I have been piecing together that part of his life ever since.

In the first stages of the research, I asked about what happened to him. Who asked him to leave? Why? What did they say? Who recorded the decision, and were there any objections?

I send different versions of the same questions to people in Concordia who might remember him, or who might be connected to someone who still has a record. Do you have a picture? Is there a membership list somewhere? I tell them that his name might be spelled several ways. I tell them, he was a pharmacist. He was nearly two meters tall. I add in whatever details might help someone recognize him, or recall a story they heard about him. Then I wait.

In between responses I wonder about who stood beside him.

I want to know whether anyone noticed he was gone, whether his friends turned their backs on him and his wife, my great-grandmother Elena. I wonder if anyone went looking for him after he stopped coming to the club.

The question of his belonging ran with me this past Sunday at the New York City Marathon. I wore a shirt with “Rabbi” across the front, and strangers called out, “Go Rabbi!” as I passed. Israeli flags flew on runners and among the spectators. I pointed at each one, grateful for the recognition.

Nice Jewish Runners, the running club I belong to, had a large cheering crew along the course, too. They had gathered to make a place where Jewish runners could feel recognized and encouraged. I ran through their confetti along with other Jewish runners, arms raised. They show up at every race. I have a photograph from the NYC Half Marathon of the moment I ran past them, with “Nice Jewish Runners” across my shirt.

I want to find a photograph like this of Shevaj. I know the joy of belonging to a sporting community where my Jewishness is part of what brings us together. It makes me wonder what belonging felt like for him, before the club asked him to leave.

I want to know that someone, anyone, told him he wasn’t alone.

Darío Garayalde, the article’s author, and I have written to each other regularly since I first reached out, and an unexpected friendship has grown between us. He has told me that he spends much of his time alone, since his children live and work in Buenos Aires. He appreciates our conversations, he says. They keep him company.

Our messages now begin with talk of his health and our families before they turn to the research. I care about him, and when I find out something new, I want him to know.

Knowing Darío makes me feel closer to Concordia. There is now someone there who knows my name and shares a bit of my family’s history. He understands why I keep asking, and when we write to each other, I feel a little closer to a history I thought was beyond my reach.

My conversations with him also help me feel closer to the people who can no longer tell their own stories. My grandmother was thirteen when her father died. She was the same age as many of the kids I work with now. The fact that I work with kids around the same age makes it harder for me to hold this story at a distance. I wonder how much she noticed as her father struggled, and what she understood about the antisemitism he encountered. What did the adults tell her? What did she have to figure out for herself?

I can’t go back and sit beside Shevaj, or ask Elena how she is managing. I can’t give Susana, at thirteen, a place to say what she is seeing and feeling. I wish I could have offered all of them the support I offer children and families now.

That wish keeps me writing to people in Concordia. I want to understand what happened, and to bear witness to my family’s story. I want to hear whatever anyone still remembers, and to let their lives take up more room than the silence that followed for generations.

Recently, I asked Darío what else he remembered about the discrimination Shevaj encountered. His account, as you might recall, came from conversations with Jacobo “Yaco” Bilkis, the pharmacist who had known my family.

In the 1930s, Darío told me, the club’s attitude toward Shevaj began to change, as did the attitude of some of its members. They had greatly admired his ability as an athlete but eventually they asked him to resign. There are days, perhaps years, of Shevaj’s life folded into this brief account. I try to imagine what those days felt like. Then I remember that imagining is different from knowing, and the questions arise all over again.

What did the change in attitude look like? Was it gradual, or did it feel like it happened overnight? Did he fight it, hoping things would get better?

This history is so fragile. Yaco died in 2024. We have this much because Darío listened to him, and wrote something about it. I still ache for the questions that have no answers yet.

I contacted Club Regatas Concordia hoping that something in their records might help. Perhaps a membership list, or a crew list from a regatta would give me another piece of his life there. The current director of the club told me that many of their written records had been destroyed in floods. I kept picturing ledgers floating away into the Uruguay River, and wondering whether his name might have been written on one of those pages.

I began looking for what might have survived elsewhere. I can’t just accept a missing ledger as concrete evidence of deliberate erasure. I need records. Facts. Maybe someone took records home, or tucked a photo into an album their children still have.

This possibility led me to Hugo Luis Ledesma, who shares historical rowing photographs on social media. I found whole boat crews with names attached, dating back to the 1940s. His posts included old clippings, and pictures someone had clearly kept outside of any official archive. I wrote to him.

These photographs renewed my hope. I wanted to see Shevaj among other people: where he sat in the boat, who rowed beside him, what he looked like in the middle of the effort.

Another photograph led me to Silvana De Sousa Frade and the team at the Museo Regional Municipal Palacio Arruabarrena. The image was from the Familia Arregui collection. I wondered whether my family’s life might be preserved inside someone else’s history.

A conversation with Dalia Wassner, a historian of Latin American Jewish life who directs Jews of the Americas at Brandeis University, helped me widen the search. My family’s history is part of a larger Jewish story in Argentina. She pointed me toward scholars and archives that could help me understand it. I am beginning to understand the world that my family lived in at the time.

This led me to Juan Meneguín, president of the Biblioteca Popular Andrade in Concordia, who gave me another reason to widen the search. The library didn’t have the newspaper archive I had hoped to consult. When I told him about Shevaj, the account of his exclusion did not surprise him. He decribed a history of hostility toward Jewish members at Regatas. He also told me that Jews who had been pushed out of the club founded their own club, Club Pesca. I am still verifying this story, but I am now thinking about the other Jewish families.

Who else was told to leave? What did it do to their families? What did their children hear about it? Are there other descendants asking questions like mine?

I had been wondering who stood beside Shevaj. Now I wondered whether some of these people had been pushed out alongside him.

The search has also taken me across the river, to the archive at Club Regatas Paysandú, in Uruguay. Daniele Cristina Carqueijeiro de Medeiros, a researcher who has studied the regional rowing championships, told me that records involving Concordia might survive there.

This is the current of much of this research. I send a question in an email and their response flows in, but the person doesn’t have the answer. Still, they might know about another place I can look, or maybe a relative of theirs who might remember. A single email reply can disappoint me and help me in the same paragraph. I write another message to someone new, explaining who he was all over again, and I wait.

I can’t yet definitively say that his exclusion led to everything else that followed in his life. Still, I have a feeling about it that I can’t quite explain. I want to understand the world he was trying to live in, and what happened to his sense of belonging when he was asked to leave.

The more I learn about what he lost, the more I want to know about what brought him joy.

I so deeply want to find a photograph of him doing something he loved. I want to be able to look at his face without immediately searching it for signs of pain.

He had a whole life before he died at forty-one. He was the father who stopped the car by the side of the road and pointed to flowers to tell his young daughter about the circle of life. I hold this memory alongside the harder ones I am uncovering.

Somewhere along the course of the New York City Marathon, someone held up a sign that said “Go Jaime!” It was meant for another runner, I knew that, but Jaime was Shevaj’s father’s name, and when I saw it, I thought of him.

I spend so much time typing my great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather’s names into searches and messages, asking strangers whether they recognize them. Then one of those names appeared above the crowd while I ran. Later in the race, thinking about Shevaj, I said to myself, “I feel his genes with me. I feel him.”

Since I discovered Darío’s article over the summer, I have been looking for traces of Shevaj’s life in other people’s memories and records. Marathon running gave me another way to feel close to him. I could feel my own body working, and I thought about what it might have felt like for him to pull an oar through the water, and settle into a rhythm with the other people in his boat.

I still want the photographs. For a few moments, the distance between us felt smaller.

The search has connected me to people who care enough to answer, and who follow up to ask how it’s going. I have more messages to send. I will explain who he was again, and ask whether anyone recognizes him in their story.

Somewhere, there may be a photograph of a very tall, nice Jewish rower, surrounded by the people he knew.

I’m still looking.

Research note: Accounts attributed to Darío Garayalde, Juan Meneguín, and Daniele Cristina Carqueijeiro de Medeiros come from personal correspondence with me. These recollections and research leads are distinguished from contemporary documentary evidence. The historical photographs provide context; but neither identifies Shevaj. The investigation remains ongoing.

“I just want to give up on him sometimes.”

Her voice was heavy with the combination of despair and an ache that only comes from devoted love. Her son had started making choices that went against everything they believed in at home. At first, they were barely noticeable shifts in observance, and then they were choices about how he spent his time and what he put in and on his body.

His parents loved their child with their whole and aching hearts. They also couldn’t take it anymore. They were fighting a daily battle between upholding their values and saving their child. They held themselves at a distance from him, for fear that their presence would read to him as approval. At the same time, they deeply feared losing their beloved son.

How do we stay close to a child whose choices we cannot support?

In this week’s Torah portion, Avraham wrestles with this question, first with his nephew Lot, and then with his own son.

Lot comes from Terach’s house too. When he and Avram part ways, Lot lifts his eyes and sees a plain that looks like it could be the garden of God (Bereshit 13:8-10). He then picks the comfortable, good-looking land, and pitches his tent as far as Sodom, a city whose people the Torah names as very wicked (13:12-13).

In the becoming of parenthood, many of us will watch at least one of our children lift their eyes toward something that looks beautiful from where they stand. It might be a new group of friends who seem to offer some type of belonging, or a way of living that promises a freedom they didn’t quite feel in our homes. We can often see what they can’t yet see: the circle of friends comes with risky behaviors, and the new way of living wears away at their sense of identity. Still, they walk toward it.

Avram does not cut Lot off. “Let there be no quarrel between us,” he says to him, “for we are anashim achim, kinsmen” (13:8). When Lot is taken captive, Avram goes to war to bring him home (14:14-16).

This is at the heart of parenting a child whose choices differ from our own. We can say no to a choice and keep saying yes to the child.

Lot and Avram grew up in the same family, but carried their inherited patterns in different directions. Our children may be growing up in the same home, and sit next to each other at the same Shabbat table, and still venture out carrying entirely different lessons. The choices they make do not erase what we gave them. They will carry it into the lives they create.

In this week’s parsha, Avraham gets a chance to come close to Lot again. God tells him that Sodom will be destroyed, and Avraham bargains with God. Fifty righteous people. Forty-five. Forty. Thirty. Twenty. Ten (18:24-32). Look closely: while he seems to be pleading for the city, he is actually pleading for his nephew, the one person in that city who he loves.

As parents, we advocate for our children. We go to war for them in the principal’s office, at our own family meals, and even in disagreements with one another. We plead for their whole entire self, even if we are not endorsing every choice they make. Oftentimes, our children never hear us do this. Lot never learns about the conversation between Avraham and God that saved his life.

When the destruction comes, Lot lingers, and the angels seize him by the hand and lead him out (19:16). Our children will linger too: they will stay in friendships that no longer support them and continue with habits that definitely do not serve them. A gentle hand on a shoulder, along with a reminder of where the boundary is, keeps a child close enough to return, eventually, to themselves.

Vayashkem Avraham baboker. Early the next morning, Avraham looks out toward Sodom and sees smoke rising from the land like smoke from a furnace (19:27-28). There he is, the quintessential dad waiting up for his child to pull up into that driveway, even many hours after curfew.

After only a few years, however, the same Avraham sends his own son away.

Sarah tells Avraham, “Drive out this maidservant and her son” (21:10). She never says Yishmael’s name. He only exists in relation to Hagar. The Torah tells us that Avraham internalizes this conflict, and struggles with it. It is “very bad in Avraham’s eyes, on account of his son” (21:11). We are talking about one child, two parent figures in his life, and two very different ways of seeing him. Sarah sees him as a threat, and Avraham sees him as his firstborn.

This conflict can exist in families even when parents share the same child. Two parents can look at the same child and see different things, and want to live out different priorities. One parent wants firmer boundaries, while the other aches to keep the door open to their child. In blended families, the question of whose child it is can add sharp edges to every disagreement.

God tells Avraham to listen to Sarah, and reassures him that Yishmael is his seed and will also become a nation. Avraham rises early and supplies bread and water for Hagar and Yishmael, and sends them into the wilderness (21:12-14). The Torah actually uses the same words, Vayashkem Avraham baboker, as when he rose early to look toward Sodom. Here is the same parent, rising at the same early hour, to make a very different choice.

Sitting with parents in the middle of this choice, I often hear things like, “How much I can tolerate sometimes depends on my mood, or how exhausted I am that day.” We are all this parent. The choice we are facing can be as big as who is my child? or as mundane as I can’t handle another homework battle today.

The water eventually runs out, and Hagar places her son under a bush and sits a bowshot away. She weeps, for she does not want to see the death of her child (21:15-16). I hear the echo of this when a parent weeps, “I just want to give up on him sometimes.” It is a love that runs so deep that watching the child’s pain becomes unbearable. As parents, sometimes we keep our distance because the pain feels like too much, and sometimes because we are afraid that they will interpret our closeness as approval. Either choice can feel devastating.

In my own home, when my child struggles and tells himself, “I can’t,” I feel the pull between wanting to take the pain away from him and wanting to push him, because I know he can. I also remember that feeling from moments in my own childhood, and the void that comes when there isn’t someone there to say, I am here.

In the Torah, God hears Yishmael’s voice, and leads him and Hagar to a well of water (21:17-19). Rashi reminds us of a midrash: the angels argue against saving Yishmael because of what his descendants will one day do. God judges him as he is now.

Sometimes we end up parenting the child we fear our children will become. Meanwhile, the child in front of us, thirsty under a bush, waits for us to come close to them.

It is easy to catastrophize. Our brains are built to show us the danger that lies ahead. It is much harder to sit with the child in pain and tell them, “You are worthy of being loved. Just as you are now.”

