal too.
So, my job is to write the stories, essays, songs, novels, that keep screaming at me to be written, and not to sit in judgement of all of those stories before they’ve even been told. It’s still hard to ignore the voices in my head telling me to just shut up and let the smart, capable, useful people talk, but getting so much support and validation from all of you makes a real difference. I can’t promise that my brain won’t go off the rails again by tomorrow, but at least for a few minutes I’ve been able to take in the love and acceptance you’ve been offering me, just as I am. And I am so grateful to you.
“I could use some more chicken treats, Mommy. just so you know.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
The last story we looked at in Bible Study, before breaking for the summer, was the sacrifice of Jepthah’s daughter in the book of Judges. This is clearly not the most inspiring book of the Hebrew Bible. The first five books are the stars, of course, with the origin story of the Jewish people and their relationship with God at center stage, so even when those books get boring you give them a pass (I see you Leviticus and Numbers, I see you). Then in Joshua, you get the (mostly) triumphant story of the first military leader of the ancient Israelites as they return to the land of Canaan after generations of slavery in Egypt. But then we have the book of Judges, where the ancient Israelites are living in the promised land, but still in tribal groups, and being led by one military leader (aka judge) after another. These are not the great heroes of Jewish history, and they are not portrayed as if they are.
“Are there any dogs in this story?”
Jepthah’s name in Hebrew (Yiftach), literally means “He will open,” and therefore my rabbi nicknamed him “big mouth,” because his most obvious quality is that he opens his big mouth when he shouldn’t. He’s introduced as the disinherited son of a prostitute, kicked out of Gilead by his more respectable brothers, living with the bad boys in a place called “Tov,” which, ironically, means “Good.” Eventually, the elders of Gilead go searching for him, because they are under attack by the Ammonites and he’s developed a reputation as a fighter.
Of course, his first response to them is disbelief. They kicked him out of town and now he’s supposed to save them? But then they tell him that if he can deliver them from the Ammonites, he will become their leader, which would be the ultimate turnaround for him. And, we are told, God is with him. Unfortunately, Jepthah either doesn’t know that God is on his side, or doesn’t trust in God, so he makes a vow to God, “if you deliver the Ammonites into my hands, then whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me on my safe return shall be yours and will be offered by me as a burnt offering.” To be fair to Jepthah, people kept animals in their houses, so he probably assumed he would be sacrificing a cow or a goat or a chicken.
Jepthah, of course, successfully defeats the Ammonites, and when he returns home his only child, a daughter, comes out to meet him, dancing and playing a tambourine (as one does). Upon seeing his daughter, he tears his clothes in mourning. “Ah, my daughter! You have brought me low; You have become my calamity. I have opened my mouth to Yahweh and I cannot turn back.” The Mishna, composed by the rabbis 1500 years after the period of the judges, says that a vow like this that goes against Jewish law is an invalid vow, but Jepthah didn’t get to consult the rabbis and he clearly thought he had no choice. His daughter quickly accepts her fate and just asks that she first be allowed to go away to the mountains with her friends to weep for her virginity, and I was sure this would be the moment when she ran away to live on a kibbutz, or something, but no, according to the text she is then sacrificed by her father. There’s some debate among the commentators over whether she is actually killed, or if maybe she was dedicated as a servant to God (and therefore remaining a virgin for the rest of her life, which would explain the mourning for her virginity thing). The act itself is not described, so there’s some wiggle room.
The lesson of this story has come down as: don’t make a hasty vow because there are consequences to your words. Though you could also choose to learn the lesson that if you are so insecure in your relationship with God that you can’t feel when God is with you, bad things will come of it. Of course, it’s hard to focus on either one of those lessons over the horror of child sacrifice. There seems to have been a lot of confusion in the ancient world over whether God wanted human sacrifices or not, because it was something everyone else was doing at the time and it seemed like such a good idea.
To try to make sense of this story, we read excerpts from Phyllis Trible’s Texts of Terror, which compares the story of the daughter of Jepthah with the attempted sacrifice of Isaac by his father, Abraham.
Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!” and he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “the fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So, the two of them walked on together.
When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. But the angel of God called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” and he said, “Here I am.” He said, do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now, I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.
Later, when Abraham returns to his servants and they all go back home, there’s no mention of Isaac at all, and the interpretation has been offered that in an earlier version of the Hebrew Bible Isaac really was sacrificed, and it was only a later editor who let him live, but didn’t bother to give him anything to say, because, really, what could he say?
My rabbi has long had a fascination with the story of the binding of Isaac, if only because we read about it every year during the high holidays and he has to come up with something interesting to say each time. So, as we re-read the story from Genesis, my rabbi not-so-subtly suggested that someone should write about how Isaac felt that day. Ideally, he would take poor Isaac out to lunch at his favorite diner and get the story from him first hand, but if he couldn’t do that, then maybe someone could imagine how that conversation might go. But to be honest, after reading the scene again, I was as silent as Isaac. His father almost killed him, for no reason other than that a voice Isaac could not hear told him to do it. All of this after, in the previous scene, his older half-brother, Ishmael, is exiled from the family encampment and left to die of thirst in the desert, if God hadn’t, again, stepped in.
Abraham is presented to us as the first person who can hear God’s voice, and the only one at that particular time, and he is so devoted to God that he is willing to sacrifice his sons because God asked him to, and poor Isaac (who, some commentators suggest is actually in his thirties or forties at the time of the attempted sacrifice) is then traumatized for the rest of his life. The end. What else is there to say? God and Abraham are the stars of the story, and Isaac’s fear, or anger, or confusion at his father’s murderous behavior are clearly beside the point. With Jepthah’s daughter it’s even worse, not only doesn’t she get a name, she isn’t saved at the last moment like Isaac is, which is probably why the commentators are looking for loop holes, because this can’t be the story, can it? Why is this even included in the canon?
