Category: Jewish

On roadside saints, Jesus talk, and preaching the gospel of love

8/22/2026

JESUS LOVES YOU, my cousin Terri exclaimed to me at my bat mitzvah party at the age of thirteen. She looked straight into the camera with a microphone in her hand and told me that Jesus was proud of me. Terri had become a devoted Jew for Jesus, and she wanted me to know that Jesus did indeed love me with all his heart, soul, and mind.

What to make of all that? I loved her lavender suit and her reddish cheeks, I loved her sweet, high-pitched voice. She was older than me, but perhaps not wiser, and I shook it off as a little bit crazy and a little bit wild, but beyond that—the message was harmless enough—and steeped in love.

In high school, I played the role of a preacher in a play about Jesus called “Cotton Patch Gospel,” the musical. The entire cast was Jewish, we were all kids growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust in Skokie, but somehow our director thought that this would be the perfect play. We rocked it and sang our hearts out!

I still remember the lyrics to nearly every song, full of praise and worship. “Something’s brewing in Gainesville, wonder what it could be!” And then there was “Love the Lord your God, with all your heart, soul and mind. Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” This song was sung by a gorgeous sabra from Israel with curly hair and a lioness gaze, and we didn’t think twice about it.

We were so good as an ensemble that we took it on the road to the Illinois Theater Festival, performing the musical on stage for thousands of people in the great auditorium at the state university. I wore a blue preacher’s robe, I gesticulated with my hands, preaching the gospel of Jesus’ love, convincing and believable!

Here I was learning Torah, how to decipher the ancient Hebrew, to know when to pray while bent at the knees, and yet always surrounded by Jesus, at the same time. This would have been confusing except that my parents also preached an openness to love and the possibilities of faith.

My grandmother Isabelle always took a liking to the idea of positive thinking, an idea rooted in Christian Science, and frowned upon medical interventions of any kind, even though she was married to a surgeon who stitched up wounded soldiers in Italy for four years as she raised her three sons alone back in Chicago.

During grad school in Boston, I walked through the dimly lit hallways of the Mother Church of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, and felt a strange tug toward my grandmother’s curious heart. She was a big believer in healing prayer beyond the ones we learned in Hebrew school.

This could have confused me growing up in my search for a relationship of my own with the divine, but it only brought more clarity. Rooted in Jewish traditions, I was free to roam the wilderness of faith and pick whatever flowers for my divine bouquet.

My dad used to preach the gospel of Yahweh power. My mom, the gospel of gold in the garbage heaps. I sing the gospel of the non-believer, the believer in falling in love with strangers, breaking bread with madmen and finding them quite sane, missing teeth and all.

My mom used to tell me I’d make a good rabbi, that’s not a lie. Perhaps some combination of rabbi or lawyer—I love a good fine print—so I became a poet, and then a memory merchant, swapping ancient objects for cash, saving my stash for these long months without steady work.

Thank God I have faith; it has made all the difference, if I’m honest.

One Gregorian chant was all it took for Simone Weil to feel the presence of God as proof—and poof!—believer. Similar story with other Christian mystics, how they fell into the trance of holy love by circumstance alone, a calling or a returning, who knows what to call this strange surrender?

I find peace in old churches and holy spaces of all kinds. In Naples, I met Saint Gennaro and felt immediately more at ease knowing how his story lives so fully through the city’s inhabitants. It’s always the light and these spaces that make me a believer.

Then there’s the billboard saint. If we’re to advertise anything, let it be the message of Saint Dymphna, Patron Saint of Anxiety. The seventh-century Irish princess ran away from home to escape her insufferable father. And now I’m passing her by on a busy Indiana highway, hearts connected through the mutual experience of anguish.

I can’t say I believe in every story I’m told when it comes to saints and gods, but I tend to wonder what might happen if I allowed myself to move over and make room for the love these stories bring to me.

I can squeeze in another saint as long as I can still stand on my own two feet. Or should I need to bend my knees in prayer—perhaps lay down all the way on the ground—it’s the light I’ll remember that brings me back to the story with a sense of renewed direction.

Let the light in, I mean. Let love be the only story we keep telling ourselves and each other.