Not long after the conversation where his mother told me she was ready to give up, I sat with her son. He had a hard time believing he was worth caring about, so I told him how loved he was by the adults in his life, and that he was worth caring about and fighting for. He got quiet. Then he named what he thought might help him. “I just need to know where the line is. It helps me if I can say no, because my parents won’t let me.”

So often it feels like our children are testing how far they can go before the adults in their lives say they give up on them. Our job is to show them, as much as we can, that we are not giving up. The more the people in a child’s life can hold him and hold him accountable, the more chances he has to make the right choices.

In the very next chapter, Avraham’s son calls out, “Avi,” my father, and Avraham answers, “hineini beni,” here I am, my son (22:7). Hineini is the opposite of that tentative distance. It is presence. It is I am here, where you are.

God teaches us about this presence. Even after Avraham sends his son away, God was with the boy. When we can bear to draw near to our children’s pain, even to the choices we wish they had never made, we do holy work, and God walks beside us in that closeness.

The Torah of Becoming a Parent | An Invitation

Where is your child standing right now? Where are you standing in relation to them? Take one step closer, whether in your heart or physically towards them. Say Hineini. Here I am, where you are.

“What do you want to eat for dinner?” The question is simple enough, and only requires minimal introspection.

And yet my daughter shrugs and says, “I don’t know.” Sometimes, when the answer requires a definitive yes or no, she will stare blankly and say, “sure.” Her words are noncommittal, egalitarian, easygoing. Her face tells a different story, but so subtly that if you wanted to ignore it, you could. A quick twitching downwards of her lips, a slight elevation of her eyebrows, a crinkling of her nose. She clearly does know, and does have an opinion, but she chooses to hide it, sometimes to make the moment pass more smoothly. She doesn’t want to cause any trouble, or take up too much space.

This particular morning, her answer of “I don’t know” pushed a button for me. I locked eyes with her in the rearview mirror and said very plainly, “Yes, you do know. You have wants and desires and dislikes, and I want to hear them.” I took a breath to steady the rising tide of emotions and added,

“If you learn one thing from me in your whole entire life, let it be this: your voice matters. You need to have an opinion. It doesn’t matter if it’s the unpopular one, people need to know that you care about things, because you do, and it matters.”

She stared back at me, our eyes meeting in the mirror. I looked at her and saw the girl I once was. The girl who swallowed her emotions and needs, to keep the calm, to make sure no one had to struggle too much.

In this week’s Torah portion, Avram leaves his father’s house by smashing his way out of it.

The midrash tells us that even before he heard God’s voice, a young Avram sat in the shop where his father Terach sold idols. One day, he picked up a stick and smashed every idol except the largest, and when questioned said that the largest of them had smashed the others. When his father shouted at him that idols cannot move, Avram responded, then why do you worship them? (Bereshit Rabbah 38:13).

The break from inherited patterns and beliefs begins inside Avram. He sees what his father worships and refuses to bow down to it. When God says to him, lech lecha, go forth from your land, your birthplace, and from your father’s house, to the land that I will show you (Bereshit 12:1), Avram has already heard the call from an internal source. God is meeting him mid-journey, and encouraging him to find his way.

Lech lecha literally translates to go to yourself. Rashi reads it as go for your benefit, for your good. The Zohar reads it as go to yourself, to know yourself and repair who you are. For Avram, following God and becoming himself turn out to be one road.

If we look again at the order of the verse, something jumps out. When someone sets out on a physical journey, they tend to leave the house first and the country last. The Torah, however, lists them in reverse. He leaves the land first and his father’s house last. Ramban reads this order as a climb in difficulty. When someone sets out on an emotional journey, on a path to self-discovery or definition, leaving the country is the easiest part, but leaving the house of origin is by far the hardest.

In the becoming of parenthood, we start to realize this as our children grow through phases where we struggled as children. Their struggles bring us right back to our own homes of origin. A child says “I don’t know” in the rearview mirror, and we are 11 years old again, swallowing our own needs for the sake of calm. A teenager tells us they hate us, and we are right back in our childhood living room, hollering I hate you! through torrents of tears.

Each of us carries a proverbial father’s house. For Avram, it was a way of worship and belief. For us, it can be the way our family handled anger, whether difficult subjects were talked about, or whether love was given freely or as a reward for performance. Some of us might have grown into the fixer, rushing in so our children never feel any discomfort, because nobody ever sat with us in ours and told us it was okay to feel that way. Some of us grew into the performer, still measuring our worth by how well we do, and how much people like us — or “like” us.

We might have made a vow along the way: I will never yell like my mother. I will never make my children earn my love. I will never use the counting down method.

One day we look up and realize that we have swung so far in the opposite direction of how our parents parented us that their house is somehow still setting the direction. Instead of screaming, we have forbidden all raised voices, even in excitement. We were so counted on to be reliable and obedient that we can’t bring ourselves to set a single limit. We left their house, but we still let it draw our map of parenting.

If running in the opposite direction keeps us tied to the patterns of the old house, what does leaving actually look like?

The Torah nestles an answer into a detail that is easy to miss on a quick read. At the end of last week’s parsha, Terach takes his family and sets out for the land of Canaan. He gets as far as Haran, and he settles there (Bereshit 11:31).

He travels towards the very land that God will soon send Avram to. Long before God’s call, the journey was already started by his father. When Avram finally walks into Canaan, he leaves his father’s idols behind, and finishes a journey that his father could not complete.

Our inherited patterns work this way too. We are meant to smash some of what our parents handed us. Some of it holds a journey they started and never quite finished. We are meant to carry it further than they could.

I was a peacemaker, and thirty years later, I see the same patterns in my own daughter. There are gifts in some part of that inheritance: I learned to notice what other people feel and to hold a room with empathy. That attunement is what grounds the work that I do today. The silencing of my own voice…that’s the part that I’m smashing, and loudly naming it for my own child.

God’s first words to the first patriarch send him on a journey towards himself, and the very next words carry a blessing: I will bless you, and you will be a blessing (Bereshit 12:2). The blessing comes with the command: God asks Avram to do the hardest work a person can do, to sift through everything his father has handed to him, and God promises to walk beside him when he does it.

Parenthood is a sacred journey of becoming. Every time we venture to question an old pattern rising within us, and choose a different way, we answer the call that Avram heard: leave the familiar and step into who you are becoming. Just as God walked beside Avram, God walks beside us.

The Torah of Becoming a Parent | An Invitation

Which pattern from your house of origin still travels with you? Name one piece you are ready to set down, and one piece you hope to carry further than the people who raised you could. Say them both out loud. Let God hear you on your journey too.

“Grachi…

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The question slipped into the Q&A box near the end of the panel:

When a child encounters antisemitism at school, or among peers, how can parents respond in ways that empower the child without placing the burden of educating others or defending Judaism on them?

The moderator read the question out loud and invited us to respond. Although I couldn’t see the participants’ faces, I could feel the weight of that question sitting in the room. Some of us had already lived this question, or were living it right now, and others were bracing for their turn, for their child to sit at the center of it.

Underneath the words of the question, I heard another one: How do I keep my child afloat in a world where the waters keep on rising?

Many of us are parenting inside a flood right now. We watch the news with anxiety gripping our throats, and we worry about what our children hear in school hallways and what they read about being Jewish on social media. Uncertainty hangs over Israel, and over the whole Jewish world, following us into the most mundane moments of our day. We pack lunches and send kids on their way to school while holding our breath. Sometimes we only notice we’ve been holding it when they walk back through the door, and we finally exhale.

We are continuously weighing what it means to be visibly Jewish in the places we move through each day. A routine ride on the subway now includes a conversation about whether to wear a baseball cap over a kippah, and even more intense scanning of the subway car. For women, tucking Jewish jewelry into our shirts adds another layer of safety planning beyond what we already carry.

We make these decisions for ourselves, and we make them with our children. We try to give them enough information to move through the world, enough reassurance to enter it with confidence. At the same time, we are carrying questions that we cannot answer. So much of this work happens in silence, when we are up late at night, and in the raw moments after something happens.

That silence is what stood out to me this week, as I read through Parshat Noach. Read the parsha slowly, and listen for his voice.

God speaks. God tells Noach the world will end and gives him the measurements of an ark.

Vaya’as Noach. Then, Noach does.

God speaks again. God tells Noach to gather the animals.

Vaya’as Noach. Then, Noach does again.

The rain begins, and Noach goes inside, mipnei mei hamabul, because of the waters of the flood. In his reading, Rashi found those words significant enough to pause on. He describes Noach as wavering in his belief that the flood would come, and finally entering the ark only when the waters forced him through the door.

Many of us stand in a doorway like that. We have built what we can, and we hope that the waters will not enter. We have rehearsed the safety conversation over and over, and prayed that we would never need it. On some nights, we might even truly believe that this rain will pass us by. On other nights, we lie awake, listening as it raps on the roof tiles.

In between believing and not believing, we keep on building.

Vayisgor Hashem ba’ado. God closes the door behind him.

The rain falls for forty days, and the ark floats for more than a year. Inside, a family tries to find its breath in the dark, surrounded by animals and the sound of water. The Torah does not record any of their words.

Finally, Noach opens a window and sends out a dove. He waits. He sends her again, and she returns with an olive leaf. He waits. He sees dry ground, and still he waits, until God tells him to go.

He walks out, builds an altar. God blesses him, makes a covenant with him, and sends up the iconic rainbow into the clouds.

Noach still says nothing.

He plants a vineyard. He drinks the wine, collapses, and lies uncovered in his tent.

When Noach finally, finally speaks, for the first time in the entire story, his first words curse his own grandson:

Arur Kena’an!

After all that building, gathering, and waiting, the first words we hear from him land as a burden on the next generation.

The Torah does not tell us what Noach held within him inside that ark. When reading his silence now, I think about what happens to the fear, the sadness, the grief we carry as parents when we have nowhere to speak it.

A parent can try to carry a family through the flood on competence and grit alone, building, gathering, and waiting, sealing the fear away so the children never see it. The fear still stays inside the ark with us. It can filter through the way we speak, in our seemingly unexplained impatience, or the urgency with which we ask our children questions. Our children may feel what we have never found the words for.

In this reading, I stayed with the moment when Noach opens the door to the ark. What does he see? So many of the people and places he knew are gone, destroyed. He has kept his family alive, and now they have to learn how to live here — in the ruin.

As parents, we want to promise our children an after. We tell them that this will pass, that the other side of the storm is waiting, that it won’t be this bad forever. We also whisper those same promises to ourselves, but for us they sound more like prayers. Underneath it all sits a fear we rarely speak about: What if the after looks like wreckage too?

The Torah meets that fear in a startling place: God gives the sign of the covenant while Noach is standing amid the ruin. Zot ot habrit. This is the sign of the covenant. God sends the rainbow into a sky that has just finished drowning the world, and promises never again to destroy the Earth by flood.

In the middle of the wreckage, God says to Noach: have hope.

The first blessing God gives the survivors when they step out of the ark is pru u’rvu, be fruitful and multiply. The call to bring children into the world comes to a family that has just watched everything drown.

There is still a future to enter, and there are still children to love.

So now I look back at that parent’s question: What can we give those children? What will help them move through the world without making them responsible for repairing it?

We can begin by finding somewhere to speak our own fear. A partner, a friend, or someone in our community who can hold the questions that keep us awake. We need those places where we can be uncertain, unmoored, and where we can admit how much we are carrying — and how much we are afraid. Having that support gives us more room to listen when our children come to us.

When they do, we have the capacity to take a breath.

To say to them, “I’m so glad you told me.”

Having a place to release some of our own fear allows us to hold their story. When something happens, we can ask them questions that help them tell the story: What happened? What did you hear? What did you understand from that? We can then have the capacity to wait for their answers, and to let them guide the conversation on their own terms.

We can help them practice phrases to have in their back pockets, to pull out when they find themselves in conversations that no longer feel safe: “That’s not okay.” “I’m going to find my teacher.” “I don’t want to have this conversation.” We can help them find and name the adults they can turn to, and remind them that they are allowed to leave a conversation at any time, especially if they do not feel safe.

Then we can tell them, “You don’t have to handle this alone. I’m here to help with what comes next.”

We can explain what we plan to do, we can keep them involved. A child can have a voice in the response to hate while the adults take responsibility for addressing what happened.

And we can keep giving them a Jewish life they can love.

The safety conversations take up so much room. We also need room for the joy. We need space for the laughter at our Shabbat tables, the songs that uplift and unify us, and the stories that bind us as people. Our children need to see us living Jewishly and joyfully, to catch us living our values with gusto.

When we wrapped up the panel, I offered one sentence that parents could take home to their children:

You belong to the Jewish people, and the Jewish people belong to you.

I wanted the parents listening to have something they could bring home, and something that doesn’t ask anything of a child, but gives them a place to belong. They belong whether they have an answer or not. They belong when they feel proud, and when they feel frightened. They belong even when they are still figuring out what being Jewish means to them.

We are still carrying questions we cannot answer. We are still building, and standing somewhere between believing and not believing. But we are allowed to have words for what we carry, and we are allowed to share them.

When we do, we have more room to hear what our children are carrying. We can keep handing them the promise, the way the rainbow keeps coming back into the sky.

The Torah of Becoming a Parent | An Invitation

What fear have you been keeping inside the ark? Say one piece of it out loud to someone you trust. Then tell your child: You belong to the Jewish people, and the Jewish people belong to you.

