The Kabbalah of Writing by Sherri Mandell - Inglês (2024)

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THE KABBALAH OF WRITING“Sherri Mandell is brilliant, captivating, and relentlessly honest. Herbook is a must for anyone who loves to write and wants to learn towrite better.”BRIAN KILEY, COMEDIAN, EMMY AWARD–WINNING WRITER, ANDHEAD MONOLOGUE WRITER FOR CONAN O’BRIENBrian Kiley, comedian, Emmy Award–winning writer, and headmonologue writer for Conan O’Brien “Sherri Mandell takes us on abreathtaking journey through the spiritual energy of the ten sefirotand shows how each one opens a new doorway into the practice ofwriting. This is a world where kindness honors our inner voices,boundaries help us edit and focus, and harmony creates moments ofinsight. Mandell collects guidance from poets, essayists,psychologists, philosophers, and sages alike in a conversation thatengages literary wisdom with sacred texts. Bursting with wisdomand practical advice, inspiration and writing prompts, Mandellshows us how to reveal and give voice to our own unique stories.”JANE MEDVED, AUTHOR OF DEEP CALLS TO DEEP AND OLAM,SHANA, NEFESH AND POETRY EDITOR OF THE ILANOT REVIEW“The Kabbalah of Writing is rich with the most practical suggestionsfor writers, simple to follow, and abundant with possibility. Mandellshows us by example how to live a reading and writing life everyday. Her book is a welcome guide for anyone seeking to linkspiritual growth with literary experiment.”ILANA M. BLUMBERG, PH.D., AUTHOR AND ASSOCIATEPROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT BAR-ILAN UNIVERSITY“The Tree of Life is a map of the Divine’s creative process, and acore Kabbalistic teaching is that we are partners with the Divine incompleting and perfecting our part in that process. Sherri Mandellhas given writers a great gift as she teaches us how to use the Treeof Life in our creative process, revealing our work to be the holypartnership that it is and enabling us to reach new creative depthsand heights.”MARK HORN, AUTHOR OF TAROT AND THE GATES OF LIGHT“I have never read a book that accomplishes so many goals withoutoverwhelming the reader or oversimplifying the material. TheKabbalah of Writing incorporates a serious treatment of the sefirotinterspersed with an illuminating survey of ‘writers writing aboutwriting,’ peppered with personal anecdotes that warm the heart, andtopped with an adventurous array of writing exercises.”SARAH YEHUDIT SCHNEIDER, AUTHOR OF KABBALISTICWRITINGS ON THE NATURE OF MASCULINE AND FEMININE“Highly original, beautifully conceived, The Kabbalah of Writing isa gift not only to aspiring writers but to anyone seeking to enhancetheir creative and spiritual potential.”YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI, SENIOR FELLOW AT THE SHALOMHARTMAN INSTITUTE“Such poetic, light, penetrating wisdom riffles through these pageslike an evening breeze in Jerusalem. This book contains just abouteverything I need to know to write better and live more richly.”RUCHAMA KING FEUERMAN, AUTHOR OF IN THE COURTYARD OFTHE KABBALIST“This book is a psycho-spiritual manual that applies the wisdom ofthe sefirot to the sacred art of creative writing. Freewheelinganecdotes, from personal experience, from Torah, and a multitude ofcelebrated writers, are sure to help us live more deeply, with greatercourage and humor.”JEAN-PIERRE WEILL, AUTHOR OF THE WELL OF BEINGAcknowledgmentsI thank my devoted and talented students—Faigie Heiman, Rachel (Joanne)Ginsberg, Ellen Berkman Amzallag, Sharon Litvin, Debby Neuman, ShiraShreier, Frieda Woznica, Ruth Warzecha, Michelle Gordon, and RebeccaWeinberger—for the privilege of teaching you the past many years. Myhusband, Seth, is brilliant, unique, a fantastic husband, and the love of mylife. Thank you for being my best friend and best adviser. And to mybeautiful, funny sisters, Nancy Lederman and Loren Fogelson—I’m so gladthat you are in my life.I am grateful to my determined and insightful agent, Anna Olswanger,who helped me shape this book.I am blessed with wonderful nieces and nephews and sisters-in-law andbrothers-in-law.I thank Avi Liberman for bringing Comedy for Koby to Israel,supporting the Koby Mandell Foundation, and making us laugh. ThanksJeremy and Dena Wimpheimer for your hard work in producing the shows.Thanks to Menachem and Dena Mendlowitz for opening your home andhearts to us.Finally, I want to thank our children, Daniel, Eliana and Avraham, Gaviand Pliah, and our grandchildren, Ori, Yehuda, Levi, and Tzori, who bringus such joy.ContentsIntroductionChapter 1. Will / KeterChapter 2. Inspiration / ChochmahChapter 3. Comprehension / BinChapter 4. Kindness / ChesedChapter 5. Boundaries / GevurahChapter 6. Harmony / TiferetChapter 7. Endurance / NetzachChapter 8. Surrender / HodChapter 9. Creativity / YesodChapter Ten. Rulership / MalchutA Final WordBibliographyIndexAbout the AuthorINTRODUCTIONWHEN I WAS TWENTY-SEVEN, after teaching freshman composition at VirginiaCommonwealth University in Richmond on a one-year contract, I traveledto Spain, Morocco, and Israel by myself. One July night in 1984, a newfriend and I hiked to a hot spring in Sefat, Israel, and submerged there in thedarkness. It turned out that we weren’t in a hot spring but in the mikveh*1 ofRabbi Issac Luria, known as the Ari (which means “the Lion”), the mysticassociated with the Kabbalah who shared his wisdom in Sefat in thesixteenth century. The Ari had lost his father as a child, was raised in Egyptby an uncle, and soon found his calling as a solitary seeker. He studiedmystical teachings from the Zohar†2 and meditated for seven years on theshores of the Nile. Later, he became a revered teacher of Kabbalah, probingthe mysteries of creation: How could an all-encompassing God contracthimself to leave space for the world to exist? What is the task of humanbeings in a world suffused with divinity? Though the Ari did not choose towrite, Rabbi Chaim Vital recorded the notes of the Ari’s teachings andremarked: “He was expert in the language of trees, the language of birdsand the speech of angels. He could read faces. He could discern all that anyindividual had done, and could see what they would do in the future.”There is a tradition that anybody who enters the mikveh of this inspired,holy sage returns to Judaism and a belief in the divine. I didn’t believe itthat night. I had a master’s degree in creative writing. I’d graduated fromCornell. I had no need for religion. On the other hand, I knew nothing aboutmy religion. I had no religious training—no bat mitzvah, no temple, noSunday school, no connection to Israel, the Hebrew language, or the Bible.I had no inkling of the depth and beauty of Jewish spirituality. And once Ilearned about Judaism, I felt an undeniable attraction to it. I ended upstaying in Israel, marrying a religious man, keeping Shabbat and kosher,going to synagogue, and learning to pray in Hebrew. Now I have lived inIsrael for twenty-five years. I speak Hebrew with my daughter-in-law andson-in-law. My kids and grandchildren are Israelis.When I began to teach creative writing in Jerusalem, it was natural thatI would think about writing in a different way, in a spiritual way. I had bythen learned about Kabbalah and the ten sefirot, channels or spheres thatcomprise the elemental spiritual structure underlying, infusing, andanimating the world—the divine design. I suspected that the sefirot wouldoffer a fundamental and fascinating structure for exploring the art of writingessays and memoir.Thus this book was born. Here I explain the characteristics of the sefirotand provide writing exercises, in the hope that together we can access ourcreativity and allow for divine inspiration. By studying the sefirot, profoundand essential avenues of God’s expression, we touch the processes that areat the heart of all creation.The Spiritual Truth of WritingWriting is a means of appreciating the world, allowing us to pay attentionand concentrate so that we notice and record the unique,prosecuted; personsattempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to finda plot in it will be shot.”The writer is not concerned so much with didactic meaning but rathercreative possibilities and patterns, offering the reader the possibility ofgleaning meaning. As novelist John Gardner says: “Theme is not imposedon the story but evoked from within it—initially an intuitive but finally anintellectual act on the part of the writer” (from The Art of Fiction). Thewriter achieves clarity through the process of working on the story or essay.Writing becomes an act of deep thinking that allows you to refine andclarify what it is you mean as you develop your thoughts. One imagesuggests another. An anecdote stirs a memory. As we transform anecdoteinto story, we find a pattern and meaning, what it is we are trying to get at.Yet we have to be careful of overexplaining. “To suggest is to create, toexplain is to destroy,” says the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé. In essaysthere’s more room for the writer’s interpretation on the page, but we shouldalso be aware that readers want to participate in creating meaning. God leftus with the need to complete the world he created, to make repairs wherewe find things lacking. Allow the reader to be part of the process ofinterpretation and completion.Although we don’t want to moralize, we also have to refrain from beinga wishy-washy narrator. Writer and critic Phillip Lopate says that he hasgrown weary of students’ essays that wander through a landscape withouttrying to say anything. He distinguishes between an essay that is anexploration and an essay that makes an argument and prefers a writer whois courageous enough to make a claim (“Exploration and Argument” in ToShow and Tell).Don’t be afraid to assert a bold opinion. For example, in “Shooting anElephant,” George Orwell’s classic story of his experience as a policeofficer in Burma where he felt forced to kill an elephant, the writer clearlystates his thesis: “When the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedomthat he destroys.”Sometimes the writer only reveals the theme at the end of the text. E. B.White’s essay “Once More to the Lake” is an ebullient story of his returnwith his son to the lake in Maine he enjoyed as a child. He seems to returnto his youth, enjoying the peace and beauty of the lake until the finalstartling image. His son is dressing to swim during a rainstorm and thewriter concludes: “As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin feltthe chill of death.” The reader is startled by the invasion of mortality, thereversal of tone and feeling.Similarly, the ending of James Wright’s poem “Lying in a Hammock atWilliam Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” causes us to reevaluateeverything that precedes it. The poem begins with a bucolic scene:Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,Asleep on the black trunk,Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.Down the ravine behind the empty house . . .The reader is lulled into a tranquil picture of a perfect day in nature thatsuddenly explodes in the last line:I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.I have wasted my life.The poem lands with a punch to the gut, prodding the reader to questioneverything that came before the last line.Another technique for revealing meaning is contradiction. Writers whoembrace both sides of an opposition often seem the most truthful (fromBrenda Miller, “The Date”):Despite all I’ve tried to learn in the years alone—about theworthiness of myself as an independent woman, about the intrinsicvalue of the present moment, about defining myself by my ownterms, not by someone else—despite all this, I know that my well-being this moment depends on a man’s hand knocking on the door.What’s stressed (because it comes at the end of the sentence) is thenarrator’s need for the man’s arrival, but her strong desire for independenceis also recognized. Both are true. The narrator does not shy away fromcomplexity.Here’s another example from “Kentucky” by Lee Martin:I didn’t understand, then, the complicated crosscurrents that runthrough a family’s affections, though eventually I would figure outthat even in my father’s anger, and my anguish as a result of it, lay awellspring of genuine love.Martin’s disabled father was violent, but the writer adds that this did notmean that his father didn’t love him, a painful confession. The writer leadsus to understand a terrible truth: love is sometimes built on explosiveground.In Essays after Eighty, poet Donald Hall states: “Essays, like poems andstories and novels, marry heaven and hell. Contradiction is the cellularstructure of life.” Furthermore, Hall claims that if the essay doesn’t includecontraries, the essay fails: “The emotional intricacy and urgency of humanlife expresses itself most fiercely in contradiction. If any feeling makes asunny interminable sky, the feeling is a lie and the sky is a lie.”When a writer is able to enter the complexity of a contradiction, hereveals the truth of life—meaning isn’t a matter of polarity—either this orthat—but exists between those two places. Every decision includes ashadow. Every love contains a degree of hatred, and every peace includes ahint of war.WRITING EXERCISE:COMPLICATIONS ANDCONTRADICTIONSWrite about your first boyfriend or girlfriend—or a friendship—butinclude contradiction. What was puzzling or complicated about therelationship? Perhaps what you first liked about the person laterbecame a source of anxiety. How did this relationship influence otherrelationships?Theme as a ContainerTheme determines and circumscribes what material needs to be included inthe text, according to the points that the writer is driving toward. The writercreates narrative momentum, and she needs to make sure that she doesn’tinclude material that isn’t relevant. There can be detours on the way, butthey should be tied to the overall search for meaning.Moreover, theme is crucial because most of us live our lives searchingfor meaning. What is the best way to live? Who do I love? To whom andwhat should I devote myself? Is there a God? Where do I find my truth?Drash confirms that we are creatures who continually seek meaning.Writing Exercise: Me AgainWrite about something that has been a constant theme in your life.Give specific examples and anecdotes that illustrate that theme. Isthere a pattern that you can discern?ReflectionTo tease out the meanings in our text, revealing and developing themes, weengage in reflection. In fact, it’s often the depth of reflection that creates acompelling essay. Anybody can have an experience, but it’s the way weprocess experience—our generosity of spirit, our perceptions, ourwillingness to be vulnerable, our insights—that gives the memoir its power.The source of the word reflect is the Latin reflectere, which means “tobend back”: the ability to see what we can only see when we look behindus, in retrospect. Phrases like I think, I feel, I wonder allow us to create anarrator who looks back in time from a different perspective and questions,speculates, and investigates.In seeking meaning, the writer may alternate between text that describesconcrete details of scene and text that reflects on experience. There’s apause in the action, and the interior voice takes over. Think of theannouncers in professional football: one reports the plays and one providesthe color commentary, talking about the player’s past, his injuries, hisfamily life, the scandals he has been involved in.As a writer, you do both. In this way, most writing doesn’t just recordwhat we saw and experienced; it also invites our most intimate thoughts andfeelings. The landscape of consciousness is bound to the landscape ofaction. We muse (and amuse), meditate, comment, feel, contemplate,summarize, explain, interpret, evaluate, analyze, and imagine. We confessandwe worry.“The two selves are the experiencing self, which does the living, and theremembering self, which keeps score and makes the choices,” says DanielKahneman, a Nobel Prize–winning economist and psychologist. SueWilliam Silverman, award-winning author of several memoirs, has anotherway of referring to these two selves: the innocent narrator and theexperienced narrator. The innocent narrator lives the story, but it is onlywith the benefit of time that the experienced narrator can look at the pastand find the meaning in her story—a wise woman.Writer Jon Franklin explains that sometimes when his universitystudents write about family members who are dying of cancer, they oftenbelieve that the diagnosis is the epiphany of the piece. He helps them tounderstand that the point of insight is more likely the patient’s conqueringof fear, his inner story, rather than the diagnosis of cancer. “By point ofinsight I mean the moment when the story turns toward the resolution, whenthe main character (and/or the reader) finally grasps the true nature of theproblem and knows what must be done about it. There are fates we can’tchange, but we can deal with them in ways that allow us to retain ourdignity and our sense of control.” The narrator uncovers a truth that was notreadily apparent.In “Reflection and Retrospection: A Pedagogic Mystery Story,” PhillipLopate explains that this revelation of insight can be thought of as a gift:This second perspective, the author’s retrospective employment of amore mature intelligence to interpret the past, is not merely anobligation but a privilege, an opportunity. In any autobiographicalnarrative, whether memoir or personal essay, the heart of the matteroften shines through those passages where the writer analyzes themeaning of his or her experience. The quality of thinking, the depthof insight and the willingness to wrest as much understanding as thewriter is humanly capable of arriving at—these are guarantees to thereader that a particular author’s sensibility is trustworthy andsimpatico.Many people have interesting lives, but the essay writer is the personwho can provide the reader with insight and awareness. With retrospectiveawareness, the essay writer enters the past and comments on it, questions it,finds meaning where there was none initially. What does the writer knownow that he did not grasp then? You may notice that in memoir the narratoroften states: “What I didn’t understand then was . . .” or “What took meyears to realize was . . .” This is the writer’s mature understanding, a voiceof wisdom.In Re-Authoring Lives: Interviews and Essays, narrative therapistMichael White says that insight can be thought of as a therapeuticachievement: “Stories provide the frames that make it possible for us tointerpret our experience, and these acts of interpretation are achievementsthat we take an active part in.” In this way, each story is two stories, theostensible outer story, which is like the garment of the story, and the innerstory, which is the body, the deeper theme, the real story—the narrator’spath of reckoning, understanding, and awareness.In the Torah when Moses asked to see God, he could only see God frombehind—“and you will see my back but my face shall not be seen.” As weare living, events come too quickly and closely to process. But with thebenefit of time and consciousness, as we write, we can see our lives frombehind—and may even be worthy of divine revelation.A Wise NarratorWrite about a