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On containing multitudes, letting go and talking about what moves you

7/29/2026

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ASK ME ABOUT letting go–going through your dead mother’s epic antique and vintage collection is a crash course in decision-making that forces you to slice through the illusion of sentimentality. There’s just too much stuff to hold onto that silver fork for too long before you decide that it was never important to any of you and decide to chuck it in the “donate” box. You can also ask me about vintage collections and obsessions, how I started with silver spoons and landed with a current obsession with playing cards, how those decks are a kind of tarot, we all know that.

Ask me about the Swahili coast—leaving home at the age of 33 and returning only because the world got sick and booted you back to your beginnings is a story you’re still trying to tell but if you ask me about the Swahili coast, I can easily tell you about the sea and what it meant to me, as a city girl who never learned to swim and yet spent a decade by the ocean. You can also ask me about seaweed farming, fish roasting, and octopus hunting, I’ll tell you what I remember.

Ask me about growing up Jewish against the shadow of the Holocaust—learning Hebrew in my high school classrooms taught by survivors with tattoos on their inner arms, memorizing a strange alphabet that I first encountered in holy books while preparing to bow on the bimah before god and my weary relatives! How I bled for the very first time on the exact day of my bat mitzvah and felt mortified to think, oh my god, maybe my people are right, I am a woman now! Ask me about how it feels now to be part of a pariah tribe—to be hated and slated as bad for having feelings about a land that appears hundreds of times in our prayer books.

Ask me about caregiving—or is it caretaking—and why can’t we ever figure out the difference between the two? You can ask me related questions about my daddy, infinite jazz piano-playing father of three, lover of homonyms and hot dogs, milk shakes and walks in the woods, leaf collector extraordinaire! How we’re still talking to him about the mysteries of Yahweh, how his mother was a Christian Scientist who believed in the power of positive thinking, how she loved her three boys and her husband, my handsome grandfather, Manny!

But you didn’t ask me about all that, you are asking me about caregiving—how I learned to anticipate my daddy’s requests for at least ten different beverages—he so loved to stay hydrated—how I learned to make him an egg salad sandwich exactly as he pleased, cut into four pieces, two on the plate, two on the sidelines, waiting like players on the bench. How I decided to move back home to hang out with him full-time, despite my reservations, and all the chatter about women bearing all the burden for our aging parents, so be it. Ask me how this was the greatest honor of my life—to let my daddy teach me the greatest lesson of all time, to die with grace, to die in peace, in a bed of pink sheets, surrounded by his daughters, my sisters!

Everyone says you need a “niche” on social media—pick a lane to stay sane—they say, find a message and repeat it. But I don’t have the energy anymore to separate these parts of the pie of “I,” or for that matter believe that any one of us is just one story, we know we contain multitudes, come on, already!

So when I start talking to the camera, you’ll hear me mention my daddy, and my love for vintage, and my years in Zanzibar, and my Jewish upbringing in Skokie, and why I love the woods, and how baking challah is not as easy as it looks, and which books I love, and you’ll hear me talk about consciousness and god because those channels, too, have always been wide open, ever since I was a little girl, I’ve been talking to trees, listening for long sermons from the wind.

Ask me about vintage, I’ll tell you about grief. Ask me about Zanzibar, I’ll talk about love. Ask me about faith, I’ll talk about my father. Every story is about another story. So pick up a stick and tell a story based on its color: red, a place; yellow; a person; green, a thing; blue, a memory; black, a spiritual encounter. Shake the box of sticks, repeat.

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On learning to exhale in Swahili

7/25/2026

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INSIDE THE ANTIQUE SHOP, a robed man with a round belly sneezed.

“Al-hamdulillah!” I said, looking up from a dusty shelf of brass coffee pots.
“Are you Muslim?” he asked.
“No,” I answered. “But I’ve been living here for a while. Isn’t this what we say when someone sneezes?”

He paused. Took a long breath.

“If you’re not Muslim, you can’t say this word. We take our words very seriously,” he said.

I looked over at Isdi standing behind the glass counter, wrapped from head to toe in black, as the man stormed out of her family’s shop.

We both let out a big sigh.

“He’s crazy,” she muttered in Swahili when he was out of sight. “You’re allowed to bless a man when he sneezes!”

Isdi’s words consoled me, but the encounter still left me feeling sideways.

Now that I was living in Stone Town indefinitely, I wanted to signal that I knew the right lines for the public play I was made to perform each day.

I often looked to my new friend Isdi for clues.