This week, I joined JOFA, together with the Anti Defamation League of New York and New Jersey, and the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, for an evening called “You Are Not Alone: Parenting Through Antisemitism, Together.” I sat with JOFA CEO Dr. Mindy Feldman Hecht, Speaker Julie Menin, Emmy nominated film maker, Paula Eiselt, and Tova Rosenfeld of ADL NY/NJ.

The conversation centered around the two questions that are most poignang for parents, navigating raising proud Jewish kids in a rising tide of antisemitism:

What do I say?

How much do I say?

My perspective stems from 15 years in Jewish educational and community spaces, supporting children and families navigating questions of identity, belonging — and more recently, Jewish pride and joy.

If you missed it, you can watch the full conversation here:

I turned my answers into a toolkit you can save and share. Scroll through, save or screenshot the slides you need, and send them along to a parent who needs them.

If you say one thing to your child this week, say this:

You belong to the Jewish people, and the Jewish people belong to you.

Say it out loud. Say it often. That way it is already within them when they need it.

You can find the toolkit on Instagram too:

For more on the inner voices our children carry, read Voices Our Children Carry.

With gratitude to JOFA and its partners for gathering us, and to every parent out there, raising proud Jewish kids.

The beginning is the moment before an inhale. It is the trembling stillness of a body that grasps at hope while fear pulls at it. Your hand rests on the doorknob. Once you open the door and cross the threshold, something will change.

Are you ready?

You wonder whether the person you have spent your life becoming will know how to live the life waiting through that door. Your fingers tighten around it. You turn it. You begin.

The door opens onto darkness.

Bereshit bara Elokim et hashamayim ve’et ha’aretz. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Seven words invite you into the creation of a bold, beautiful new world, and yet it is hidden. It is tohu va’vohu, unformed and empty. Your eyes search through the darkness in the doorway for any edges that will tell you where it is safe to step. Beneath you stretches what seems like water, vast and unforgiving, with a breath of cool air hanging over it.

Ve’ruach Elokim merachefet al p’nei hamayim. The spirit of God hovers over the waters. Ruach, breath and spirit.

The cool air above the roaring waters is God’s quiet exhale, released over a world of shadows. It is your exhale, releasing from your chest at the threshold. In the next few verses, the world begins to take shape in a collection of moments, held together in the construct of days.

The moments that make us parents do not appear as neatly as the seven words at the beginning of a scroll. They are simply moments, forming out of the shadows as steps into a new becoming. A tiny cry that breaks through thick anticipation, shattering and rearranging the fibers of our hearts. A phone call that tells us, finally, we will hold the child we have waited for through long seasons of grief. We step into a role we never imagined would be ours to fill.

Sometimes that beginning happens in the middle of the story.

A child who grew from us, and who we thought we knew so intimately, begins to take a shape we no longer recognize, moving through the world as if guided by a different energy. We find our lives suddenly interrupted, and we no longer have the words to define, or even understand, what we are living in. Something happens that changes the shape of our family, and suddenly we are thrust back into a world of shadows with no edges to define. We try to reach for the ways of love and protection that we know, those that have never failed us, but we discover that this moment is asking something different of us.

We’ve been parents for four years, or forty years, or maybe forty minutes. Here we are, at a threshold, our hands trembling around the doorknob, wondering whether we have what it takes to begin — or begin again.

And maybe the hardest part is that no one else can see the doorway.

We are alone in tohu va’vohu, waiting for someone to define the edges of light, water, and land for us. While we are grasping for shapes to emerge out of the shadows, those around us continue on defined land. Life is being lived around us, and maybe we watch ourselves participating in it, while inside we are still grasping.

We are on the couch with a brand new human, asking ourselves, How am I supposed to keep this thing alive when I can barely keep myself alive? And still we yearn for who we were before.

We are in the communal places that once felt so familiar — school events, synagogue lobbies — exchanging pleasantries, smiling at photographs of family vacations on other people’s phones, and wondering, How it is that no one else can see the shadows? How are they continuing to live, as though creation itself hasn’t been undone?

Before the light, before a single defined edge appears, we return to the breath of God hovering over the waters. The Torah inhales in the shapeless, and before there is light or any definition, God breathes.

And here is where we, perhaps, begin, too.

With a breath pulled into a body that does not yet know what comes next. With a ruach that brings the strange realization that our own world is empty and undefined, while life continues around us. We can be frightened, and still be present. We can be uncertain, and still capable of love, longing for the person we once were while beginning to discover the person we are becoming.

And then, into the darkness, comes a voice: Vayomer Elokim yehi or. Vayehi or. And God said, let there be light, and there was light. Two words, and the darkness gives way to light spilling across the waters, illuminating the edges of a world that only seconds ago had no discernible shape.

Parents search for that light in the moments when our own worlds become unrecognizable. We listen for the words that will make everything make sense, and wait for the morning when we will wake up and know exactly what to do. We might whisper yehi into the darkness of a sleepless night, into the leaden silences that linger after a difficult conversation, and into the spaces between questions we are terrified to ask and answers we might be even more afraid to hear.

Let there be light! Tell me what to do! Let me be good enough for the person who needs me. Let this all be okay.

Sometimes, the darkness remains.

The baby still isn’t sleeping. The child is still hurting. The phone call hasn’t delivered the news we wanted. The words we wish we hadn’t said echo harshly in the space between us. The world before us remains unfamiliar, undefined.

The Torah lets this darkness stay. After the light comes, God separates it from the darkness and names them both. Vayikra Elokimm la’or yom, velachoshech layla. God named the light, day, and the darkness, night. Even the darkness gets a name, and thus a place in creation. Vayehi erev, vayehi boker, yom echad. There was evening, and there was morning; one day. The first ever day in creation begins in the dark. The darkness in our parenting, too, gets a name, a place.

Naming that darkness, giving it language, allows it to breathe. It is where we can say, I am exhausted. I miss who I used to be. I am afraid I can’t do it. We are allowed to speak our shadows out loud, to trace the edges of the feelings that threaten to take the breath from us. It is okay for us to be not okay. To be in the midst of yearning, without knowing what we are reaching for. Naming this allows for the body to open itself back up, making room for breath to come back in. When the words leave our mouths, something in our bodies releases, loosens.

Over the coming year, we will walk through the Torah together, following the stories of people who loved and fell through yearning, who shattered and grew through courage, who were undone and remade by the creation of a people. We will greet the parts of ourselves in parenting that live in light and darkness. Week by week, we will unravel and discover together the transformation of the people we are becoming through the experience of loving and raising others.

In the story of creation, the darkness comes first. Evening is defined, and then morning. Your hand is still on the doorknob in this moment. You inhale. You begin.

The Torah of Becoming a Parent | An Invitation
What part of me is just beginning again? What is this season of parenting asking of me, drawing out of me? Give one piece of your darkness a name out loud. Let yourself hear it.

In 2012, I launched The “I Am” Project, a curriculum that brings contemplative practice into everyday classrooms through movement and creative expression. She was thrilled that I was bringing experiential learning to middle schoolers, an age group she often called neglected. To her, it looked like a second toddlerhood — something I have long come to agree with her on. After she visited one of my sessions at a public middle school outside of Philadelphia, she told me how much of what I was doing with those kids reminded her of her own work with young children.

We talked about it on and off over the years, with her referring to my work as tu proyecto de “I Am” con los niños grandes. I didn’t know how much she was giving me in those conversations until I began mentoring and training teenagers to lead younger children. Now, I am filled with questions that I want to bring to her as a colleague, and dementia has changed what she and I can talk about.

While researching our family for The Concordia Papers, I found her writing. Two articles appeared in 1999 in 0 a 5: La educación en los primeros años, an Argentinean early childhood education series. A third appeared in 2008 in Infancia, a journal published in Spain. In them, she writes about practice teaching in Buenos Aires, about the kindergartens of the kibbutz movement, and about the work of Gideon Lewin, an Israeli educator whose Child Activity Center at Oranim studied children’s spontaneous activity and the adult’s place within it.

The 2008 article appeared four years before she walked into one of my middle school classrooms outside of Philadelphia, four years before she told me that my work reminded her of hers.

This piece, crafted over a few weeks, resumes a conversation that I might have with her, Profesora Susana G. de Szulanski, as my grandmother, teacher and colleague.

Susana’s side of this conversation is assembled from her published articles and interviews I recorded with her in 2018. I have translated and excerpted her words, placing passages from different moments with my own questions. Some remain in her Spanish. This is an imagined exchange grounded in what she wrote and said. Everything I say is what I would tell her if we could sit at the table, with her articles between us, preferably with café and flan.

She wrote for teachers, and she still has a great deal to teach them. After some of our exchanges, I have included a short note for today’s educator, drawn from her words and my practice.

Me: I have the articles here with me. I am so grateful to have them. Can you tell me a little bit about where this all started for you?

Susana: Papá was a pharmacist, and the pharmacy was in an English neighborhood in Concordia. So they sent me to an English kindergarten.

Me: How old were you?

Susana: I was three years old, and I was the only one who wasn’t a little English girl. I don’t know if that had anything to do with my later studying the preschool years.

Me: I wonder about that. I am drawn to leadership work with teens, to help them find the strength in themselves and one another. Maybe because I didn’t feel that way at their age. In your article, you remember a classroom from early years at the Mitre kindergarten. What was it like?

Susana: In the early 1950s, I was a kindergarten teacher at the Jardín de Infancia Mitre in Buenos Aires.

Me: What did that room look like?

Susana: Each child had his own table and chair, perfectly lined up like desks in a primary school. And every moment, every detail, was planned in advance.

Me: That doesn’t sound like the way I remember learning with you.

Susana: One day, during a practice lesson, a child asked for permission to ask, "Señorita, cuándo jugamos?”

Me: Miss, when do we play? Oh wow, he had to ask permission to ask.

Susana: It was a very difficult question for me to answer in that moment. I consider it one of the greatest challenges of my teaching life, that moment, and that question.

Me: Did you ever find an answer for him?

Susana: In later years, when I was finishing my studies in Boston, I found part of the answers, but I don’t think they were the most significant ones.

Me: So where did you find the rest of the answers?

Susana: Later on, in the 1960s, I was now teaching future teachers, with Margarita Ravioli, who trained directly under Maria Montessori. We opened a model classroom, and reorganized those desks into little work areas.

Me: So you found those answers back in the classroom, with children.

Susana: His question became the question for me. When do we play? became a fuller one: where? with what? with whom? and for what do we play?

Me: What does that kind of play make possible for a child?

Susana: They do what children need: the chance to create, express, feel, explore, observe, relate, represent, construct, solve, plan, converse, interact.

Me: What did you give them to work with?

Susana: Basic materials like sand, water, and blocks. They encouraged creative and constructive activity and were considered the most valuable.

Me: My own kids have always seen water as an invitation to play. At our Sukkot youth program, my youngest, who is two, spent the whole program playing with our water cart. It held a tall plastic dispenser with a black spigot and a pile of clear cups. She filled a cup and poured it out, then filled it again, over and over, and over. By the time I took her picture, the water was pooling on the cart and puddling around her pink sneakers. She held up her cup to show me, her face full of delight.

We had put it there so people could get a drink. She found something else to do with it.

Susana: There is no toy more meaningful, and joyful, than a real, old telephone that someone has stopped using.

Me: When I was little, you would set out so many things for me to discover and play with. When I was watching her at the cart, I thought of how much you would have loved to watch her play.

When we spoke in 2018, when you talked about being a mother, you said something that I think about a lot:

Susana: El cariño no es una cosa que uno lo calcula, es una cosa espontánea.

Me: Affection isn’t something you calculate. It is spontaneous.

Me: I work a lot with teenagers. This year over seventy of them are on my youth leadership team. When I tell them that they are the ones in charge, that the responsibility for the room of kids is theirs, you should see how they stand a little taller.

Susana: So, what is the role of the adult? How should they intervene?

Me: I think about that every week, especially during our High Holiday season, when we are working together for several programs in a row. When do I step in? When do I let them figure it out? How do you describe the teacher’s participation?

Susana: The teacher can invite the child to play, and can take part in the play if it’s needed. Her participation does not mean she dominates the play, or tries to control the child’s spontaneity.

Me: I think that’s the hard part. We adults want the children to be responsible, and then its very hard for us to watch them try. We get impatient. I get impatient.

Susana: Si no le permitimos resolver por sí mismo, no sabrá qué es responsabilidad. If we don’t allow them to solve the challenges on their own, they will not know what responsibility is.

Me: That was the last line of your 2008 article.

Can I tell you what happened on Rosh Hashanah? We had over 100 children come through our youth floor each morning. On the second day, a little boy, around 5 years old, started crying for his parents. One of my fifteen-year old youth leaders, sat down on the floor next to him, and said, “It’s okay to be sad. I’m here for you. How can I help?” He was using the words we practice in orientation, and week after week. He knew to get down on the floor next to him. I didn’t have to send him over, he saw a child who needed someone, and he went.

I stayed nearby and watched, letting that moment be fully his.

A week later, I ran into the youth leader’s mom, who told me that when that little boy sees the youth leader at school, he now runs to him, gives him a hug.

Susana: What do you think about the in-between time? The transition time?

Me: Transition times are where a lot of challenge and growth both live. Those are the moments where the kids are crying for their parents, or wondering about what comes next. My youth leaders are learning something here too: they learn to sit with a child’s discomfort, and their own.

It took me a long time to trust the fact that I could stand back, and let the room be alive on its own. You write about how the adult’s role changed during the research at the Activity Center.

Susana: At the beginning of the research, the children were given the chance to act freely, and the teacher’s role was just to observe. Later, the need arose to study how the adult influences the dynamic.