disturbing or traumatic event. Tell us the story anddescribe the emotions you experienced. What has changed in yourunderstanding of the event? What did you feel then and what do youfeel and understand now? What had to happen for you to be able tosee the experience differently? Be a kind and wise narrator.Techniques of Reflection That Foster InsightQuestionsMy friend Dr. Deborah Risk Tobin, a therapist for forty years, told me thatwhen she meets with patients who are resistant and armored she tries to finda way to get beyond the posturing, and what she always finds is the hiddenpain. How does she build this trust with her patients? By asking questions.We all know people who never ask us questions about anything we say. Butthose curious or empathetic people who do question us (gently) often helpus to clarify what we are thinking, what we need and desire.Rabbi Hutner said: “There is no good answer that does not come from aquestion.” Questions like Could it be? How is it possible? give us theability to examine, probe, and understand. In addition, phrases ofuncertainty like perhaps or maybe or it might have been or I wonder ifencourage us to speculate, to examine and discard hypotheses aboutbehavior and experience, imagining alternatives and possibilities,appraising and reappraising, deepening the questions.The four questions that are asked at the Passover Seder are a centraldevice for sharing the intergenerational story of the Exodus, the centralstory of the Jewish people. Socrates, of course, employed a system ofdisciplined questions to engage his students. The complexity of our thinkingand analysis corresponds with the level of the questions that we ask.Here is an excerpt from the memoir Circling My Mother by MaryGordon that illustrates the power of asking questions, as the writer probesthe dilemma of writing about the taboo subject of her mother’s body.How is it possible to speak of a mother’s body?Possible, that is, without betrayal?And if it is possible, is it permissible?To speak of it as if it were not a body but somethingthat could be turned into a work of art?Gordon wonders about the legitimacy of writing about her mother’s body:Is it a betrayal or a topic that is permissible? Her questions allow the readerto understand both her courage and her hesitancy.Barbara Kingsolver says that when writing a novel she always startswith questions that she can’t answer: “Otherwise you get bored halfwaythrough if you already know the answers. If you’re asking what seem to beunanswerable questions, then you have to keep showing up.” When youwrite, try to ask a question that you don’t have the answer to and see whathappens. Even if you don’t find an answer, the exploration will be real.Rainer Maria Rilke understood the importance of questions andcautions us not to be hasty in trying to answer questions before we areready (from Letters to a Young Poet):Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to lovethe questions themselves like locked rooms or like books written ina very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannotbe given you because you would not be able to live them Live thequestions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it,live along some distant day into the answer.I love that phrase: Live the questions. Don’t come to hasty conclusions. Letyourself be confused, even in chaos, until an answer is slowly revealed toyou.In fact, it may be useful to envision your essay as grappling with aspecific central question or line of inquiry. Sometimes the title of an essaytells the reader exactly what that question is, for example Carlos Fuentes’sessay, “How I Started to Write,” or Wole Soyinka’s essay “Why Do I Fast?”RepetitionRepetition is a form of reflection that enables us to slow down the narrativein order to seek meaning. We repeat words or sentences to make sense ofexperience and provide a sense of coherence in the essay.We can think of repetition as a form of meditation, continuous calmthought on some subject, deep thinking, and reflection.Repetition can also be thought of as ruminating, to chew somethingover and over. The writer attempts to digest his experience—to absorb it. Infact, the psychological act of rumination is linked to posttraumatic growth.Professor Richard Tedeschi from the University of North Carolina foundthat survivors of trauma who give themselves time to deal withbigquestions—such as Why did I survive? Is there a God? What should I dowith my life now?—sometimes experience a leap in their creative powers.They re-vision their lives because they provide themselves with time toprocess and integrate their experience.In addition, all repetition creates emphasis, as we circle and home in onwhat concerns us. In life when we find that events repeat themselves, it maybe a sign to pay attention: the unconscious is trying to speak to us.The repetition of language in a text can also create a sense of coherenceand harmony. Think of a refrain in music: the melody advances and buildsso that when we return to the refrain, it’s the same and yet different. Eachrepetition can be thought of as an escalation—more like a spiral than acircle. The key in writing is to find ways to repeat with-out beingrepetitious, without being boring or monotonous.An example of the cumulative power of repetition (Terry TempestWilliams, “Why I Write”):I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write tocreate fabric in a world that often appears black and white. I write todiscover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. I write tobegin a dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and inimagining things differently perhaps the world will change. I writeto honor beauty. I write to correspond with my friends. I write as adaily act of improvisation. I write because it creates my composure.I write against power and for democracy. I write myself out of mynightmares and into my dreams. I write in a solitude born out ofcommunity. . .WRITING EXERCISE: WHY DO YOUWRITE?Tell us why you write. Use Terry Tempest William’s template,beginning each sentence with “I write to” or “I write because.”Structuring an Essay through Questioning and RepetitionLook at the way that Joan Didion employs repetition and questioning toseek meaning in her husband’s sudden death in The Year of MagicalThinking:Why, if those were my images of death, did I remain so unable toaccept the fact that he had died? Was it because I was failing tounderstand it as something that had happened to him? Was itbecause I was still understanding it as something that had happenedto me?Life changes fast.Life changes in the instant.You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.The question of self-pity.You see how early the question of self-pity entered the picture.Here, besides questions and repetition, we have the additional technique ofshort choppy sentences that imitate the stunned thinking of the narrator. Asreaders, we participate in the narrator’s struggle to understand the tragedyshe is experiencing. The writer creates a feeling of immediacy and urgency.Repetition can also provide the scaffolding for an entire essay. Alsoknown as anaphora, repeating a strong opening phrase creates a pleasingsense of rhythm and cadence. Anaphora can be employed at the line level,“Get busy living or get busy dying,” or the repetition can be threadedthroughout successive lines, as in Ecclesiastes 3:1–8, “There is a time foreverything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: A time to beborn and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot.”Brenda Miller uses anaphora to structure her essay “The Date.” Shebegins her essay with the sentence: “A man I like is coming for dinnertonight.” Then a few pages later she adds: “A man I like is coming todinner, so I get out all of my cookbooks and choose and discard recipes as iftrying on dresses.” Four paragraphs later she writes: “A man I like iscoming to dinner which means I need to do the laundry and wash the sheets,just in case.”Variations in the repetition add interest as well as a sense of coherence.WRITING EXERCISE: HOME ISWHERE I . . .Write an essay beginning: “Home is where I . . .” Return to thatphrase numerous times during the essay.NegationSome ideas and experiences can’t be described or understood by what theyare, but rather by what they are not. What isn’t. What wasn’t. What willnever be. Some experiences are truly unnameable, impenetrable.As writers it may make sense to focus on the negative image, like apainter who makes use of the negative space surrounding the images hecreates. Sometimes, as in the abstract paintings of Jackson Pollock, theempty space becomes as important as the positive. (I once visited JacksonPollack’s studio in East Hampton where we were told to put on the paperslippers available to us in a basket. The drippings on the floor were not tobe disturbed. It wasn’t only the negative space of the paintings that hadacquired significance but the evidence of Pollack’s process as well.)Negation is also a profound way of summoning up content and materialthat may have been repressed yet is needed for us to make meaning of ourlives. Freud says: “To deny something is to say: that is something I wouldrather repress. With the help of the symbol of negation, the thinking processfrees itself from the limitations of repression and enriches itself with thesubject matter without which it could not work efficiently.” Negationprovides access to uncomfortable, disturbing material that may hide in thesubconscious, waiting for expression.It’s sometimes easier to write about what isn’t than to write about whatis.Often, negation and repetition go hand in hand as the author seeksmeaning by recounting both what can and cannot be spoken of (JamaicaKincaid, My Brother):He did unspeakable things then, at least he could not speak of themand I could not really speak of them to him. I could name to him thethings he did, but he could not name to me the things he did. Hestole from his mother (our mother, she was my own mother, too, butI was only in the process of placing another distance between us, Iwas not in the process of saying I know nothing of her, as I amdoing now), he stole from his brothers; he would have stolen fromme, too, but the things he could steal from me were not available tohim: my possessions were stored on a continent far away fromwhere he lived. He lied. He stole, he lied, and when I say he didunspeakable things, just what do I mean, for surely I know I havelied and once I stole stationery from an office in which I worked?Kincaid’s use of repetition, negation, and questions replicates the intricateand unspeakably difficult tangled web of family and family responsibility.With these techniques she distances herself from her brother who didunspeakable things, yet by the end of the essay, she implicates herself aswell: she admits that she lied and also stole office stationery.Here is a striking example of negation. In Circling My Mother, MaryGordon tells us what she does not want to say, which is often the mostpowerful psychic material:I know there are a number of ways I don’t want to talk. A number ofways I don’t want to write. I don’t want to pity myself for being achild born of a body such as my mother’s. And I don’t want todescribe my mother’s body. Not anymore. Not now. I did it once.But she was living then. Now she is dead.Finally, we can even negate our negation as in this quote from KeithGessen: “As for me, I wasn’t really an idiot. But neither was I not an idiot.”Or this: ”I hadn’t been yelling. I didn’t think. But I hadn’t not been yellingeither.”Gessen’s attempts to clarify and qualify demonstrate the imprecision oflanguage. His use of negation, while playful, highlights the difficulty oftrying to understand ourselves and to communicate that knowledge.Negation can also be employed to provide the structure for an entireessay, as in this example.Until I danced at my daughter’s wedding, I didn’t know howcomplex joy could be. I didn’t realize that I could soar in abandon,dancing with family and friends, and at the end of the wedding wavesadly goodbye to my daughter who was leaving our family with herhusband. I didn’t grasp that a wedding was a goodbye party.But recently, my daughterhad her first baby. When I visited herin the hospital, the nurse asked if this was my first grandchild. I saidyes. She answered: “Now you know joy!”WRITING EXERCISES: REPETITION,QUESTIONS, NEGATIONUntil IWrite an essay that begins: “Until I . . ., I did not know.” Continue theessay with a sequence of sentences, such as: “I did not know,” “Ididn’t realize,” “I didn’t grasp,” and so on. Try to end the essay with areversal—a positive statement like the one above: “Now you knowjoy!”You can also write about a troubling experience and begin: “UntilI [. . .], I did not know [. . .].”Remembering and Not RememberingI was fortunate to attend a workshop in Jerusalem with writerBrandel France de Bravo who gave us this exercise.Think of an event that had great emotional gravity for you. Writea list of at least ten sentences that begin with “I remember.” Thencreate another list with “I don’t remember.” Weave those sentencesinto an essay.Three EventsThink of three things that happened in the past month that made animpression on you.*6 Why did you pick these events? Write abouteach event and then reflect on what they have in common. Use thetechniques of repetition, questions, negation, and short choppysentences to meditate, speculate, or hypothesize.First MemoriesThink of one of the first memories you have of yourself a child.Where are you? Who is there with you? What’s happening? Userepetition, questions, and negation to speculate on why youremember this and what this memory means to you.SecretSodThe final level of pardes, sod, means “secret.” Secrets are at the heart ofmany pieces of writing, since God, creation, the world itself, and even ourown lives seem to be a secret. Every narrative is based on a question, amystery, something we cannot understand. Mystery and secrets keep thereader in suspense, waiting for more information to be revealed. Secretsmirror the mystery of our lives, the inescapable mystery of death. Theworld is a mystery, yet as writers, we don’t always have to solve thatmystery; rather we need to respect it and honor it.Sod is also connected to originality and creativity. What can you saythat is uniquely yours? What can you say that stems from your uniquevision and experience of the world? When you write a book proposal, thepublisher wants you to look at the other books on the topic. Why is yourbook different? What do you have to say on this topic that hasn’t been saidbefore? When you are writing from your deepest most authentic self, youare capable of writing what nobody else has said because it is yours.Sod is a surprise because it is distinct and original and authentic. Whatdo you have to say that will surprise your readers (and yourself)? You maydiscover an epiphany, which literally means “the appearance of God.” Eachpiece of writing has its own discovery. It may be your sudden understandingof the theme of the work or the way that the images work together. It mayoccur when you understand the deeper meaning behind the events youdescribe. It’s that aha moment. And until you reach that moment of surprise,the work is probably not complete.To summarize the pardes system of pshat, remez, drash, and sod: Wepaint a scene with vivid details, and then we remember a similar experienceor reference a related text or scientific finding. We build our essay as wesearch for meaning through the act of reflection and may receive the gift ofan epiphany or revelation, a secret that is revealed to us—a hint of thedivine.4KINDNESSChesedWe move now from the sefirot of will, inspiration, and comprehension,which are considered cognitive intellectual qualities, to the next sevensefirot, which are regarded as more emotional. These seven sefirotcorrespond to biblical figures like Abraham, Moses, Joseph, and KingDavid.The first of the emotional sefirot, chesed or kindness, can be thought ofas an expansive act of generosity, compassion, and unrestricted love, withproperties that are similar to light. As Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan says in his bookInner Space: Introduction to Kabbalah, Meditation and Prophecy: “Themain property of light is that it has no boundaries—it enters and penetrateswithout borders, indiscriminately.”When we write, chesed enhances our generosity of expression so thatwe don’t hold back or save anything. We aren’t miserly with our words orour experiences. We let it all out without judgment.Chesed corresponds to the biblical hero Abraham, who was able to givelavishly and freely. After his circumcision at the age of ninetynine, eventhough he was in great pain, he stood outside his tent to welcome guests.When three travelers passed by his tent, he served them a feast. God waitedwhile Abraham served his guests: we learn from this that hospitality towayfarers is greater than welcoming the presence of God (Shabbat 127a).The biblical commentator Rashi states that the three men were angels wholater informed Abraham that his wife, Sara, would have a baby (at the ageof ninety). Sometimes kindness creates miracles.Kindness, this radical generosity, is a way of saying yes, amen to theworld. It reminds me of the art of improvisation. Butch Bradley, a comedianfrom LA, told me this about improvisation: you say yes to everything. Blueballoon, yes, Old City, yes, child sucking a lollypop, yes, pencil falling onthe floor, yes, cell phone ringing in the middle of the show. Yes.The more the better. Use it all. Think of what Nora Ephron’s mothersaid to her and her sisters when they complained about their problems:everything is copy.Yet there is a danger in too much chesed, too much love. For the firstdraft kindness is crucial in opening the channels of expression. But later,kindness can become a problem. For example, if a writer grows tooattached to his material, he will not be able to cut what needs to be let go of.