Her Yemeni family’s corner antique shop overflowed with ancient objects—brass coffee pots with long wooden handles, ornately carved wooden treasure boxes, old metal mirrors with painted ceramic tiles—that had traveled from India to Africa to Oman and Europe and back again.

I loved stepping into the cool, quiet storefront and browsing up and down the long aisles that held so much history, chatting with Isdi as tourists popped in and out for a trinket or souvenir.

Isdi went out of her way to speak slowly to me in Swahili, often inviting me to sit with her and her older sister on tiny stools by the open doors, watching the world go by with them.

The soft-spoken sisters always welcomed me warmly into their world, but I sensed there were many layers and aspects of their lives that would never translate.

That morning, Isdi joined me out front after the angry man who policed my greetings stomped out of the shop. I needed to readjust my headscarf to cover my bare shoulders before heading back out onto the narrow streets buzzing with life and stench.

She kept telling me not to worry—that she knew the man, a devout Muslim who bristled at foreigners feigning knowledge of the island's customs—but I still felt ashamed.

I wondered how much longer I could stay in a place that always made me feel like I was breaking some rule—offending god (or devout men in religious robes).

By the time I arrived in Zanzibar in the mid-2000s, tourism had already exploded on the islands—there were wazungu--foreigners like me—everywhere.

But at the height of naiveté, I believed I was different—that if I spoke Swahili enough, covered my hair just right, and walked with the slow, casual confidence of an islander who had discarded clocks as a concept, Icould somehow feel like I belonged here a little longer and a little more than everyone else.

Quite an absurd assumption, I know, and it’s one that kept on caving in on itself the longer I stayed, the more I spoke, the deeper I trekked inside the culture.

Isdi knew how to talk to tourists—her business depended on it—and maybe that’s how she knew just the right words to comfort me enough to keep coming back to visit. I often took my guests to her curio shop, and we always left with bags full of silver charms and chiseled wooden boxes.

But I’ve never stopped wondering what Isdi really believed about me and the way women like me moved around the islands as in-betweeners—not quite tourists (we knew too much)—but not quite locals either.

We were not believers.

I didn’t come to Zanzibar as a seeker or a believer.

I grew up thinking I could make my own rules about god as I went along. But in Zanzibar, Islam sings from every shadow and slant.

Trying to live by the rules stultified me.

Back home, I was used to lingering on the outskirts of faith. But I couldn’t hide out with my doubts in Zanzibar. I found myself on stage, one of many conflicted characters in the island’s story of itself as righteous and pure.

It didn’t help matters much that I’d clung to a man with long dreadlocks coiled like a crown on his head, rebelling against Islam.

I was the pale-skinned, freckled Jewish American woman walking by his side, conspiring with his rebellion.

People like Isdi tolerated people like me—but not the devout man who'd admonished me before storming out. My presence threatened the purity he believed he was protecting.

How would I live so long in a place where belief—or at least the performance of belief—organized every social interaction, when I was an unbeliever?

The Swahili clock is set to divine time. Prayer here is the collective promise of a long, deep breath—a way to reset the social rhythms, five times a day.

I exhaled with my neighbors.

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A recipe, an idea, an invitation—on welcoming a Friday morning with a wink

7/3/2026

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A RECIPE, for Fran’s brownies, sits on my desk.

We call her Aunt Fran—though we’re not related by blood—and her brownies are the best. Fran was best friends with my mom, and growing up, we were kind of scared of her. She has this Bostonian no-nonsense tone in her voice, and took a tough approach to keeping us all in line.

I didn't understand her "meanness" growing up, but I truly appreciate her now, and we still talk from time to time. She called me "Mandy," and reassured me much later in life that she knew how hard it was to grow up with a mother like mine.

Bless them both.

I still have Aunt Fran's brownies recipe card with my mom’s writing on it, that slanted ease, as if the letters are parading off the page. They used to bake and cook all kinds of things together, spent hours in the kitchen together rolling crepes and egg rolls, mixing the ingredients for brownies and tuna noodle casseroles. They kept busy and seemed to have fun with each other, getting through life. Fran used to live down the street from us.

I’ve tried to adapt the brownie recipe in recent years—it’s too sweet, I never buy baker’s chocolate, I need to improvise—and yet, this recipe reveals its winning feature, the will to bend toward the sweetness of time.