Me: What did that research suggest about the teacher’s role?

Susana: El maestro se asume como tal. The teacher accepts the role of being the teacher.

Me: What does that mean in the room with a child?

Susana: The teacher’s participation is fundamental because every child needs a personal relationship: encouragement and conversation about what they are doing, helping them define the problem they’re working on, and giving the activity a name. The child needs to learn to solve the problem themselves, to accept frustration, and to receive support at the right moment.

Me: I call it holding the room. I teach my youth leaders to notice first: who just walked in, who is sitting alone, who looks like they’re about to cry, and who needs a job or something to do with their hands. Then they can decide what to do, or whether to do anything. I’m always around so they can find me, but I let them take the lead. That kind of attention takes practice.

Me: Can I ask you about a child who might need more support?

The child who can’t sit, or who hides under the table, or who runs away. The child who is often called “the problem”?

Susana: The teacher is responsible for giving the child what the child needs, but cultural and educational conditions can limit, narrow, and distort the child’s productive nature.

Me: So sometimes the child needs something we haven’t made room for.

Susana: The reasons that a child might take something apart are many: curiosity about how a mechanism works, releasing tension and aggression, the need to master destruction without coming into conflict with the adults.

Me: So taking something apart can be an activity worth making room for. Is that what drew you to those yards of old things children could dismantle?

Susana: From the outside, it looks messy and inelegant, but if we study the children’s work, we see the order, the structure, and how much creativity goes into it. The emphasis is placed neither on what the teacher does, nor on the plan, but rather on accompanying the child dynamically in the whole of the activity.

Me: That makes me think about what our rooms allow for. For us, sometimes it means youth leaders sitting outside the rooms with children who need more quiet. The child is still part of the program, even when they need to be outside the room.

Me: Susana, you keep coming back to the word: productivo, productive.

Susana: The philosophical and social foundation behind it is the values of a productive society: the child learns to give concrete form to the things they create.

Me: You wrote that in the 1999 article, and again in 2008. In our interview, you also spoke about the place work held in your family.

Susana: I grew up on it, I would even say that in my household it was a religious value: work.

Me: I remember you telling me that, about watching your grandparents rise to tend to the farm, and the children.

Susana: I can’t really ever be without doing something.

Me: I think I inherited that from you. But I want to stay with that word, productive. I keep coming back to belonging. I believe that every child who walks into our programs carries the image of God before they make or say a single thing. The children having a hard time carry it, the children who need something different carry it, and the children who spend the whole morning outside of the room carry it too.

Susana: Margarita Ravioli used to add this sentence to the letters she sent home to the parents of the Mitre kindergarten: “En esta casa se enseña a su hijo a ser, no a tener.” In this house, we teach your child to be, not to have.

Me: To be. You carried both of those ideas: the importance of work, and this insistence on being. I want to understand how you held them together.

Susana: What the child has built belongs to them. Others value and respect it. It carries their own style, and they can have a territory of their own.

Me: Even if what the child builds is a cup of water, filled and poured out over, and over again.

Can I tell you something? I am often wondering whether I stepped in too much, or too little.

Susana: In reliving this approach, I ask myself to what extent the balance holds between the child who builds their learning, and the teacher who teaches.

Me: Seems like you also kept asking yourself a similar question. That’s very comforting.

Susana: What became very clear to me is the need to strengthen the role of the educator as an autonomous, reflective researcher.

Me: Teaching forms the teacher.

Me: Do you remember when you came to visit my first The “I Am” Project classroom outside of Philadelphia? Afterwards, you told me that my middle school students reminded you of your little ones. Now I train those niños grandes to be with little ones.

What would you tell me now?

Susana:

Me: This is where I can’t answer for you. I won’t guess at what you would say, although I would give a great deal to hear it, over café and flan, with your articles and these photos actually spread out between us.

I do still have the last line of your article:

Susana: Si no le permitimos resolver por sí mismo, no sabrá qué es responsabilidad.

Sources: Susana G. de Szulanski, “El juego-trabajo” and “El patio de desechos” (1999); “La actividad en el desarrollo integral” (2008).

The wink made me laugh in the only way one can laugh when someone holds a mirror up to you. She knows that this is the cornerstone of my teachings to parents, educators, pretty much anyone I meet and speak to. Grace is a regular amongst my toolbox, portfolio, and the questions I ask people when they tell me they are just so burnt out. Having it handed back to me felt like a nice little pillow thrown at me, but instead of doubling over, I caught it and decided to take a nap on it. (I actually was asleep shortly after the 7:31pm time stamp.)

Her reminder for grace came at a good time. For anyone who works in Jewish community, Tishrei, the first month of the Jewish year, which contains all of the high holidays, is a strange season to live inside. These are the days that the entire year leans towards. At Neilah, at the end of Yom Kippur, we stand with our hearts wide open, ready to accept the cleansing and forgiveness, and just a few days later we are building a temporary hut outside our house, and shaking a tree branch with a lemon-like fruit. We are knee deep in symbolism, and opening our hearts even further to embrace our community, and every moment carries significant weight for the families we serve, and for ours as well. These are also the same weeks that are the most crowded of the year - both in events, and in actual people. On Yom Kippur, my youth leaders and I held space for 125 or so children on the youth floor while their parents prayed in services down below.

Yesterday, I was in a meeting about, believe it or not, spiritual wellbeing, and someone asked me how the holidays were going. In response, I started counting. I told her that between Erev Rosh Hashanah and this conversation, our team had run eight youth programs, with three more still on the calendar. As I was telling her about it, I felt both proud of our work and exhausted at the same time.

The first thing for me to go during these busy times is the sacred time I dedicate to writing. Drafts sit open as tabs on my laptop and scraps of paper on my desk. Ideas come to me on a long run, or as I’m driving my kids to school between holidays, and they’re gone before I have a chance to write them down, often remaining as faint wisps of what they were. The stack of books on my night table keeps growing, the number of bookmarked podcasts I need to hear multiplies, and as the month goes on, my creative breath stalls. In previous years, I saw this as failure. I would berate myself, and sacrifice much-needed sleep to get up earlier and force out my craft, with the result feeling stale and more like homework than holy work.

In the same meeting someone asked me what Jewish texts inspire my work, and I laughed when I found myself talking about how so much of the prescription for spiritual wellbeing lives in the very first chapters of the Torah. The first Shabbat is described as a day where the divine stopped from the work of creation and it says vayinafash (Shemot 31:17). The word shares an etymological root with the word nefesh, which means soul. A further reading by Rashi, a great Torah commentator, reads it as taking a breath, and being restored. After six days of making the world, the Creator paused to be re-souled, indicating that creation and breath are inextricably tied together.

Creativity is the soul expressing itself outward; it is a long exhale after inhaling so much of life and processing it - sometimes quickly, and sometimes over many years, within us. It needs the inhale, it needs the integration, and it needs some room for the soul to settle and fill again. When every hour is spoken for, the soul has nowhere to stretch, and the inhales are short and shallow. The words stay inside, and the silence echoes.

This week, we are eating our meals in the sukkah, a dwelling that Jewish law requires us to build with gaps. The schach, the temporary roof, has to let the stars show through a little bit. I’d like to offer that maybe our inner lives need the same architecture - enough covering to shelter us, with openings where the light can get in.

Grace here means letting the writing wait, even if it feels painful, without treating that pain as punishment. I think it means trusting the ebb and the flow, and eventually the return as a celebration.

These paragraphs are being written in hiding while my children wait to be taken somewhere, because of course they also don’t have school. It is an exhale I needed between programs, between being needed. After Simchat Torah, the calendar will open again, and I expect more words will come back the way they do, with enough time to marinate and fully cook before I unveil them. Until then, I am sitting under the schach, the temporary roof, looking up through the gaps.

If you are in the thick of your own busy season, where could you breathe a little more space into your own roof? Where is there room for your own grace to shine through?

I didn’t do enough this year.

I wasn’t enough this year.

I’m not good enough to be forgiven.

I know this well. For over a decade, I walked into Yom Kippur already holding my own verdict in my heart. I wasn’t well enough, I wasn’t healed enough. I walked into every Yom Kippur filled with shame at the fact that I hadn’t fixed what was wrong with me, that I hadn’t become whatever version of myself I had promised that I would be by now. So I would sit in services pleading, begging silently and feeling certain that everyone around me would be forgiven and I would continue to be punished. It was very complicated, and very confusing.

At the time, I really thought that this dread belonged only to me, that it was a symptom of the specific illness I was carrying. But the more I’ve spoken with people, counseled people, and listened — especially listened —the more I hear this same voice echoing through their own stories. It ranges from the mundane, day to day life things that we wish we could do better, like putting our phones down more, to the deeper, more guttural pain that comes with living with struggle, with living a life that involves fighting to stay afloat, but not quite getting air. Different verses, different chorus, similar tune:

I didn’t do enough this year.

I wasn’t enough this year.

I’m not good enough to be forgiven.

I don’t actually spend a lot of time in services on the high holidays, since I work in service of the community, caring for the children and creating a meaningful experience for them. My two touch points end up being Kol Nidrei and Neilah. The opening of the closing, and then the moment where the gates creak shut. Kol Nidrei is where the year’s unfulfilled vows are released, a strange kind of mercy that comes before the reckoning. Neilah is where what’s left are just people, standing at the gates as they start to close, saying whatever it is that they still need to say before that final click shut.

There’s a teaching that moves me, truly moves me to tears every year. I shush my kids when it comes through so they can bathe in its glow and its power, as much as any adult around them. It is the recitation of Go'd’s thirteen attributes of mercy.

There is nothing conditional in there. It doesn’t say “Go’d is compassionate and gracious if you pull yourself together. Nor does it say Go’d is slow to anger, as long as you don’t complain too much. It also doesn’t say keeper of grudges - it says preserver of kindness.

We are the ones who insert the conditional. We are the ones who say to ourselves, we will forgive but… or we are forgiven but…. We are the ones who dwell on the parts of the liturgy that told us we have sinned, that we have transgressed, that we have lied, and spoken out of turn, that we were quick to anger, and that we were not gracious. We read the same viduy - the same litany of sins every single year - and this is what sticks with us. It is never the mercy that comes wrapped around it, that is repeated before and after and in between. We leave those services able to recite that list of transgressions like we’re doing a Costco run, and not able to return to kindness or compassion.

We remember that we have sinned, but we forget that we were told in the very same paragraph, that we would be forgiven. And cleansed.

Confession feels active. It is the part of the workout where you are feeling the burn, where you are screaming in pain internally but you know that its good for you. Pouring out our sins in a choreographed way through vidui is something that we tangibly do. Mercy, however, is the quieter part of the workout: it is the rest between sets, it is the sip of water, it is the stretch where everything feels like a great sigh of relief. But we can’t control it. It happens to us, if we let it. If we rest, if we drink, if we stretch, we feel relief. If we lean into mercy, maybe we feel it too. That maybe is a scary place to be. So we white-knuckle-grip the part we think we can influence. The mercy passes by us like a sunset through a car window. Beautiful, ephemeral, gone.

But the thirteen attributes actually ask us to pay attention to something besides our failures. They pull our attention to compassion, grace, patience, an abundance of kindness. We are being asked to do more than just recite the liturgy. Maybe we can let ourselves feel what is hardest to offer ourselves: love. Love when we are shining, and love when we are fading. Love when we are winning, and love when we are trailing.

I wish I knew this during the decade plus of Yom Kippurs where I went in begging to be forgiven for not being healed yet. I wish I knew that I could just be kind to myself even though I was still struggling, it was still okay. I wish that I had known the language I was learning in therapy —that language of self compassion —was more than intellectual exercise. That it could actually carry into my soul. That it could actually soften the pain at its very fiber.

If Go’d receives me with compassion when I feel unworthy, could I possibly also learn to receive myself that way? Can I let the kindness of the words I’m reciting actually reach into the places I’ve spent a whole lifetime withholding it from myself?

I wonder if this year we can begin there.

When that chorus of I didn’t do enough this year rises, maybe we pause for a moment before it crescendos into I wasn’t enough. We can make room for what needs to change, what we want to change, and acknowledge how hard we have been trying.

Go a little easier on yourself this Yom Kippur. When you hear those words about mercy, remember that it is speaking to you — and about you—too.

Rob was talking about lifting weights, about how to get that heavy weight up and down in a bent over row position, without losing focus, losing control. With my eyes shut right, and using all my energy to focus on the fibers in my back muscles, I repeated it to myself, like a mantra.

Control the positive, control the negative.

I liked the way it rolled around my brain, and I held it as thought I could watch it bouncing around from side to side. It made sense to me- control when you’re lifting, and control when you’re lowering. Then, as one’s mind does in a class where we’re lifting heavy things and putting them down on repeat, my mind wandered.

It went back to a conversation I had yesterday with a parent whose child is having a particularly complex time adjusting to high school. On top of the usual layers of newness —-friends, heavier academic load, new place to go every day — this particular high schooler was negotiating whether she had any motivation to do anything at all, period. Whereas you’d expect some apprehension, this parent was facing flat out refusal. She was going to avoid the hard stuff by simply avoiding everything.

When we first started working together, I had asked her, what are you looking forward to doing this year? Or even this month, or tomorrow. She would simply stare at me blankly and say, “what do you mean looking forward to? I don’t really do that- I just sort of, exist.”

Now, a few months into the work, the language has become more granular, about what aspects of her day she can fully be present in, and even experience joy —or at least contentment. For her mother, watching her daughter struggle to simply be a person in a day was becoming too much, too hard. She yearned for her daughter to just be normal.