“You must kill your darlings” is a well-known writing maxim attributed toFaulkner. That which is overly beloved is sometimes sentimental or cliché.Language can be too pretty or literary. Elmore Leonard says that he cuts anysentence that sounds like writing.In addition, kindness has to be used correctly and in its right measure.The sages say that he who is kind to the cruel will be cruel to the kind.Some commentators say that Abraham faced the greatest trial of his lifewhen he was called upon to sacrifice his son Isaac precisely becauseAbraham embodied too much chesed and had to learn to restrict himself, tocreate limits and borders. Ultimately, he was not forced to sacrifice hischild: God told him to take a ram as an offering instead of his son.In this chapter we’ll learn about the power of kindness: the importanceof a generous first draft, the power of free writing, and how finding theright imagery can heal us.Chesed also means that we are kind to ourselves as writers, taking ourselvesseriously, giving ourselves time to devote to writing and editing: we carveout work time for ourselves, even if it’s only a few hours a week.Kindness in the form of self-compassion is crucial because it mayenable us to keep working. Here’s Elizabeth Gilbert on an importantconnection between kindness to ourselves and writing:As for discipline—it’s important, but sort of over-rated. The moreimportant virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness. Becauseyour writing will always disappoint you. Your laziness will alwaysdisappoint you. You will make vows: “I’m going to write for anhour every day,” and then you won’t do it. You will think: “I suck,I’m such a failure. I’m washed-up.” Continuing to write after thatheartache of disappointment doesn’t take only discipline, but alsoself-forgiveness (which comes from a place of kind and encouragingand motherly love).A Chassidic story underscores this link between love and discipline. Afather was having terrible problems because his child refused to listen tohim. The father asked his rabbi what he should do, expectingthe rabbi totell him to punish his son or at least reprimand him. Instead the rabbi said:love him even more.The Blank Page and KindnessWhen we write we may unconsciously imagine a reader who loves us—and whom we love. The essayist Phillip Lopate says that we create in ourwriting an ideal relationship with the reader, who we somehow believe willbe our kind, patient mother. The blank page is supremely accepting andforgiving. For this reason, some of us are willing to write things that wewould be reluctant to say to anybody in private.The act of writing itself can also be thought of as a kindness because itis restorative. When we write we produce brain waves that are restful.Sometimes when I return to writing, especially if I have been away on aspeaking tour, I feel my mind relax as I return to the empty page. Writingfocuses our scattered thoughts and relaxes our brains. My creative writingprofessor, poet Archie Ammons, told me that even though he had won aPulitzer Prize and many other honors, more important to him was the gift ofthe act of writing. Writing, he said, was its own reward.Free WritingFree writing is a generosity of expression, a means of creating flow thatcorresponds to the sefira of kindness. You write without judging yourself,without criticizing, without thinking too much, without going back, withouterasing. You keep writing and open yourself to divine inspiration.Set a time limit, for example fifteen minutes, and write. Let it all out.You don’t have to correct yourself because everything is the way it needs tobe. Whatever comes is what needs to be said. My yoga teacher sometimessays: “Let the breath breathe you.” When free writing let the voice speakthrough you.Trust the process. Allow digression, chaos, and a lack of control. Youdon’t have to cross out or edit or censor: there’s time for that later. WriterMarilynne Robinson tells us that in this stage, you’re immersing yourself inthe writing, connecting to your deeper mind, collecting material from yoursubconscious (“The Deep Mind: A Profile of Marilynne Robinson” in Poets& Writers, 2015).Natalie Goldberg refers to free writing as first thoughts, those that aren’tcensored or edited. Buddhists believe that these thoughts containtremendous energy because they are unmediated, closer to the divinesource. In addition, with free writing, you can bypass those less-thanlovingvoices that tell you that you have nothing to say. Sometimes you arerewarded with insights that are discovered on the crooked paths of inquiry.When the Israelites left Egypt, God took them on a roundabout pathbecause he realized that if the people were close to Egypt, they would beafraid and would want to return to what they knew— even slavery. It’s hardto leave the known world, no matter how awful it is. Free writing with itselaborate twists and leaps gives us the possibility of turning toward theunknown, the unconscious.Make sure to save these pages because they can become first drafts.They have an energy, power, and truth that you will probably want to returnto.WRITING EXERCISE: FREE WRITINGFree write for ten days in a row, fifteen minutes a day. Do notcensor. Do not erase. Do not go back. Just keep going. Peter Elbow,a pioneer in this process, says that if you feel that you have nothingto say, keep your fingers or pen or pencil moving and write “I don’tknow what to write” over and over until a thought comes to you. Afteryou’re finished keep whatever has energy. You may decide todevelop the free writing into an essay or story. Or you may decide toleave it and start again tomorrow.The Essay as a Form of KindnessThe personal essay is characterized by a generosity of form. Sara Levine in“The Essayist Is Sorry for Your Loss” describes essay writing:The essay seems disorganized. I think, because it has a stake inpretending not to know where it is going. Putting on its hat, headingfor the door, it seems to follow the random movement of the minditself. This looks like laziness but it smells like epistemology.Because essays offer a way of thinking, a dramatization of processas opposed to a curtain unfurled on the final product all scrubbedand clean as the newborn on TV.As narrators, we are like tour guides, thinking aloud as we travel,allowing for interesting detours.In addition, the essay embraces freedom as we gather the disparate andthe discarded, that which sometimes arrives indiscriminately.Part of the magic of the essay is the way that (in words poached fromWalt Whitman) the form can contain a multitude: story, poetry, research,and stray bits of information can be collected and woven together. In thisway, we are alert to a magic in living. When we are on the lookout formaterial, everything becomes more interesting.The Loving NarratorReaders may not respond to a narrator who indulges too much in selfpity orunjustified anger. Most readers identify with a narrator who, though shemay have issues, insecurities, and idiosyncrasies, is ultimately tender,loving, and forgiving. For example, in this excerpt from What Comes Nextand How to Like It, Abigail Thomas presents herself as a complicated,interesting, and likeable narrator. Also notice how she writes about herselfin the third person, which gives her the narrative distance to step out of herpersonal angst.She used to think she needed to know things to be the mother. . . .But one weekend when her oldest daughter was afraid she waslosing her baby, she spoke to her son-in-law on the telephone. Shyly,she asked him, “Do you think I should come?”“My wife needs her mother,” said her son-in-law and in that secondshe understood all at once and forever everything she needed toknow.The narrator is down to earth, human, candid, imperfect, and loving. Likemost of us. And the third person gives the reader the emotional distance toobserve the narrator as she is observing herself. Elissa Schappell reviewedthe book in Vanity Fair with these words: “Irreverent, wise, and boundlesslygenerous.” Wouldn’t you love to have your book reviewed with thosewords?In this excerpt from the essay called “Loitering” in The Book ofDelights, Ross Gay also creates a generous narrator who seems to be verygood company, even when he is speaking of a difficult topic:The Webster’s definition of loiter reads thus: “to stand or waitaround idly without apparent purpose” . . .Among the synonyms for this behavior are linger, loaf, laze,lounge, lollygaggle, dawdle . . .All of these words to me imply having a nice day Which leads tobeing, even if only temporarily, nonconsumptive, and this is a crimein America, and more explicitly criminal depending upon anynumber of quickly apprehended visual cues.For instance, the darker your skin, the more likely you are to be“loitering.” Though a Patagonia jacket could do some work todisrupt that perception.A Patagonia jacket, colorful pants, Tretorn sneakers with shortsocks, an Ivy League ball cap, and a thick book that is not the Bibleand you’re almost golden. Almost.Gay casts an eye on the pain and anger of feeling under attack because ofhis skin color yet his tone is almost playful. His critical yet loving stancetoward the world allows the reader to feel both his pain and his joy.Healing through WritingWriting can also provide us with a means of healing from hurt and trauma.Though many of us are familiar with writers who suffered from mentalillness, alcoholism, or depression and killed themselves, like ErnestHemingway, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, or David Foster Wallace, writingcan also be a means of recovery.Writing can offer us a modicum of control even in the midst of greatchaos. For example, Joyce Carol Oates discusses the impulse to understandlife through writing:The act of writing is an act of attempted comprehension, and, in achildlike way, control; we are so baffled and exhausted by what hashappened, we want to imagine that giving words to the unspeakablewill make it somehow our own. (“Why We Write about Grief,” NewYork Times)By translating our experience into a story, we give our pain a form,attempting to tame the traumatic experience. Even if that control is illusory,we find coherence in the chaos.Meghan O’Rourke, a writer for the New Yorker and author of The LongGoodbye about her mother’s death from cancer, says: “You know, writinghas always been the way I make sense of the world. It’s a kind of stayagainst dread, and chaos” (“Why We Write about Grief,” New York Times).“If I told the story of her death, I might understand it better, make sense ofit—perhaps even change it If I could find the right turning point in thenarrative, then maybe, like Orpheus, I could bring the one I sought backfrom the dead. Aha: Here she is, walking behind me” (“Story’s End,” NewYorker).I understand that need to keep a person alive by writing him alive. Afew months after my son’s murder, I began to write our story, Koby’s story,about the mystical signs and experiences that occurred before and after hismurder. Sometimes I felt like Scheherazade, the Persian queen who, underthreat of death, told the king a story for a thousand and one nights: if Istopped writing, the pain would kill me.I wrote in the hope of somehow keeping my son alive, but also becauseI needed a place to put my suffering. It’s not that the pain went away, but Ihad something to contain it as I wrote, somewhere to release it for a fewhours. I could hear my son’s voice in my mind as I wrote and cried.Eventually, I crafted the story into a spiritual memoir, The Blessing of aBroken Heart. My friend Ruchama King Feuerman, author of the novelSeven Blessings, says that there’s a French word for this type of writing:chantpleure. To sing and cry together.I’m drawn to the redemptive side of writing because I am trained as acertified pastoral counselor and run groups for bereaved mothers. Also overthe years, I have met many people in my writing classes who have difficultand even tragic stories and yet, through writing, they experiencebreakthroughs—spiritual growth. I’ve had some students tell me that ourwriting class is better than therapy and much less expensive. John Freeman,the editor of the literary journal Granta, says: “It’s easy to forget that prosecan be a vessel for something which is broken; that a story can be the onlything you survive with.” Prose is able to contain our rage, pain, and,ultimately, our love.The author Michael Crichton is often cited as saying, “Writing is howyou make the experience your own, how you explore what it means to you,how you come to possess it, and ultimately release it.” (I will never releasethe sorrow of my son’s murder, but writing has helped me live with it.)Professor James Pennebaker of the University of Texas, a socialpsychologist, confirms that writing can benefit your health. In the 1990sPennebaker researched the question: Why do people with terrible secretsoften have health problems? He wondered: If people could share thosesecrets, would their health problems improve?Pennebaker asked students to free write for twenty minutes for fourconsecutive days about an emotional upheaval in their lives. When studentsdescribed the distressing incident in detail as well as the feelings they hadabout what had happened, their physical health improved. They had fewervisits to the health clinic, and their blood pressure was lower. But justwriting about the distressing event itself did not elicit healing, nor did onlyventing feelings. The writer had to connect both the event and his emotions.In other words, the students had to narrate the pshat— the who, what, when,where, why—as well as the remez and drash, to reflect and comment on andinterpret the meaning of their experience.Changing the PastWhen we write we have the unique opportunity to revisit and even revisethat which hurt us. Debra Magpie Earling wrote the book Perma Red, basedon the story of her aunt who died at the age of twenty-three, battered on theside of the road. Earling writes: “The wonderful thing about writing is thatmaybe we can avenge the dead.” It’s not that the past is changed, but wechange our relationship to the past.Writing offers us the generous possibility of accessing additionalmeanings that were not possible at the time of the experience. Frenchphilosopher Gaston Bachelard argues that there is a constitutiveimagination, activated by reverie. Reverie—daydreaming or play with thesymbolic imagination—is distinct from memory, which reflects on what hasgone before and is dependent on and even stuck in the past. The dream likeconstitutive imagination has the power to affect and even change the pastbecause the new imagery can reverberate with the events and experiences ofthe past and generate new material. In this way, alternative story lines andnew meanings are fashioned. There’s the possibility of imaginative releasefrom the past. We write our way into an expanded future.Literary RealityGrammar itself offers a mechanism for creating a literary reality thattranscends our lived experience. Conditional expressions in the past,present, or future voice what may not be possible in reality but is possible inlanguage, and these possibilities create their own reality.Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express a hypotheticalstate such as a wish, desire, or imaginary situation. If I were a butterfly, Iwould fly away.We describe a counterfactual reality, unbound by the rules of this world.For example, we state what we would have done or what we would like todo, regardless of whether or not we can actually do it. I would like to be anightingale singing in a forest. I wish I were six feet tall and could sinkjump shots.These expressions give us the opportunity to voicealternatives:If I had been thinking, I would have saidHow I would have liked toI might have saidI would have preferred I imagineSuppose?What if?You can return to a scene and replay it, imagining a different or moresatisfactory encounter or outcome—in the language of psychodrama, akinder, preferred story, a surplus reality that exists in imagination.Emily Hiestand employs counterfactual reality at the end of her essay“Hose.” When she was a child, one afternoon, as her neighbor Mrs. Baylisswalked by her home, Emily and her brother turned a hose on her, not oncebut three times. In this excerpt the narrator, now a woman in her fifties,revisits her home and finds that Mrs. Bayliss has died:How I would like to have visited her once more, or to have takenour chances on a walk together down the hill to Jackson Square.Could I have found a way to thank her? It would have been adelicate undertaking, involving the risk of appearing completelyunreconstructed. But I might have tried, for by her person, by herprofoundly misplaced trust, the lady, Mrs. Bayliss, provided me asingular and pristine happiness—undimmed across five longdecades.The narrator doesn’t seek forgiveness for her behavior during childhood.Instead, she wants to thank Mrs. Bayliss for that startling act of happiness.She can’t thank her in person, but she does get to thank Mrs. Bayliss on thepage, which creates a literary reality liberated from the constraints of thepast. This literary reality, using words that are not possible to say in person,has its own expansive generosity and truth.In the essay “A Bottle of Water in Brazzaville,” Laird Hunt uses themode of the counterfactual to describe his desire for a different outcomethan the one that occurred when he was a visiting writing teacher in theRepublic of Congo on behalf of the State Department. He enjoyed teachinghis workshop on memory and imagination to these students who hadrecently endured a horrific civil war. At the end of the class, when Hunt wasready to board the van to take him back to his hotel, one of the students saidhe was thirsty, and the facilitator, himself Congolese, told thestudent to goback inside, suggesting that he’d find a bottle of water in the hot classroom.Laird and the facilitator both held bottles of water on that impossibly hotday, and Laird knew that there was probably no water awaiting his studentwho, no doubt, would have to walk many miles to return to his home.What I repeatedly find I cannot express, when I launch my verbalshards of that day into the air, in such poor imitation of mygrandmother, is what I really mean to, the core of what I want to sayabout the moment. Which is something along the lines of, “One hotday in another country, I had some water and someone else wasthirsty and I did not give him what I so easily could have.” Whichitself is a circumlocution, possibly an unforgivable one, for what Iwill never be able to say in person: “I’m sorry.”Though the narrator confesses that he will never be able to apologize inperson, this apology, while imperfect and not directed at the right audience,is an admission of guilt that allows the writer to take responsibility for hismistake and imagine a different outcome. Though he could not offerkindness to his student, the writing allows him to imagine being a personwho could and might if a similar situation were to arise. These words offerthe author the possibility of change—and a hope of forgiveness.Here is another example of counterfactual reality from Hands by TedKooser: a narrator voicing his desire to be embraced by his father. Thoughthe narrator’s father is dead, and can no longer hug him, the writing itselfseems like an embrace.I would like to be held by these hands, held by them as they werewhen I was a child and I seemed to fall within them wherever Imight turn. I would like to feel them warm and broad against myback and would like to be pressed to the breast of this man with hisfaint perfume of aftershave, with the tiny brown moles on his neck,with the knot of his necktie slightly darkened by perspiration.In a more lighthearted way, wishes can allow us to engage in fantasy—aform of unbounded reality—as Nora Ephron does in her essay “SerialMonogamy” in I Feel Bad about My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being aWoman:I always secretly wished that Lee [Lum] would include one of myrecipes in one of his cookbooks—he frequently came to dinner andwas always fantastically complimentary about the food—but henever asked me for any of my recipes.She also fantasizes about imaginary conversations:I have always had a weakness for iceberg lettuce with Roquefortdressing, and that’s one of the things I used to have imaginaryarguments with Craig [Claiborne] about.Writing can be a means for us to transcend the boundaries of our life sothat we forgive, reimagine, and even reconstitute ourselves. In this way,memoir isn’t just about the past. It’s also about the future.WRITING EXERCISES:LITERARY REALITYWrite an essay that begins with I would like or I wish. Or take astory or essay you have written and change the ending so that itemploys counterfactual statements like I wish or I want to or ifonly or suppose or I imagine or I might have.Write about something you meant to say, or wished that you hadsaid. Somewhere in the essay state: What I didn’t say (and wishI could have said). You can repeat that phrase as much as youwant to. Tell us the story and reflect on the experience. In thisessay you have the chance to reimagine your experience.Write an essay where you include a fantasy: cooking the perfectmeal, speaking to your favorite writer, acting in a series onNetflix.Write an essay or a poem where each sentence or line beginswith “I wish.”