There are, if you can imagine, even more horrifying stories in the book of Judges, all meant to portray the struggles of becoming a nation, and while we tend to prefer the stories where the people are better than average and God is generous, I think the fact that we have to sit with our ancestors’ mistakes is probably the point of reading the Hebrew Bible. Sure, it’s nice to imagine that your ancestors had a direct connection to God, but how does that help you figure out how to live your life today without God telling you exactly what to do? The word “Torah,” literally means “teaching,” so it’s fair to assume that we are supposed to be learning from these stories about how not to make the same mistakes as our ancestors (though some present-day politicians seem to think those mistakes are actually a road map to be followed). Eventually, instead of leaders who are focused solely on war and security, we start to see prophets and kings and priests who are more self-aware, more strategic, and more connected to God. But we’re not there yet.
We didn’t read the story of Jepthah’s daughter at this particular moment because we knew it would resonate uncomfortably with the present day Middle East, it was just the next book in the series, and, according to my rabbi, we have to read every word, no matter how boring, or how many unpronounceable names we come across (usually it’s my job to read the unpronounceable names, and the repetitive lists of animal sacrifices, because I’m the youngest and have dues to pay). But there’s something reassuring in knowing that, eventually, even the book of Judges will end, and better times are ahead. With new elections coming up, both in Israel in October and in the United States in November, there is the possibility that smarter, better leaders will prevail over our present-day Jepthahs, and this cycle of history can finally move on. We can only hope.
“Or we can hide until it’s over.”
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?
My plan for the summer included writing the first draft of my mystery novel, finally, after years of thinking about it and plotting it out. Everyone I talked to said it sounded like a great idea, and of course I should pursue it, and it would be so much more fun than all of my other writing ideas, which are, let’s face it, pretty depressing. So, I wrote out my list of open questions about the plot and the characters and who was getting killed and who was doing the killing, and I printed out worksheets with one prompt per page (so it wouldn’t be too overwhelming), and I got through the first few pages and then…nothing. I also bought a few (used) copies of How-to-write-a-mystery books, and I read half of one chapter of one book and then that petered out too. Which is, I guess, my brain’s way of telling me that it’s not the right time for the mystery yet.
“I think you need a nap.”
But I’m not sure what to work on instead. Most of the summer, and for a long time before that, to be honest, the writing that has come most naturally to me has been memoir essays, for the blog and otherwise, but does that mean I should be writing a memoir? Because I still don’t really believe that I can write a whole memoir, or get it published, and I’ve also been thinking about a bunch of other projects that have been on hold for one reason or another, and I’m asking myself how much memoir and how much fiction is the right balance for me at this moment. How much of my own pain can I tolerate? And how much fiction do I need to infuse into my life to make it bearable? I once had a non-fiction teacher who said that all writing is 80% true and 20% fiction, whether you choose to call it a novel or a memoir, which sounded both jaded and possibly true to me at the time, but then a lot of memoir writers got caught outright lying, so… Honestly, I’ve always believed that full-length memoirs only work when people are writing about suffering and struggles and vulnerability that they have already overcome, and therefore I should write fiction until my life works out, and then I can write a memoir if I really want to. I’ve also never been much of a memoir reader, even when literary memoirs were at the top of the best seller lists, and they say that you should write the book you want to read, which is why I thought I should write a mystery in the first place. So, I’m confused.
My therapist used to tell me that my problem was stubbornness. She believed that I was choosing not to write the kinds of things that would get published, and choosing not to do all of the other things that normal people do – because of my ideals. And I would love to be able to take credit for that, but it’s bullshit. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out academic writing, until I finally had to accept that a PhD thesis would probably kill me. And I took classes in poetry and TV writing and playwriting and fiction and non-fiction and on and on and I tried to figure out what was getting published and how to write it, I just wasn’t successful. So, sitting there in therapy and being told that I was being stubborn, and a perfectionist, when I knew that’s not what was going on, left me feeling like I couldn’t be trusted to know myself, or know anything. If no one believes you are who you say you are, are you still you?
I love writing the blog. I love writing essays, period. I always have. In college, I used to write essays for my teachers, not for credit, just to try out my ideas and process what I was learning in class. But when I sent my essays out to literary magazines, and my short stories and poems and novels, they were rejected over and over again. And I figured, first of all, if I’m going to be rejected, I’d rather it be for something that isn’t 100% me, thank you very much. And second, I can’t really fix who I am to make myself more palatable and marketable, but I can make things up, so better to stick with fiction. Except, I don’t know what to fix in fiction anymore either. I really don’t know what makes one story/novel/memoir/artist successful and another an also-ran.
I’ve been watching the auditions from The Voice Israel on Youtube and most of the people who don’t get a chair to turn, sound (to me) just as talented as most of the people who do. It has so much to do with what each judge can relate to, in that moment, on that day. And that sucks. If I can be just as talented and work just as hard as another writer, but because their stars align and mine don’t, they are successful and I am not – where does that leave me?
And I guess I’m thinking, maybe there is no “right” answer. Maybe there is no type of writing that will automatically be successful, and I’m not stubbornly avoiding the correct path, and I don’t need to browbeat myself into becoming a totally different kind of writer, because it wouldn’t make a difference.