In our conversations, after gently guiding her off the normal pony, we looked at what are the pushes and pulls in her daughter’s life that she is struggling to navigate. Where is she having a hard time picking up the weight, and where is she having a hard time putting it down? So to speak. We spoke about how joy sometimes can be just as overwhelming as despair. That for some people, there is real fear in feeling joy because they expect something to go wrong, And there is comfort and feeling despair because there is little room for additional disappointment. Then we talked about what it looks like for her daughter.

When we broke it down, She saw that the apprehension wasn’t just a “unwillingness to try” But rather, a real mental, emotional, and physiological weight that her daughter was picking up and putting down.

Something about the fitness cue: control the positive and control the negative, got me thinking about how many other things I hear in movement context have made their way into the way I also approach parenting and the caregiving of others.

This morning, after this fitness class, I sat and played around a little bit with how to tie some of the cues that I hear often with real parenting guidance that I give folks in my care. Then, because this is how my brain works, I thought about what grounding pillars of Jewish wisdom could tie in nicely to both the cue and the parenting guidance.

I have a really hard time with social media and self marketing, but I think this carousel turned out pretty nicely. I’m sharing the images here, so that you may enjoy — And please feel free to share them with any other others who might enjoy them too.

At the end of the day, we are all picking up and putting down hard things all the time. We are really good at that, and we’re really good at telling ourselves how not good we are at that. So here is an invitation for all of us to approach that heavy lifting with some grace.

I had been eyeing Female Fight Club for many months now, ever since I had an impromptu sprint through a blizzard with the owner back in January. This morning, I walked in for my first boxing class since 2013.

The room was full of women in every stage of life, wrapping their hands, eyeing the boxing bags along the wall, and limbering up for the class. I brought my own gloves, which felt strange and heavy on my hands, and the same boxing shoes I wore when I trained regularly all those years ago. The shoes were too slippery for the gym’s wooden floor. I wasn’t sure if this would be a welcome return to the sport, or an awkward entrance after too much time away.

We began with jabs and crosses, and my body settled into the rhythm as though I had never stopped training. My hands remembered what to do, my feet found their stance, and my legs remembered how to steady each punch.

The body moving through those combinations, however, was not the same one that had hesitantly entered boxing gyms more than a decade ago.

Back then, I was in early recovery, trying to hold two things that felt impossible to hold together: the desire to become physically stronger and the work of healing from a disorder that had taught me not to trust my own body. Boxing became one of the places where that trust slowly returned.

The body that walked into the gym this morning has carried three pregnancies. It has lived for more than five years without the symptoms of an illness that once defined me. It holds more than a decade of quiet, deliberate inner work.

It is a new body that just happens to remember how to throw a punch.

As I moved through class, feeling each punch land against the bag and reverberate through me, my mind began to wander. The rhythm carried me through a decade of boxing memories, although most of them were not my own. They belonged to the children I have raised and treated, and taught how to box.

I thought about how often children feel something in their bodies before they know how to express it in words, and how quickly we adults try to reach them with our own language, when what they may need first is to move.

When a child is angry, and we ask them to calm down, where does their anger go?

When a child is too frightened to talk to us, where does that fear go?

Where does grief live for children before they know how to talk about it?

For some children, the path toward an answer might begin by slipping their hands into a pair of boxing gloves. Or their feet into a baseball cleat. Or allowing their bodies to dance freely.

The modality of movement doesn’t matter so much as the child having a place where their feeling is allowed to exist without it having to take over, without it having to bubble over and create a situation. Movement allows anger to be a force without causing harm, where fear can move without being rushed into explanation, and where sadness can be dislodged just a bit to allow tears to flow.

One of my clients once wrote about the big feelings that overtook him at school and how he had learned to gather them into his hands, work them out through a boxing glove, and breathe. He was discovering that he could hold his feelings, move with them, and remain himself as they passed through. Over the years, he grew to have language available for those feelings - words he could use so not to need to hide away under a classroom desk.

It might not be boxing for your kid - Your child might run hard across the yard, kick a ball against the side of the house, jump from one couch cushion to another, pound clay (something my own son just discovered as cathartic!), or dance so wildly that you have to move the furniture so they don’t hurt themselves. What matters is that they find a safe place for the feeling to travel.

So: The next time your child is overtaken by something they can’t explain - something that grips them and comes out in a torrent of tears and screaming: notice what their body is already trying to do.

Are their hands clenched into tight little fists? Are their legs restless? Have they curled themselves up into a small, protected shape? Are they crashing into furniture, pushing up against you, or disappearing under a table?

Then, once you see what their body is doing, follow along. If they’re pushing, hold up a pillow and invite them to push against them. If they’re pacing, open the door and walk - or run - beside them around the block without asking questions. If they’re restless, put on music they like to move to. If they need grounding, offer them something heavy to carry (for kids this could be a gallon of milk). If they’re disappearing, sit on the floor nearby and breathe.

Breathe in deeply through your nose to the count of 1-2-3-4, and out through your mouth to the same without making them do it to.

Show them that their feeling can exist without fully taking over.

Show them that power can exist within safe boundaries.

Boxing opened this possibility for me at a time where my feelings were trapped beneath a sharp critical voice and broken circuits in my brain that told me I wasn’t good enough. Over the years, I have watched dozens of children access this same learning. A child plants their feet into a boxing stance, feeling strong and rooted to the ground. They throw a punch, protect their face, exhale as they strike, and return their hands to position.

Their anger is recruited as energy to help, to express, and to free them from the sensation of being trapped.

As the parent, you become the steadying force, the structure that can hold the boundaries of their container so that their feeling can move, and move through. By staying close and also offering an avenue for them to move this energy you are telling them them that their feelings are not too much for you. When you resist the urge to seek out an immediate explanation, you’re telling them that they don’t have to perform calm in order to be connected to you. You’re teaching them to find a safe container for what is happening inside of them and you are showing them that anger, fear, sadness, grief, overwhelm…can all be survived.

In Jewish tradition this kind of strength is called gevurah. It is power held within boundaries. In the text, we are asked “who is strong?” and the answer comes as “the person who can govern their own impulses”. We might take this to mean that we need to control, when really what we need to be able to do is to hold. It means becoming strong enough to stay with a feeling without either fearing it, or allowing it to run the room, or the car ride, or the dinner conversation. It also means holding steady: not being swept away by our child’s feeling either.

In boxing, the child practices gevurah when they plant their feet, feel the anger in their arms, strike the bag, and return their hands to position.

In whatever type of movement they practice, it looks like set, act, reset.

You practice it when you remain close, offer and steady along with them. This might be harder than it sounds, particularly when your child’s distress also awakens something in you.

That anger might be a splash of oil in your own hot pan, and it might meet a part of you that was never allowed to be that angry. The tears may stir up the kid in you who learned to stop crying quickly - for the sake of family calm. Their frantic movement, constant question asking may have you longing for stillness and quiet, order and control.

At this time of year, when we speak so much about teshuvah, repentance, and also return, this is one way we practice it. We help our children return to their breath after anger and to connection after rupture, showing them that they can still find steadiness after losing their footing. We can also find ours along with them.

When you’re asking them to calm down, you might actually mean is, I need to know that everything is going to be okay.

When class ended, I unlaced the old boxing shoes that no longer worked on this particular floor. I’ll probably replace them with an old pair of running shoes, bringing together the movements that hold my own container. In either case, I’ll probably be here again, even if I don’t know what each new movement brings.

Set. Act. Reset.

Gevurah. Hold.

Teshuvah. Return.

It’s the same shape regardless of what the movement is for you, and for your child. What matters is that they practice, and you allow yourself to grow right along with them.

In the middle of school supply shopping at Target, I yelled at my son. “Go away!” I didn’t mean to say that. What I meant to say was “put that away.” He was holding some kind of lock journal and sticker combination, branded with Minions to make it as attractive as possible to a bored eight-year-old dragged along by his mother, and I wanted to tell him he didn’t need it. Instead I yelled. I mean, yelled. "Go away!”

In the split second breath-held stare down that followed, we somehow both opted for laughter, marveling how truly ridiculous this moment was, how ridiculous the whole endeavor felt once you zoomed out.

We are actually new to school supply shopping. My kids start at a new school in a week, and for the first time in ten years of parenting, we have to buy our own supplies. Their old school provided everything but backpacks and water bottle, folded into some fund we paid into without ever knowing what it covered. Staring down at three monster lists, circling, scratching off, scratching off my own scratching off, I never really knew what supplies they’d been using all along. I just knew that they had them. Someone else had been handling that task for me, and I hadn’t quite noticed until I was scrolling through seventy five different options for blunt ended scissors.

My sister and I fondly remember school supply shopping as children - that dull aching joy that came with the discovery of a new Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper Binder - it came with stickers! As I was wandering the aisles of Target, lost in this neon-branded jungle like a domesticated cheetah set back out into the wild, expected to find her own dinner, it occurred to me that the fond memories of school supply shopping existed because we were the children at the time. Now, as the parent, wondering why on earth my two and a half year old needs three different kinds of markers, I realize that we were putting my mother through abject torture. My mother was actually with us on this shopping trip.

“How we did this before amazon, I don’t even know.” She just shrugged and smiled happily at the joy of sharing this moment with her grandchildren.

In these moments of my life, I don’t feel very rabbinic. I don’t feel very spiritual. I sometimes wonder if I feel anything at all, or if I am simply moving through some self-driving setting, where all that matters is the destination -self checkout counter, with all the things I need.

A few mornings later, I was standing in my doorway at 6am, watching rain come down hard enough that I had to decide, right then and there, whether the twelve miles on my calendar were actually going to happen today. I hadn’t slept enough, and I hadn’t eaten anything before going out - only consumed some running fuel. Yes, I know, as a woman in her 40’s, I really should not be doing any runs or workouts without eating - but, you know what? Sometimes, it just doesn’t work out that way. I had literally dragged myself out of bed twenty minutes before I needed to start my run, which for a long run, is its own act of sabotage.

I turned back, grabbed my Chicago Marathon Finisher rain jacket, and went out anyway.

As I started my three mile warmup, I thought about parenting influencers. You know who I mean - all these bright toothed moms who have viral meme carousels that make you both feel good and bad about yourself as a parent. I thought about what they actually look like when their kid is negotiating TV time for the 11th time that day, or when they catch themselves yelling “go away” in the middle of a crowded Target.

I thought about the ones who post from the school pickup line, hair done, some line about grace or gentle parenting, or even the ones that lean into the mess - for likes and followers. I thought about the capital W - Why. Why am I here? doing this? right now? It went beyond the run, beyond Target, beyond even a question about a life path. It became about bigger purpose - and it was exhausting.

Right around the end of the first marathon pace set, the sky opened up all the way. It was a full on thunderstorm, complete with lightning forking its way across the sky, and thunder reverberating louder than the up-tempo music in my ears. I stood under a building awning on a street I run on three times a week and stood there, soaked, watching my run melt away from me.

I figured I might as well run home, and wait it out there. I imagined myself running faster than lightning, jumping in my skin every time the sky lit up. When I got there, I sat on our steps, watching the weather app on my phone count down the minutes until the storm passed.

I didn’t want to stop this run. I had already decided that this was the window for my long run, and informed my husband of the timing, and this is how this morning was supposed to go. This storm was not on the schedule. The schedule called for twelve miles, two workout sets, done by 8am, on to the rest of a busy Sunday. Instead, I sat there, staring at my soaked sneakers, furious at the weather.

I’ve been thinking about that Go away! moment. As I sit here writing this, I wonder what it was that had actually come out of me, what had I been trying to say in Target all along? I don’t think it was something I was saying to my son, exactly, but maybe to the whole relentless accumulation of things: the lists, and the decisions, and the questions, and the negotiations, and the blunt-ended scissors, and the marathon training, and the dining room table that is always crowded, and the endless demand to know what everyone needs and where it can be found.

Go away. Just for a minute, go away!

The storm, of course, did not go away because I asked it to. Just like the school supply list, and all the other needs, don’t go away simply because I am tired.

My life does not fall neatly into place because I have arranged twelve miles into the first pre-dawn hours of the day. Motherhood does not become more manageable when every item on the school supply list has been crossed off. Those supplies still need to be labeled, sorted, packed, and delivered to school.

And then I wonder, am I supposed to identify the sacred in all of this? Am I supposed to find an internal glow to rub on my skin like a good moisturizer?

On these days, when I am simply soaked and angry on my front steps, watching the minutes disappear, I can’t reach it.

Truthfully, I also wanted to artfully weave in the boat metaphor into this essay. It was something a colleague texted me, as we were trying to figure something out while the program was actually happening. The boat didn’t make it into the essay, but the sentiment of continuously building as we go along, that’s all over the lives we live.

The catch? Being spiritually present actually means being fully in these run-of-the-mill, life creating moments. Being a person in recovery, a mother in the trenches, a human in the world means that I get to feel the anger, the frustration, the disappointment, and even the relentless beating down of the rain on my shoulders.

Being spiritually present goes beyond the glossy photos and artfully curated content. It means noticing the pounding in my temples, sitting here, in soaked sneakers, in the middle of a run that isn’t finished. It means pushing a red shopping cart, crossing items off a list, and laughing at the absurdity of it all. It’s being in it, and being okay with it being hard.

It’s about knowing that life isn’t always going to run on schedule, and that sometimes the neat little metaphor just doesn’t fit.

It bubbled up in the blur of a family-filled afternoon at my grandparents’ apartment in Ramat Aviv. Somewhere between clearing the soup plates after lunch and setting up games for my younger cousins, someone mentioned Shevaj.