*7Write a few paragraphs where you imagine a whole other life foryour mother or father or yourself. For example: “In my mother’sother life, she is a singer in a jazz band and is applauded everynight.” Continue on with writing the fantasy life and see where itleads you.How the Fitting Image Heals UsAn image is something that you can see, feel, taste, touch, hear, or sense.The cup of old cold coffee with the skin of milk that looks like a map ofFrance sitting next to your computer in the chipped “Happy Birthday” mug.The photo on the wall of your mother as a teenager standing next to an oldblack Ford. She’s wearing blue overalls, her hair is in waves down to hershoulders, and a Pall Mall cigarette dangles from her mouth.An image is alive, emotional. It carries a suitcase of meaning waiting tobe unpacked. The young woman in the overalls, my mother, projects afeeling of freedom, all possibilities are open to the beautiful young woman.Artist and writer Linda Barry says that images from childhood canconjure whole worlds. Even something as fleeting as a telephone numbercan offer us entrance into memory. (This may not work for those of youwho grew up with cell phones and never had to memorize phone numbers!)When I think of my childhood phone number, I remember being a teenager,standing in the kitchen holding the yellow phone with its curly macaroniline, walking around the room until the cord stopped me as I talked to myfriend Jan while waiting for the call interruption signal from a boy who Ithought might finally call me.Images offer complexity because they contain more than one symbolicmeaning. There is no instant correlation, no one solution for an image. In ashort video I saw recently in a gallery in Tel Aviv, a woman stood on thesand near a beach, surrounded by low thorny bushes. She wouldn’t movefrom her place no matter who—whether an older man or a young woman—offered a hand, trying to help her. That image of being stuck conveysdifferent meanings to different people: stubbornness or will, certainty orinsanity.But images do more than add dimension to our texts—they also offer ushealing. Lynda Barry writes about V. S. Ramachandran, an innovativeneuroscientist. He treated an amputee who suffered terrible pain because hefelt that he constantly held his missing left hand in a tight fist that hecouldn’t release. Ramachandran had the patient insert his right hand into amirror box and position it so he was tricked into seeing his left hand as if itwere still part of his body. As a result, the patient could finally unclench hismissing hand, and his pain went away.Barry says that we all have losses, the loss of parents or friends orlovers. “The only way to open your fist,” she says, “is to see your owntrouble reflected in an image, a story, a poem, or a book you read.” In otherwords, when we write or read, we may stumble upon or find images thatmirror our own troubles, resonating with some deep emotional chord insideus, allowing us release from our pain.I can attest to the power of imagery to effect healing. My first memoir,The Blessing of a Broken Heart, had no narrative design; it was a series ofstories. But I realized that there were two images in the book that keptrepeating: the cave and the bird’s nest. My son Koby was murdered in acave a quarter mile from our home. The year after Koby’s murder, Iexperienced a series of mysterious encounters with birds: birds fell dead atmy feet or hit the windshield of my car. A bird smacked against my headwhen I was walking on the beach. I dreamed about birds’ nests.Eventually, I understood that the images of the cave and the bird’s nestcould provide a narrative arc for the book. The cave, dark and closed, aplace of sadness and darkness and terrible fear, contrasted with its reverseimage, the bird’s nest, which is open and a place of comfort and growth andnurturing. The nest became the narrator’s aspiration— a movement awayfrom the darkness of the cave toward air and light and birth and freedom. Inaddition, the bird’s nest became an important signifier of theme: in theKabbalah, it is written that the Messiah waits in the celestial “bird’s nest” ofthe Garden of Eden to redeem the world. I was able to frame our family’stragic story as part of a larger story. It doesn’t mean that by writing thebook, I leftmy pain behind. But I did find a way to temporarily contain it.The writer Isak Dinesen says that there is no sorrow that can’t be bornewith a story. Finding the right frame and imagery and language andnarrative voice helps us bear our difficult stories. But there is anotherdimension to healing. One must also find the right audience. It’s not justtelling the story but the way the story is received and responded to that canprovide additional healing. For example, one of my students wrote an essayabout being alone with her mother when she died almost fifty years ago in aJerusalem hospital. Rebecca, who was then nineteen, was visiting Israelwith her mother, a widow. Rebecca and her mother were both first-timetourists to Israel, and when Rebecca’s mother fell ill, Rebecca was totallyalone in a foreign hospital, helpless in a society and language that were nother own. Many years later, in a chance encounter, a rabbi who had been inthe hallway of the hospital the night that Rebecca’s mother died toldRebecca that he had heard her cry of pain. He said, “I never heard anybodyscream like that in my life.” In class, Rebecca said that she realized that hehad validated her suffering, which she thought had gone unwitnessed.Because of that recognition, the fact that her pain was acknowledged byanother, a bit of her pain eased.Another example: My student Stella’s husband was one of the first hearttransplant recipients in England. She wrote about leaving him in thehospital after his operation because she had small children at home and hadto care for them. She tried to visit him the next day, but the nurses wouldn’tlet her in to see him. The next day, he fell into a coma, and he died beforeshe saw him again. She wrote about her guilt in not being with her husbandwhen he died, the painful feeling that she had abandoned him.In class, one of the other students told her that often a person cannot letgo and die when his loved ones surround him, and it could be that she hadbeen kind to leave him. She was in her seventies by then and had neverbefore thought of her husband’s death without guilt.WRITING EXERCISES: EXPANSIONAND TRANSFORMATIONChildhood ImageWrite about a difficult incident you experienced as a child. Take animage from the story—something that you saw or heard or tasted ortouched.Now try to look at that image in a new way. Turn it inside out.Reverse it. Stand it on its head. A window can become a door. Acircle can become a hula hoop. The glass holder for a yahrzeitcandle*8 becomes a drinking glass (as it sometimes does).What does the image tell you that you didn’t know before? Letthe image speak to you. Now talk back to that image. Incorporatesome of this playfulness and reverie in the final text.An Image and a ConversationStructure an essay around an image and a conversation.*9 Imagescan serve as bookends for a scene. Place your characters in aspecific setting and include an image, perhaps of a person’s hands.Two people can have a conversation, disagree, or take some sort ofaction.Now return to the image, which should be different in some way.For example, you could start with a woman stirring soup, wearing anapron. Two of her children sit at the table arguing about their father.At the end of the essay, the woman may do something different withher hands. The apron may be used to wipe up a spill on the ground.Or to wave out a small fire. Or be thrown in the garbage. Play withthis, experiment.An ApologyWrite an apology that you wish you had received fromsomebody.Now write an apology to somebody. Address the apology to aparticular person. What did you intend and how did thoseintentions go awry? If you want, you can begin each sentencewith “I’m sorry that . . .”Write an apology to yourself, a letter of forgiveness. Be kind andcompassionate to yourself.One SentenceWrite a page that is one long sentence, a run-on sentence. Begenerous and expansive in language. Write about who and what youlove, right now. Don’t stop.5BOUNDARIESGevurahGEVURAH MEANS LIMITS AND BOUNDARIES, an act of restriction. Rabbi Kook,the first chief rabbi of Israel, writes that only through constriction can theworld take on a character that is seemingly independent of God. Otherwise,God would fill all available space, and there would be no room for anythingexcept God. In addition, the world was created with boundaries, betweenthe earth and the firmament, between the days of the week and Shabbat,between the ocean and the land.Gevurah entails judgment, discernment, and discretion. It’s not theopposite of kindness but complements it because gevurah concerns itselfwith giving what the other can receive. Thus, gevurah and chesed arealways in relationship. Gevurah provides a container for kindness and loveto protect these energies from being wasted or lost. It sets margins andlimits. Chesed and gevurah are often depicted as hands that can embrace,carry, and contain. Chesed is the right hand, gevurah the left: love requiresboth.The ability to contract, to hold back, is associated with the biblicalfigure Isaac who allowed himself to be bound for a burnt offering. WhenAbraham was called upon to offer Isaac as a sacrifice, Isaac resisted fleeingeven though some sources say he was thirty-seven years old at the time.Isaac was able to limit his own needs, to restrain himself, even in the face ofimpending death. His father did not divulge his mission, but manycommentators state that Isaac must have known. Isaac’s gevurah was aspowerful as his father’s chesed and love for God. Still, Isaac paid a price forthis act of devotion. A midrash*10 says that Isaac became blind in lateryears because the angels cried, and their tears fell into his eyes when he wasbrought up as a sacrifice.Though gevurah may seem to be a less attractive quality than kindness,it’s sometimes more valuable. For one thing, gevurah often has morestaying power than chesed. A midrash tells us that Abraham had manyfollowers who converted to his belief in one God, but as soon as he died,they reverted to idol worship. Isaac influenced fewer people, but they wereable to integrate his teachings into their lives and continue the tradition ofmonotheism.As writers, gevurah is crucial because it provides you with the ability toconcentrate, to pay attention and move slowly and deliberately, to focus andlinger if necessary. It is the ability to spotlight what is significant and deletethe extraneous and to know the difference between the two. You are able torestrain yourself in order to achieve coherence. What you leave out in yourwork is as important as what you keep in. “Writing is not the main thing,but erasing,” says Rev. Menachem Mendel Morgensztern of Kotzk, Poland,better known as the Kotzker Rabbi, who lived in the early nineteenthcentury. Michelangelo said that sculpture was cutting away until the essencewas revealed. Gevurah, finding the boundaries of our work, brings us to theessential heart and power of our stories. We return to our text and craft it todeepen its focus and power.Yet sometimes we can cut too much and lose the heart and power of thestory. We may impose structure too early. We edit too quickly. We censor,criticize, and condemn before the words are out. It’s important to allowourselves to write our ways to the heart of our pieces, the central metaphorsand images that appear as we free our imaginations. At the same time, it’snecessary to delete and cut to advance your narrative: As writer BillKittredge reportedly stated: “Readers do not want to put their foot on thesame step twice.”Gevurah is also the ability to focus on a smaller slice of narrative. In herbook Bird by Bird, about the art of writing, Anne Lamott suggests cuttingout a one-inch window in a piece of paper so that the writer can practicelooking at something very closely, magnifying it. Less can be more.Boundaries and limits shape texts so that they are penetrable,accessible.Think of cutting back the bushes in your front yard so that the path to thefront door is clear. You can’t let weeds overwhelm the flowers. Yet, anessay also needs weeds, lavish overgrowth, vegetation that just sprouts—writing that appears almost magically from the subconscious. Asanthropologist Mary Douglas writes about a garden (from Purity andDanger): “If all of the weeds are removed, the garden is impoverished.”On the other hand, some weeding leads to greater growth. The rightamount of trimming allows us to tame chaos and create a sense of order,coherence, and beauty.In this chapter, we’ll look at how boundaries and limits are essential toboth narrative and sentence structure. We’ll also discuss the need to devoteourselves to our work, to take our writing lives seriously.Focusing on Narrative StructureEvery plot structure requires shaping our text in order to achieve a narrativedesign. While these designs are more commonly associated with fiction,studying different narrative structures can help essayists think about themost effective ways to order and arrange events in our writing.The most obvious narrative structure is chronological. It’s the way welive, after all. But that doesn’t mean that you always have to start in thebeginning and close at the end. Memoir and story are not autobiography. Inother words, you don’t just record what happened to you, day after day, yearafter year. (Although writer Joe Gould did just that.) As Sven Birkertsremarks in The Art of Time in Memoir, there is no better way to smother amemoir than to rely on chronology:The point is story, not chronology, and in memoir the story all butrequires the dramatic ordering that hindsight affords. The question isnot what happened when, but what for the writer, was the path ofrealization, and it is the highlighting of this that overturns thetyranny of the linear and allows the subtle or obviousimplementation of the after the fact perspective.“The tyranny of the linear.” What a beautiful phrase. Writing allows usto escape the oppression of chronology. When you ask somebody how hisday was and he answers by recounting the events hour by hour, it can betrying (unless it’s your teenage son, in which case you’re thrilled that he’sspeaking to you!). Birkerts says, “Memoir begins not with event but withthe intuition of meaning—with the mysterious fact that life can sometimesstep free from the chaos of contingency and become story.” Instead ofviewing life as a chronological series of chance events, the memoirist seeksthe pattern of story.Thus, text is often liberated from the constraints of chronology. AsFrench-Swiss director and screenwriter Jean-Luc Godard says: “There is abeginning, middle, and end . . . but not in that order.” For example, HaroldPinter employs reverse chronology in his play “The Betrayal.” The firstscene takes place after the events of betrayal. The play then movesbackward in time, toward the beginning of the characters’ indiscretions.One plot structure mimics the movement of the letter e. A story jumpsinto action, often beginning from the middle of the story (not the end as inPinter’s play). Next the writer circles back to give us background and thenjumps forward, continuing on from where the author started toward theultimate resolution. For example, John McPhee explains in an article for theNew Yorker that he wrote “Travels in Georgia” in the shape of an e. “Thestory would work best, I thought, if I started not on Day 1 but with a laterscene involving a policeman and a snapping turtle. So the piece flashedback to its beginnings and then ran forward and eventually past the turtleand on through the remaining occurrences.”Similarly, in Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott states that one can think of plotas A, B, D, C, E. In this model, A is action, B is background, D isdevelopment, C is climax, and E is ending.Again, we begin in the middle of an experience or action withoutunderstanding how the characters came to be there. Then the writer fills inthe necessary background. By starting in the middle of the story whenthings are happening, the author hooks the reader, keeping her interestedand perhaps a little puzzled. Once the reader is involved in the action, she ismore likely to have the patience to plod through the back story, which maybe less compelling. Next, the characters and theme are fleshed out anddeveloped. Tension builds until a climax, often one main dramatic event,which brings us to a resolution or ending.You may choose to delete the first paragraph or the first chapter orchapters of your writing to find the more exciting, potent action. Our firstparagraphs are sometimes a kind of throat clearing needed to find theenergy of the narrative.More on the Narrative ArcSome say there are only two main plot lines: a mysterious stranger arrivesin town or a person leaves home—an arrival or a departure. Yet these arereally the same because both entail giving up the familiar. Both can be seenas quests that usually employ a narrative arc, a rising motion with tensionalong the way that is ultimately released: the stranger finds herself acceptedin the new town or feels alienated and leaves. A narrative arc typicallyrefers to fiction, but it’s also useful to consider when writing memoir. Tocreate an arc for memoir, think of maintaining tension by opposing desirewith obstacles. Each time the narrator (or protagonist in a story) satisfies adesire, another obstacle is introduced that keeps the motion of the storyrising. You can think of the development as opposing positive and negativecharges: as in an atom, the tension bonds the elements together.As one thread of the story advances, a competing need demandsattention. Just when the narrator has almost accomplished his desire,something comes to interrupt its fulfillment. Finally, when the narratorfigures out how to overcome the last obstacle, there is a moment ofresolution. In essay writing the resolution may be the narrator’s hardwoninsight.Some magicians also perform their art by utilizing an arc, which, ofcourse, has a different meaning on the stage. Magician and professionalpickpocket entertainer Apollo Robbins says: “The eye will follow an objectmoving in an arc without looking back to its point of origin, but when anobject is moving in a straight line, the eye tends to return to the point oforigin, the viewer’s attention snapping back as if it were a rubber band”(Adam Green, “A Pickpocket’s Tale”). In other words, if