Ideally, I would have a plan going forward. I would work on one project at a time, research the perfect agent/publisher/audience for it, become wildly successful, and then move on to the next one. But my brain doesn’t work that way, and trying to twist myself into shapes that don’t fit me is both really uncomfortable and clearly a waste of time. So, what does that mean? I have no idea. I guess it means that I should write what I’m up to writing, when I’m up to writing it, and ignore as many of the insistent shoulds as I possibly can, except that ignoring those voices in my head is not one of my natural talents either. Basically, I’m getting my writing done, if I’m learning about myself and the world around me and I’m doing the best I can, maybe that is enough for now.
“Have you considered chicken treats? They’re like magic.”
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 wrote a set of lyrics, or a poem, or something, and I wanted to see if I could translate it into an actual song, at which point, of course, I forgot everything I’d ever known about music or writing. I went to Google to ask how to write a song and found page after page that boiled down to: set up the story in verse one, state the basic emotion of the song in the chorus, advance the story in verse two, and good luck. But shockingly, I still felt clueless about how to proceed. In general, when I write I just write, and the rhythm comes from the words themselves and from how often I need to stop and breathe. In order to write a song, though, I needed a more deliberate structure and I was still at a loss.
“Oy.”
So then I collected a YouTube list of songs that seemed well-structured (to me) and started listening to them to see if I could figure out how they worked. I listened to a lot of Mumford and Sons songs, like Awake My Soul and I Will Wait, and My Church and The Bones by Maren Morris, and Falling and Sweet Creature from Harry Styles, and songs from Regina Spektor and Van Morrison and Sarah Mclachlan and James Taylor and Nat King Cole. And what I noticed, after listening to dozens of songs and reminding myself to listen for rhyme and meter each time, wasn’t rhyme and meter. Instead, it was how I felt. Even when a song didn’t bother to finish telling its story, as long as there was one moment where I felt something or saw something or maybe even smelled something, the song felt successful.
I also noticed that I really wanted to rewrite other people’s songs. I’d be singing along, feeling like this is my song, until a word or two would ring false and break the spell. For example, Kelly Clarkson’s song Mine is beautiful and heartbreaking and almost perfect, until she gets to the line “eternal sunshine of the spotless mind,” which feels like a foreign substance dropped in from popular culture rather than part of an organic whole. (I blame my rabbi for this tendency of mine to want to edit. He “adapts” poems and essays from established writers to fit his purposes throughout the year, and especially on the high holidays, when we need as much help from English as possible to try to understand the endless Hebrew liturgy. I mean, I was always like this, but now I have, like, God’s permission.)
Anyway, with all of that in mind, I was even more uncertain about how to proceed. I was especially flummoxed by the need to rhyme, because it reminded me of having to buy a thesaurus in graduate school and being told there was always a “right” word for each purpose. But one of the things I learned from my long listening experiment was that rhyme schemes can help create a sense of anticipation, or inevitability, in a song, taking something that otherwise feels humdrum and making it almost magic. So, bravely, I looked through my existing lyrics and made a list of words I thought I could find rhymes for, and then I asked Google for rhymes (no more stupid thesaurus for me!)) and wrote down every possible word that resonated for me. At this point I was lost in a sea of words and even more overwhelmed than before, but I reminded myself that there’s always a way forward and I started freewriting every image I could think of for each word on my list.
If this is starting to sound like a ridiculous amount of work, especially with no guarantee that it would lead anywhere productive, I agree. But I can’t think of any other way forward. The gulf between “I want to write a song” and “I know how to write a song” feels so vast, it’s like trying to fly over an ocean without a plane, or a life preserver. And I’m still somewhere over the Atlantic at the moment, desperately flapping my wings. Wish me luck!
“Good luck and chicken treats, 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?
As a rule, I’m more comfortable writing letters (or emails or texts) than trying to tell someone what I think face to face, because even when I prepare ahead of time, and write down all of my thoughts, and study the bullet points over and over again, my mind still goes blank when faced with someone else’s plan for the conversation. Part of the problem is that I can see when they don’t understand me (in writing, I don’t find that out until later), but even more than that, I get intimidated by people who radiate confidence, whether that confidence is warranted or not. I’ve never had a talent for certainty, even though I have plenty of opinions, and the shining star of someone else’s confidence tends to dazzle me into silence.
“Do I look confident to you?”
Even when I’m alone, though, I still struggle to hold onto my own thoughts in the face of so many impatient internal interruptions: But you should have done this already! But you’re taking too long! But why is everyone else so far ahead of you?! I can barely finish one sentence without the “But, but, but” voice butting in. That voice insists that it knows the world better than I do, and knows who I should be in every situation, and it gets louder and louder if I dare to ignore it. The problem is, I created this internal voice myself, in therapy, modeling it on my long-term therapist’s voice. I had automatically internalized my father’s deep baritone telling me that I was stupid and selfish and the cause of all evil, so when I started therapy I needed a strong voice to help fight it off, and Mom’s gentle voice, encouraging me to say more, to sing more, to dance more, wasn’t loud enough to shout him down. I was relieved to be able to mimic my therapist’s confidence, in herself and in me, to keep my father at bay. But, somewhere along the way, the inner voice that was supposed to be protecting me started to cause harm. It never turned mean or abusive, but it started to get impatient with me, insisting that I should be able to do more than I could, and demanding that I march to a more predictable rhythm than my natural sway. Each time I thought that I’d found my footing on the skinny balance beam of “I know what I’m talking about,” that internal voice would break in and tell me that I was wrong and I’d fall to the floor in a jumble of arms and legs. It took me way too long to realize that this was happening, and even longer to believe that I could do something to change it.