Every family has stories that change the atmosphere in the room when they emerge. A name comes up that stills the room, with people’s hearts quietly racing underneath the tension. Unresolved stories tend to do that - show up. They gnaw at us until someone releases the pressure. Unfortunately, this tends to happen in the middle of an otherwise peaceful family gathering.

That’s what I noticed first: the change.

It was as though a ghost had sidled up next to us on the couch, dragging along with it a frisson that chilled the room. My grandmother, who ordinarily loved telling stories about her life and work, abruptly shut the conversation down. She said something to the effect of, “we aren’t going to talk about this with the children in the room.” She didn’t want to talk about her father.

At the time, I knew almost nothing about my family’s life in Argentina before they made aliyah. I hadn’t learned about the financial hardship, bankruptcy, the shattered dreams, or the fact that my grandmother’s name may have once appeared on a list of people marked to be “disappeared.” I didn’t understand how much of that story still remained unspoken, or how many questions I would eventually have.

I only understood that something had happened to the energy in that room.

I was already primed to pick up on this. At this stage in my life, I was already preoccupied with weighty questions about identity and belonging. I was also struggling quietly with a depression so insidious that I had begun taking it out on my own body. It was the first summer of long sleeves worn to hide scars, the first summer of longings I could not understand and emotional swings that could leave me gasping for breath.

Mostly, I hid it.

On the outside, I was exceptionally capable: the oldest child and the oldest grandchild on both sides of my family, accustomed to carrying other people’s emotional weight. I paid attention to changes in mood, and I noticed when things weren’t being said. Constant vigilance.

So when this whisper of a story slithered into the room, I noticed.

Who was this man? How did he die, actually? and why had my grandmother’s demeanor changed so completely when my uncle mentioned him?

My teenage mind supplied an answer almost immediately: He had obviously killed himself.

I don’t think anyone actually said this out loud, but the possibility seemed to inhabit everything that went unsaid. It was in the few seconds that slipped out about the family story around his death. It was in my grandmother’s hardened expression, the speed with which she ended the conversation. Perhaps I also recognized the story through the pain I was already carrying. But the idea settled into my mind as fact, and for a brief instant, it brought me something close to relief.

There had been someone before me who struggled.
Maybe I wasn’t the first to live with this darkness, daily.
Maybe I wasn’t entirely alone, even though I still felt entirely alone.

I wanted to understand the anguish in my grandmother’s voice and the hardened look that came into her eyes when she quelled the conversation.

For years, Shevaj remained little more than fragments of a story, and a death surrounded by silence. Then, as I interviewed my grandmother before her 90th birthday, she began to talk about him.

He became a tenderhearted father, remembered by the daughter who admired him. He became the grief a young girl had carried since she was thirteen. He became the father she was not allowed to say goodbye to. Slowly, he began to become a person who had lived before he became the story of how he died.

When I began looking for him, mainly through the question of how he had died, I encountered something I had not expected: pieces of the life that came before. Darìo’s article gave me details about the man, the father, the pharmacist he was. It allowed me to peek behind the veil and catch a glimpse of Shevaj a human being.

He was no longer a mysterious family story, he was a business owner who purchased La Farmacia del Indio in Concordia, Argentina in 1927. He was a handsome man, almost two meters tall, an athlete and a member of an elite rowing club. According to a local historian, antisemitism eventually pushed him out of the rowing club.

Another pharmacist from Concordia, Yaco Bilkis, had known my great grandparents personally. In his interview with Darìo, he remembered Shevaj as “un caballero en toda la extensión de la palabra” - a gentleman in every sense of the word.

These were small details, but they immediately changed my relationship to him. I started to feel deep compassion for him. He was working hard to create a life for his family built on values and hard work, and something - whether the consequences of the growing antisemitism of the day, or an internal struggle - or both, led him to despair so deep he could not get out of it.

A death is a fixed point. It can swallow everything around it, especially when it is traumatic and unexplained. But a man who stood nearly two meters tall took up space in the world. A rower had strength in his shoulders, and knew the feeling of an oar crashing through the water. A pharmacists opened his shop in the morning, greeted customers, and measured out medicines. A gentleman was observed in relation to other people, and remembered, half a century later, for how he treated them.

I became hungry for more knowledge about him. I began to search for details of his life, wherever they might be found. Was there still a record for Shevaj and Elena as members of the Concordia Rowing Club? Did anyone still know the story of what happened to them? Did anyone sit by him to try and help him out of the darkness? These are questions that I am still pursuing, through personal accounts and memories recorded in journals.

In my search, I found his grave.

It rests in one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in Argentina, El Cementerio Israelita de Liniers, thousands of miles from where I was. When AMIA sent me the photograph, I felt my breath catch in my throat. There it was, in gleaming black stone, with a small picture of him wearing a whimsical expression, and a simple sentence underneath his name and date of death: his wife and daughter. I couldn’t reach out and touch it, but there it was: a physical place in the world where his name remained.

I noticed that there were overgrown weeds in small slot where one could plant flowers. It was a small thing, almost absurdly small beside the questions I had been asking, but I wanted to replace the flowers. I didn’t think that it would resolve any mystery, or give the thirteen-year-old version of my grandmother back her father, but it was something I could do.

I reached out to AMIA if the flowers could be replaced.

They could be, for a fee.

After I paid it, someone in Argentina went to the place where my great grandfather was buried, put new flowers on his grave, and sent me a picture.

In that moment, I knew this was bigger than a family research project.

It became about tending to a branch of my family tree that had long been neglected, about tending to his memory, and restoring the man he was - the father he was - for my grandmother.

I can’t fix the fact that she lost him when she was thirteen, nor can I change that he might have suffered in silence for much of his life. I can’t go back to family gatherings of my youth and ask the questions I have now. I can’t even go back to my grandmother today and ask them, as the answers have long been burned by the tendrils of her dementia.

But I can tell a story.

I can recover the man from the shadows of his death, and tell the story of who he was in life.

I can return to what remains and caring for it: preserving documents and records in old directories and nurturing relationships with the people who can help me tell the story. I can go visit the places where my family lived, worked, and died. I can understand the values that have been passed down to me, and perhaps also what I may have inherited in my genes.

I can put new flowers on his grave.

Every morning when I leave my house, I say a series of sentences to myself that start with the words “I am”. Some people might call these sentences affirmations, because they are positive-leaning statements that I say about myself so that my brain can hear me. I have said them every day for at least the last five years. I say them out loud, and sometimes my toddler will finish the sentence for me.

I will start with, “I am…”

and I will hear her pipe up, “so lucky”

My kids think it’s funny that I do this, and sometimes they even roll their eyes when they hear me prattling on in the front seat of the car, or as I’m gathering everyone’s water bottles. Sometimes, they will also join me, but most of the time they wait until I finish to ask me the first of the litany of morning questions, or tell me a story they forgot to tell me from yesterday. They’ve learned that when I start with my “I am” statements, to pause and listen. Even if they don’t quite understand why I do them.

What I know is that every morning that they are around me when I do this, they are hearing me speak well about myself. Even if I don’t fully believe what I am saying on a particular morning - maybe it was a hard night, maybe we are in the midst of a stormy season in our family, maybe I have drifted somewhere so far away in my own mind that these sentences act as life preservers, helping me swim back to shore.

What I also know is that they are seeing me use one of my therapeutic tools on myself. Every single day.

They hear what I say when something frustrating happens. Instead of letting myself slide immediately into despair, I try to believe that even if I cannot control what is happening, I can remain open to the meaning within it. Traffic. Setbacks. Rejections. Illness. I don’t always know what something means, but I show my children that I believe there is something larger than me at work, and I want them to see what it looks like to practice faith in ordinary moments.

More than anything, they are watching me practice actively believing a different story about myself.

That wasn’t always the case, as this was not always the story I told.

There was once a time, not so long ago, when I would sit with the jagged edges of a feeling poking through my esophagus, and feel like I couldn’t breathe. I would notice it, feel its insisting presence creeping tentacles into my sinuses, but I would not be able to name it, work through it, or dislodge it. It would grow, amorphous and spiky, and sit. Inside me. Something as easily name-able as frustration would morph into resentment. Then anger. Then rage. All of it turned inward. This feeling was here because there was something wrong with me.

I wanted that feeling gone.

Not just this feeling, but every feeling. Even joy could sometimes be so overwhelming for me that I would need it to leave. That’s when I would tell myself,

I can’t handle this. I need to get rid of it.

And another voice would arrive with a solution.

Just eat something, you’ll feel better.

And I would, and then I wouldn’t.

Every addiction is different, but mine began, in part, as a way for me to protect myself from truths I didn’t know how to carry. It wasn’t quite a conscious decision, but somewhere in the pathways of my young brain, eating chocolate was much easier than saying, someone hurt me. Hoarding and hiding chocolate became much easier than naming, I don’t feel safe here.

The brain learns through repetition. When a behavior brings relief, even temporary relief, the brain remembers the route and becomes more likely to take it again.

Let’s say we want to teach our child to ride a two-wheeled scooter. The more we encourage them to practice, to ride through the wobble, to figure out for themselves that they’re favoring the right foot, the more likely they are to succeed. They practice until balance becomes instinctive.

This is far more complicated when the repeated behavior is a way of escaping pain. I learned, really without being explicitly taught, that food, especially sugar, could help me keep an uncomfortable feeling at bay long enough for me to put it away.

As a child, my internal storage locker had plenty of room. As I got older, I continued to file away situations, emotions, and truths that I found too hard to cope with.

Eventually, that locker filled up.

Ten years later, I found myself dealing with a full blown eating disorder - one that would go on to terrorize my life for the better part of the following decade.

The undoing took as much work as the doing.

It took ten years to wear the first path in my brain deep enough for the disease to settle into it. It took another ten years, beginning with recovery, to build a path in a different direction.

When I finally walked into therapy ready to face the truth, the sentences I carried in with me were:

I am a bad person. I poison other people’s lives.

It was, at that point, what I truly believed about myself, and my brain was doing what brains do - collecting evidence to support the case I had already made.

Every mistake I made became proof. Every strained relationship became proof. Every time I hurt someone, disappointed someone, or failed to become the person I thought I should be by now, my brain added another page to the file. It ignored anything that didn’t quite fit into the case file, that would lead to a different verdict.

This is one of the ways that our narrative identity takes shape. We build a story about who we are, centered around a particular truth, and we interpret our lives through that story. We notice what confirms it, and our brains simply ignore what doesn’t fit. Most of this happens without our conscious approval, it is just the way our brain files information. Eventually, that story just becomes truth.

My therapist didn’t believe me. She refused to accept the verdict that I had walked in with, and countered simply with:

”I don’t see a bad person. I see a sad person, and a person in need of healing.”

That single sentence, and what she then went on to teach me about compassion, formed a crack in the shell that had hardened around my life. I wish I could say that I had walked out of her office feeling that I was a good person in need of healing - or even that I was worthy of healing. But for the first time, there was another story. There was another case that I could start to build.

Through that crack, light was now coming in. In drips, at first. It would show up in moments where I was really struggling, and I’d hear a voice say “it’s okay, you’re trying your best.” It would show up in moments where I was being kind, or helpful, or working towards a goal, and it would say, “that was good.” After many years, much therapy, and a whole lot of other work, a new pathway existed, because I was making a new case:

I am a person who is healing.

Now, another voice answers when I face a hard situation, feeling, or truth. Instead of telling me how to escape, it says:

“You can get through this. I believe in you.”

A miracle sometimes can sound like your own voice, finally on your side.

Now, I carry these truths forward into the work I do with children, with families, with people in places of struggle. People who initiate sessions with me, often walk in with a truth about themselves - or their kids - that has a very well worn groove. In their introduction, they might call themselves out for having anger issues, say that they have too much anxiety and can’t handle simple tasks, or quite simply walk in with a diagnosis that they have shaped their whole lives around.

As a practitioner, it almost doesn’t matter to me what their self-narrative is when they walk in. I go back to what my own therapist said to me, you are a person in need of healing, and I open up the possibility of compassion with my clients.

We begin to tell a different story, once centered around the truth of who they are as people, beyond what brought them into session with me.

The young boy who told me that he had already been labeled as having “anger issues” eventually became one who saw himself as passionate, and allowed himself to tell people that he misses them, to write genuinely heartwarming thank you notes to his teachers, and cheer loudly for his friends. The teen who had been diagnosed as bipolar, and shaped her life around the highs and lows, eventually leaned into her talents as a musician, and found that composing music was not just a creative outlet, but also a therapeutic one. The mother who believed she was doing everything wrong, despite carrying the whole family’s emotional and mental load, eventually uncovered the old story that was telling her asking for help meant that she was weak.

Their lives started to change once they started to change the way they spoke about - and to - themselves.

I have anger issues became I am a passionate person.

I can’t have a normal life because I am bipolar became I can tap into my energy to create.

I have to do everything myself became I can ask for help, and it’s okay.

So now it’s your turn: what is the story that you are currently telling yourself, about yourself that isn’t serving you?

I do everything around here.

I am so busy, I have no time for myself.

I am not a reliable person, because I just don’t have time to help others.

I am a bad mother.

I am worthless.

I have to struggle in secret.

Find your sentence. Write it down.

Then ask it one question, gently. Ask it, Is this actually true? Or is it the oldest thing you’ve every believed about yourself?

Now write the sentence you want your brain to start building a new case around.

Say it with the same certainty the old one had, even if you don’t believe it yet. Especially if you don’t believe it yet.

I am someone who is learning to rest.

I am someone who asks for help.