there are no hillsand valleys, if everything is flat, you will lose your audience’s attention.There has to be change. When the narrator faces a series of compellingobstacles, the reader stays engaged: there is tension, narrative momentum—and, maybe, even magic.It’s also possible to think of story as a series of problems and evenfailures. Writer Benjamin Percy says that we can direct our stories toward aworst-case scenario: the thing we most fear. He calls this the rock-bottommoment, the dark night of the soul, when your character is ready to give up.He offers the example of a couple who long for a child, finally adopt a nine-year-old boy, and then find he was abused and undernourished and behaveslike a nightmare. How the parents cope with this painful relationship is thecentral arc of the story.Even a simple arc can maintain an audience’s interest. A few years ago,when I was speaking about one of my books in Melbourne, Australia, myhusband and I viewed a video in the Melbourne Metropolitan Museum ofArt with only one real character, a watermelon, but plenty of drama. Twohands on both sides of the watermelon kept adding rubber bands around itscircumference. Only two people’s hands were shown. Slowly thewatermelon began to take on an hourglass form. The video was surprisinglycompelling because there was tension: When would the watermelon finallyburst open? Many people gathered watching the video for over a half houruntil the watermelon exploded with ripe pink chunks and juice over thefloor. It seemed like a surprise even though we all know what’s inside awatermelon. Yet the video prodded us to look at a watermelon as if we hadnever seen one before.Writer Sven Birkerts offers another model for narrative structure—problem, escalation, eruption, and consequence. In the watermelon videothere was a literal eruption. As Birkerts says, in discussing drama, “themain tensions have been discharged and the reader feels that a passage hasbeen fully undergone.” The reader feels that she has completed a journey.Different Essay StructuresThe Flash Nonfiction EssayThe flash essay may have a traditional narrative structure, but whatdistinguishes it is its length—usually under 750 words—and its urgency andenergy. The flash relies on concision and compression; it’s tightly focused.Because it’s so short, you don’t have much time to introduce yourself oryour topic; it’s more like a quick run than a leisurely walk. Writer DintyMoore says that the flash essay begins in heat, “some burning urgency”(“Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction”). Barrie Jean Borich says thatthe narrator is searching for the “flash,” a decisive moment, a place wherethe essay rises from narrative into something surprising like an image. Youcan also experiment with a more associative narrative structure. In addition,the flash is an excellent place to work with material that you had to deletefrom previous work.Structures without Narrative ArcsThere are a variety of structures that don’t rely on a plot but still have theirown logic, their own limits and boundaries.Episodic StructureRather than a traditional plot structure, the author can narrate vignettes withless attention to chronological order. In Safekeeping Abigail Thomas saysthis about the story of her husband’s death: “It came in bits and pieces and itneeded to be in bits and pieces. My life has no narrative flow, no arc, myremembered life seemed to consist of moments big and small, and it’s inthese moments that I began to find some truths.”This structure is liberating because there is no need to stick tochronology or to provide transitions. The structure may proceed like an outof order slide show, but if each image is compelling, the reader will stickwith you. A central motif and repeating characters create coherence.The Lyric EssayThe lyric essay is even more fragmented than an episodic structure andreads more like a poem. Logical connections are left to the reader. Oftenthere is no resolution. A lyric essay may be composed of scraps of memoryor experience or research or lists or recipes or directions and includemultiple voices and points of view. “As a work gets more autobiographical,more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks intofragments. Our lives aren’t prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore,by its very nature, reality-based art—underprocessed, underproduced—splinters and explodes” (David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto).Thus, the lyric essay may have no final point or theme, other than the waythe shards and fragments cohere or contradict each other. Yet it can also beplayful, inviting the reader to speculate, reading into the gaps. You maywant to separate the sections with spaces and asterisks.The Braided EssayThe braided essay, a form of lyric essay, weaves two or three elementstogether, so that the strands join and repeat and part and intersect again, likea braid or a strand of DNA. Brenda Miller’s braided essay, “A BraidedHeart: Shaping the Lyric Essay,” has three main strands: a definition of lyricand braided essays, a narrative about the process of braiding challah, and astory about French braids, as well as some looser wisps about art andmassage. There is a pleasing sense of repetition and departure.The CollageThe collage structure may feel liberating because you don’t have to worryhow the parts of your writing are going to fit together. You can write amemoir in small manageable chapters, and then piece them together like acrazy quilt. This structure is useful when you really don’t know what it isyou want to say, and you don’t know what your central motif is. Thefragments of your experience become pieces that can then be arranged tofind pattern. Juxtaposition, the relationships between the pieces, help youclarify meaning. Titles and subtitles also provide coherence. For example,the title “My Children Explain the Big Issues” allows the reader to piecetogether the vignettes in Will Baker’s essay, which otherwise would seemlike disconnected random thinking. Without the title the reader wouldstruggle to understand the connection between sections.Other StructuresContrastDeveloping an essay can be compared to interior design—which sometimesuses a focal point, repetition, and contrast in a room. To create a pleasingdesign, a center is needed to draw the eye, which establishes a motif (acolor or shape) that is then repeated. But there also needs to be opposition,contrast.Think of constructing an essay based on a contrast—the differencebetween living in two cities or the contrast between illness and health, forexample. In the essay “Joy,” Zadie Smith builds her essay by distinguishingjoy from pleasure. She tells the reader that she prefers pleasure: she takesindiscriminate pleasure in food, feels pleasure in looking at other people’sfaces, and then startles us with her insight about joy, the way it colludeswith terror because the things that bring us the most joy are also those thatcan be lost to us—our friends, our children, our spouses.The SwerveYour essay can also bounce between two topics. For example, I’m writing amemoir now about becoming Israeli, and in between the chapters of mymetamorphosis, I give recipes that break up the narrative. You can alsoinsert lists or menus or an email to create a more playful tone, as well as amore interesting and complex rhythm and tempo.Writing Exercise: A SwerveStart by writing about something interesting that happened to youtoday, and then make a list of what you didn’t accomplish or whatyou ate for lunch, or what you looked at online—to break up thenarrative. Be playful. Consider how the list can enhance the meaningof the essay.ImagesAs we saw earlier, images can also provide structure for an essay. The lastessay that psychiatrist Dr. Oliver Sacks published was called “Filter Fish,” astory about gefilte fish, how his mother made it for him as a young childwith its viscous gel, and then how, as an adult, he asked his non-Jewishhousekeeper to make it for him. When he was dying, he ordered the gentle-tasting gefilte fish from Zabar’s. He wrote that gefilte fish would usher himout of life as it had ushered him in. Gefilte fish improbably provides aframe for his life.Julie Taymor, the movie and theater director, says that she uses a centralimage to organize all of her productions. In The Lion King, for example, sheemployed “the circle of life” as an ongoing theme. Primo Levi, an Italianchemist who was imprisoned in Auschwitz-Birkenau, wrote The PeriodicTable and chose chemical elements as the focus of stories. For example,vanadium, a chemical used in making paint, is the title of a chapter about anunexpected epistolary exchange where Levi slowly understands that theman he is corresponding with is, in fact, the Nazi who oversaw him whileLevi was imprisoned, a chemist in a German war factory during theHolocaust.M. F. K. Fisher structured her book according to the alphabet (AnAlphabet for Gourmets). Anne Morrow Lindbergh structured Gift from theSea according to the shapes and thematic associations of different shells.There’s a book whose chapters are based on different sewing techniques,and one structured according to the names of the twentysix Bikram yogaposes. Judy Gold, a comedian who wrote My Life as a Sit-Com, an Off-Broadway show, tells her story onstage throughsometimes fleetingtruths that the divine sends to each of us, our stories.Rabbi Pinchas, a pious man who lived in Lod, Palestine, in the secondcentury, said, “A man’s soul will teach him. There is no man who is notconstantly being taught by his soul.” One of Rabbi Pinchas’s disciplesasked: “If this is so, why don’t men obey their souls?” Rabbi Pinchasexplained, “The soul teaches constantly. But it never repeats” (MartinBuber, Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters).Writing allows us to respect and remember those moments. That whichis truly ours cannot be duplicated by another person, but it can be lost to usif we don’t receive it and express and transform it by telling our stories. Theword sefira (channel) is related to the Hebrew word lesaper, which means“to tell a story.” Each of us has a unique, valuable story to contribute to thelarger story of being. Writing becomes a pilgrimage to discover the sacredstories given to us: singular gifts of imagination that only we can reveal tothe world through our writing, shining sparks of divinity, ideas and imagesand insights. Divine inspiration.A Summary of the SefirotThe first sefirot we will examine are will, inspiration, and comprehension.Almost every piece of writing is based on will: the writer’s need to expressor question or understand something pushes her to the written word. Nextwe allow for inspiration, both the small and large gifts we receive from theworld as well as moments of frustration and anger that motivate us toexpress ourselves. We struggle for comprehension: What is it we are tryingto say? What is being revealed to us through patterns and images thatrepeat, intersect, and transform themselves? We contemplate and imagine.We question, reflect, and engage with our text.The next seven spheres, known as the more emotional ones, arekindness, boundaries, harmony, endurance, surrender, creativity, andrulership.Kindness means that we honor our inner voices, give free rein to ourexpression, overflow with words, write without self-consciousness aboutwhat we love and hate, explore our passions and interests. But the need forboundaries enables us to contract—to pare down and edit in order to focusso that we can discover harmony: moments of insight.Writing requires both endurance—perseverance and patience—as wellas the ability and time to surrender to what the material wants to tell youbecause your writing will speak to you; your writing will tell you what youneed to know. Close attention to your text will allow you to generate newmaterial and insights. Even when you are not writing, your mind is inmotion, sometimes in a dreamlike generative state. Your creativity becomesheightened.You can think of rulership as a way of governing your material,realizing your own unique voice in this world, your own vision andauthority. Rabbi Kook, the first rabbi of the state of Israel, says that “tobelieve in God is to believe that one’s soul and character are God-given andmust come to self-realization not only for one’s own sake, but also for thatof humanity and of God himself” (Yehudah Mirsky, Rav Kook: Mystic in aTime of Revolution). Telling one’s story becomes an essential part of thespiritual evolution of the world.Each sefira has its own character, but the sefirot also blend with oneanother, are tempered by one another, and arrive as mixtures. In fact, everysefira contains all of the others, and in most situations, we express acombination of the sefirot. For example, we accompany kindness withboundaries and limits because unbounded kindness can be destructive.Think of a parent who always gives to a child without saying no, and howthat child will be damaged. For the sake of simplicity, I present each sefiraas distinct but know that they are woven together in our world.In this book we will examine the sefirot in terms of both form andcontent. For example, how does the form of the essay embody generosity, acharacteristic of the sefira of kindness? What does generosity mean to you?What does it mean to you to set boundaries? What is the role ofperseverance in your writing life? How have you learned to surrender?This book focuses on memoir and essay writing because I am primarilya memoir writer. My first book, The Blessing of a Broken Heart, chronicledmy struggles in dealing with the murder of my son Koby and won aNational Jewish Book Award.Writing is a process of thinking—it’s how we know what we know—and this book is for anybody who wants to think about his or her writing, toimprove it, to keep working on it, and to see it as a necessary spiritualmission. It’s not surprising that the word sefira is also connected to sapir,the Hebrew word for “sapphire.” Think of your stories as precious gemswaiting to be mined, polished, and offered to the world. Use the techniquesand exercises in this book to create a writing practice for yourself so thatyou can appreciate the richness of your life, retrieve its divine beauty, andshare your unique wisdom.WRITING EXERCISE: A WISH AND APRAYERWrite a prayer or wish for yourself. You might want to keep this nearyour writing desk. What are your intentions, hopes, and dreams foryourself as a writer?1WILLKeterTHE SEFIRA KETER, WHICH LITERALLY MEANS “CROWN,” is the sphere that isclosest to God and most distant from us. God’s presence and power loomabove us, but the meaning and mechanism of divine will are impossible forus to fathom. The world that God created is so majestic and complicated—simple and complex, imminent and transcendent—that it defies ourcomprehension. The big questions— what happens after death and beforebirth, the meaning of the soul, nature, and stars and galaxies, how the brainworks, why there is a world at all—are simply beyond our grasp. As I writethis the world is in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, which demonstratesour lack of control in this world. With all of our advances in science andtechnology, we are still at the mercy of forces we cannot always understand.Will, however, reminds us that, no matter what, we are actors in theworld who can choose the way we want to live. Even during the horrors ofthe Holocaust, there were those who refused to relinquish their personalpower. Many helped friends or relatives in the concentration camps withthem, sharing their meager rations, choosing to be as human as possibleunder horrifying conditions. Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the most recentLubavitcher rabbi who died in Brooklyn in 1994 and is still revered by hisfollowers, said, “A person is where his will is.” According to commentaryin the Bible, wherever it says “and it came to pass” is a sign of impendingtragedy because the characters are passive (Megillah 10B).*3 Activity, onthe other hand, is the defeat of tragedy: wherever the Bible says “and therewill be,” is a sign of impending joy (Bamidbar Rabbah 13).†4If the narrator in our essays and memoirs ardently wants and desires, heis more inclined to be an actor in the story, to take an engaged role ratherthan be a passive victim who is buffeted and defeated by experience. In thisway, the narrator becomes heroic, even if his heroism consists of thehonesty with which he interprets the events in his life. When the narratordesires truth and refuses to be battered by events, the reader is more likelyto stay interested in the narrator’s struggles.In this chapter we’ll try to understand how will propels us to composeour lives in writing. We’ll also look at an array of obstacles that prevent usfrom expressing our will in this world.DesireDesire is the hidden engine of will. We feel hungry and desire to eat, so weharness our will to make a meal. We desire to help a friend, so we engageour will and drive to his house and lend him our car. We love language andlong to create, to express our being in the world. So we marshal our willand write.It’s important to understand your desire to write. What drives you towrite?revisiting sit-coms, boththose she watched as a child and those she later, as an adult, created andpitched to TV executives.In all of these the writer is bound by structure, which entails boundaries,gevurah. But these unusual structures also are a form of chesed, kindness,because they give us something to push against, and free us to to be moreimaginative, playful, and original.WRITING EXERCISES: DIFFERENTSTRUCTURESTake an essay you’ve already written and change the structure.For example, if it’s a narrative, try to start at a different place inthe story and work backward until you arrive at the originalopening. Continue from there.Nora and Delia Ephron explored their lives through the outfitsthey wore in the play Life, Loss, and What I Wore (adapted froma book by Ilene Beckerman). Write an essay about three outfits,or three meals, or three songs. Let each item suggest a storyand see how they work together and complement each other.You can include a song, an outfit, and a meal in each section.Write a story where you invent a structure, one developedaccording to your own original design. One of my students usedthe different cars she has driven during her life as an organizingprinciple, beginning with a VW van in the 1960s.Write an essay where you talk about yourself through differentparts of the body. (See Phillip Lopate’s essay “Portrait of MyBody” with its marvelous opening line: “I am a man who tilts.”)Write a flash essay with discards from previous work.LanguageGevurah teaches us to pare each sentence down to its essentials so thelanguage is most powerful, without excess verbiage. As writers we askourselves: Is this word necessary? Is it the right word? The best word? Dowe create a rhythm in our prose? On the other hand, do we allow expansivedigression when it’s interesting and alive?Also there are tips to make sentences more beautiful. Use muscularverbs and get rid of the verb to be. The punch or emphasis of the sentenceshould come at the end where the sentence culminates. Rid yourself of thepassive tense, except where it’s needed. Think about letting your maincharacter act, not