To my sweet, sweet E,
Last week, the internet algorithm got me. I usually pride myself on being able to resist such things, but this time, it offered me a beautiful wooden toy menorah from Pottery Barn Kids. Don’t click on it, I said to myself. You don’t need more stuff. You live in a New York City apartment. E doesn’t need more toys, especially one that will mainly be used eight days a year. But I clicked on the ad, and I added the menorah to my cart, and I checked out, and now you have been playing with it each night, counting the candles, as we light the menorah together. It was probably worth it, but honestly, you would have not have missed it.
Afterwards, I texted my good friend. “This war is making me crazy,” I said. “I just ordered E a super bougie wooden menorah.”
When I was in elementary school, I really wanted a stuffed Torah. My mother, your grandma, didn’t want to buy me one. She probably thought we didn’t need more stuffed animals (true) and that it was overpriced (also true.) So I found some felt and some stuffing and sewed one myself, and one for your Aunt Sarah for good measure. It wasn’t particularly well done, but it was what I wanted—a Torah of my own, that I could hug and carry around with me. In retrospect, it is probably not shocking that I pursued a career learning and teaching Jewish text.
All of these years later, I still can’t quite explain why I wanted that Torah so badly, but I can tell you, E, that before your first Simchat Torah, when you were only 8 months old, your abba and I went to West Side Judaica and bought you a purple plush torah, all your own. You took to it right away (though for some reason, you do not like your plush lulav and etrog), and when you learned to talk, you would sing “Torah Torah,” lifting it up when you got to “Moshe!” in the song.
This year, that torah was with us when we went to shul on Simchat Torah. We knew that something very bad was happening in Israel, but having been offline because of the chag, we did not yet have any real conception of how catastrophic things were. You held your torah tight as you bounced on our shoulders and our laps, not noticing how tears were pouring down my face as the people around us sang “Am Yisrael Chai” louder and louder. For you, that moment was one of joy, with some of your favorite things—music, your parents, chocolate, your stuffed torah. For me, though, it was a moment of mourning, not only for the tragedy whose depths I did not yet comprehend, but also for my fear that your Judaism might one day bring you pain.
I am incredibly lucky that my experiences of Judaism have been primarily of joy. I grew up in a shul where they danced every Friday night during Lecha Dodi. At Jewish summer camp, I found a Jewish community that I carry with me in my heart more than 20 years after I last attended. When I first encountered Talmud, I fell in love, and no matter what has been hard in my life, when I teach Torah, I always, always, always feel better. My Judaism was not one of restrictions, but one of expansive love and joy and community. I mostly do not chafe at the limits of halakha; instead, I find that more often, they unbound me, letting me become the fullest version of myself.
When I found out, E, that you were going to join our family—when you were nothing but a highly magnified picture of six cells on a piece of photo paper the day of our embryo transfer—I dreamed of showing you that joy. I dreamed of you looking forward to Shabbat each week, of watching you learn Torah for the first time, of giving you gelt on Chanukah and apples and honey on Rosh Hashanah. I dreamed of you having an expansive communal Judaism that bound you to your people while reminding you of your responsibility to the world. Just three generations after both of your namesakes had to flee the Nazis in Germany as children, you were going to grow in a world where you never had to fear because of your Jewish identity. Your Judaism would be joyful, as I was so blessed to have mine be.
And now? This is still, my beloved E, one of my greatest wishes for you. But in the last two months, I have also seen people calling for genocide of Jews at my alma mater, people defacing pictures of kidnapped Jewish babies with excrement in our neighborhood, people calling for the cancelation of public Chanukah celebrations because somehow the war between Israel and Hamas made it “too political” to be Jewish. For the first time, I have worried about your abba walking around with a kippah and my wearing a mitpachat and knee length skirts. I am, I admit, sometimes nervous when you loudly sing your Hebrew songs as you walk down the street. My heart bleeds for the dead and kidnapped Israeli children, and the dead Palestinian children. But selfishly, I confess, it also bleeds a little for you. Thank God, you are safe—but I have never been more aware that that safety is an accident of history and circumstance, and that it is more precarious than perhaps it has ever been in my life.
So what am I doing in the face of this fear? E, my promise to you is that I will not let anyone steal our Jewish joy. For millennia, being Jewish has been an act of defiance. It seems we are in one of those moments yet again. But we get to decide how that defiance will manifest and I choose joy. This does not mean that we do not mourn, or cry out, or fight hard. Our grief is heavy, and part of being a Jew is carrying it. But I believe that will only be made lighter if we lift that grief with song and celebration when we have the opportunity.
On Sunday, we went to a bar mitzvah. I missed most of the service because you kept trying to storm the bimah to lead the congregation in a round of HaAderet veHaEmunah, so we stepped out, but I made it in for the d’var torah. The bar mitzvah boy, wise beyond his years like his parents, spoke about how we often talk about the miracle of Chanukah as being that the light lasted for eight days, but actually, the miracle is that the Chashmonaim decided to light the menorah at all, despite thinking it would be extinguished too soon. This is the burden and the miracle of the Jewish people—to face destruction and then light another light, as a sign of faith that things can be different, even if it seems impossible to imagine how.
Many people have spoken, reasonably, about how hard it is to light Chanukah candles this year in the face of so much darkness. But for me, honestly, it has felt like the most intuitively Jewish thing in the world. When we said the Shehechiyanu the first night, I felt it in my bones—how miraculous, how unlikely, how beautiful that somehow we are here, marking this moment together. Through the grace of God, through tragedy and darkness, only because of miracles and defiant celebration, E, we are here. And that is cause for joy.
With all of my love forever,
Your mommy
Since the first night of Chanukah, our students at Yeshivat Maharat have been publishing pieces on the topic of “finding light in unexpected pieces,” with a new piece added each day of the holiday. You can read them here.
This piece is in memory of everyone who was killed on October 7th in Israel, and with prayers that the rest of the hostages should be returned soon. It is also in memory of Shira Palmer-Sherman, who died on the first night of Chanukah 23 years ago, but whose joy and love of Judaism still informs my Jewish practice every day.