The Lilith Blog

January 26, 2021 by Eleanor J. Bader

Honoring the Memory of a Special Young Woman— by Teaching Consent

When Erin Michele Levitas was 19, she was raped by someone she knew. As she processed and healed from what had happened, she made a decision: After college, she would attend law school and become an advocate for survivors of sexual assault.

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January 26, 2021 by admin

How to Really Achieve Equal Pay?

As Americans were obsessing over the results of the presidential election, a New Zealand law aimed at eliminating pay discrimination against women in female-dominated occupations went into effect. The bill, which takes an approach known as “pay equity,” provides a road map for
addressing the seemingly intractable gender pay gap.

Unlike “equal pay”—the concept most often used to address gender pay disparities in the United States—the concept of “pay equity” doesn’t just demand equal pay for women doing the same work as men, in the same positions. Such efforts, while worthwhile, ignore the role of occupational segregation in keeping women’s pay down: There are some jobs done mostly by women and others that are still largely the province of men. The latter are typically better paid.

But if the coronavirus has taught us anything, it is that what has traditionally been women’s work—caring, cleaning, the provision of food—can no longer be taken for granted. “It’s not the bankers and the hedge fund managers and the highest paid people” upon whose services we’ve come to rely, said Amy Ross, former national organizer for New Zealand’s
Public Service Association union. “It’s our supermarket workers, it’s our cleaners, it’s
our nurses—and they’re all women!”

It has also taught us how poorly these jobs are compensated. Over half of workers
designated essential in the United States are women; their jobs are typically paid well below the median hourly wage of a little over $19 an hour. (Median hourly pay for cashiers is just $11.37; for child care workers it’s $11.65; health support workers such as home health aides and orderlies make $12.68.)

Instead of “equal pay for equal work,” supporters of pay equity call for “equal pay for work of equal value,” or “comparable worth.” They ask us to consider whether a female-dominated occupation such as a nursing home aide, for instance, is really so different from a male-dominated one, such as corrections officer, when both are physically exhausting, emotionally demanding, and stressful—and if not, why is the nursing home aide paid so much less? In the words of New Zealand’s law, the pay scale for women should be “determined by reference to what men would be paid to do the same work abstracting from skills, responsibility, conditions and degrees of effort.”

What is at stake is not just a simple pay raise but a society-wide reckoning with the value of “women’s work.” How much do we really think this work is worth? But also: How do we decide?

—
ANNA LOUISE SUSSMAN, “Women’s Work’ Can No Longer Be Taken for Granted,” The New York Times, November, 2020.

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The Lilith Blog

January 7, 2021 by Arielle Silver-Willner

A Little Backyard Writing School

It’s Friday afternoon and I am in my backyard, setting out plastic cushions six feet apart, disinfecting pencils, and copying my lesson plan onto a dry erase board with multi-colored markers. It’s starting to get cold, but I’m armed with a case of hand warmers and a list of activities that will keep my students moving.

I’m ready for winter.

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The Lilith Blog

November 24, 2020 by Yona Zeldis McDonough

Life Without Lipstick

This has been the year of devastation. Just to start, there’s the staggering death toll from COVID, the collapse of the economy, the millions out of work, threatened by homelessness—and that’s not even saying a word about the savage animosity surrounding the election or the reckoning with American racism that has resurfaced in recent months. 

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October 23, 2020 by admin

Parenting During the Pandemic

SARAH SELTZER: 37, Lilith’s digital editor and mom of two.

Dear Friends,

I’m in NYC with a baby and toddler at home and little childcare help; my partner is a recent cancer survivor so we’re cautious. Like so many working moms, my job is more flexible (and provides less income) than my male partner’s, so my work overflows into lunch breaks, early mornings, naps, weekends and after bedtime. But it gets done.

When the weather is good, a two-hour trip to a park with some social-distance visiting is the day’s highlight. When we’re stuck at home? Tears, yelling, and messes.