merely be acted upon.Use adjectives sparingly or in an interesting way. For example, here isNora Ephron in “Serial Monogamy”: “It [The Gourmet Cookbook] had beenassembled by the editors of Gourmet and was punctuated by the splendid,reverent, slightly lugubrious photographs of food that the magazine wasfamous for.” Notice how the adjective lugubrious surprises us and also addsan edge, in contrast with the positive adjectives that come before it.Furthermore, your sentences should not be monotonous. (The wordmonotonous is monotonous, isn’t it? A form of onomatopoeia.) Don’t makeyour sentences all the same length either. There now. Better. My sentencesaren’t all the same length, are they? Use short sentences to create emphasis.Today.Sometimes—when it feels right—interrupt your sentences. Don’t pareeverything down. The rising points of the action, the most interesting andimportant parts of your story or commentaries, should be emphasized andwell developed, fleshed out with enough language to call attention to them.Finding Time to WriteIt’s not easy to apply limits and boundaries to our lives. To say no to socialobligations, to consecrate time to our writing practice. But the spirit ofgevurah teaches us to be resolute. If we want to write, we create a structure,a discipline, to dedicate our time, focus, and energy toward writing.Yet there is a danger in gevurah—relying too much on structure,discipline, and limits. We also need to invite play and spontaneity and funinto our work—and into our lives. Julia Cameron advises us to have aplaydate each week to bring more creativity into our lives, to nourish ourspirit and intellect. And sometimes it’s more important to have fun than tostick to your schedule. I will usually give up my writing time to play withmy grandchildren.Fear and AweThe inner emotion associated with gevurah is fear. We fear that our writingis not powerful enough, that nobody will listen to us or care. That we arewasting our time. We fear that we are not living up to our own or other’sexpectations. We fear what others will say about us.Give yourself permission to feel whatever it is you feel. It’s OK to beafraid of writing, of exposing your interior life and sharing your truth.You’re not alone. Why do you think people spend so much timephotographing their meals on Instagram? We’re much less vulnerablesharing a meal than we are sharing our souls.We’re all afraid of something. Just make sure to write about it.WRITING EXERCISE: LIMITS ANDFEARSWrite about saying no, about limits. When were you able to sayno and feel good about it? Do you feel guilty about saying no?What role does discipline play in your life?Write about a time when you were afraid, mortally afraid. Tell ushow you coped or didn’t cope. Scream to the world your anxietyand your fear.Write about an enemy that you fear. Who or what in your life doyou struggle with?6HARMONYTiferetTIFERET IS THE COMBINATION OF GEVURAH AND CHESED, kindness andboundaries: harmony. Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan tells us that tiferet is associatedwith the third day when God separated the sea and the dry land: “The thirdday set boundaries: not all sea, not all dry land, but a balance between thetwo.” Tiferet, located in the heart, is the sefira of balance and harmony.Rabbi Elie Munk, a Torah scholar and businessman born in Paris in1900, describes harmony as life’s most basic goal. He states that perfectionis static because if a person were to reach perfection, there would benothing else to attain. Harmony, on the other hand, is ongoing. “It is ourpurpose to harmonize the threads of being: talents, thoughts, actions, andemotions, so that a person will be in harmony with God’s creation.”Harmony doesn’t mean that we are in stasis. Rather it’s a temporaryhard-earned balance. It’s telling that Jacob, the biblical figure associatedwith harmony, struggled with adversity all of his life. He fought with hisbrother Esav over his birthright, fled his home, was denied Rachel, thewoman he wanted to marry, and tricked into marrying her sister, Leah.When he was old and longed for peace and quiet and harmony, his favoriteson Yosef disappeared. His other sons had sold Yosef into slavery.Thus, tiferet, harmony, is not a stopping point but rather an ongoingrecalibration of the balance between kindness and limits, abundance andboundaries.An old joke: A Buddhist asked a hotdog vendor for a hotdog. “Make meone with everything.” We rarely feel one with everything. Writing stemsfrom disharmony and the desire to redress it. For example, the bestsellingbook The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is the storyof Henrietta’s family’s need to correct an injustice from the past to establisha new sense of balance and harmony in their lives. When Henrietta washospitalized with cancer in the 1940s, cancer cells from her body wereextracted and cultured to be used for research without permission or profitfor the family. (Cancer cells keep growing.) While the family stillexperiences a strong sense of violation, some family members do come torealize that though they will never own their mother’s cells, those cells havebenefited the world.In this chapter we’ll examine some facets of harmony—the need,sometimes, for disharmony or discordance; harmony with our audience;metaphor as a type of harmony; and the music of language.A few months ago my husband and I drove to a conference where I wouldbe speaking about my book The Road to Resilience: From Chaos toCelebration. On the way to Eilat, my husband missed a stop sign and waspulled over for a ticket, even though he had slowed down and yielded. I wasfurious with the cops because they were parked there waiting for people tomiss the stop sign, which was very hard to see and was at the end of aroadwith a high speed limit. The odds were stacked against anyone actuallyseeing that sign.We got out of the car, and I felt even more angry because we werepaying a lot of money to attend the conference and I didn’t want to add ahuge fine to that sum. I tried to talk my way out of a ticket. I have to admitthat I did not feel very resilient when the policeman wouldn’t listen to me.Then the police stopped another car behind us, filled with a group ofreligious men all dressed in black coats and hats. They were Breslovers,followers of Rebbe Nachman who lived in the late eighteenth century inUkraine. They all got out of the car, and one immediately began to twirlaround, dancing and singing a tune, a nigun. I asked one of them: “How canyou be so happy? You’re going to get a big ticket.” He answered: “You’llsee when you get up to heaven. This money, you don’t have to worry about.It’s tzedekah [charity] for the state of Israel. You don’t have to be upsetabout it.”I laughed. Sometimes life and writing offer the opportunity forreframing experience or, in more academic terms, cognitive restructuring, aparadigm shift—finding a moment of harmony and balance where noneseems to exist.Language can also be thought of in terms of harmony and balance. Intelling our stories we struggle to find the appropriate language, words thatare in harmony with the experience we are describing. Yet sometimes itmakes more sense to shun that harmony. Aharon Appelfeld, an only childfrom Bukovina, lived a charmed life with his well-to-do parents before theSecond World War. But his innocent life was shattered when he was ingrade school: his mother was murdered by soldiers and he was imprisonedin a concentration camp in Transnistria. A young boy, he fled from therealone and survived in the forests and by living with peasants. Here’s whathe has to say about words (from The Story of a Life):I’ve carried with me my mistrust of words from those years. Afluent stream of words awakens suspicion within me. I preferstuttering, for in stuttering I hear the friction and the disquiet, theeffort to purge impurities from the words, the desire to offersomething from inside you. Smooth, fluent sentences leave me witha feeling of uncleanness, of order that hides emptiness.Stuttering, in this case, is more appropriate than fluency. Sometimes themore easily that language comes to us, the more it covers up ourvulnerability. When my Hebrew was much weaker, I worked in the hospitalon the cancer ward as a pastoral counselor, and some of my most profoundexperiences occurred because I couldn’t speak fluently. I was there to listenand to be a humble presence. I couldn’t resort to any usual response. Nordid I offer any words about my own situation. My silence allowed me to“read” and focus on the patient.TruthTiferet also means truth. It’s interesting, though, that the biblical characterJacob, known as the man of truth, was both deceitful and also the victim ofdeceit. Jacob lied to his father, Issac, to attain the birthright that wassupposed to be his brother Esav’s. Later Jacob’s father-in-law, Laban, liedto Jacob, giving him Leah for his wife instead of his love, Rachel. Truthseems like it should be simple, yet it seldom is.Before creating Adam, God said, “Let us make man” in the plural. Thecommentary in the Midrash tells us that God consulted with the angels. Theangels were divided into different groups. Love said, “Let him be created,and he will do loving deeds.” But Truth said, “Let him not be createdbecause he will be all deceit.” Righteousness said, “Let him be createdbecause he will do righteous deeds.” Peace said, “Let him not be createdbecause he will be all quarrelsome and discord.”What did God do? He seized hold of Truth, and “he cast truth to theground” (Daniel 8:12). “Then the angels said to God, ‘Why do you despiseyour Angel of Truth? Let Truth rise out of the earth, as it is said, ‘Truthsprings out of the earth’” (Genesis Rabbah 8:5).This story demonstrates that our ability to know the truth is limited andpartial. Each of us holds a fragment of fractured truth. That is why it is soimportant that we tell and share our stories because only then can a largertruth be illuminated.Thus, every narrative is a portion of the truth. Ask siblings the story oftheir childhood, and everyone has different parents. Similarly, when you tella story, it’s from your own angle (I almost wrote angel— interesting) ofperspective. Certain details have to be omitted to emphasize the thrust ortheme of the story. The writer is like a pilot who has to make sure that thenarrative as craft is launched and carried on the path it establishes for itselfso that it lands in one piece. Otherwise, the craft may not lift off the groundor it may be bound for nowhere. To do so, the writer has to heighten certainaspects of the story and diminish others.WRITING EXERCISE: ONE TRUETHINGMy teacher, novelist William Giraldi, asked his students to write onetrue sentence about their fathers. That one true sentence can formthe kernel of an essay.Harmony and EnlargementHarmony can also be thought of as the writer’s ability to situate the story interms of a larger context, to connect with a wider world. The self swingsbetween the narrow confines of the personal life and the greaterspaciousness and expansiveness of the world at large.For example, you may choose to let the news of the day or thelandscape outside your home reverberate with the more personal text ofyour story. A few years ago in Israel, there was an emergency preparednessexercise in case of an earthquake. Everybody was supposed to receive amessage on their cell phone at 11 a.m. telling them to go outside to practicefor an emergency. (I’m still not sure what that entailed.) This event wasjuxtaposed with the fact that my daughter had left for her first day ofcollege. Though my daughter’s departure was not an emergency, theseparation was also a small—maybe not so small—earthquake in my lifefor which I was not entirely prepared. The juxtaposition provided an echoof similarity: the external world offered a psychological symbol for aninternal emotional state.In this excerpt from the novel The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez,the narrator situates the characters in a very particular context: the historicalmoment shapes the characters’ attitudes, fate, and destiny:It was the year of Tet, the year of the highest number of casualties inVietnam. It was the year of the Prague Spring, the year of theassassinations of Robert Kennedy and Dr. King, the year theDemocratic National Convention turned bloody (it was also the yearof My Lai, but we were not yet aware of it).James Baldwin begins his essay “Notes of a Native Son” by situatinghis family story in the drama of a larger historical moment:On the twenty-ninth of July, in 1943, my father died. On the sameday, a few hours later, his last child was born. Over a month beforethis, while all our energies were concentrated in waiting for theseevents, there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots ofthe century. A few hours after my father’s funeral, while he lay instate in the undertaker’s chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. Onthe morning of the third of August, we drove my father to thegraveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass.Baldwin later interprets the political violence that accompanies thedeath of his father as a personal message, viewing the events as “acorrective for the pride of his eldest son. I had declined to believe in thatapocalypse which had been central to my father’s vision; very well, lifeseemed to be saying, here is something that will certainly pass for anapocalypse until the real thing comes along.”The personal and the political are interwoven and dramatically resonate.A more lighthearted example: In “Serial Monogomy” Nora Ephroncomments on her personal experience by juxtaposing seemingly unrelatedevents: “Just before I moved to New York, two historic events hadoccurred: the birth-control pill was invented and the first Julia Childcookbook was published.” Notice how those events coalesce in her nextsentence: “As a result, everyone was having sex, and when the sex was overyou cooked something.”WRITING EXERCISE: YOURPERSONAL HISTORYResearch what happened on the day or month or year that you wereborn. Begin an essay with that information and then explore how thatevent has paralleled or contrasted with your own personal history insome way.Metaphor and Simile as HarmonyMetaphor and simile are ways of connecting two seemingly disconnectedthings and revealing a surprising harmony. Simile uses like or as: My loveis like a red, red rose. Metaphor leaves out the connecting like or as andmakes a direct link: All the world’s a stage. Two disparate objects havesomething startling in common and can be understood in terms of oneanother.Poet Mark Doty calls metaphor “an unexpected collision.” JamesDickey goes even further:The deliberate conjunction of disparate items which we callmetaphor is not so much a way of understanding the world but aperpetually exciting way of recreating it from its own parts, asthough God—who admittedly did it right the first time—had by nomeans exhausted the possibilities. It is a way of causing the items ofthe real world to act upon each other, to recombine, to suffer andlearn from the mysterious value systems, or value-making systems,of the individual, both in his socially conditioned and in his inmost,wild, and untutored mind. It is a way of putting the world togetheraccording to rules which one never fully understands, but which areas powerfully compelling as anything in the whole human makeup.A way of creating and reinventing the world, recognizing onenesswhere it doesn’t seem to exist. Things that seem disparate have somethingin common, a unity. For example, in The City in the Sea, Edgar Allan Poecompares a sea to a wilderness of glass.In Paris to the Moon, Adam Gopnik creates a more prosaic simile, thesimilarities between French bureaucracy and an exercise machine.Every French ministry is like a Nautilus machine, thoughtfullydesigned to provide maximum possible resistance to your efforts,only to give way just at the moment of total mental failure. Parisiansemerge from the government buildings on the Isle de la Cite feelingjust the way New Yorkers do after a good workout: aching andexhausted but on top of the world.Paris sounds a lot like Israel.Victor Lodato begins his story “Jack, July” with this powerfulmetaphor: “The sun was a wolf. The fanged light had been trailing him forhours, tricky with clouds.” Lodato’s crisp metaphor—the sun as a wolf—isoriginal and stunning.Here are two examples of similes that express surprising connections:“My return to Naples was like having a defective umbrella thatsuddenly closes over your head in a gust of wind.” (Elena Ferrante,The Story of a New Name, Neapolitan Quartet)“The interesting ones are like islands,” he said. “You don’t bump intothem on the street or at a party. You have to know where they are andthen go to them by arrangement.” (Rachel Cusk, Outline)Writer Bret Anthony Johnston suggests formulating similes and metaphorsby combining different senses: sight, vision, hearing, touch, or taste. Thistechnique is called synesthesia, a merging of senses where, for example,somebody visualizes colors when they hear music. Hearing and visionbecame one. Another example: when the Jewish people were given theTorah at Mount Sinai, they saw the voice of God.When constructing metaphors and similes, we can merge two or moresenses to make interesting comparisons. Johnson gives an example of thissynthesis of senses from Amy Bloom’s story “Silver Water”:My sister’s voice was like mountain water in a silver pitcher, theclear blue beauty of it cools you and lifts you up beyond your heat,beyond your body.Instead of making a comparison that links two auditory images, Bloomlinks sound (her sister’s voice) with vision (water in a silver pitcher) andtouch (cools you).In her poem “The Fish,” Elizabeth Bishop describes the fish’s bulk notonly in terms of weight but also of sound:He hung a grunting weightHere’s my own example, which links the auditory and the visual:When the congregation murmured the final prayer of Yom Kippur,Neila, it was as if a flock of storks suddenly lifted off from darkconcrete, whirled into the air, and flew off, flapping their enormouswings, forming a point or, more accurately, a mathematical symbol,the one that means greater than or less than, depending on yourpoint of view.WRITING EXERCISE: MAKINGMETAPHORS AND SIMILESWrite a metaphor or simile by merging two senses. Complete thesesentences:The sound of the children’s laughter on the swings [waslike/was] . . .The smell of the stew on the stove [was like/was] . . .The singing on Friday night [was like/was] . . .Reading a bedtime story to my children [is like/is] . . .The knife was as sharp as . . .The mountains were lit by an orange light as if . . .Dialogue as a Mode of DiscordOf course, drama requires conflict. Sometimes, though, conflict is not stateddirectly, only alluded to. Whole stories are written with the real subject insubtext because what needs to be expressed is too dangerous to voice outloud. Talking about the taboo subject will upset the status quo that has beencreated, the apparent harmony. Think of how many families avoid certainsubjects—secrets, hurtful topics, the names of dead loved ones, anythingthat causes pain or longing.