I am doing my best, and this is really hard.

Parenting is hard, and I am doing what I can for my kids.

I love the life I am building.

Now go look for evidence. Go find one thing this week that supports your new narrative. Notice it, name it, write it down, and even let yourself be proud of it, for just one second.

I start every single day with my sentences. Sometimes my kids hear me, and sometimes it’s 5am and I’m headed out for a run.

My brain hears me every time.

Find your sentence. Say it to yourself. Until your brain believes it.

The article in El Heraldo described my grandmother in a single sentence:

Elena and Shevaj Grachinsky, it said, had one daughter, “que era muy bella, en el recuerdo de la gente de aquel tiempo.”

She was very beautiful, in the memory of the people of that time. That daughter was my abuela Susana.

As you may recall, this all began with a small summer project: transcribing video interviews I had recorded with her before her 90th birthday.

One thing I haven’t shared yet is that my abuela has advanced dementia.

When we visited her in Israel with our three children in 2024, she could still recall some biographical details from her early life in Argentina. Every few minutes, though, her mind would drift elsewhere, and she would ask me how old she was.

“Ninety-six,” I would answer.

Each time, she reacted with genuine shock.

My abuela - and actually all four of my grandparents- played a powerful role in my formative story, and later, in my story of healing. I grew up with their homes as safe spaces: places of play and exploration, warmth, comforting food, and love.

Unconditional, unrestricted love.

Looking back, I often think that foundation protected me during some of the hardest times that came later.

We’ll get there.

I called my grandparents by their first names. I don’t quite remember why, but I suspect Susana had something to do with it.

In Susana’s home, I played with sand and water. We sorted seashells we had collected together on the beach just down the road from her apartment in Ramat Aviv, our feet tickled by the water and wet sand clinging to our interlaced fingers as we walked. Her home offered endless sensory pleasure, and endless room for curiosity.

We cooked together: empanadas, flan, and her legendary vegetable soup.

At the time, I only knew that being with Susana meant being free to touch, taste, sort, pour, build, spill, ask questions, and explore.

I did not yet know that these were more than the pleasures she created for her precocious granddaughter. They were connected to the ideas about children, play, and learning that shaped her entire professional life.

I knew a little bit about that life: stories she had shared with me over the years, a book she co-wrote on early-childhood education that I had never read, and when my own children were born, her genuine delight watching me allow them to touch, climb, splash, sort, build, and explore.

But I did not yet understand how those pieces fit together, or just how far her ideas had traveled.

Then I found the article.

It felt strange to find my grandmother described in an article about the old pharmacies of a city she had left half a century ago. She was unnamed, appearing only as the daughter of Elena and Shevaj, and apparently beautiful enough to remain in someone’s memory.

The article was written by Darío Garayalde, an eighty-seven-year-old historian of Concordia. Its subject was the Farmacia del Indio, which Susana’s father purchased in 1927. Darío explained that many of the details came from Jacobo “Yaco” Bilkis, another pharmacist from Concordia who had known the family personally and held them in high regard.

As I was doing some late-night mental math (if you haven’t guessed yet, a lot of this cataloguing happens after my own kids are asleep), I realized that Yaco would have been around Susana’s age, which means that he was a teenage boy remembering a teenage girl.

The article was published in January 2026. I hoped that meant Yaco might still be alive.

In conversation with Darío, I learned that Yaco died in 2024.

I had found someone who remembered my grandmother as a girl, but I had found him just a little too late to ask him anything myself.

I began to imagine what I would have asked him if he were still alive.

Did he remember Susana inside the pharmacy? Did he see her walking with her parents? Was she shy, or outspoken? How old was she in the memory he carried with him?

What did he mean when he remembered her as very beautiful?

I know what Susana looked like as a young woman. I have family photographs. I can see the physical beauty that the article describes. But a photograph is different from someone genuinely remembering you.

A photograph preserves the surface of one moment. A memory reveals a life unfolding around it.

And what a life hers became!

The little girl from Concordia became an early-childhood educator and a teacher of teachers. She, and my abuelo Roberto — who was a fascinating person in his own right — were deeply active in Argentina’s Zionist movement.

In 1976, they made aliyah with their grown children and with Elena. To this day, my father believes that her determination to go to Israel “saved” our branch of the family from the financial hardships it might otherwise have faced in Argentina.

From Israel, Susana began traveling back to Latin America as an educator and adviser. The freedom to touch, sort, build, and explore that I experienced in her home belonged to a much wider set of ideas about childhood and development. They belonged to her personal philosophy as an educator, and one she carried into classrooms across continents and generations.

I am only beginning to reconstruct that part of her story - and sift through her writing, to understand how she thought and to learn from her.

As I read her writing, I am also beginning to recognize something unexpected: echoes of my own path.

Some of the ideas that I find in her work are striking because they sound so familiar. Her belief in children’s needs to explore freely. Her attention to the environments we create for them. Her understanding that learning happens through movement, play, curiosity, and direct encounters with the world.

These are ideas I absorbed in her home, long before I knew what an educational philosophy was. Later, they surfaced in the way I raise my own children, and in my own writing about childhood, healing, safety, and exploration. For example in Running Commentary: Let Kids Lead .

Some of this might have come directly from her. Perhaps she taught me through the space she created for me, rather than through explicit lessons. Perhaps some ideas move through a family in ways so subtle we barely notice their arrival.

Israel - a love for the land, the people, and the drive to become a spiritual leader amongst them - may be another such inheritance.

I haven’t lived there since I was a young child, and attempts to return and make a life there have not succeeded. And yet, my connection to Israel remains deep: a powerful, persistent longing to be there, alongside profound grief over its pain.

As I reconstruct Susana and Roberto’s involvement in Argentina’s Zionist movement, investigate accounts of the antisemitism Elena and Shevaj may have experienced in Concordia, and consider the determination that ultimately led my grandparents to make aliyah, I find myself with more and more questions. Especially about how those experiences shaped the choices of later generations, and where each of us eventually found, or failed to find, home.

It is another thread to follow.

There are tantalizing fragments of her life still waiting for me: an experimental kindergarten in Buenos Aires; classrooms organized around play dating back over 50 years; a childhood Zionist gathering around a bonfire; a Yiddish song she remembered for most of her life; a book about preschool education in Israel; articles published across several countries; courses for educators in Latin America; and even a connection to Sesame Street.

Each fragment opens another path.

They will become stories of their own.

For now, I keep returning to that single sentence in the article:

A very beautiful woman, in the memory of the people of that time.

Every family has stories that get passed down from one generation to the next.

They come up at dinner tables, and during those rare times where extended family gathers together in aging matriarch’s living room. They surface when we start going through old photographs, or when a child asks about someone’s name. Some details don’t change from one telling to the next, but others shift with the telling, adding layers of mystery to family history.

My family has one of these stories. It is about the early lives of my great grandparents, Elena Gorelik de Grachinsky (z“l) and Shevaj Grachinsky (z'“l). They are the parents of my only living grandparent, my abuela Susana - who was also their only child.

I knew Elena when I was a child. I remember her as strong, sharp woman. Someone people paid attention to, and also someone who clearly had set expectations in the home for a very long time. She lived with my grandparents, and her presence in my early childhood years, growing up between warm extended visits in the homes of my two sets of grandparents, was so significant that my oldest child carries a middle name honoring her memory.

Towards the end of her life, she remembered very few names, but she remembered mine. She would call out Yalushi, Yalushi, even when I was not around.

I have heard fragments about Elena and Shevaj’s life in Concordia, Argentina, where they had been part of a small Jewish community, a remnant of the migration experiment led by Baron Maurice de Hirsch, which has all but disappeared. For the last few years, I have been slowly cataloguing my grandparents personal histories, based off of writing of theirs that I have, memories from my childhood, and conversations with my parents.

Every few months, I would try to research my great grandparents from afar. I searched their names, tried different spellings, looked for anything from Argentina that might tell me who they had been. Especially, I was looking for any information about Susana’s father, who died under curious circumstances when she was just 13 years old. There is great family lore about his death, and some hushed conversations about what some of us might have inherited, genetically speaking, from him.

In the years where I struggled the most with depression, and the various colorful offshoots that I encountered, I became almost desperate to understand. Every time I asked the question though, the same fuzzy stories would be told. A mysterious illness. A short hospitalization. A burial my grandmother was not allowed to attend. I needed to know who they were, before their lives became a set of stories repeated at the table.

Usually, my research turned up nothing.

Earlier this week, I was transcribing video interviews I’d recorded with Susana before her 90th birthday, recordings I made so that my children would have her stories in her own voice. Listening to her, it occurred to me to search again.

I typed in my great grandparents’ names, then at the last moment added a note to try variations, since Jewish names often get misspelled, especially historically.

An article appeared.

It had run in a small local newspaper in Concordia called El Heraldo, and it contained details about Elena and Shevaj I had never seen before. These weren't the kind of facts you can pull from a public record. I had been trying to do that for many years. They were intimate, specific to their work and their personalities and their place in the community. Whoever had written it had known them personally, or had known someone who did.

I started contacting people. I wrote to the newspaper, and searched genealogical archives with this new spelling of their names. I reached out to museums that preserve Jewish history, contacted the AMIA center in Buenos Aires.

A few hours later, I got responses back. A military record. Recorded notes. The whatsapp contact for the author of the article. I wrote to him, expecting nothing - but full of curiosity.

For years, I had been trying to find one small sign that my great grandparents had left a trace behind. Now I was corresonding with someone who had written about them in detail: an eighty seven year old historian named Dario, still living in Argentina.

The article mentioned that my great grandmother, Elena, had been the first female dentist in Concordia.

I read the sentence several times, and marveled at the significance of this. A woman - a Jewish woman at that -at that time in pre-WWII Argentina, succeeding as a medical professional - and recognized as such. I had known she was intelligent and determined. I had never heard that she might have been the first woman to practice dentistry in the city.

Five minutes after I read this information, my phone rang.

It was my own dentist’s office.

I had been on the waiting list for an appointment since May. They suddenly had an opening for the next morning.

If you’ve followed my writing enough, you will know that I don’t take such alignment lightly. I am a strong believer in spiritual alignment, and signs that show up to tell us we are on path.

Whether this was a communication from the beyond, or just from my dentist - I took the appointment, I also took on the assignment of continuing this research.

Not every thread of research has moved this fast. Some messages still have no response. Some archives don’t have what I’m looking for, and some tell me quite simply - you need to come here to Argentina, to find what you’re looking for. Some records may only exist in the memories of people who are long gone.

And yet - new avenues of research keep opening. I have more phone numbers to contact, records to look for, and memories to find.

All of this started while I was listening to my grandmother tell me her own stories. I recorded those interviews to preserve what she remembered, and as I was listening - I became curious about the people who were long gone, and the stories they had left behind.

Family stories keep a person alive long after they’re gone. They can also flatten a life down to a few familiar details: a name, a profession, a country, a story everyone’s heard before. I want to know what’s underneath those details.

Who were Elena and Shevaj in Concordia, actually?

What did they build there?

Where did it all go?

What brought their families to Argentina in the first place, and what happened to the relatives whose names are no longer in our stories?

This post opens a new series on this Substack called The Concordia Papers. It's going to be an ongoing record of trying to answer those questions, starting with Elena Gorelik and Shevaj Grachinsky, their families, and their life in Jewish Concordia. I'll share what I find as I find it, document the sources, correct the family record when I have to, and keep building a fuller tree, including the parents, siblings, and extended family who usually get left out of the direct-line version of a story.

I may not share all the intimate details here, but I will share enough to peak your curiosty, and maybe challenge you to dig a little and find what has nourished your own roots.

The project won’t stop with Concordia. Eventually I’ll turn to my grandfather’s side, the Szulanskis, who have their own history of entrepreneurship and migration across multiple countries. I want to know where that story starts, how the family moved from place to place, what they built each time, and where the Szulanskis in the world are now. I want to see if I can find the descendants of the people who helped the Szulanskis leave Europe.

I have found some contemporaries - a cousin who owns a high end Jewelry line, another who is a film producer.

Some posts here will follow one person or one discovery. Others will sit inside an open question, a family account that contradicts itself, or the slow process of chasing down and verifying a single record - or even the origins of a name. Expect dead ends. Expect the tree to shift as new information comes in. And expect to sit with me both in frustration and wonderment.

If you know a Szulanski, a Grachinsky, or a Gorelik, spelled any way at all, I want to hear from you. We might not be related. But there might be a photograph, a document, or a story sitting in your family that connects to mine.

I’m following the curiosity and seeing where it leads.

Come along and see what turns up.

In 9th grade, I took a class about food.

I don’t remember exactly what the class was called, but I remember that we learned about nutrition, the food pyramid, and then we cooked all sorts of different kinds of food in small groups, including, incredibly, a baked Alaska.

This was apparently a very popular class for student athletes in their junior and senior year, as it was known to provide an easy A, and a science credit.

I don’t remember why I took the course, but I do remember three things: how incredible our baked Alaska looked when it came out of the oven, the three course meal we cooked for my grandfather as our final exam, and a project I made about nutrition where I took a cute picture of myself as a child, juxtaposed it with an akwkard looking picture of me as a 14 year old, and wrote in gel pen in capital letters:

WANT TO KNOW HOW SUCH A CUTE KID ENDS UP LOOKING LIKE THIS?

and went on to detail how one should eat a nutritionally balanced diet.

The poster, the pictures, and the baked Alaska came rushing back to me while I was trying to work on two writing projects about parenting: An updated liturgy companion for parents, and an outline for a book raising chidlren with honesty, mindfulness, and Jewish wisdom.