Every day, I track Covid statistics on my phone. Early on in the pandemic, when our own New York was suffering gravely, I had my husband change my Twitter password so I would stop obsessing. I slept better. I hated that I slept better.

The tiny pleasures and stolen cups of coffee that kept me sane as a working parent of little kids are totally out of reach. Here comes the disclaimer (and we all do this) that I am one of the lucky ones, and being with my kids has its blessings, too. But as my quiet text threads with other friends who are similarly “lucky” reveal that we all feel a sense of drowning, and fear. The headlines bear this out: “Single Mothers Hit Hard.” “Real Life Horror Stories from Pandemic Motherhood.” “Pandemic Could Scar a Generation of Working Mothers.” The substance of these pieces? Women, especially women of color, single moms, and working moms, are bearing the brunt of the economic and social fallout: double burdens at home, discrimination at work if work exists, the twin terrors of anti-Black state violence and disease, a generation set back on the path to equality.

I’ve asked some women Lilith knows (but who don’t know each other) to talk about how this feels right now. Let’s dive in. Where are you all quarantining? What is your day like? What do you miss? Anything you’re OK with giving up?

TAMAR FOX: 36, a writer and editor who does not bake sourdough bread, but does obsess about houseplants.

I’m in Philadelphia with my five-year-old back in daycare, and it feels incredible. My partner and I both worked from home before Covid, but when it hit, we spent three months passing our child back and forth, counting the minutes until her afternoon screentime. My 12-year-old stepdaughter was going back and forth between us and her mom, doing schoolwork, understandably bored and frustrated. I spent every minute feeling intense guilt about what I wasn’t doing: being an attentive parent, focusing on work, getting dinner on the table before 8 PM.

We have childcare now, but school is starting again, and it’s going to be virtual. How do you do kindergarten online? We will likely join one of those “pods” that everyone is talking about, though I’m also worried about how to do this in a way that doesn’t reinforce segregation and divert resources from schools, as some have argued they will. Yet there is no possible way for me to teach my child and do my job at the same time. Every family I know is inventing its own plan, and I’m so full of rage I feel on the brink of screaming.

In the “before times,” every Shabbat we would go to a playground near our house. All our friends would be there, and for sometimes four hours or more we would just hang out–the kids yo-yoing back and forth from the slides to the spiderweb to the parents with the snacks. It is cheesy, but I just yearn to do that again. I miss sitting around for hours at a time and not worrying about dying of a virus.

ARIELLE DERBY: an elementary school principal and the 41-year-old mother of “two amazing kids.” She lives in Silver Spring, MD.

Hi everyone.

I’m a single mom. I have an eight-year-old son I share custody of with my ex-wife, and I had a baby on my own in November. He’ll soon be a year old, which I cannot believe. I’m a school principal, and since we went virtual on March 13 I feel like I have not stopped to breathe. Trying to run a school for other people’s kids and a school for my own (same school, but different experience, of course) and a daycare and a household all from our one-bedroom apartment was a constant succession of Big Feelings, most of them bad.

I’m good in a crisis. I felt grateful to be employed, to have (some) money to throw at our problems—like being able to pay to have groceries delivered, to have friends and family to Zoom with and reliable internet and devices for everyone. I thought we were doing pretty well, despite everything. But things started to fall apart for me around the end of May, when I realized this wasn’t a crisis. It was life.

On July 6 our daycare opened for infants again and I started sending the baby. It was amazing. He went for a week and two days and then a staff member got sick, and they shut down for three days. It wasn’t a teacher who worked with infants, but it was sobering. Following that the baby ran a low fever for two days, which caused me to get us all tested…negative.

My older son had a hard time with Zoom school. We talk a lot about feelings, and he said recently, “Everything is just so crappy now that when little things happen it just makes it even more crappy.” (He’s inherited my potty mouth.) He’s also thoughtful and sweet and funny and has spent more time playing Minecraft and watching Minecraft YouTubers in the past months than I care to admit. I am terrified about what the new school year will be like for him.