“Hills Like White Elephants,” Hemingway’s story of a couplediscussing an abortion, is told almost all in dialogue: the man and womanhave a conversation at a café in a train station without mentioning theproblem they’re struggling with. The emotions are understated, written incode. The abortion is the elephant in the room—the unstated issue thatlooms over everything, like the hills in the distance.Dialogue, of course, is often used to describe overt conflict as well as toreveal character. Consider this passage from Jazz by Toni Morrison:“I need my breath now.” Violet tests the hot comb. It scorches along brown finger on the newspaper.“Did he move out? Is he with her?”“No. We still together. She’s dead.”“Dead? Then what’s the matter with you?”“He thinks about her all the time. Nothing on his mind but her.Won’t work. Can’t sleep. Grieves all day, all night . . .”“Oh,” says the woman “You in trouble,” she says, yawning.“Deep deep trouble. Can’t rival the dead for love. Lose every time.”That beautiful passage portrays the discord and conflict in the relationship,how the dead can be perfect, while the living are so flawed.Dialogue can also reveal the hurtful way that people don’t listen to oneanother, even when one is speaking about something close to his heart. InChekhov’s short story “The Lady with the Dog,” the protagonist, DmitriGurov, tells his fellow card player about his deep fascination with thewoman he met in Yalta. The acquaintance replies, “You were right thisevening: the sturgeon was a bit too strong!” Not everyone can be a goodlistener, but when we are talking about something close to our hearts andthe listener doesn’t listen at all, it can feel particularly painful.Though we don’t always use dialogue in essays and memoir, it’s usefulto think of the narrator of your essays as being in dialogue with the self,layers of persona in conflict with one another, parts of the self inconversation, competing voices that create disharmony or static. Thenarrator may then choose to reconcile those voices, to find a point oftemporary harmony or stasis. Or not.WRITING EXERCISE: TALKING TOYOURSELFWrite a story where you talk to yourself about a problem you aregoing through. Let layers of your personality be in conflict with oneanother.It’s really not that bad. Itcould be a lot worse. I mean who careshow I look? I’m still a good person, a caring person, a loving aunt. Aperson is what she is on the inside, right? But my thighs rub when Iwalk. I want another piece of red velvet cake, the one my motherused to bake before. Before all that bad stuff. I am going to bake thatcake. But I shouldn’t. Maybe I will just go check if I have the recipe. Iknow that there’s baking soda and vanilla extract in the house ’causeI made those chocolate chip cookies. No, no, I can’t stop thinkingabout how much weight I’ve gained in the past four months. I gainedeighteen pounds in four months. I don’t know what I was thinking. Mymom told me why they called it red velvet. Like that dress shebought me. I don’t know how I got fat. Or maybe I do.MusicWriters learn to be sensitive to the music of language, attuned to theharmony of its sound and meaning and nuances. Writers read their workaloud so that they can hear when a word is out of tune, when the rhythm isoff, when the meaning isn’t quite right.Here’s writer Leonard Michaels on the music of writing (from “MyYiddish”):Ultimately, I believe, meaning has less to do with language thanwith music, a sensuous flow that becomes language only by default,so to speak, and by degrees. In great fiction and poetry, meaning isobviously close to music. Writing about a story by Gogol, Nabokovsays it goes la, la, do, la la la etc. The story’s meaning is radicallymusical. I’ve often had to rewrite a paragraph because the soundwas wrong. When at last it seemed right, I discovered—incredibly—the sense was right. Sense follows song.Read your work aloud to yourself or to somebody else. Then you canhear when something doesn’t work.In an interview in the New Yorker, “Long Story Short” by DanaGoodyear, Lydia Davis, the acclaimed writer of very short stories, explainshow when she writes or reads, she pays attention to an inner sense oflanguage.“I’ve gotten very alert not just to mixed metaphor but to any writingmistake,” she said. “A little bell goes off in my head first. I knowsomething’s wrong here. Then secondly I see what it is.” She openedthe notebook and read a sentence about an acute intimacy that haderoded into something dull. “Acute is sharp, and then eroded is anearth metaphor,” she said. She read another: “‘A paper bag stuffedwith empty wine bottles.’ I thought about that. You’d think he couldget away with it, but he can’t, because ‘stuffed’ is a verb that comesfrom material. It’s soft, so it’s a problem to stuff it with somethinghard.”A sensitivity to both sound and meaning may be what distinguishesgood writers. They’re attuned to the nuances of language. This sensitivityisn’t just about being accurate; it’s also sourced in a love of words.WRITING EXERCISE: DISCORD ANDMUSICWrite a dialogue where two people are in conflict. Each has adesire that is at odds with the other’s. As the dialogueprogresses, put more obstacles in their way. Raise the stakes.As you come to the end of the dialogue, see what happens.Have the characters reached some kind of resolution or are theyeven more polarized?Write a dialogue where it’s clear that the two people are notlistening to each other.Every story can be thought of as a war. Write an essay about afight that you had with somebody. Plunge the reader into thechaos and discord.Read one of your essays aloud to somebody. Now letsomebody read it to you. Listen to its music.Thinking about AudienceHarmony also means that we are concerned with our audience. If you saysomething that everybody has heard before, you bore your audience andlose your reader. You are not in harmony with your audience’s intellect andneeds.When you write, you might imagine talking to a specific person so thatyou can choose what you say and how you say it—your tone and diction.That will help you determine how intimate you want to be with your reader,the language you’ll choose. Pretend you’re writing to a friend or an aunt ora professor. What will keep them reading? What do you know that theydon’t? Make sure your first sentence and paragraph draw them in.Also feel free to turn to the audience at times and engage with thereader directly, using the second person. You involve the reader moreclosely when you ask him or her a question. Here’s an example from astudent essay: What should I do? I wondered. What would you do?WRITING EXERCISE: MY DEARFAMILYWrite a letter to a family member who you never met. Tell him or herabout your life. Include a family story and a family saying. See whathappens.BeautyTiferet also suggests beauty. Today I saw a bright-green lizard on the barkof a eucalyptus tree and watched as his eyes turned to look at me, littlebrown beads that revolved in their sockets, 360 degrees. He grasped the treewith the pads of his extended claws and extended his back legs. “Beautifulsounds, sights and smells revive a person,” says the Talmud.There is a beauty of symmetry and harmony, but there is also a beautyof imperfection. In Japanese gardens, for example, a path may contain anirregular number of stones. This sense of being off balance replicates thebeauty of nature where nothing is perfect. Not everything has to match. Inceramics the technique called wabi sabi allows for the beauty ofirregularity. A bowl is not perfectly oval; a patina is irregular. It may be thewriter’s job to convey unexpected beauty to the reader, like the beauty inthe wear and tear of aging.The worn, scratched wooden night table next to my bed was passeddown to us by my husband’s great-aunt. It used to bother me that it waschipped and scratched, and I thought that I should paint it or sand it, yetnever got around to it (It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but I don’t knowhow to do it). One night, my husband and I went out to dinner nearAshkelon in a restaurant where we sat at a scratched wooden table. As Ilooked around, I noticed that all of the tables were scratched, beat-up wood.In fact, the surfaces looked a lot like my night table. The owner of therestaurant told me that the tables were scratched on purpose, in fact it was astyle—distressed. Now I respect my table for revealing something of itslife, having a history. I am able to see its (distressed) beauty.A Lack of CertaintyThe challenge of the sefira of harmony is to allow discord and chaos. If thewriter tries to present an experience as if there are no hesitations, questions,or problems, then the writing may not engage the reader. When everythingis presented as flawless, there is no story and no possibility of achievinginsight. Think of it this way: a pearl is created from the dirt that gets intothe oyster’s shell. There needs to be friction for something interesting,unlikely, and beautiful to emerge. Don’t be afraid to admit your uncertainty.Tell people about the discord, chaos, and trauma in your life.WRITING EXERCISE: WITHOUTRESOLUTIONWrite about something that is troubling you as if you were talking to aloving friend or a therapist. Don’t try to solve anything. Just let thestory speak for itself. If something embarrasses you, note that butkeep writing.7ENDURANCENetzachNETZACH (ENDURANCE OR ETERNITY), which is on the same line as kindness(the right side of the body), allows us to move through the world withdetermination. Its inner quality is confidence, the audacity to take a stand,express an opinion, believe in oneself. It allows us to overcome theobstacles that prevent us from asserting ourselves.Netzach comes paired with the quality of hod, the sefira that meanssurrender. These two sefirot are compared to the legs of the body: netzachthe right leg, hod the left.Netzach is associated with the fourth day of creation: the stars and sunand moon were created on that day, fixed forever in their orbits. Netzach,steadfast and enduring, has a sense of assurance, a stubbornness. It’sforthright, ready to argue and stake a claim, but itdoesn’t have to yell. Toexpress our voice in the world, to write and continue writing, to endure inour writing, we need netzach.In this chapter we’ll look at the quality of endurance: the need to state abold opinion, accept and learn from the criticism of fellow writers, weatherrejections from publishers, and persist in our work.After I had two books published and had won a National Jewish BookAward, I expected that the publishing gates would open. I was wrong. Notonly did I have to struggle to get published, I was also humiliated in afiction writing group.The first time I attended that group, I was anxious because I only knewone member of the group and I had just started writing short stories. I hadno idea how the others would receive me. At the meeting there were two ofus who were new. Mona was much younger than me, but she seemed like agood writer. During the evening somebody gave writing prompts, linesfrom a poem that we used as starting points for stories. Then somebodypresented a short story she had been working on. I didn’t say much. I didn’tfeel that it was my job to pronounce judgments at the first meeting. Besides,I try to be a gentle critic, believing that change and growth come when aperson feels supported, not when they feel attacked.I still remember the first comment that my poetry teacher gave me in1978, when I was twenty-two and just starting my master’s degree increative writing at Colorado State University. I read the poem I had handedout to the other eight students in the writing group, and this is what myprofessor said: “This sounds like the poem of a fifteen-year-old girl.” Hedidn’t say it as a compliment. I was devastated.I was totally taken aback when before the next meeting of the fictionwriting group in Jerusalem, I mistakenly received a group email sent fromone of the participants. The message went something like this: “MaybeSherri knows how to write, but I don’t think she knows anything about howto critique. She didn’t seem very bright. Mona, the other new person, wasfantastic, really sharp. I don’t know. Maybe if we coach Sherri, give hersome books on writing fiction, she’ll catch on— but I’m not so sure that sheis right for the group.”You have to understand that I was teaching creative writing at the time.My mother used to say a good life is the best revenge. But now I see,writing well may really be the best revenge.I decided to stay in the group. I have some of the qualities associatedwith netzach like persistence and stubbornness and the ability to endurerejection. (Not that I like it. It still hurts. Oh boy, does it hurt!) The nextmeeting I submitted a story, and the participants gave me a few helpfulcomments. But the woman who had written the evil email asked me: “Areyou sure that you understand the concept of the short story? That thecharacter has to act, not just be acted upon?” And she later said: “Some ofthis dialogue is just deadly.”I felt humiliated, but again I told myself that I had received a NationalJewish Book Award and that this woman had probably never had anythingpublished.A few days later I sent the story off to a short story contest in Momentmagazine judged by Erica Jong. Six months later the magazine called, and Ithought that they wanted to sell me a subscription. Instead, I learned that Ihad won first prize, publication, a thousand dollars, and a trip to LA for theawards ceremony.Endurance, persistence, fortitude. A kind of faith. Because there are somany people who will put you down and humiliate you, tell you that youdon’t know much, that you can’t do this and not to waste your time.Who are they to speak? And who are you not to?Moses, the biblical figure associated with netzach, learned about enduranceas he led the Hebrew people through the wilderness. At first, when Godspoke to him and told him that he would bring the Israelites out of Egypt,he questioned God’s command. He didn’t feel like he was the right personto lead the nation. It was difficult for him to speak. He stuttered. “Who am Ithat I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt? . . . Whoam I to lead the people to Israel out of Egypt?”God showed him the burning bush, a symbol of endurance. Even whenit seemed that the bush should have burned up and been destroyed, itcontinued to blaze—a message to Moses that what seemed most difficultwould not annihilate him. Eventually, he found his voice and became thegreatest leader of the Jewish people. A man who stuttered became a manwho was able to lead the people through forty years in the desert. He wasable to fight for the people when they disbelieved, when they lost theirfaith.I am the codirector of the Koby Mandell Foundation, which runsprograms and camps in Israel for bereaved children and families. Inpartnership with comedian Avi Liberman, we run comedy fundraisers twicea year with stand-up comedians who have been featured on American late-night television shows and on Netflix specials. My husband and I introducethe show, and we always tell a joke. Last year I told a terrible joke. In fact, Iforgot the joke in the middle. Later, I talked with one of the comediansabout how to tell a joke. He told me: “You have to walk in, plant themicrophone, and own the stage.”We are so hesitant in our lives to own the stage, but netzach tells us thatthere are times when we need to be sure, certain, confident, ready to fightfor our beliefs, ready to make a claim, even when others may not agree withus.The danger of netzach is that you become too much of a bulldozer andalienate others because you don’t listen to them. You may get too involvedin polemics or dogma. Netzach comes paired with hod so that we don’tbecome obstinate but remain supple and pliable, no matter how great ourpassion.DevotionIn Outliers Malcolm Gladwell describes research about becoming great: toexcel at something, you have to devote at least ten thousand hours of work.That means sitting at your desk and writing, thinking, reading, revising. Atfirst, writing’s a tough discipline, and then it may turn into a pleasurableneed (at least sometimes). The brain has a plasticity: the act of writingpaves new neural pathways. Once those pathways are formed, traversingthose pathways allows you to enter a concentrated state of focus. To be inthe flow. Sometimes.As a writer you need endurance and persistence, the ability to continueeven when it seems that nobody could give a raisin about your work. Whenmy children were young and napping, I wrote children’s stories, and I keptsending them out and guess what? The editor of a prestigious publishinghouse called me and told me that she was interested in publishing thepicture book. A few weeks later, I got a letter that they had decided not totake it. But I kept writing. Thirty years later, I had my first picture bookpublished, The Elephant in the Sukkah. After I broke my ankle, when Ientered the sukkah, the temporary hut that some Jewish people construct forthe holiday of Sukkot, I felt like an elephant with my walker, like there wasno room for me. And the story was born. I hope it doesn’t take you thirtyyears to achieve your writing dreams, but sometimes it does take a lot oftime. (Of course, that’s not true for everybody.) And today you can publishyour own work more easily or post it on Facebook or Instagram.Writing can be seen as an act of devotion, a calling. You have to keepworking, often alone. You may have to tell yourself that your writing hasvalue no matter what the outside world tells you. You have to believe inyourself even if nobody else does.Virginia Woolf says this about the need to persevere (from A Writer’sDiary):The creative power, which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a newbook, quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily.Doubts creep in. And then one becomes resigned. Determination notto give in, and the sense of an impending shape, keep one at it morethan anything.Netzach allows us to keep steady, determined, and patient, waiting forthe shape of our work to be revealed, while hoping to one day find anaudience for our work. My agent, Anna Olswanger, is now shopping aroundanother children’s book that I wrote, and she told me that perseverance andpatience are the keys to getting a book published: netzach and hod.Finding a FocusWe don’t just endure or persevere. Netzach teaches us to focus, even withthe terrible distraction of all of our electronic devices. When we aren’tworking or taking care of a family and we do have time to write, we turnaway from our email, Kindle, or apps and narrow our attention toconcentrate on our writing. To create a diamond, carbon has to be stressedunder enormous pressure, under high temperatures, deep in the earth forbillions of years—yes, billions!In addition, netzach enables us to focus our story through a particularlens. For example, in the Neapolitan Quartet, a four-novel series, ElenaFerrante concentrates on the relationship between two friends fromchildhood, and that compression magnifies the complex emotional bonds oftheir relationship.The Structure of an ArgumentNetzach also teaches us to think about writing as an act of persuasion. Wehave an argument, a claim that we want to make. We want others tounderstand our thinking, our opinions. We can think of structuringarguments through asking four main questions: What is it? Why is it? Howis it? And what should be done be done about