I haven’t fixed it all yet, of course. I just know that the next task is to replace that voice with something more my own, even though, most days, trying to ignore the critical voice makes me feel like I’m standing in the middle of a thunderstorm and trying to ignore the rain. My own voice is still pretty easily drowned out, but I’m hoping that, at this point, I’ve slayed enough of my dragons that I no longer need a big, booming voice to fight my battles for me. And maybe, just maybe, I can give my own voice the chance to grow into whatever it was meant to be from the beginning.
“I hear a voice saying that the puppy dog needs more chicken treats. Can you hear it?”
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 had another oral surgery a couple of weeks age, a second attempt at a skin graft to ameliorate recurring infections around one of the zygomatic implants, after last summer’s attempt failed. I scheduled the surgery for after school was over for the year, so I would have time to rest and recover before having to deal with actual people again. We had to take a car service to the doctor’s office because I was going to be on anesthesia for the procedure and therefore wouldn’t be allowed to drive myself home, but Mom came with me for uneventful-ride-with-a-stranger and when we arrived Mom set herself up in the waiting room with a book to read and a sewing project, and the staff took me over to an exam room to prepare for the procedure.
“I stayed home. Thank God.”
There were a lot of Elton John songs playing over the speakers that morning, for some reason. Usually there’s a mix of music from the seventies and eighties, and very rarely from the nineties, but there was something comforting about hearing Elton John’s voice over and over, as if he was hanging out in the room with me and keeping me calm as they put the mask over my nose and started the nitrous and then poked my arms, endlessly, in search of a good vein for the anesthesia. I think there were three needle sticks before they finally believed me that the good vein is in my right arm. The last thing I remembered was the doctor saying, “she’s a cheap date,” and I wanted to stand up and tell him that’s not funny, but I was out. I woke up to instructions about where to hold the gauze to staunch the blood, and how to put pressure on the gauze with my tongue, and then I was taken to the recovery room, given a few envelopes of gauze, and the same aftercare sheet I’ve gotten for every procedure in that office, and sent on my way.
Almost as soon as I got home, though, I realized that I was going through the gauze much faster than I was supposed to. I can’t remember if I’d ever used all of the gauze in the packet before, but this time my mouth was filling up with blood faster than I could change out the gauze, and blood kept pouring onto my shirt before I could fold up new pieces of paper towel to replace the gauze. I couldn’t speak through all of the blood and gauze and paper towel, so Mom called the doctor’s office for advice and they told us to come back in right away to get the wound cauterized. This day was getting expensive, with our third taxi ride in a row, but I had no choice, so I held a pile of paper towels to my face and stared out the window of the car, watching all the same houses pass by for the third time.
Then I was back in the exam room and they were syphoning away the blood, and rinsing my mouth with salt water, and the doctor was pressing on the wound so hard it felt like his fist was going to push into my brain. My face must have still been numb from the earlier procedure, though, because even though I was uncomfortable and confused, I wasn’t in a lot of pain, and then the bleeding finally stopped and they washed my face, and gave me another sleeve of gauze, and sent me on my way again. One of the nurses offered me apple juice as I was leaving, but I was afraid to dislodge the gauze and start the bleeding all over again, so I promised I would drink something once I got home.
Mom and I sat in the waiting room for the next ten or fifteen minutes, waiting for the notification that the car had arrived, and then we took the elevator down to the lobby to meet the driver in the parking lot. I felt sort of dizzy and clammy when I stepped out of the elevator, but I thought it was form getting back in touch with the heat of the day after living in the bliss of air-conditioning for hours (it was 80 degrees Fahrenheit in the real world), so I was sure I just needed to rest against the wall for a second and I’d be fine. I took a few breaths and stood back up and made it another few steps towards the glass doors of the vestibule, where I knew I would really start to feel the heat, but I had to find a wall to lean on again, and then I found myself sitting on the floor, which just seemed silly. I laughed at myself and pulled myself up again, feeling like I was getting a full day’s exercise in one go, but I felt really nauseous and found myself on the floor again. From far away, I could hear Mom asking me if I was able to move my arm, because it seemed that my arm was trapped in the doorway and sticking out into the vestibule, and she was worried I would get hurt, or that I would block someone from entering or exiting, I don’t know. I must have been able to move my arm out of the way, and I must have tried to get up again, but the next thing I remember is being flat on my back and hearing the sound of racing footsteps coming down the stairs. Mom had gone back up in the elevator to get the doctor, and it seemed like the whole team had come downstairs with him. I could hear Mom telling them that I’d fainted and hit my head, which was news to me, and I felt a cold compress on my forehead and an oxygen mask over my nose, and one nurse even had a little electric fan that she used to try and cool me off. They put my feet up on a chair at some point and I heard the doctor say that he’d called for an ambulance, and then there were even more people around me, lifting me onto a stretcher (it’s good that she’s wearing jeans, so we can lift her by her belt loops).
Then I was in the ambulance and they were checking my blood pressure and doing more needle sticks (at least three more tries before they found a vein they could use). Every once in a while, I was able to say something, like, that’s the bad arm, the good vein is on the other side, and I could hear the EMTs asking how old I was and saying, no way, she looks twenty-five (which lifted my spirits, I have to say). They put a neck brace on me, because of the fall I couldn’t remember, and I heard Mom tell them that I’d hit my butt first and then my head, so I was probably okay. They brought me to the nearest hospital, which was literally around the corner, and I remember being outside for a moment and then they pushed my stretcher into the emergency room and transferred me to one of the hospital stretchers, which were all sort of floating around the room, with some make-shift screens put up between them to allude to privacy. They checked all of my vitals again, and took the neck brace off, thank God (because at that moment the brace was causing the most pain), and I had to sign a bunch of digital forms, but I can’t tell you what they were, and then the doctor told me her plan: blood tests to see if I needed a transfusion and a CT scan to make sure I didn’t have a concussion.
