My beautiful dog, Teddy, died last week. I'm still processing.

It was an emotional week for many people, including me. I feel like Teddy wanted to teach me some things.

My beautiful dog, Teddy, died this week. He was 13 years old, and had lived his whole life in our family home in Modi’in, Israel. We got him from the pound at 3 months old, as a present for my daughter’s 16th birthday. He was very small at the time, and seemed anxious, a bit neglected, but loving and very cuddly. We named him Teddy because the kids thought he felt like a Teddy bear, even though we could tell from the size of his paws that he was going to get big. Even now as I’m writing, it’s hard to believe that he’s not lying on the floor near me, as he often did. One of his happiest activities was lying on the grass with me when I did yoga. I took his presence for granted, I suppose. Like so much else. His spot on the stoop feels empty, leaving that gnawing sense of missing something. I should have pet him more.

Teddy getting ready for yoga

Teddy giving himself a back-rub

Teddy getting a little paw massage from my granddaughter, a few weeks before he died.

Although we had six weeks since we got the terrible diagnosis about his cancer to emotionally prepare for this, it was still hard for all of us. For me, the process took a surreal turn two weeks ago when a dear friend of mine also received a shocking and unexpected diagnosis of late-stage cancer. My Whatsapps for the past two weeks have been alternating between conversations about Teddy and hospital rotations for my friend. That juxtaposition has weighed on me, leaving me with strange feelings about life and spirit, doubts about the ways that we were taught to believe that humans are different from animals, and bizarre thoughts about end of life and end of days.

It didn’t help that the world has been in chaos during all this. The backdrop of all these private events were some jarring world events — the first anniversary of Jan 6, unprecedented numbers of Omicron-infected, and extreme weather events upending life in areas around the world. On Teddy’s last day of breath, 50 miles of highway were iced over in Washington, D.C. for 27 hours. That felt like a metaphor of some sort.

All this has meshed into one unsettling haze. Some days, I feel like we are all at the edge of some kind of unseen precipice. A precipice. Yet, we continue to go through life as normal. In fact, in the midst of all this, I joyously and hopefully launched a brand new feminist initiative.

Once again, I muster all my excitement and optimism to keep on walking, no matter what is happening around me. Yet, that habit or practice of putting one foot in front of the other is in direct competition with a part of my being that feels like none of it matters at all. We move forward, we keep fighting for life, even as we grapple with a jarring uncertainty about the fate and future of humanity.

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Today, as I was leaving the hospital, I had a little private moment of irritated annoyance, followed by annoyance at myself for being annoyed.

As I got out of the elevator, I passed a man who was shlepping a lot of stuff. A visibly Hassidic man with a black velvet hat and long black kapota, He wheeled a suitcase and carried a few plastic bags. I imagined that he was perhaps preparing to spend Shabbat in the hospital with his wife who had just given birth, or maybe he was bringing Shabbat clothes for his father recovering from surgery. I know from experience that sometimes when people have to spend Shabbat in the hospital, they want to still feel like it’s Shabbat. A clean, ironed shirt, a special kugel, or some music does the trick for some people. When my friend, Chaya, was in the hospital after her stroke, she was so happy when people from the community walked to the hospital to sing her zemirot. Years later, she remembered that experience as one of the most comforting aspects of her hospital stay. Shortly before she died a few months ago, she told me again how much it helped her at the time.

As I saw the Hassid entering the elevator that I was stepping out of, I imagined to myself what he might be carrying in that suitcase. Things to bring comfort to himself or whomever he was visiting in the hospital.

A favorite sweater. Slippers. Face cream. A siddur. A book of crossword puzzles. A water bottle. A hairbrush. A diary and pen. Chocolate.

I was just imagining.

But then, something else struck me. Along with all his peckelech that he was shlepping, he was also carrying a hat box in the shape of the hat on his head. I have no idea whether it was to store his own hat or whether it had someone else’s hat in it. , but either way, I found myself thinking, Really?! Of the zillions of things that a person can use while they are lying in the hospital — or their caretaker can use — a hat and a hat box would be far down my list of priorities. And if you’re already carrying so much stuff, can’t you find ways to lighten your load?

My brain started to ruminate on the power of social conventions and peer-pressure. How easily we can all be convinced to do things that defy all logic. Refuse to wear a mask. Scale the walls of the Capital while carrying a gun or wearing a fur vest. Wear a wig of human hair in order to cover one’s own human hair. Refuse to spend a Shabbat without wearing a black velvet hat.

I really didn’t mean to be so judgmental about this man. I wasn’t trying to be mean-thinking towards this poor guy who was looking at spending Shabbat in a hospital. I was mostly thinking about myself. I was mostly remembering the zillions of things that I considered essential over the years. And how long it took for me to unload what was unnecessary in my journey.