What do I long for? Not worrying about the trauma this is inflicting on my kid and all my students. Being able to buy groceries without its being A Production. Hanging out with colleagues in my office after school. Going out for coffee. Not feeling like every single fucking decision is life or death.

I started using Facebook like a public journal when this all started. I posted every day and tried to focus on the little moments of joy. My neighbors’ gardens blooming, my kids giggling. I know I am lucky. And yet. And still.

KATIE COLT: a writer, musician, and parent in the Chicago area.

Hi everyone.

I live in the suburbs with my husband and two kids. My daily life is centered around making sure the kids have what they need. Most of the domestic labor falls on me, as my husband has had to go into work from Day One of the pandemic (he’s a brewing production manager at a nationally distributed brewery).

Our five-year-old, a delightful and boisterous boy, is a “mover” (he physically cannot sit still) and is suspected to be ASD. Remote learning for his pre-K class was a disaster, and I am dreading our district’s remote-for-everyone plan, even though it’s safest. With my two-year-old, I’ve been trying to give him extra attention to help with his speech delay, but most of the time I just end up the referee between the kids. I’m worried that the younger one is missing out on socialization time, and that his speech delay is a result of being isolated. I feel like a failure because I can’t split myself into two people that can simultaneously give each child 100% of me.

On top of this, all I want to do is be alone. In April, I lost my dad to Covid. I’ve barely been able to get space to myself to grieve. Before this all happened, I was looking forward to sending the five-year-old to full-time kindergarten and the two-year-old to daycare a couple of days a week so I could spend time creating: writing and making art and music. I fear I will lose myself completely if I cannot figure out how to do this.

CHAVA SHERVINGTON: a longtime diversity activist in the Jewish community, as well as an attorney and mom in Los Angeles.

Hi everyone.

I’m a mother of two living on the West Coast with my husband and two daughters (four and six). I’m managing most household responsibilities, a house renovation, and am on the leadership team of an organization with a focus on racial equity work in the Jewish community. I’m on a hamster wheel: my husband is an essential worker, my kids are old enough to need real education and entertainment but not old enough to manage it themselves, and my professional responsibilities have exploded because of the new attention to racial justice.

My day cycles through conference calls, webinars, interior design, and refereeing household arguments. As an incredibly social person, I’m struggling with the fact that my circle has disappeared. Instead of conferences, social gatherings, smachot, and our warm shul and school community, I’m home with most of my in-person communication relegated to explaining for the 1000th time that, yes, my kids have to clean up their room even though they’re “still playing with it.”

An extreme extrovert, I am starved for adult interaction, leading me to spend more time on social media than I’d prefer to. I try to assuage my guilt with the fact that it does assist me in building relationships with my fellow Jews of color, but it also leads me to disappointment in the larger community as well, especially some responses to the movement for racial justice.

My kids are rotating between Zoom, the longest running game of house in history, and constantly anticipating the things they’re going to do when this gets better. Baruch Hashem they’ve adjusted to their new normal, but it was fraught with early behavioral regressions, chutzpah and clinginess combined with frustration that Mommy being home doesn’t always mean that Mommy’s available. My general 80s approach to parenting seems to be paying off, as my kids can entertain themselves for hours with dolls, books, and art…with only a few mishaps. I’m impressed with how resilient they’ve been and how much they’ve been willing to sacrifice until “after the virus.”

I feel like I’m creating infinite extensions on when that actually is, when they’ll be able to play with friends, return to shul, visit cousins and grandparents who live plane rides away. But I am inspired by their generosity of spirit and willingness to take this in stride. One thing I’ve learned so far is that there are lessons all around us, if only we’re willing to pay attention.

All the best,

Chava

AUTUMN LEONARD: a mother of two who leads workshops and conversations for parents and kids about race.

