First Grade

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“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
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Crocus

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I was taught that, on holidays, each of us can access all the power and grandiose beauty of that holiday’s inception, weave it into our personal lives and reap miracles. Any miracles. All of them.
 
When I wrote this piece, I expected it to be some panicked articulation about what to even do with the grandness of that gift (which is was), that got increasingly more panicky the longer I kept writing (which it definitely did). But at some point the narrative shifted - and I realized I’d begun answering myself.

Crocus

Dearly beloved religion that was, what were you thinking when you let the world change you? I liked you best the way you were.

***

You tell me to change everything. The way I cook, the way I clean. To collectively rework the redemption of my people by burning breadcrumbs on my stovetop and debating with my Jewish neighbors down the block over different brands of bleach.

I never understood it. Grant me something grand. An entire nation all captive in one place, redeemed as desperately as breathing. Sprung from the lowest depths of spiritual depravity to the height of holiness. Ammonia or Clorox?

Darling.

What does it mean to access the love and potential of something glorious as a holiday given by G-d? A gift that literally changed how the world was run, re-given every year to every one of us, and with just as much potential? How do we hold space for that in our lives, and work miracles with it?

Mine is a rugged kind of religion.

Dear G-d. It’s me. Fighting on the outskirts of a thunderstorm again. Reworking my entire life, because I had a plan but it started raining…

Halakha started there, I think. A word intrinsic to the foundations of our faith, but it is not a grounded one. It means to walk, to go, to journey. So I think it began on the outskirts of Egypt three thousand years ago and then some, when we literally ran to freedom.

What does it mean to run to freedom? Was I bound?

Dear G-d. It’s me. I need another miracle.

I’m late for work and stuck in traffic. Can you hold the green light for me?

I said something sharp to a friend the other day. He’ll never tell me, but I saw it in his eyes. Can you help me fix it?

I am painting with the colors of a broken country, to find some peace in this one. Will you grant us the strength to build something beautiful from the things that scarred us deepest.

I’ll tell you a secret. I’ve been running for two years now. Somewhere different every hour on the hour. Getting dressed while driving on the South Street bridge, because that’s the longest light. Sending emails from the shower while cooking soup for Shabbos. Every single moment filled with scorching meaning, because I’m running from what I’ll remember if I sit too still.

I am not a slave to time.

***

Dance with me here. On the edge of what hasn’t been redeemed yet.

 

Because I’m waiting for the moment,

Where the person who I was meets the woman that I am, and tells her

“You are lovely.”

 

To repair the moments,

When I looked back at that girl a million times and said,

“You weren’t brave enough.”

***

And so. I am reminding you of your power to break free. To breathe peacefully. That gift was strong enough to liberate a nation, so surely you can do this.

My dear, nobody ever told you.

That a young child taught me to see flowers in the fields I fought in

And when I swore that I was fierce,

- with blood down my fingers and mud on my face -

He knelt down in the blossoms and plucked one for my hair

Like he’s been doing for the last two years.

He’d never forgotten how to find flowers.

***

The word for freedom is cheirut, which literally means “engraving.” It is a complexity that the freest people are made up of engravings. Not afraid to leave a mark. Not afraid of being changed a little. Of wandering a little. Of holding on our hearts the markings of this journey.

Dear beloved religion that was. What were you thinking?

I was thinking I could teach you that your soul is steady.

That freedom is a crocus.

That miracles are the most stable thing.

***

Dance with me here, on the edge of what hasn’t been repaired yet. We can fix it, if we scour the stains and embrace the way it changes.

If we dance like it was never broken.



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