AN IDEA came to me this morning, to write about how my friends are doing the most amazing things but they don’t toot their own horns or sing their own praises, and I sometimes wonder if I should just write about each of them, one story at a time, how they found what lights them up and went and did it, how they figured out the answer to that game we were all playing a few years ago during peak pandemic times:

“What would be your job during the apocalypse?”

"What’s the one thing you’re good at that you’d be willing to contribute to the commune in the after-times?”

And here we are—in the after times—making our offerings, quietly, with confidence and grace. The calligrapher friend, the critical response friend, the gardener friend, the massage therapist friend, the editor friend, the organizer friend, the ceremonies friend, the yoga for wellness friend, the writing workshop leader friend, the grant writer friend, all of us, saying “Here, I have this, and what do you have, and can we share?”

The world should know about these quiet geniuses. I bet you know so many amazing people, too, who we deserve to know—and our hearts would expand if we became aware of all the good they make and do in this life.

AN INVITATION came to me this morning, to go for brunch at a local spot that just opened up, with my sister and her two lovely friends, two creatives with warm hearts and sweet souls, who gather for a coffee or a fancy granola bowl or a bagel shmear, because it’s Friday, and a holiday weekend approaches, and everyone’s off work, if they still have jobs, so why not go for brunch?

I’m grateful for the invite, I’ve been trying to socialize more with friends, but I’m seriously underemployed and kind of broke when it comes to brunch. Besides, this morning I’ve been called to knead dough for another round of challah-making experiments.

So as the dough is rising in the blue and white marbled bowl, covered with a cloth featuring blue and white tiger prints, I decline the invite. I have a date with god, this morning, I tell myself, an appointment with the divine, to drop into deep time and knead my way toward a better understanding of how yeast works to come alive and bring us sustenance, our daily bread.

Pray for me, that the dough rises, but not too high, that the bread keeps its shape this time, that the center is sweet.

Shabbat shalom, and happy Fourth, to all grappling with the meaning of any of it, the boom and shock of it all.

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On blue moons, gods and fates, and living the commandment of our names

5/31/2026

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A BLUE MOON IN SAGITTARIUS—I accept this exceptional celestial invitation to release and reset—the astrologers say this could be just the right moment to practice radical honesty and it’s all happening tonight!

In the age of astrological hyperbole, when every configuration of stars signals unprecedented transformation, it’s hard to make sense of any of it. But a full moon is a full moon, blue or otherwise, and I’m carrying the residual pain of impasses. I’ll howl at the moon tonight.

Outdated beliefs: the ones that begin with “I used to” and end with “but now I…” Emotional baggage: goodbye to the good lie that kept me tied to you. Personal truths: the morning was never mine but I made peace with it; I still love smoking a cigarette—especially at night—even though I’ve sworn them off as “so good, but not for me.”

What are you carrying around that you need to set down—at least for a night or two? This moon will follow you around and tug at your heart strings, asking for a bit of attention and an honorable mention with the gods of fate.

In high school, we read the bible as mythology and then we read all about the greek gods. It never occurred to me how radical and revolutionary this could be—how offensive, actually—until I got older and saw with my own eyes how seriously the literalists took the word of god.

What I gathered, then and now, is that humans act in god-like ways when pressed or stressed and their transcendent deeds get inscribed into the collective books of belief. I read this morning how in Hebrew, the word for crisis and birth pains are the same--mashber--and this amazed me, to consider how what the body perceives as pain is also an opening—a beginning—a rebirth.

Thank you, Rachel*, for telling me about this. I’ve spent so much time and energy attempting to contain the part of me I call Jewish that I’ve tended to ignore the beautiful wisdom embedded in our ancient language and traditions. I find myself taking secret passageways back to my faith—offline and undocumented—one step at a time.

It’s sweet to think of the time my parents put into naming me. In Jewish tradition, our names are commandments. Amanda comes from Latin for love, “she who must be loved” or “worthy of love” or “beloved,” well which one is it! Love is the commandment, that’s clear. Supposedly there are millions of Amandas worldwide. So much love. So much love!

I was never crazy about my name but I accepted it. I’ve also been called Dodin and Didi, names of endearment, names indicating that I have been loved, am worthy of it. My daddy wanted to name me Deirdre, I guess there’s some family lore that my parents disagreed on what to call me.