As the image of that poster floated up from my subconscious, I was fourteen again. I remembered standing in front of the mirror every morning thinking, Well, this is it. This is what I have to work with. I remembered the effort it took to carry that feeling throughout each school day, without letting anyone notice. By the time I looked back at my computer, my shoulders ached and tears were running down my face.

I hadn’t thought about that class, or that poster, or baked Alaskas in over 25 years. I was in it - squinting beneath the fluorescent lighting of the makeshift home-ec classroom, walking on the gritty linoleum tiles of my high school, handing in a homework assignment that was, in hindsight, a plea to be seen.

I didn’t feel surprised by the poster itself. Children don’t always know how to ask for help directly. Sometimes they ask using the only language they have: a drawing, a story they wrote, or a homework assignment. When I was 14, no one asked me about it. I carried a poster into school that essentially read “I hate my body”, and somehow everyone just agreed it was a project about nutrition.

Looking back, I don’t wish someone had seen it and said, oh honey you’re so beautiful! I don’t think that was what I was asking.

I wish someone had looked at it, set it aside for a moment, and said, tell me a little bit more about this. I wish someone had gotten curious about the capital letters, and the side-by-side photographs, and wondered, just for one more moment, what was really going on here.

So this morning, I decided to invite this 14 year old to the surface. To sit beside her, and let her say everything she didn’t have the words for.

What she had to say was hard to hear.

She told me that she didn’t think there was anyone she could really talk to. She worried a lot about everyone else, but she couldn’t really explain why. She said she was desperate to feel safe inside a friendship, and she was sure that if people really knew her, they would leave. She felt heavy in her body, and uncomfortable in her own mind, but she couldn’t really explain these things. She assumed this was simply what it felt like to be her.

She knew, or at least believed, that she wasn’t like the other kids. So she became very good at hiding it. She smiled, and tried to make people happy. She worked hard at not being too much, and became the kind of child who looked like she was doing fine. Just fine.

I listened to her for a long time.

I set aside my writing, and sat with her. There were things I wanted to tell her. I wanted her to know that one day she’d find friendships that could hold her whole self, and could fully exhale. I wanted to tell her that she would eventually understand why her body and mind felt so heavy, and that there hadn’t been anything wrong with her in the first place.

But as I sat with her, I realized that none of that would have mattered to her yet. She didn’t need me to reassure her, to tell her she had so many other qualities beyond what her body looked like.

She just needed me to be there, to listen, and to stay.

That’s when I realized why this memory had interrupted my morning writing. Here I was, trying to write about parenting, and instead I had spent the better part of it sitting beside a fourteen year old who had been waiting decades for someone to ask her what that poster was really about.

Sitting with her, I also think about my own daughter, who is just beginning to enter this season of life. Her eyes, once only alight with the curiosity of a childhood led by imaginative play, are beginning to hold something new. Every now and then, I catch hesitation before she tells me how she’s feeling, or a question that seems to weigh on her.

She will still sit on the floor and play dolls with her sister and build imaginary worlds with her friends, but every so often, I can hear adolescence knocking quietly at the door.

I want so badly to protect her from ever standing in front of a mirror and deciding, at fourteen, that this is all she has to work with. I want her never to feel the need to cry for help in gel-penned capital letters.

But wanting this for her is not the same thing as being able to give it to her. Loving her doesn’t erase the voices that I grew up with.

There are still days when I have to skip a run, and I can feel an old voice begin its calculations before I’ve even had coffee. Some weeks, the waistbands of my skirts sit differently, and another voice quietly suggests that my worth has shifted with it. Years ago, that voice would have sent me into hiding, and now I recognize it, tell it, shhh, and pick up a basketball to play with my children.

I didn’t always know how to do that.

Before I had children, I thought healing was mostly about me. I wrote about healing from the point of view of someone trying to understand the many versions of myself that had known pain, illness, fear, and struggle. It was about making my own life make sense out of those experiences - making them mean something.

Every pregnancy asked something from me that I wasn’t always sure I had to give. They asked for trust, nourishment, more patience with a body that changed almost daily. I had to keep choosing to care for a body that often felt unfamiliar to me, and sometimes scary.

It still feels hard to admit this sometimes, but there were years where just surviving felt like enough, when learning to quiet the voices enough to get through the day felt like healing. But my kids weren’t just going to become who I would hope they would be just because I said the right things to them.

My children were going to know the truth eventually, because children always know more than what we give them credit for. They notice how we speak about our own bodies, and how we look at ourselves in the mirror. They notice how whether we rest after a hard day, or spend the afternoon punishing ourselves. They know whether our mistakes become a place for shame to build, or a space for us to practice repair.

My kids were going to borrow the ways I speak to myself. They were going to watch how I recover from mistakes, or don’t. They were going to yell, “I want my damn blue cup!” as two year olds because they’d heard one of us say it once, and remind me, all over again, that they are always listening. They were going to learn about living in a changing body from the way that I show them what its like to live in a changing body.

Fourteen year old me learned somewhere along the way that keeping pain quiet was the way to survive. So she was kind, helpful, and responsible. But pain leaks out - it sits in the way our eyes don’t fully turn up when we smile, and it comes out in projects that are supposed to be about nutrition, but are actually about asking for help.

As much as I would like to, I can’t promise my daughter that she will never stand in front of a mirror and wonder if she is enough. I can’t promise that middle school won’t bruise her, that friendships won’t break her heart, or that she’ll never inherit some of the messages about bodies that seem to float through the air we breathe.

What I can promise is something else.

I can promise that she never has to hide her questions from me. That whatever language they arrive in, I’ll be listening. That I will sit by her, get curious, and say, tell me a little bit more about this.

Twenty five years after I made that poster, I finally asked the fourteen year old who made it what she was trying to say.

I hope my daughter never has to wait that long.

Last night, I dreamt that I stopped my run after just one mile.

I didn’t remember it, of course, until this morning, I had done just that. Something about the 1.00 marker flashing on my watch invited the memory of my dream back to my consciousness. As I stood there, gearing up for the shift from the warm-up to a five mile block of marathon paced miles, I felt my heart flutter.

Then, I heard my brain tell me that I had permission to stop the run, and go home. That, in fact, it would be so much nicer to peel off my already sweaty clothes, and go back to bed. Actually, wouldn’t it be lovely to just stay in bed for the rest of the day? or even the week? Then, just in case I didn’t need more proof of how quickly brain circuits ignite, I was offered up the information that if, in fact, I did want to stay in bed all week, there were pills out there that could help me do that.

I clicked my watch back on, and ran down the hill into the five miles.

This week, I am in an educator training via called GrowTorah, the organization Hineini Hub will partner with this year on a life skills pillar in our weekly program. Part of the training means visiting existing gardens in schools and communities, walking through rows of planters and garden beds, looking at what other people’s energy produced throughout the year.

In one of them, we learned that when a plant starts to grow outside of its designated growing area, it means that the plant has volunteered itself. A seed drops somewhere it wasn’t intentionally planted, and grows there anyway. One particular volunteered tomato plant that we looked at had come from a plant that was already dying. Its stems were splitting, and the leaves were going yellow. I imagined it, dramatically flinging a part of itself past the border of the garden bed out onto gravel, with nothing to hold on to, so that somewhere it genes could keep going.

In nature, the instinct to survive is so powerful that a plant will fling its progeny into the unknown. Part of it stays and dies, and another part flings itself outward before the end arrives.

There is a version of us that sees survival as staying in the first half. In my life, it looked like days folded into other days, mostly asleep, mostly with artificial aid, so that time would pass without me having to be awake for it. I stayed inside the bed and felt like dying, and I called it rest. We do this when we stay in patterns that feel safe and comfortable, but that finally, end up killing us. Sometimes slowly, and sometimes quickly.

This morning, that voice showed up again. The one that wants to stay in the bed, in the stillness, to let time pass without having to be part of it - taking risks simply by engaging with the universe. I recognized it. It stunned me.

Even more so, the fact it had already been shown to me. In my dream, the night before, I was already being told - this mile marker will come, and you will have to make a choice: stay rooted, or fling yourself forward.

I saw it. I heard it.

I clicked my watch back on and flung myself over the border, down the hill instead.

As I sat down to write this, I wondered if Jewish wisdom had anything to offer for this, and what I find - is the flinging itself engraved into liturgical beauty:

הַזֹּרְעִים בְּדִמְעָה בְּרִנָּה יִקְצֹרוּ׃
הָלוֹךְ יֵלֵךְ  וּבָכֹה נֹשֵׂא מֶשֶׁךְ־הַזָּרַע בֹּא־יָבֹא בְרִנָּה נֹשֵׂא אֲלֻמֹּתָיו׃

They who sow in tears
shall reap with songs of joy.
One who goes along weeping,
carrying the seed-bag,
shall come back with songs of joy,
carrying the sheaves.

(Tehillim 126: 5-6)

We have seen it. Felt it. Heard it. From the beginning of our personhood.

Flinging into our own survival.

For weeks I had been staring at the tangle of weeds that overtook our burgeoning tomato plants, feeling utterly helpless. When we planted this year’s crop of vegetables at the end of May, I already knew it was a nod at hoping I’d feel less burnt out by the time they bore fruit in July.

It was pouring on the day we chose to plant, because of course it was. Crouching into our raised garden beds, the memory of my shirt getting caught in the chicken wire last year keeping me in a squat that sent my joints screaming. I had told my husband to only buy 8 plants, 4 for each garden bed. Our plants tend to grow wild, untamed, rarely pruned. Each year, my children delight at the giant vegetables that grow unrestricted in our garden beds, uncaring about the fact that the bigger they are, the more bitter they are. We still delight in collecting pictures of zucchinis that are slightly larger than the baby, now toddler.

So, here I was, knees in the dirt, because the squat didn’t hold, planting the 16 plants that he had bought, knowing deep down that I’d be tearing half of them out two months from now when they grew too wild to tame.

Since May, I’ve been watching the garden rampage. The cucumber plant grew wild and spiky, unfurling itself through the chicken wire, into our A/C compactor, reaching across to the other garden bed. It choked the broccoli plant, which sadly had to be removed. In the adjacent garden bed, the tomato vines sunk low, heavy with new fruit, and completely overtaken by musky, grassy weeds.

Every Sunday, we talked about how we needed to weed the garden. Every Sunday, I knew it meant I needed to weed the garden. And I didn’t.

Finally, last Friday, I’d had enough. After picking up my toddler from daycare, we marched down to the garden with gloves and trowels, and began to hack at the jungle of weeds. For her, it was pure sensory delight, digging, squishing, pulling, and tasting her way through two hours of outside time.

For me, it became an existential mission, to free the tomatoes from the roots that choked them, to allow them even a chance to bear fruit productively and joyfully.

I believe plants can feel, and I could feel the despair of my tomato plants, fighting for sunlight from the bottom of the bed. It sunk its teeth into me, and what began as an attempt to tame the garden evolved into a mission: to allow these innocent fruits a chance at breath, sunlight, and growth.

At some point in this process, my son joined us fresh from his baseball lesson, salty sweat dripping down his bangs, which also desperately need a cut. He waded into the tomato bed all action, and no gloves, pulling grass by the fistful and holding each clump up for inspection, before tossing it aside. He found a cucumber still clinging to the vine, pressed his face to the chicken wire to get a better angle, and ate it right there, with all the dirt and spikes. He grinned at me like he’d just robbed someone of a home run.

While the children delighted, my mission to free the tomatoes grew more serious, with metaphors unfurling in my brain as the tomato vines bounced up, freed from the grassy weeds that weighed them down. I started thinking about how long those weeds were allowed to grow. Every Sunday for two months we said that we needed to tend to them. Every Sunday the garden grew wilder and wilder. We knew something had to be done, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that we hadn’t quite yet had enough of the carnage.

Of course, I started thinking about recovery. Honestly, these days, I’m rarely not thinking about it. Pivoting in my job focus has meant a pivot in my thinking. As dirt encrusted itself into the grooves of my watch, and sprinkled into my gloves from the opening at my wrists, I thought about how many times in my own process I’d reached the place of enough before doing anything about it. As I prepare for another season of running support groups, and holding space for people on Shabbatons, I’m spending a lot of time thinking about the story I’m telling. The story where I should have been overtaken by the weeds of my own illness, and the one where I survived.

In recovery spaces, we talk about rock bottom as though it is one singular event that catalyzes healing. What frustrates me in most recovery narratives is the impatience we have in telling the full story. The dance is one step forward, two steps back. It’s having six months of success followed by three weeks of relapse. It’s then being willing to step back into the dirt, dig past the earthworms, and remove the weeds so the fruits can grow. In my own story, I would have done well to set up a trampoline in my rock bottom; it would have made for a much more entertaining landing when I hit it again, and again, and again.

There was no trampoline. There was just showing up over and over again, to weed the same patch of dirt. There was just getting up every morning, even after the worst days, and kneeling back down into it. There was just coming back to the same bed, the same tangle, and reaching in again with hands still scarred from the day before. There was just dirt under my fingernails, palms trembling, and a silent prayer that the roots might finally come loose.

At some point in the weeding, my husband called me from inside the house to find out what our plans were for Shabbat dinner. It was then that I realized we were two hours into the process, and the kids and I were caked in dirt and sweat. The toddler was still gleefully digging with her trowel, and savoring green tomatoes as though they were fully ripened.

We still weren’t done. I looked around the tomato bed and realized that about three quarters of it was clear, with tomato vines neatly pinned up onto the poles I’d set up for them- and the rest of it was still a wild jungle of weeds and drowning vines.