Hello new thought partners. It’s lovely to be sharing ideas. My family has been quarantined in our fourth-floor walk-up apartment in Brooklyn for the centuries that have passed since March 16: the day NYC schools closed. My son turned seven two days before the closing. The pictures from his slumber party look so forbidden now, like we were fiddling on the Titanic as it sank. That was before wearing masks was supposed to be important. All of my work quickly dried up. I teach yoga and do facilitation and anti-oppression coaching. Once the yoga studios closed I had to wait and see if they would go online, and once they went online, I had to wait and see if they would invite me to be on the roster. Meanwhile my husband’s job exploded. He co-directs a parenting organization, and every single person on staff besides my husband is a working momma. My husband was the only person on his staff who had a partner who was no longer working full time, so I experienced more pressure to take care of the kids in order to free my husband up to backstop all those other mommas he works with. It was a masterclass on how I put unnecessary pressure on myself. I waded into remote learning while my husband worked up to 70 hours/week.

Remote learning was a slow-motion disaster for my first grader. He did not want to be seen on Zoom calls. I bribed my kids with chocolate to run laps up and down our hallway and stairwell. I kept taking videos of my youngest in apoplectic tears and then talking myself out of sending them to our teachers.

Here’s what I know about my emotional state: Dissociation is my superpower, I often feel fine in an emergency while knowing that in a few months or years I will have panic and anxiety and not know why. It’s like taking out an emotional loan against my future. So when this first began that’s what I did. I stayed very calm. It was an adventure. We would figure it out.

I have been teaching yoga via Zoom from my living room, or from my bedroom (with the bed flipped up against the wall), or even sneaking up onto the roof of my apartment. I have been holding space for other people while embracing how much I could not feel myself. There is a generation of kids whose entire lives will never be the same (they are calling them Generation C for Covid and/or Change). There are so many families who have been decimated.

Then George Floyd was murdered, the uprisings began, and suddenly I was absolutely incapable of pretending everything was fine anymore. So now I have become a stay-at-home momma, who intermittently teaches yoga from every room except the bathroom, who stayed indoors for most of three months—and then took her kids out to protest in the middle of a pandemic. While I have handled the pandemic of racism my whole life, I couldn’t handle the twin pandemics of racism and Covid and just stay safe.

ARIELLE DERBY:

I do appreciate hearing your stories, and at the same time it’s like a horror novel I don’t want to read.

Autumn, your words resonated with me. As an educator and a parent, I cannot stop thinking about the long- and short-term effects this will have on our kids. What lessons are they learning? God, I hope I am modeling and teaching resilience, gratitude, flexibility, strength…in my mind I am pretty much hiding in bed all the time.

What are our kids learning about who and what is valued in America? What will it mean for them to see and process that the grown ups can’t fix it? Can’t fully protect them? We are all affected, and at the same time my skin, my class status, my resources change the level and nature of my affectedness. Perhaps that is one thing for the “silver lining” list—having to think about and confront my privilege and what it means, the abundance of gratitude that comes with those realizations, the spur to action as a necessary response to those realizations.

KATIE COLT:

Arielle, this sentiment really resonated with me. What I am doing and where I am in my head are usually two completely different processes, as if I am split in two, each piece located on separate continents. When my five-year-old was a baby, I was struggling with postpartum depression and anxiety, and I was telling my mother about the terrible thoughts in my head while I was nuzzling him and feeding him. “You may be thinking of terrible things, but you’re not doing terrible things,” she said. If reassuring my kids while I quake in fear is considered “lying,” like one men’s magazine article described it, well, I’m nearly pathological. Everyday I’m full of dread and believe it MUST be leaking out somewhere, yet my kids ask to put their masks on the moment I open their car doors to unbuckle their little seatbelts. If anything, this makes me feel a little triumphant, this normalization of pandemic life. Because ultimately we have lost, but we are here.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how ineffective communities in today’s world can be at providing basic care for each other. In my neighborhood, I’m lucky to know several neighbors on my block, but we watch each other struggle with grief and loss, with working from home, with lack of childcare, and we say very little about it.