The original procedure had been at 11:15 that morning and we’d returned to the doctor’s office around 3:30 in the afternoon, so we probably got to the hospital around 4:30 pm. There was a nice lady in the bed next to me with an amputated leg who seemed to think I was up to making conversation, and then they gave me saline in one of the many holes they’d made in my arms, and I just stayed flat on my back because even lifting my head felt impossible.
There was something about those few hours, where I could take in most of what was happening to me but couldn’t really make logical decisions, that felt revelatory. I’d forgotten that this state of being even existed, even though it was a very common state from my childhood, because, I realized, I’ve always read more consciousness and choice into my memories than was really there. I always thought I should have been able to understand things, and should have been able to make better choices, but lying there on the hospital stretcher, I realized how silly that was. The whole time I’d been in the lobby of the doctor’s building, falling and standing back up and falling again, I’d been so sure that I would be able to stand up and walk out to the car if I just tried a little bit harder, and each time I was wrong.
At some point, Mom got a text from the oral surgeon, who had seen some of my early test results and wanted us to know that the reason my blood sugar was slightly elevated was because he’d put a steroid into my anesthesia cocktail, along with the Propofol and Versed, to extend the length of time the pain relief would last. And that was the first time in hours that I even remembered that I’d had surgery that morning and that half my face was still numb. Eventually, the saline started to do its job and they brought me some apple juice to drink and some disgusting orange Jello to try to shovel into my mouth and they tilted the bed so I could sit up like a human again and see what was going on around me.
Next up, they took me for a CT scan on my own personal stretcher, because they didn’t trust me on my feet even long enough to transfer me to a wheelchair, and I found my sense of humor returning, which was good because I could see my reflection in the elevator door and it was a lot. And then I was back in the Emergency Room, waiting for results. I remember thinking about all of the people I should be calling or texting, and just having no energy to even look for my phone. There was a basketball game, or maybe hockey, on the TV screen in the distance, but mostly I just listened to the conversations around me: the woman with the amputated leg really didn’t like her sandwich, and a woman with cancer arrived in so much pain that her not quite adult daughter had to speak for her, and there was a man with back pain who kept trying to stand up against the nurse’s advice, and a woman I couldn’t see who was angry about something I couldn’t understand.
Once all of the test results finally came back, the doctor told me that the blood loss and the anesthesia, and having two serious procedures in one day, had caused a Vaso-vagal Syncope (AKA I fainted), and it wasn’t an uncommon response (which is what my brother had said a few hours earlier, when Mom texted him). I was discharged from the hospital after 11 PM, once the doctor was convinced that I could walk without falling down, and we called the car service yet again to take us home. I was starting to feel much better, and therefore much more aware that my poor mother had spent the whole day taking care of me, despite the fact that she was walking with a cane and sitting on a hard chair and really really really needed a nap. We both struggled with the walk from the parking lot when we got home, and I had to sit down twice to rest along the walkway. Our downstairs neighbor, a nurse, met us at the front door of our building and insisted on helping me up the stairs, and I don’t know why I kept arguing with her because I really needed the help. We’d called her earlier to ask her to check on Tzippy for us, and it turned out she’d been waiting up for hours just to see how I was doing.
The left side of my face was still numb, but I dutifully ate a few spoonfuls of chocolate pudding, because it was at the top of my soft foods diet list, and then I made my way to my bedroom and fell asleep.
“I did not sleep, ever.”
I hadn’t really believed in the fainting part of Mom’s story, to be honest, until I woke up the next morning and could feel the sore spot on the back of my head from where I’d hit the floor, and the pain from the actual surgery was starting to kick in as well. I looked over the aftercare sheet from the doctor’s office and took the recommended doses of Tylenol and Ibuprofen and made myself some very well smushed tuna with mayo. The pain in my mouth kept getting worse throughout the day, but I was sure the Tylenol and Ibuprofen should be enough to manage it, since the doctor hadn’t prescribed an opiate this time around, and I really didn’t want to bother anyone.
I was still very disoriented, and exhausted, so I had a lot of time to think over the next few days and I kept reliving those few moments in the lobby of the doctor’s building, and wondering what would have happened if Mom hadn’t been there with me. I would have been just as helpless, but no one would have been there to fill the gap between what I could do for myself and what needed to be done, and that gap was starting to look really vast. And now that I was remembering all of those times as a kid when I couldn’t help myself, and no one else was around to fill the gap, I realized that instead of feeling the grief and helplessness of those moments, I’d filled the space with self-loathing, as if yelling at myself to try harder would suddenly make me capable of doing the impossible. There’s something so terrifying about that space, where there’s nothing I can do and no one is coming to save me, and my mind chose to deal with it by pretending I was wrong, telling me that if I could just push myself a little bit harder, be smarter, older, stronger, taller, healthier, whatever else I was not, then I would be okay.
But now, seeing myself over and over on the floor in the lobby of the doctor’s building, and realizing there was nothing I could have done, was an incredible relief; as if I was patting my younger self on the head and saying, see, you didn’t do anything wrong, and here’s the proof: when people knew you were struggling and were able to be of help, they came running. I remember being told as a kid that life isn’t supposed to be fair, and thinking that that was just nonsense, because of course life is supposed to be fair, and therefore if I’m not getting the help I need then I must not deserve it. That makes the world make sense. That makes the math work. But maybe the math doesn’t add up in real life. Maybe, more often than not, the gap between what I need and what I get is left unfilled, not out of intentional malice or because it’s what I deserve, but just by chance. Which is terrifying.