This morning I thought about my dad, gone but ever-present in our lives, urging us on and transmitting messages of love—commandments, really. A memory popped into my mind of that time when my dad took me and my sisters to see Flashdance, that movie about a woman steelworker who aspires to become a professional dancer.

I know, it’s kind of scandalous, right? This was the 1980s when taking kids to R-rated movies was not that big of a deal and we felt grown enough anyway to handle all that we saw that afternoon. Of course, we loved every single minute of it—the triumphant moment when she’s finally auditioning for the dance panel and nails it!

But what I remember most about watching this film at the age of eight is coming home and dancing with abandon on the green carpet of a lawn in front of our childhood home and feeling whipped up with big love for creative possibilities. I spun in circles with my arms spread wide open singing Irene Cara’s 1983 anthem, “Flashdance.”

“Take your passion—and make it happen!” I belted out every word of that song, which I still have memorized and on every playlist.

OK, so what does this have to do at all with a blue moon or faith or crisis or the meaning of our names? There’s this feeling that life is about breaking free—moments of restraint and release—times of holding on and letting go.

And whatever the moon’s messages are tonight for me—I’m listening!

*Rachel Goldberg-Polin, author of When We See You Again.

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On fire and rain and the essence of a Jewish midwest existence

5/28/2026

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ON LONG TRIPS, I’d fall asleep in the car only to wake up and realize we’d only driven thirty minutes to stop first at Bill Knapps. What I remember about the now-shuttered restaurant chain is their famous potatoes au gratin and coloring with crayons while I waited for my mom to signal she was ready to head back on the road.

I haven’t thought about this place in years but it was referenced in Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s writing about her Jewish childhood in the midwest, and I can’t help but notice the many points of overlap that feel quintessential in some way: camp memories, learning to play the guitar, the smell of deep fresh pine in the woods of Michigan, where the air just smells like cool heaven.

My mother was born in Watervliet, so the story goes. Grew up in Benton Harbor, married my dad at a gorgeous synagogue within walking distance of her childhood home. I visited a few years ago with my boyfriend, walking around the block a few times in the summer heat, a melted iced coffee in my hand, imagining the limits and possibilities of her life. I sometimes scroll through Zillow looking for summer cottages nearby, thinking that would be a place I could also call home.

Who knows.

I haven’t picked up my guitar in a long time but every once in a while, strumming a song or two on it also makes me feel like I’m home again—not in some place—in my soul’s home. My mom noticed how I obsessed over learning certain songs in eighth grade so she purchased a really nice guitar for me that year, but because I spent a lot of time hating her, I also had ambivalent feelings toward that guitar.

It’s stuck with me though after all these years. It’s in my closet, along with the stash of sheet music I lugged around with me, hoping I’d one day master “Angel of Montgomery” or “Father and Son” or “You’ve Got a Friend.” Just yesterday morning, they let me know you were gone...and the tears well up just like that. I think it all points to my summers at Jewish overnight camp in Wisconsin.

There’s no greater peace than sitting around a campfire and yet I’ve yet to learn how to build one on my own. I keep telling myself that at some point I’ll return to my aspirations as a nature girly and get to work on learning the skills that would make it make sense to sleep in the woods and build a fire and cook over it and wake up at dawn. One day, I keep telling myself. I’ll bring my guitar! We can sing around the fire forever.

What I once thought was our story — my family’s story, my mom’s story — is in some way a Jewish diaspora story I couldn’t see as clearly as I do now when I was growing up. I’m sure I was told at some point that Michiana wasn’t always a welcoming place for Jewish people but it also didn’t stick because I didn’t want to believe that such a world existed. I know better now, sadly.

And still, Jewish people found their way in the pine woods and dune towns of Indiana and Michigan, and I still trek northward in that direction, hoping to feel the essence of this collective presence in the region. We’re here, tucked into the American story, getting loud and writing books when we’re called to, but otherwise trying to figure out how to strike a match and light a peaceful fire, so it seems.

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travel far now

On roadside saints, Jesus talk, and preaching the gospel of love

On containing multitudes, letting go and talking about what moves you

On learning to exhale in Swahili

A recipe, an idea, an invitation—on welcoming a Friday morning with a wink

On blue moons, gods and fates, and living the commandment of our names

On fire and rain and the essence of a Jewish midwest existence

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