Because, somehow, the privilege we share has sent us our own independent islands, all lined up neatly in a row, and no one knows how to swim or wants to learn. Anyway, maybe that’s what the future, post-pandemic looks like to me: social contracts of reciprocity. I’m ready to jump in the water and discover how to float.

CHAVA SHERVINGTON:

Katie, so much of what you wrote I could have written myself. I don’t know if I would classify it as “lying” but I feel responsible for minimizing my children’s anxiety, sadness, and fear. I think there’s a distinct difference between avoiding and denying current realities, and helping children manage difficult circumstances. Given how isolating, depressing, and fear-inducing Covid, the continuing police brutality and rhetorical backlash around the current civil rights movement, and the economic downturn can be for adults, I have made specific choices around how we discuss these issues around them. I’m constantly questioning whether I’m making the right decisions about what we do and don’t discuss, but I’m hoping that I’m instilling core values around equity, justice, and communal responsibility.

And I miss my village! This pandemic has exposed the lack of governmental and societal support for women and children, how structural racism exacerbates that lack of support, and even for those in privileged circumstances demonstrates how necessary a village is. It’s also raised so many questions that society must reckon with in a serious way as we come out of this pandemic. Going back to “normal’ is not an option. This moment has exposed how normal is not working for so many of us. The new mommy wars around pods or no pods, remote learning vs. in person learning are only a reflection of the disparities that already exist.

Those of us who profess to value equity need to re-evaluate how we engage with institutions. As I see businesses who refuse to take cash, I think of all the folks with no credit or no bank accounts who are now prevented from accessing resources.

How much are we willing to sacrifice because of inadequate childcare options, how do we ensure that kids with food insecurity have proper access to nutritional meals, are employer expectations based in efficiency or in patriarchy, how do our personal relationships need to be reevaluated so that women aren’t overburdened? What are the many ways that this pandemic has more widely exposed racial disparities in health care, education, wealth, job opportunities, how many folks have been thrown into an economic tailspin due to a societal crisis? How do we build systems of resilience that don’t rely on exploitation?

One of my biggest fears is that this moment will pass, these questions will get pushed aside and pushed off until our next moment of crisis.

AUTUMN LEONARD:

My grandmother was an undertaker, firmly a member of the black upper-middle class in her town of Flint, Michigan. When I was a kid, everyone there knew my grandmother. She ran a funeral and undertaking business. I was seven the first time I saw a dead body in her basement. Since then I never lost the realization that death was something that could happen to any of us at any time. It has changed the way I live my life, because if you keep in mind that one day you will die it changes your idea of what is important. It has made me think a lot about how adulting is just playing an elaborate game. Some folks make up the rules to the game, and the rest of us try to win. When you look at life that way, rather than being fixed, everything seems adjustable.

The strange thing for me about Covid is that suddenly large sections of society are not ignoring mortality and the fact we can change the rules of society when necessary. Here in NYC, we could pause paying rent and mortgages for those at risk of homelessness. It’s in our power to keep people from being forced out into the streets during a pandemic. When survival is on the line, we rethink what is necessary.

I have had conversations with my 97-year-old grandfather (Jewish, not Black) about how he’s satisfied with the life he has led. I cannot imagine him saying this to me pre-Covid. I cannot imagine discussing it with my kids. But I have been discussing these things with my kids. “No matter what happens to Poppa, he will be satisfied. He is not worried.” We have no control over what happens at Poppa’s retirement home and they are all locked down there, no visitors, and anytime someone tests positive all the residents cannot leave their rooms. So suddenly we are talking to Poppa more than ever. My kids may know their greatgrandfather better than they might’ve. I think because of these discussions my kids are avid social distancers. We do not sugarcoat or ignore or pretend that anything other than our lives or someone else’s life is in the balance.

Recently we went to what we thought would be a distanced playdate and the other girls ran and hugged each other. They then turned to my eleven-year-old and tried to shame her into hugging them. My kiddo said “You have to respect my boundaries.” Until then I didn’t know just how determined she could be.

And yet I would give back knowing my daughter has a core of steel and my grandfather is at peace in a heartbeat if it meant we were not living through what we are living through.

TAMAR FOX:

For years I’ve been saying that the old folk tale It Could Always Be Worse is basically the story of my life, and should be printed on my headstone. As a foster parent, I do sometimes add people to my house and it always does make me feel like I’ve lost my mind, and when it’s over I always do feel this intense peace that I’m able to be there for kids that need a safe space. That has been a big piece of Covid times for me. Feeling overwhelmed and stressed and livid, and also grateful.

I worry for my friends who don’t have partners or kids. My best friend is a frontline doctor in New York. After months of excruciating work, he suddenly had to put his dog down last week, and my heart is breaking for him. I have caught myself wishing I had some alone time to watch all the Netflix, and sleep uninterrupted and keep the house cleanish for more than 5 minutes. But having people (and pets and plants) to take care of has also kept me from descending into madness.

One of the weirdest parts of all of this has been figuring out how to be there for friends experiencing loss (deaths, but also miscarriages, cancer diagnoses, job loss, etc) when I can’t give them hugs, or easily make them meals, or help with childcare. I keep thinking about how much I needed my friends when my mom died, and when we had new babies. It sucks to not be able to do the things for others that helped me. My old standards are pretty useless now. I’m doing text check-ins. Sending postcards to friends every week. But it doesn’t feel like enough.

SARAH SELTZER:

It’s 5.30 am and I’m nursing my baby as the sun rises: so in the new normal, office hours have begun. As Autumn and Arielle have said, the revelations and insights I may have gained because of this mass suffering—I was schlepping way too much “before,” focused on providing for my kids (Pumped breastmilk! Dinner!) rather than just being with them—are valuable, yes, but not valuable enough.

Autumn, I also broke my quarantine to walk in a BLM protest with my kids, and my partner has been doing an intensive antiracist curriculum with our oldest, but I yearn to do more that’s physical: to make marching and organizing a part of my rhythm as I used to do during Occupy Wall Street, during various feminist uprisings, and earlier, during protests of the Bush era.

One of the things I struggled with as a new mom in the Trump era is that my body isn’t mine to use spontaneously. It is the center of a small ecosystem. But sometimes I wear a teargas- proof bandanna from Occupy as my Covid mask, to remind myself that protest movements always return, that, as my mother and Lilith colleagues remind me, the period of life with young children is finite, even short, and that someday I may be marching along with my kids, celebrating victories with my kids, being taught how to be in intimate spaces with other people again by them, and with them.

And now to try to get an hour of sleep before the day begins, again.

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October 23, 2020 by admin

Can Good Things Possibly Emerge from 2020?

In real life, I’m not a Pollyanna personality. My eye goes to what needs to be fixed rather than seeing first what’s already shiny and bright. A misplaced modifier or coffee mug calls me quickly into critique mode.

But these past eight months, soon rounding into a year, have not felt like real life. And so, out of character, I find myself meta-phorically squinting to discern what few good things seem to be emerging from behind the dark clouds of this pandemic, with its grim losses and its miseries.

A few potentially positive developments are surfacing from our generally unwelcome experiences, and I note them while also recognizing my privileged perspective as a woman with health insurance, an adequate pantry, and fairly reliable internet with which to do my work and connect, gratefully, with family and friends.

The first change that struck me was that The New York Times, that daily arbiter of our reality, is reviewing unprecedented numbers of books and art by people of color, especially women of color. Perhaps the impetus is to right a wrong, correct an oversight. With so little to review in the performing arts––no live concerts, no Broadway––there’s room to open the arts coverage lens wider than usual.

Of course there’s more. Horrific hunger is becoming more widespread, even in lands of plenty. And everywhere, an acknowledgement of scarcity—both of funds and of access––from fridge- foraging posts on social media to shortages of canned goods. One consequence is that during the pandemic the upscale restaurants likely to have warranted publicity are now off-limits, and even the august New Yorker magazine has had to pivot its spotlight from indoor fancy dining to small-scale take-out joints, frozen foods you can make at home and local places feeding their neighbors that might have escaped notice in a more conventional time.

These may seem like small shifts relative to the vast problem of global hunger, but they suggest that a certain democratization is at work. Perhaps this small seed will grow into greater awareness of what’s really important, with empathy shaping food policy.

Another unintended, unexpected outcome from the pandemic’s necessities is less quantifiable, but this one holds lessons too: we have been forced to reimagine not only our mourning rituals (Zoom shivas, recorded funerals and eulogies) but also our simchas, those celebrations of life’s happy landmarks. People are finding ways to seize joy by all available handholds. The bat and bar mitzvah ceremony for a family’s twins, originally planned as a multi-generational tour of Israel, instead evolved as a masked outdoor service, the 13-year-olds prepared by their grandfather, in a service led by a great-uncle, with the few close relatives,

socially distanced, smiling together in a sunny backyard. The direct
involvement of the older generations, this family reports, brought
an unexpected resonance that would have been missing in a more standard-issue event. Or the decision made by an engaged couple to advance their elaborate wedding, scheduled a year from now, replacing it with a small outdoor chuppah ceremony this fall. Judging from the jubilant photos, no one’s happiness was diminished (except perhaps the caterer’s). The bride and groom could share their joy in the present rather than waiting a year through who-knows-what-uncertainties of health and fortune.

Look, these are not universally cheering panaceas, or anodynes for painful, significant losses—of loved ones, of jobs, of the chance to be with people we care about. But these glimmers of good news are reminders that we have points of connection available to us still, and that simplicity, born of necessity, brings its own pleasures and poignancy. They also remind us of the enduring ability to adapt to adversity.

For me, the enforced isolations bring both gain and pain. As an editor working remotely, with concentrated time to write and to process a complete, uninterrupted thought? A plus, mostly. But having to communicate via email or text when I’m accustomed

What good things can possibly emerge from our present circumstances?
to the pace of immediate, lively conversations in person? With people I’m accustomed to seeing in real life in Lilith’s office? Not very satisfying.

In a singular way, though, the pandemic has provided gradual easing into an anticipated change that would have been far more unsettling were it to have happened in Before Times: Naomi Danis, Lilith’s longtime managing editor, plans to retire at the end of 2020 to write more of her wonderful, perceptive children’s books. The pandemic’s work-from-home routine has become an accidental dress rehearsal for the separation when, after 30 years, Naomi will no longer appear under “staff ” on the masthead, although we look forward to keeping her close as a contributing editor. In addition to her tireless and creative work ensuring that Lilith’s humans and systems work smoothly, Naomi has modeled how to ask hard questions and how to smooth ruffled feathers. Rabbi Susan Schnur, Lilith former senior editor, once wrote that the women at Lilith operate “like teabags in a single pot,” steeped in one another’s quotidian lives. But beyond that steeping is Naomi’s own particular skill in honoring differing opinions while holding steady to the course of her own moral, Jewish, feminist, writerly compass.

I’m spurred to paraphrase Arlene Agus: May our dreams become our blessings in the year ahead.

Susan Weidman Schneider Editor in Chief susanws@lilith.org

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October 12, 2020 by Rishe Groner

Reflections on Sukkot During the Coronavirus

So.

I don’t know about you, but I never thought we’d be here.

Saying goodbye to Sukkot, the grand festival of rejoicing, the time when we celebrate harvest, honor abundance, and pray for the rains to come.