Anyway, I spent the rest of the week resting and recovering, thinking deep thoughts, eating soft foods, and wondering why the Tylenol and Ibuprofen didn’t seem to be doing very much. And then, exactly a week after the initial surgery, I woke up at three thirty in the morning to the taste of blood in my mouth. I put pressure on the wound right away, just like they’d done in the doctor’s office, and I looked up excessive-bleeding-a-week-after-oral-surgery on my phone and tried to feel reassured when it said that if I kept pressing on the wound and stayed upright, the bleeding would eventually stop. Mom got up to sit with me and after forty-five minutes or so, the paper towels I kept stuffing into my mouth started to be less and less soaked in blood, and I was finally able to take some pain medication, and a few deep breaths. Mom went back to bed, but I stayed on the couch in the living room and kept pressure on the wound, just in case. And then, around six or seven o’clock in the morning the bleeding started again. I went through four rolls of paper towels trying to staunch the blood and I finally texted the doctor’s office and was told me to come in as soon as possible. I woke Mom up again and she called the car service, again, and we made it out to the parking lot somehow and arrived at the office sometime around 8:30 am. But, after getting myself out of the car and thanking the driver and closing the car door, I couldn’t take another step. The nausea and dizziness and this strange weakness in my legs were overwhelming. Mom went inside to get help and I sat down on the sidewalk, trying to scoot along the ground to get a few feet closer to the front door, and then the doctor’s assistant arrived with a tech and a wheelchair, and they brought me inside and up to the exam room.
“What the F&%# is going on, Mommy?!”
The syphoning began again, and it was as if the intervening week hadn’t happened. The doctor was probably in the middle of another surgery when I arrived, so his assistant was in charge of assessing the situation and she gave me fluids through an IV and put me on the nitrous again. Somewhere along the way I heard her telling the doctor, “she’s a faucet,” probably in response to his endless requests for updates while she was busy trying to keep me from drowning in my own blood. Eventually, the doctor decided to cauterize the wound without anesthesia, so he could see where the blood was coming from, he said, and the pain was extraordinary. I was screaming and crying openly and my hands and feet and bottom lip started to go numb, and the doctor said I was hyperventilating and needed to focus on breathing out through the mask more than breathing in and I would have slapped him if I’d had any strength at all. At some point the doctor was standing in front of me and asking if I wanted to go to the hospital and of course, I said no, and then, finally, the anesthesia must have kicked in. I don’t remember losing consciousness but everything became sort of fuzzy. A nurse and a tech stayed with me, changing the gauze religiously until the bleeding had completely stopped, massaging my hands when they went numb again, checking on mom and letting her know I was okay, even bringing her pretzels and coffee in the waiting room.
Before running to help with the next procedure, the doctor’s assistant told me to stick to a liquid diet for the next few weeks, drinking a lot of Ensure and smoothies to keep my calories up, and I wondered why she was telling me that now, instead of a week earlier. I made a point of asking when I should go back to rinsing with the medicated mouthwash in case the vigorous (recommended) rinsing was also part of the problem, and she said, definitely not today. They transferred me back to the wheel chair and then wheeled me to the waiting room to sit with Mom until the car service could arrive, and then the nurse took me downstairs in the wheelchair and made sure I was safe in the back seat of the taxi before walking away.
The lesson this time around seemed to be that both me and Mom needed to work on asking for help sooner, and not worrying so much about bothering people, so even before we arrived back home Mom had texted the maintenance man at our co-op to ask if he could bring her rollator down from our apartment (it was actually her sister’s rollator, offered just in case she might need it). I was barely able to stand up long enough to transfer from the car to the rollator, even with help, but it was an incredible relief to find myself sitting on the rollator seat while our maintenance man pushed me all the way around the parking lot and up the walkway (I tried my best to hold my feet up off the ground, so they wouldn’t act as brakes), and we even zoomed along for the last bit, reminding me of childhood visits with Grandpa, driving along in his convertible with the wind in my hair.
And then I was sitting in front of our building, unable to stand, let alone to climb the two steps up to the front door, and forget about the twenty steps up the stairs to the apartment. My downstairs neighbor, the nurse, was home in the middle of the day, fortuitously, and she looked at me and looked at Mom and offered to drive us to the hospital. But I didn’t want to go. I thought, maybe I could just sit there for a few hours until I felt stronger, but my neighbor was dubious and said I’d be safer in the hospital, where they would probably want to give me a transfusion. When I finally accepted that I had no choice – my feet were not walking themselves up those stairs – I also realized that I couldn’t even make my way back down to the parking lot and into my neighbor’s car, so we called for an ambulance.
The maintenance man went to meet the EMTs in the parking lot and brought them to the backyard, where I’d been resettled in the shade, with a bottle of water and a box of tissues (I can’t even tell you how lucky we are in our neighbor and our maintenance man). There were two or three EMTs and they transferred me onto a stretcher and rolled me down to the ambulance, and then the one who looked like a cross between Harry Styles and Harry Potter started the assessment. He couldn’t have been much older than my nephews, and he had tattoos down both arms like Harry Styles, but he had a reassuringly sweet smile and I was pretty sure the bangs on his forehead were covering a lightning shaped scar. He took my vitals, including an EKG, but he didn’t try to put in an IV for fluids this time. My arms were already black and blue from all of the needle sticks the week before, and then again from that morning, so he might just have left it for the nurses to manage later in the ER, when I wasn’t so much of a moving target.