That hat box represented, for me, all the things that other people expected me to hang on to in my life, whether I needed it or not, whether it suited me or not, whether it was something that helped me or not. I have carried so many ideas about what a religious woman should be, what a mother should be, how women should dress and behave and speak, how I should live, what I should believe…..

Jews — and probably most faith communities — do this on purpose. Jews have a heavy-handed, rules-filled, convention-soaked set of traditions that are instilled from the second we are born. We are laden with urgency, guilt, fears, anxieties, responsibilities, commandments, and expectations to carry 3000 years’ worth of stories, texts, and laws. We fast because of things that happened 2000 years ago, not even for things that happened in our lifetimes. We spend weeks preparing for a wacky matzah-centric feast to tell a 3500-year-old story as if it just happened. We carry a narrative about how the world hates us with such ferocity that we can be triggered by innocuous headlines or world events that do not even involve us to proclaim them as examples of antisemitism.

That is a LOT of hat boxes.

Over the years, I have let go of a lot of these. Little by little. When I first moved to Israel in 1993, I carried lots of hat boxes — literally and figuratively. I had actual hats to not only match my outfits as a correct Flatbush girl should do, but also to enable me to fit in to the mold of what a correct religious woman should look like. It was during those years in which the modern Orthodox community was raising girls to be more Jewishly educated than our mothers. We could read a blatt of Gemara and have halakhic discussions with our rabbis, and considered ourselves smarter and more knowledgeable than the women who came before us. So many of us emerged with the idea that, unlike what many of our mothers did, we were supposed to cover our hair and wear skirts. I did that for a few years, until little-by-little I let go of those boxes, too.

I kept dropping boxes. I dropped my father’s ideas about how a correct mother should stay home and raise kids and not be too “ambitious” or “careerist”. I dropped ideas about women and money, about women and driving, about women and speaking loudly. I dropped ideas about the necessity of my servitude, and making myself a doormat in order to please others. So many boxes I let go of….

I also dropped ideas about Zionism, about Jewish moral superiority, about how non-Jews all hate Jews, about our relationships to larger humanity, about the overall correctness of Torah traditions, about God, about food, about women’s sexuality, about desire, about religious leadership, about Jewish education, about halakha, and about what makes for a good life.

Some days I feel like almost everything I was taught was wrong. All those efforts to instill containers full of ideas into our brains from the age of zero feels like the opposite of righteousness. We are laden with so many pitchifkes in our brains to preempt excess questioning or chas v’shalom rebellion. But for me, that ultimately had the opposite effect. I was carrying so many boxes that I couldn’t do it any more. Little by little I started dropping them.

I’ve chucked out a lot and I’m carrying less. But I don’t always feel lighter. Many days, the very memories of all that I carried for so long continue to make me feel weighted down. I’m still in constant conversation with all those boxes I threw off of me. Like this essay.

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But now, I’m starting to ask myself what I want to keep.

The world we are living in, and the intensity of our everyday confrontations with existential questions — like, will democracy last the year, is the earth going to burn, and how many people are going to die from Covid before we’re done — has brought this process to the fore. I’m letting go of boxes that I no longer want to carry while I’m still opening them all up to find the one that actually matters to me. If it even exists.

I don’t want to end this essay with the cliché that, you know, once you face death you realize that all that matters is our family. I don’t believe that at all. As much as I love my people, I don’t actually subscribe to the idea that the only real meaning we have is in family. That line was used on me throughout my formative years to stifle my ambitions and dreams. Any time I considered a life of exploration, creativity, or freedom, I was reminded over and again that the only meaningful work for women is to sustain family relationships. Our job was to hold down the fort while the men had freedom to do what they wanted. The men got credit for family without making the sacrifices for it that women made. And at men’s funerals, we can talk about family while also talking about their work-related contributions to the world. I’m not interested in the idea that the only thing that matters for me is raising a family. I don’t buy into that at all, and even writing it fills me with tremors.

Most days, I think to myself, I want to spend my life creating something. I want to make my own boxes, my own meanings. I want to craft. Whether that’s books or events or music — or this blog — I want to craft things.

And then I want to release them into the world.

I want to make stuff that other people relate to, or engage with, or gain something from.

Mostly, I think I’ve decided that I don’t want to carry anything. I want to create for the world, and release into humanity, and be free from carrying anything myself. Because the less I carry, the more I can move, see, explore, wonder, and then do my thing. The less I carry, the more I can live.

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I am imagining Teddy lying on the floor next to me as I write this words. I deeply feel like he connected with me in ways beyond words. He was able to reflect back to me what I was feeling. When I was happy, he was happy. When I was anxious, he barked in agitation. When I was free, he leapt around the garden. He encouraged me so much to do that. He urged me to go out and run around — not just for his own joy, but also for mine.

I feel like, if there is one message that Teddy is sharing with me right now it’s this. He’s reminding me to get out there and create.

Thank you, Teddy, for all that love and care.

So here I am. Releasing this into the world. To you.

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