Telling Stories: Reflections on a Broken World

This is the story I often tell about myself: I am a displaced Jewish New Yorker.

I am a Jewish professor in rural Southwest Georgia. Since last October, I have been thinking about the stories I grew up with, the stories I have rejected outright as well as the stories I thought I had rejected but are rooted so deep in my sense of self that I didn’t even realize I still believed them. The stories I need to stop telling myself. The stories I should rewrite.
On Wednesday, October 5, 2023, I fell and broke my wrist. And that’s when I began to question the stories I’ve told and been told.

I live by the theatre artist’s story; the show must go on. I fell while painting the floor of the set for our production of Driving Miss Daisy, the day before opening night. Rushing through the job, I stepped back into one of the three paint trays arranged upstage. It slid out from under me. Time slowed as I fell screaming and hit the floor hard. I lay there, my wrist at an unnatural angle, somehow attached to my left arm, cradled by my kneeling director-husband. I was in so much pain, but all I could think of was the show, what would happen to the show? I was carried away by an embarrassing amount of EMTs, in front of my students, my dean, my new president and transported 50 miles to the hospital. I was in surgery before noon the next day.

Before wheeling me in, the surgeon told me a new story “Your hand will never be the same, you will have arthritis, and oh yes, a permanent, partial disability”.

As I healed, I reconsidered the stories I told myself about work, about doing it all. Then, I began to reconsider other stories. Many of the most damaging stories were told about me. I have been told I am clumsy so often I absolutely believe it. But I used to have grace. In my teens, I spent entire summer afternoons Israeli and American folk dancing. My dancing continued through college and long nights on club dance floors. Sometime between the age of 21 and 40 I stopped telling myself that I could dance. In mid-life I started falling—tearing my ACL in class, dislocating my shoulder in a conference hotel bathroom, and shattering the bones in my wrist on October 5.

The surgery was October 6, and Israel was attacked on October 7. My wrist splinted, I was dependent on my husband for showers, clothing, and food. Sleeping fitfully, alone in my daughter’s bed, I watched the Go Pro and cell phone footage on my phone, until I couldn’t anymore. I called my children, the same ages as those young people at Nova. I wished they were still at home.

The first few days following the attack were painful and lonely.
My mom and brothers checked in periodically. No one sent a care package or card. I heard from my former college president, who thought of me immediately and understood, having a Jewish sister-in-law, how I must be feeling. I don’t remember hearing from many others, maybe I did, but I don’t remember. No Facebook messages or emails. Not even from people who knew I’d had a bad injury.

This was a story I was told as a child: No one will care about you as much as your family. Some part of me must have understood that this was not true. When I was a child, I had a recurring nightmare in which my parents and brothers turned into monsters and were chasing me. Until I met my husband I had nightmares, and frequently woke up screaming. I talked in my sleep as well, terrifying bunk and roommates. It was finally when I met Jeff and felt so completely accepted that the nightmares stopped. Or maybe this is just the story I tell myself.

Here’s the story I was told during my teen years: Jews stick together because no one cares about us like we do. I was told to date Jewish boys, marry a Jewish man. I rejected this story outright. All of it, or I thought I had. It’s complicated.

I know exactly how many Jewish boys I dated growing up. Three: my camp boyfriends and my first serious relationship in college. In Israel at 21, I had a brief but intense romance with Danny, a court clerk recently released from his military service. For Danny and his friends, being Jewish was identity, not religion, and their Shabbat mornings were spent on the soccer field, not in synagogue. My Israeli family lit candles, had long Friday night meals, and slow Saturdays, but I can’t recall any worship services with them either. Being Jewish for them was just that—a being, a life.

One Friday night, my grandfather’s cousin, Rose, followed me out onto her Petach Tikva balcony. Insisting I belonged there, she told me the story I had been told all my life—Israel was our homeland, our one safe space where Jews can simply be. But that story was complicated by the American soldiers I stayed with in Eilat, who were patrolling a border far from home because people with a shared history could not be trusted to honor their agreements. And by the soldier on the bus to Jerusalem who bitterly complained about delaying or foregoing college. And by Danny and his friends, paratroopers during the war with Lebanon, who wept during The Color Purple. They were triggered by the story of Celie in a way I could never comprehend. When I asked them about the war, they made jokes, they changed the topic, or they grew silent. Danny, in his halting English, told me I would not understand, and they didn’t have the words to tell.

And I knew that I didn’t belong, and more importantly, that my future children needed to grow up in a country that separated church and state.

Since I married my lapsed Methodist husband and had our children, I have struggled to help them write their identity stories. Jeff suggested we join the Reform Temple when the kids were young.. I taught their Sunday School classes, and we celebrated holidays. But none of us made lasting friendships, and only our son became a Bar Mitzvah. I regret giving in to our daughter’s insistence that she didn’t want a Bat Mitzvah. She was terrified by the idea, and I was relieved at not having to spend more money we didn’t have.

I have so many stories to apologize to my children for.

Neither of our kids have close Jewish friends or partners. Both do still identify strongly with their Jewish heritage, and that is not something I would wish away. It is a gift to have strong, foundational stories. At the same time, their future depends on the stories they tell themselves as they move forward.

All our futures do.