We went to a different hospital this time, closer to home and with a much bigger emergency room, and the EMT parked me in the entrance hallway and reported my history and vitals to the nurse in charge, and she put two bracelets on my arm, one with my name and birthdate on it, and one in bright neon yellow that said “fall risk.” Pretty quickly they moved me from the assessment hallway to my new parking spot at the end of another hallway, and I started to meet a lot of nurses and techs and doctors. My sense of time was all over the place, but I remember a lot of blood being taken, and I remember drinking apple juice and worrying that the bleeding was going to start all over again.
The ER doctor asked a cardiologist to consult at some point, and he pulled the skin under my right eye (checking for hidden aliens?) and looked at my blood test results and said I’d probably lost half my blood volume and would need a transfusion. Which meant that the needle sticks had to start again. One nurse even got out the ultrasound wand to try and locate a vein before sticking me three more times, but the pain was excruciating and she still couldn’t find a good vein. Eventually the next nurse, or the one after her, found a usable vein on the back of my right hand, and then she taped the needle in place three times so it wouldn’t move even in an earthquake. By then they had decided to keep me overnight for observation and I sent Mom home to rest (one of the nurses had even brought her a tuna sandwich and some gingerale along the way). More blood was taken (no wonder I needed a transfusion!) and they checked my blood pressure a thousand more times and gave me more apple juice, and I spoke to my brother on the phone and he told me that when they gave me the transfusion, I would be able to hear the memories of the blood’s owner (he reads a lot of sci fi), so I was looking forward to that.
Mom had reached out to the executive director of our synagogue (one of her favorite people on the planet) so I got a call from one rabbi and texts from the other. I still couldn’t walk, or really stand on my own, but my sense of humor had returned somewhere along the way, and I was taking copious notes in my tiny notebook, and at some point they started the actual transfusion, and then at nine or ten o’clock they transferred me to a semi-private room deep in the ER, where I could watch TV and, to my surprise, was able to fall asleep.
They woke me up around five or six the next morning and the first thing I noticed was the pain. Whatever anesthesia the oral surgeon had given me in his office the day before was finally starting to wear off, but the nurse needed a doctor’s approval before she could even give me an Ensure, let alone a Tylenol, so it was a few more hours of sitting and waiting in pain while they gave me more fluids through the IV.
The older rabbi from my synagogue came to visit around ten or eleven that morning, and the younger rabbi texted to check up on me and asked if I’d like to be added to the Mishaberach list, so people could pray for my well-being at Friday night services this week, and I surprised myself by saying yes to that for the first time in my life.
The cardiologist came in to check on me at some point, and had my blood pressure checked in three positions, lying down, sitting and standing up, before ordering more fluids. And, finally, sometime after noon, the cardiologist cleared me to go home. It still took a while before they could remove the IV – which was really well taped in place and therefore hurt like hell when it came out – but Mom was able to get a lift from yet another generous neighbor, and the nurse walked me out of the emergency room for pick up. When I sat down on a bench by the front circle where patients were supposed to be picked up, I realized that I was finally walking on my own power for the first time in twenty-four hours, and then I saw the car and didn’t quite sprint across the parking lot to get into the backseat of the car, and finally, we went home.
I slept for a long time that afternoon, after filling up on Tylenol and Ibuprofen and Ensure, and when I woke up Mom told me she had called the doctor’s offices asking about pain management, so I guess I must have mentioned the pain to her, but she hadn’t heard back yet, so I took more Tylenol, drank another Ensure, mixed with Fairlife Chocolate Milk to make it more palatable, and went back to sleep.
The next morning, the pain was so bad that I couldn’t even drink the Ensure, so I texted the doctor’s assistant and she had the doctor call in a prescription for Percocet and Mom was able to get a lift to CVS to pick it up for me.
The Percocet did its job, so it was a few days before I realized that I didn’t have my hospital notebook anymore (I was sure it was sitting safely in my pocketbook waiting for me, but I must have lost it among the sheets of the hospital bed at some point), and I felt stupid, because the nurse had specifically asked me if I had left anything behind when I left the ER, and I didn’t think to check for the notebook. But I drank more Ensure and got to work reconstructing events to the best of my ability, though to be honest, everything from the midway point of this essay onward is just a guess.
As you can imagine, I have some notes for my doctor about what to do differently next time around (on someone else, because I can’t see going through this again, even if this procedure was as unsuccessful as the last one). I still worry that I’m going to wake up with a mouthful of blood in the middle of the night, but so far everything has remained intact.
I’m not sure what lesson to take from all of this, to be honest. I was hoping that writing it all out would give me some clues to bigger life lessons, but for now I’m just grateful that there are so many kind people in my immediate vicinity, willing to go out of their way to help me. Though, I think Tzippy has been taking her own notes on the whole ordeal, so she might be ready to share her life lessons any day now. Fingers crossed.
“I have absolutely nothing to say.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
I don’t remember when Tzipporah started to run out of the room each time I sat down at the computer, maybe sometime in February or March, after that one time when I tried to bring her to my zoom Hebrew class and she knocked my juice onto the keyboard in her desperate attempt to flee. She’d already made it clear by then that she didn’t want to come to Bible study sessions on zoom either (Ellie used to love to sit on my lap and watch the rabbi make faces on the screen), so any sign of the computer moving, or me moving towards the computer, made Tzippy very nervous.
“Computers are dangerous.”
But, more recently, I realized that Tzippy was also leaving the room when I wasn’t sitting at the computer. I’d be on the couch, minding my own business (staring at my phone), and suddenly she had somewhere else to be, often running straight to my bedroom to pee on the exercise mat. Or, apropos of nothing at all, she would leave the living room just to get a drink of water or to sniff something in the hallway or even to pee on the actual wee wee pad. For most of the year and a half that she’d been living with us, she’d refused to leave her bed as long as I was in the living room with her, often waiting hours and hours before daring to pee or to look for her dinner, but suddenly, she was free.