it?The first question: What is it? allows us to describe the particulars of aphenomenon that interests us. The next question: Why is it? analyzes howsomething came into being, its history. Then we evaluate the subject’sworth—why it’s good or bad—or which parts are positive, which arenegative—and finally we make a proposal—what should be done about thisissue? This four-part structure allows us to think logically through anargument. In addition, we have to anticipate the reader’s objections to ourargument and refute those claims.Of course, when we write essays and memoirs, we’re not usuallywriting straight-up arguments, and especially not proposals, but thisstructure may be useful to you in organizing your thoughts or straighteningout a first draft.Netzach as A More Expansive ViewNetzach also means eternity, which is of course, timeless, something thatendures, one of the attributes of God. By using the lens of netzach, we canextend our stories, relating to what happened before we came on the stage,before the start of our own personal stories. The present can be infused withthe past.WRITING EXERCISE: WHAT CAMEBEFOREWrite about where you live and what happened in your town beforeyou arrived there. You can describe the town’s history or geographyor geology. Use the word “before” at least three times.WRITING EXERCISE: PERSIST AND INSISTNetzach is also related to nitzachon, the Hebrew word for“victory.” Success is often a matter of persistence, endurance,refusing to give up. Write about what success means to you anda time you were successful.Write about a time in your life when you were persistent, evenstubborn, when you refused to give in.Write a letter of complaint to a person, place, or company youare displeased with. Be firm, courteous, and creative. LydiaDavis wrote a very short story called “Letter to a FuneralParlour” that was a letter of complaint to a funeral director whohad called her father’s remains cremains, a word that she feltshowed disrespect and insensitivity.Write a letter of complaint to a part of your body.8SURRENDERHodWHILE NETZACH IS THE POWER OF ENDURANCE, hod is the ability to surrender.Hod was created on the fifth day, the day that the first living creatures, fishand birds, were created. Both fish and birds move about more freely thanother animals—fluidly, easily, and gracefully. They aren’t bound to thegravity of this world.While netzach is unchanging, hod is malleable, flexible, supple,humble. But surrender is not a synonym for defeat. Instead, there’s a gloryassociated with surrender, a beauty. Aaron, Moses’s older brother, is thebiblical figure associated with hod. While Moses was fiery and unyielding,Aaron was more flexible, known as a man of peace. If couples did not getalong, he was able to help them bridge their differences. A midrash tells usthat thousands of babies were named after Aaron because he brought peopletogether in peace. When his two children were killed after bringing astrange fire into the temple, we are told that Aaron was silent. He was ableto contain himself even when suffering, even when the ways of God did notmake sense. (Or maybe he was simply stunned into silence by the trauma.)In this chapter we’ll look at surrender in terms of a narrator’s humilityand empathy. We’ll also explore some additional meanings of hod: to admit,thank, and praise.HumilityHod is on the left side of the body, the same side as gevurah, the ability torestrain oneself. Sometimes, even in a very personal essay, the primacy ofthe I can be minimized, as the narrator turns her focus to others or othersubjects. For example, in “Six Glimpses of the Past: On Photography andMemory,” Janet Malcolm begins her essay, which is structured byphotographs, by describing a famous painting:I am looking at two pictures. One is a color reproduction of Ingres’sgreat 1832 portrait of Louis-François Bertin, a powerfully bulkyman in his sixties, dressed in black, who sits with both handsassertively planted on his thighs, and engages the viewer with a lookof determination touched with irony. The other is a black and whitesnapshot of a two or three-year-old girl taken by an anonymousphotographer sometime in the nineteen thirties. The young child hasassumed Bertin’s pose.In a later paragraph she tells us: “The young child in the snapshot is me.”Even though the essay details Malcolm’s family history, the narratorportrays herself as curious instead of narcissistic or self-involved. Sheoffers the reader entrance to a world larger than just her particular family.Yehuda Amichai’s poem “Tourists” also delays the introduction of the I.It begins:Visits of condolence is all we get from themThey squat at the Holocaust Memorial.It’s not until the second stanza that the poet turns to the I.Once I sat on the steps by a gate at David’s Tower, I placed my twoheavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists was standing aroundtheir guide and I became their target marker. “You see that manwith the baskets? Just right of his head there’s an arch from theRoman period. Just right of his head.” “But he’s moving, he’smoving!”I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them,“You see that arch from the Roman period? It’s not important: butnext to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who’s bought fruitand vegetables for his family.”The reader identifies with the humility of the narrator, while the poem isactually an assertion of the primacy of the personal, eclipsing the historical.Amichai tells us that the man who has been shopping deserves moreattention than the ruins.WRITING EXERCISE: EKPHRASIS—ART AS LITERARY DEVICEWrite about a work of art that you connect to. Start by describing apainting or sculpture and then tell the reader how you respond to thatwork of art, what it means to you. Highlight the art and artist, but alsoconvey how your own thoughts or story connect with the painting orsculpture.Point of ViewThe flexibility of hod offers empathy, allows us to imagine andacknowledge other points of view. “When I write a story I am all thecharacters in it,” says Israeli fiction writer Etgar Keret in an interview abouthis story “Creative Writing.” Even when writing a memoir, you can openyourself to other points of view. For example, as the narrator you can usephrases like this: “I imagine what my mother was thinking that day.” “Ibelieve my husband saw that. . .”The stork is called hasidah in Hebrew, which means “the devout or theloving one” because storks give so much love to their mates and theiryoung. Yet the stork is classified in the Bible as a nonkosher bird. Why?Because storks give love only to their own. In other words, the stork doesnot extend its empathy. Hod, on the other hand, allows us to expand ourcompassion.WRITING EXERCISE: WRITING FROMDIFFERENT POINTS OF VIEWChildhood IncidentWrite a story about a childhood incident but write it in thirdperson. As Abigail Thomas says in Safekeeping: Some TrueStories from a Life: “There are things you can say in the thirdthat would sound maudlin in the first.”Write about a difficult choice you made, one that you may feelguilty about. Now write the same story in the third person. Doesthat narrative distance change the story in any way?A Family PhotoPick a family photograph or a photograph that has meaning for you.Describe the picture in the third person as if you were a stranger looking atit. Don’t write now about any personal meaning it holds for you. What isthe quality of the photograph? Grainy? Dark? Torn? What is the lightinglike? What is the time period when the photo was taken? What is in thebackground? What do the participants look like? What are they wearing?What are they holding? What is the expression on their faces? What hashappened to bring them together?Now, on another sheet of paper, pick one of the people in thephotograph and imagining that you are that person, write an intimatemonologue of your thoughts and feelings. I wrote about a photograph of mygrandmother working behind the counter in her Brooklyn lingerie store inthe 1920s and imagined her displeasure when a customer wanted to bargaindown the price.Next write about the photo as if you were the photographer. What isgoing through your head as you take the picture? What is your relationshipto the subjects and how do you feel about them?In the first or second person, write to one of the people in thephotograph from their future. What do you want to tell them that they don’tyet know?Finally, write about what happened before and after the photo wastaken.Put these sections together, omitting what doesn’t seem important,developing what interests you the most. Leave white space between thesections, especially when there are changes in point of view.You can also exchange photos with another writer and imagine the storyof the photograph without knowing anything about it.Unusual Points of ViewWe may surprise ourselves and our readers as we perceive the world from aunique perspective. For example, in Margaret Atwood’s story “StoneMattress,” at one point the narrator reflects from the point of view of araven. Verna, now an older woman, debates murdering a man she has meton a cruise to Alaska, as she slowly realizes that he is the boy who rapedher when they were in high school, the person who ruined her life.Pregnant, she was sent to a home for unwed mothers and had to give awaythe baby.A raven flies overhead, circles around. Can it tell? It is waiting. Shelooks down through its eyes, sees an old woman—because, face it,she is an old woman now—on the verge of murdering an even olderman because of an anger already facing into the distance of used-uptime. It’s paltry. It’s vicious. It’s normal. It’s what happens in life.Somehow by writing from the raven’s point of view, the narratornormalizes her desire for murder.Atwood’s poem “A Drone Scans the Wreckage” also takes an unusualperspective, that of an inanimate object of war, to shock us out of ourcomplacency.Point of view is not only a matter of perspective or empathy but also ofpower. The person who tells the story most often owns the story. In hisbook The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story, Christopher Castellaniargues that the narrator of the story is the person who is empowered to tellthe story. But he is also the person who bears responsibility for it.WRITING EXERCISE: EXPANDINGOUR PERSPECTIVEDescribe a landscape as seen by a bird. Do not mention thebird.*11Write an essay about a disturbing incident that you experienced.Now rewrite the essay from the point of view of someone elsewho was involved. How does the new perspective change thestory?Write a story about a time you were lost. Now tell the story fromthe point of view of an animal or object that witnessed you.Write an essay about any topic in the second person (you). Thefollowing excerpt is from “Second Person,” an essay by EhudHavatzelet.You’ve sworn never to write a piece in Second Person.You ask yourself why. Lorrie Moore and Jay McInerney didit well. Eudora Welty has that great story, right? Someoneonce told you there was a whole French novel written inSecond Person.You remember you don’t read French.You’ve heard Second Person is inclusive, it brings thereader into the fray, a character’s divorce or the search forlost car keys or rollicking good sex becomes yours. SecondPerson establishes a dialogue with the reader, you’ve beentold, unlike First Person, a neurotic’s whining, orOmniscience, a dialogue with God, who doesn’t even havethe manners to answer back.Surrendering to the MaterialWriter Joan Leggant describes the text a writer accumulates as inventory,available to be worked with. The famous maxim of Chekhov is similar: if inthe beginning of the book, there’s a rifle hanging on the wall, by the end ofthe work the gun should be fired. Use what you have. Richard Powersdescribes the process of the first draft as a writer scattering crumbs,suggesting a path for the writer to return to in further drafts. The writingtells you where you need to go.The process of writing also requires surrender, submitting to theunconscious. In addition, sometimes you have to take a break from thework to allow the ideas to percolate so that you can receive what you needto continue writing. In the haftorah*12 for Chanukah we read Zecharia’sprophecy: not by might or power, but by my spirit.Get up from your writing. Do the dishes or cook and eat dinner. Go fora walk. Your subconscious is still at work. Silas House, a novelist,playwright, and nonfiction writer says (from “The Art of Being Still”):The No. 1 question I get at readings is: “How many hours a day doyou write?” I used to stumble on this question. I don’t write everyday, but when I first started going on book tours I was afraid I’d berevealed as a true fraud if I admitted that. Sometimes I write for 20minutes. Other times I don’t stop writing for six hours, falling overat the end like an emotional, wrung-out mess, simultaneouslyexhausted and exhilarated. Sometimes I go months without putting aword on the page.One night, however, I was asked that question and the rightanswer just popped out, unknown to me before it found solidity onthe air: “I write every waking minute,” I said. I meant, of course,that I am always writing in my head.VoicesSometimes, when we write, it may feel as if we are talking in voices, asthough God is speaking through us. The voice of the piece comes to us aliveand vital. The writing takes off by itself. I’m sure you have read about theauthor who says that his characters take over the story, and he sits back andlistens to them. Poet William Blake said that while writing some of hispoems, he felt he was taking dictation.The writing arrives as a gift. Yet the danger in the sefira of hod is thewriter who believes that his work should always be an inspired meetingwith the muse. In my experience, it’s our job to create a home for thatinspiration when it’s willing to visit us. Hod comes paired with netzach,endurance and persistence, so that while we wait for inspiration, we keepslogging on.GratitudeHod is also related to hoda-ah, the Hebrew word for “praise”—the ability toappreciate the beauty and glory of the world, to feel and express gratitude.Although many essays are written about discomfortand anxiety, we canwrite essays about experiences that lead us toward appreciation. What orwho do you appreciate? Who do you honor? What experiences aredelightful, even blissful? James Wright’s poem “A Blessing” describes anexalted encounter with horses on the side of the road. Here’s an excerpt:They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happinessThat we have come.They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.We can also be grateful for those writers whose work is most importantto us. Which writers do you appreciate? Whose work do you love reading?Admitting Our MistakesHod also means “to admit”: to admit weakness or vulnerability oruncertainty. We can continually reevaluate our claims, opinions, andfeelings. We can admit that we are ambivalent about an experience ordecision. We can admit to lying. For example, in Brenda Miller’s essay“The Date,” she tells us that she is willing to let her date view theunvarnished person on her refrigerator door, the notes and picturesunderneath magnets there. But later on in the essay she says, “I lied. Ichanged everything on my refrigerator, on my bulletin board, on mymantelpiece.”We can give ourselves permission to be wrong as in this excerpt fromthe poem “Winter Stars” by Larry Levis:I got it all wrong.I wound up believing in words the way a scientistBelieves in carbon, after death.Tonight, I’m talking to you, father, althoughIt is quiet here in the Midwest, where a small wind,The size of a wrist, wakes the cold again—Which may be all that’s left of you & me.When I left home at seventeen, I left for good.That pale haze of stars goes on & on,Like laughter that has found a final, silent shapeOn a black sky. It means everythingIt cannot say. Look, it’s empty out there, & cold.Cold enough to reconcileEven a father, even a son.The poet doesn’t just admit a mistake. He takes responsibility and allowsfor the possibility of reconciliation.WRITING EXERCISE: FAILURES ANDMISTAKESWrite an essay about a mistake that you made.Write an essay about a scar, wound, illness, or accident.Write about a great failure, a stupendous failure, when you orsomeone you love made a total mess of things.Write an essay about something you were once certain aboutand now need to reevaluate. You can start “Once I knew . . .”PatienceHod relates to a deep patience with one’s work. We return to the writingover and over, paying attention to what is present and what is missing. Wemay have to wait, to be silent, to pay attention, to trust that more will berevealed. Patience is a form of humility, an ability to dwell in uncertainty. Ittells us that even though we are working toward a finished text, we cannothurry the process.WRITING EXERCISE: BE PATIENT,PLEASEIn an interview in Makor Rishon, an Israeli newspaper, Israeliscreenwriter and director Rama Burshtein says that waiting andprayer are essential elements of her creative process. As youwrite, talk to God about the process. Wait and see where youare guided.Write an essay about patience. When are you patient? What areyou most impatient about? How do you cope with impatience?Write an essay that is a meditation on an object or a pastime, onprayer, aging, weddings, or funerals. Let your mind enter thetopic as fully as you can. Linger. Be curious. Slow down. Youcan address the reader if you want, using words like behold orlook.9CREATIVITY YesodYESOD IS THE JUNCTION OF NETZACH AND HOD. Paralleling the sixth day ofcreation, the day that human beings were created, yesod is the sefiraassociated with sexuality and creativity. God created us to create—babies,ideas, machines, technology, stories.Jewish thought tells us that each day brings a new creative energy to theworld, a rejuvenation. We have the possibility of re-creating ourselves,seeing things anew, writing texts that lead us toward a deeper, moreprofound bond with the world. Acting in the world as God’s creativepartner.In the Torah after God promises Moses that he will lead the people outof slavery, when Moses asks God his name he answers: I will be what I willbe. God, who is perfect in every way, encompasses an aspect of becoming.We, too, are in the act of becoming, and our creativity offers us thepossibility of reinvention and transformation.Yet every act of creativity involves a descent into chaos and darkness.“The kernel which is sown in the earth must disintegrate so that the ear ofgrain may sprout from its pieces. Strength cannot be resurrected until it hasdwelt in secrecy. Putting off a shape, putting on a shape—these are done inthe instant of pure nothingness” (Martin Buber, Ten Rungs: CollectedHasidic Sayings).Some people find it hard to create something new because they resistchaos and uncertainty and reach conclusions too quickly, seeking control.They rush toward what they already know. But every act of true creativitydemands that we dwell in mystery.Yosef, the biblical character associated with yesod, found redemptionand renewal after he had dwelled in the dark space of prison, where hecorrectly interpreted the dreams of another inmate, Pharaoh’s former butler.Pharoah was the ruler of Egypt, and when, years later, he too had aperplexing dream, