This Week: Snow Days for Days

On keeping your heart soft. Plus, reading recommendations.

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Dear fam,

Last week, I started a new job. A real, grown-up, 9:00-5:00 job with a salary that comes at regular intervals. Not that freelancing isn’t real — it very much is. Freelancing, as I experienced it, is a non-stop hustle to do everything and anything that pays. You never know how much you’re going to be making on any given month, and just chasing down clients to get them to pay you can be a full-time job. I worked hard as a freelancer.

But this is different.

I have a schedule. I have team meetings. I cannot finish an article at 11:00 pm because my child (or children) had a meltdown and my afternoon disappeared. I have to get it together, and my kids have to understand that I’m at work — even though my role is fully remote and I’m just in my home office. This is a huge shift in our family’s home life.

Also, just to keep things interesting, this whole week has featured incessant school closures. Which means, of course, that the kids have been more or less at home as we adjust to this new reality.

It’s been… a challenge for all of us.

I feel very fortunate to have found work at a fantastic organization, with folks who have been extremely understanding as Big Kid joins the various Zoom meetings. But this is not ideal. One day, for example, I was trying to focus on writing some copy for an upcoming campaign, but Big Kid came to visit me about every ten minutes. Just to check I was ok. Or to let me know the snow-cones were delicious. Or to give me a hug.

All so sweet! But also so distracting!

We’ve been innovating solutions. Our parent counselor, bless her, suggested we make signs to put on the door to show him when he can come in and when he can’t. This was semi-successful, but still left a lot to be desired. “The sign was red, honey,” I said, when he came in during my check-in with my manager. “But I just wanted a hug, it’ll be so quick,” he answered.

I don’t know how much of this is because he’s a Covid-baby; he was just six months old when the pandemic shut down the world. He never left our sides ‘til he was two, never really interacted with other kids until then either. Or, you know, maybe it’s just because we’re very connected to one another. Either way, loosening Big Kid’s attachment is going to be a painful transition. It already is.

He already told me twice this week that he doesn’t like me anymore. I mean, he also told me he loves me about a million times. But it’s pretty jarring to hear your kid say those words out loud for the first time.

I get it, though. I’m more tired, less patient, more headachey. I’m not up for a dance contest after eight hours of Zoom meetings and writing. I need to build up my stamina for many hours of working in a row — I’m too used to working in powerful, 30 minute bursts. The adjustment feels weird to me, too, but Big Kid wants me to be the Mama he knows and loves.

Shenanigans

When I went to look at the weekly Torah portion for some kind of wisdom, as I tend to, I saw that it’s Bo, roughly chapters 10-13 of the Book of Exodus. The portion opens with these verses:

“Then G-d said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh. For I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his courtiers, in order that I may display these My signs among them, and that you may recount in the hearing of your child and of your child’s child how I made a mockery of the Egyptians and how I displayed My signs among them—in order that you may know that I am G-d.” (Exodus 10:1-2)

This portion is smack-dab in the middle of the story of the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt, towards the end of the ten plagues. Last week’s portion wrapped up plague number seven — Hail — wherein fireballs fell from the sky destroying the homes of the people of Egypt (but sparing the Israelites). After this plague, does Pharaoh let the people of Israel go? No he does not — that’s how we get to ten plagues. This is what happens instead:

“But when Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the thunder had ceased, he became stubborn and reverted to his guilty ways, as did his courtiers. So Pharaoh’s heart stiffened and he would not let the Israelites go, just as G-d had foretold through Moses.” (Exodus 9:34-35)

And so, this week we read about the last three plagues: locusts, darkness, and death of the firstborn. Or, in other words: consuming of all that can sustain life, descent into chaotic madness, and utter destruction.

This whole story has always unsettled me. First, there’s the matter of a recurrent contradiction: Some of the times Pharaoh’s heart is hardened he is the one becoming stubborn, and some of the time it’s G-d who’s doing the hardening. Second, would it not be better for G-d to have not hardened Pharaoh’s heart? Wouldn’t that have saved everyone, the Israelites and Egyptians alike, a whole lot of suffering?

I’m not the only Jewish person to ask these questions. In the 16th century, Rabbi Ovadiah ben Jacob Sforno¹ wrote that “Pharaoh had convinced himself after every plague that G-d had already exhausted the punitive means at His disposal, and that He could do no more to him […] Pharaoh made this fatal mistake out of his arrogance.” In the 12th century, Ibn Ezra wrote that the reason G-d hardened Pharaoh’s heart is “that [He] might show these [His] signs in the midst of them.”

It’s pretty easy to have a hard heart, actually. The world is full of opportunities to become callous, rough, unyielding. Good things happen to bad people. Bad things — appalling things — happen to good people. People we love die too young, and perpetrators of unbearable evil die of old age. It’s kind of a miracle that anyone has a soft heart, when you think about it.

We can all be Pharaoh, falling under the influence of powers greater than our own and choosing more violence over less. We can all be like Moses, who saw the injustice of an Israelite man being beaten and stood up for him.

In Deuteronomy 30, verse 19-20, G-d says:

הַעִידֹ֨תִי בָכֶ֣ם הַיּוֹם֮ אֶת־הַשָּׁמַ֣יִם וְאֶת־הָאָרֶץ֒ הַחַיִּ֤ים וְהַמָּ֙וֶת֙ נָתַ֣תִּי לְפָנֶ֔יךָ הַבְּרָכָ֖ה וְהַקְּלָלָ֑ה וּבָֽחַרְתָּ֙ בַּֽחַיִּ֔ים לְמַ֥עַן תִּחְיֶ֖ה אַתָּ֥ה וְזַרְעֶֽךָ׃ לְאַֽהֲבָה֙ אֶת־יְהוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ לִשְׁמֹ֥עַ בְּקֹל֖וֹ וּלְדָבְקָה־ב֑ו

I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day: I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life—so you and your offspring should live. By loving your G-d, heeding G-d’s commands, and holding fast to [G-d].

I think about this all the time. Choose life, G-d says, and life means love, and softness, and vulnerability, and realness. Hardness of one’s heart is the death of one’s soul. And this applies to everything in life. Politics, relationships, heck — even the everyday nonsense of annoying traffic. We can be pissed off, choose hardness, or we can be soft. Malleable. Open.

So, when my kid busts in the room to “just check on me,” I’m going to try to choose softness. Compassion. When he does something wild, just to get my attention, I’m going to try to choose to see his point of view. To remember that this is truly hard for him. Stubbornness, the narrows of the mind, gets us nowhere.

I will get it wrong. Probably even tonight. But maybe I’ll get it right some of the time, too.

Shabbat shalom,

Mikhal

What I’m reading

• Virginia Sole-Smith
  wrote brilliantly about how, yes, mermaid water is a diet. And also about how critics of overconsumption sometimes — sometimes — might be getting it wrong on issues of class, race, and more.

• Emily Nagoski
  wrote about how choosing to wear pajamas for her NY Times profile was a bold, nay, courageous choice.

• Bess Stillman
  continues to write essays about her husband’s cancer that bring up so many issues with our medical system, and are also just bursting with humanity and love. This last one was wonderful.

• As always, the

  Oldster Magazine
  roundup of weekend links is a treasure trove.

• Maya C. Popa
  ’s poetry series is breathtaking. Here’s just one edition that will make you swoon.

• Thanks to

  Erin Reed
  , you know which trans girl scouts to order cookies from! I have celiac, so I can’t eat Thin Mints. But I fully expect you to live my best Thin Mint life for me, so go ahead and get shopping.

• Noha Beshir
  wrote about finding wisdom in her faith that grounds her in a “beauty-obsessed world,” and how wearing a hijab can be a choice made from a place of empowerment.

What I’m writing

Frankly, a whole lot of marketing copy. Which I’m enjoying a lot — it’s a really interesting challenge in a lot of unexpected ways. But I also have this review of Touching the Art by Matthilda Bernstein-Sycamore up on the Jewish Book Council. To say I loved this book is an understatement. Go buy it. Especially if, like me, you are from a Jewish family with ties to Baltimore. Or are queer. Or have a heart that pumps blood through your veins. Or love sentences that make you forget to breathe. You can buy it here.

1. Commonly known as just ‘Sforno’