Author: Liz
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Aliyah is a million cuts.
When you’re 22 and pick up and move to another country with a minimum 9-hour flight time, you’re really not thinking about 18 years later when the other shoe drops. The first shoe dropped when you had your first kid, and realized how hard it is to have added yet another family member to the…
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Bebe update: twelve years
A lot of people don’t know how to make choices. I don’t mean the right choices. I mean, how to go about choosing. Not only do you relish in making choices, you know how. Or it’s innate, at least. It comes easy to you. Whatever is going on in there is an actual thinking process.…
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To my bat mitzvah.
I could choose to roll my eyes at having to come up with another dvar torah related to one of my kids’ various Vayikra parshas – just a year later – but instead, I’ll leave the korbanot and the cohanim behind. Really, we have one word to focus on – look no further than the…
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Nettles update: nine years
I spent a lot of this last year thinking about wiring. The way our brains are wired. What does that mean? Yeah, it sounds weird, I know. Not like wires, what’s running around the office desk or what you pick up and randomly turn into some art project. It’s more the way our minds take…
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Naturally insatiable.
Why are we so hungry all the time? Why are we hard coded for never enough, never satiated? Is it evolutionary? Survival? So we constantly have something to live for? Is that when we start to die, when the hunger disappears? When we do these hikes, and I turn back to look, for one luxurious…
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Undressing Israel.
A set of giant concrete blocks that serve as guard posts at the checkpoint near my house now has a fancy sign on it: עמדה 2 Things here have always felt concrete – heavy, burdensome, temporary but permanent – but they’re getting more and more more concrete over time and experience and murder and terror…
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Bleak.
Some make a habit of exaggerating the bleakness of our civil future here in Israel, many many more make a habit of not relating to it enough. The reckoning is creeping even slower than you’d imagine; bursting those bubbles is harder than you think. So tonight was the second in a series of motzei shabbat…
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The hard way.
At the ‘חוג בת מצווה’ I’m doing with my daughter, tonight’s session was focused on Jewish Israeli women heroes of the last century; this follows six weeks focused on even earlier historical Jewish strongwomen. Posters that hung around the room exposed us to some oldies but goodies – Naomi Shemer, Golda Meir, Henrietta Szold –…
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Woman, today.
#1 This time was different. I’m not sure why. I guess I am. There’s a weight on my chest. For months, for several years. Like I’m sure there is on yours, at least, maybe. I dunked once and felt like I could see myself in the water. That weight was lifted within the liquid mass…
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Go forth.
What a weird twist… to be exploring Jewishness and Israeliness and what this peoplehood means these days when it’s appearing more and more difficult to understand the meaning of what’s happening in the world… …during the week we read parshat Lech Lecha. What does it mean to pick up and leave something you know? Swept…
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Is ‘local’ the answer?
I’ve been thinking about local vs global for a while now. I think there’s a clear crossover between my midlife crisis (five years and counting?) and this growing sense that the most important thing we can do – as individuals – is pay attention to the local vs the global. There seems to be a…
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On to the next stage of modern teenage development: Looking over your shoulder.
Two days ago was Yom Yerushalayim, or Jerusalem Day – the celebration of the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967, where Jews were finally allowed to roam freely in the Old City due to their own sovereignty. It’s a day I really only tend to think about in the context of traffic to my former Jerusalem…