And yet, we are. still. in. this. mess.

Last week, I walked the eerily empty streets of Jerusalem. It was an evening that would otherwise be packed with shoppers, tourists, visitors, hawkers, strangers, every kind of colorful human. There would be people buying their palm-branch-and-citron Lulav and Etrog sets from outdoor markets while tourists enjoy a late-night ice cream or beer and outdoor buskers strum their music to contribute to the overall din of joy.

Instead, there were just a few of us, approaching the stray stalls that were open to sell the season’s necessities, a sukkah plank here, a Lulav there; while the produce stands tried to get rid of their last vegetables and the buses stopped running at 9pm. It was dystopian, it was sad, it was infuriating.

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September 24, 2020 by admin

Why did(n’t) the Funeral Procession Cross the Road?

I brought my hand to my heart and took a deep breath. The voicemail was from David, at Levine’s Chapel in Brookline, MA, one of the most thoughtful funeral home directors I have the somewhat unusual privilege to know. As a rabbi, it is not unusual to get a call from a funeral home director; the rabbinate is a vocation where you make plans with friends with the caveat that you’ll show up as long as no one dies. 

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July 27, 2020 by admin

Say Goodnight, Especially in Quarantine

Psychic containment means checking on others who may not have adequate resources or family support. When you check on your elderly neighbor down the hall, it is helpful to her, and it also reminds you that you are not alone. Psychological containment means daily video or phone calls with friends and family. This is particularly important near the end of the day, when the silence and darkness of Covid’s viral overload become more real without the distractions of work and family. Connecting with others before bedtime should become a ritual—even similar to lullabies and the stories we read to children at night to soothe them to sleep. Just as children need to hear the comfort of another’s voice to calm their minds at night, so will all of us

. …Our need for connection to each other, laid down in infancy, is the most basic and enduring part of our existence.

ALEXIS TOMARKEN, “Even in Isolation, Don’t Forget to Say Goodnight.” The Lilith Blog

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July 27, 2020 by admin

Immigration Activism Met Spirituality at Our Quarantine Seder

My husband, Aryeh, and I have been counting many things over the past several months: the days of quarantine; the omer, those days between Passover and Shavuot; the days that Darwin Ramos will remain with us in our home.

Aryeh and I were at an immigration protest at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Manhattan last August when we met Darwin for the first time. Aryeh is a Talmud professor and a community organizer, and had helped to organize this protest. Our observant and progressive Jewish communities convened for a ceremony to commemorate Tisha B’Av, and to highlight family separation and the deaths that were occurring on the border and in detention centers. Darwin’s story was part of the ceremony. We heard about his torture at the hands of Honduran drug cartels who were threatened by his environmental activism, the journey he took northward to save his life, and his experiences as an asylum-seeker here in the U.S. That day we got just a chapter of his story.

A mutual friend introduced us. He was helping Darwin to secure reliable housing after release from the Adelanto Detention Center. We were about to become empty-nesters. Could we take him in? We had a lot of questions. How would we explain kashrut and Shabbat? Would he be okay without being able to cook meat in the house? We have one shower in our house, would that be comfortable for him and for us? With my college Spanish and Aryeh’s very basic activist Spanish, would we be able to communicate if there were things that weren’t working for him or for us? What would it feel like for us to have a stranger living in our home?

We were all beginning to feel more comfortable with one another. When Darwin and I were in the kitchen at the same time, we might get caught up in animated conversations: national and global politics, family, religion. Occasionally, I walked into the kitchen to find Aryeh in a theological conversation, via Google Translate, with Darwin, who had attended seminary as part of his activist training. Darwin is enthusiastic and curious, warm and intelligent, fierce in his perspectives but gentle in demeanor. Darwin’s lawyer had connected him with the Project for Torture Victims. As he worked with the psychologist, Darwin slowly began sharing more of his story.

ANDREA HODOS, The Lilith Blog

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