I can’t find any reliable patterns in her new behaviors, though. Sometimes she still sits in her bed and stares at me like I’m a bomb about to explode, and sometimes she casually walks into the hallway for a snack in the middle of Murder, She Wrote. Sometimes she steps out of her bed at random to take a long stretch, before starting her next nap, and sometimes if I even look in her direction she runs for her life. And I really don’t love that she’s going to my room to pee (though at least she’s peeing on the rubber mat instead of on the rug, so it’s easier to clean), but there’s something about this new wandering version of Tzippy that’s fun to watch. It feels like we’re on season two of a really good TV show and even though I’m not sure where the story is going, I’m already fascinated by the plot twists. And, honestly, I can’t wait to see what happens in season three!
“I’m still the star of the show, Mommy.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
In the past, when I’ve tried to take Tzipporah for a walk she just sat on the ground and shivered, and if I dared to tug on her leash she fought like a wild animal to get away, burrowing under the bench by the retaining wall or trying to climb the wall itself. I was still taking her with me to therapy once a week, but I hadn’t tried putting her toes on the ground in months, and then last weekend something changed. Usually when we return home from therapy, Tzippy is exhausted, waiting just long enough to eat her chicken treat before stretching out in her bed for a long nap, but the day before the big blizzard she seemed more awake and aware, as if she was waiting for her next adventure.
I’m not sure what convinced me to try again, maybe just knowing that we would be snowed in for the next few days, but I bundled her back up in her winter coat, and put her leash back on, and carried her down the stairs and outside. At first, when I put her down on the walkway, she just sat down and waited as usual, shivering and looking around in alarm. But when Grandma started to walk ahead of us, Tzippy actually followed her. She only took a few steps before sitting back down again, but when I gave her some head scratches and encouragement, she took another few steps, and then a few more and a few more.
We managed the equivalent of one block – between our front door and the next building in the complex – and then she sat down more firmly and refused to go any further. I was sure I’d have to carry her, but when I turned back towards home Tzippy stood up and followed me, taking five steps at a time instead of three. She finally hit her limit about ten feet away from our front door, and then she sat down in front of me and refused to go another step. I picked her up and gave her kisses and so much praise for her amazing accomplishment, and she seemed to understand that she’d done something special, but she was also exhausted. As soon as I carried her upstairs and gave her a treat, she ran back to her bed to eat it and then stretched out for a long nap.
I’m sure it sounds like the tiniest of accomplishments, but it felt like a huge breakthrough. I’d almost given up on the possibility of change after more than a year of trying everything, and I have no idea what made this breakthrough possible; maybe it was all of those hours in therapy, or maybe her new food changed something, or maybe she was just ready.
The next day, after the snow had started to fall but before the real blizzard kicked in, we decided to try another walk just to see if the first one was a fluke. Tzippy was not at all sure about putting her paws down on the snowy walkway, but once again, when Grandma walked ahead of her, Tzippy followed. We walked twice as far, because Grandma insisted, but Tzippy wasn’t thrilled with the extra distance and kept trying to crawl under and through my legs to convince me to pick her up. With frequent breaks for head scratches and encouragement, we made it all the way back to our building, but the two steps up to the door were a no-go. When I picked her up, I touched her toes to each step to show her how it was done, but she was not at all interested and just wanted to get back inside.
Once the blizzard kicked in, we were content to stay indoors for the duration, and we didn’t go back outside until all of the shoveling and plowing had been done (by other people). But then we tried walking again. The third walk was short, and Tzippy was not enthusiastic, but she did it, so as the snow melts, I see a lot of short walks in Tzippy’s future. And if she needs to complain, I’m sure my therapist is ready to listen, and Grandma will hand out chicken treats by the handful as needed. I just hope it doesn’t take another year before Tzippy is ready to try the stairs.
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 reading through piles and piles of notebooks, and files and files on the computer, to see which of my writing projects still spark my interest; and unfortunately, they all do. I can sort of prioritize one, or two (or five) above the rest, but it’s like trying to choose my favorite dog and having to ignore all of the others. How can you look away from that sweet, lonely, hungry little dog?! What kind of monster are you?!
There are novel ideas in the notebooks, and novel drafts on the computer, and drafts of long essays and short essays, and children’s stories, and short stories, and mysteries, and even a science fiction story or two. And along with all of the writing projects, I also have lesson plans to write, and a ton of therapy work I still need to do in order to become the kind of functional adult who doesn’t need to crawl under the bed and hide (which hurts my back, honestly).
This is what happens when I try to open the creaky, dusty, long-closed doors in my brain. I know I have to do this every once in a while, if only to make sure I’m not leaving something important behind, but it’s overwhelming. And, of course, there are endless internal arguments over which ideas have the best chance of getting published, and which ones will be an exhausting waste of time, and why do I have to be a writer at all when I really should be doing something more useful with my life, or at least more practical. But I’ve been a writer since I first learned how to hold one of those fat red pencils in nursery school, and if I stopped writing it would feel like I’d stopped breathing. And, really, even if it looks like I’m standing still, I am frantically kicking my feet under the surface, like a duck; and yet I judge myself only by what other people can see.
At some point, hopefully soon, I will finish this reassessment period and be able to choose a few manageable goals to work towards and put the rest aside. And then maybe I can put off the next reassessment for a while, or at least make sure I’m better medicated by then.
“Chicken fixes everything.”
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?
rachelmankowitz 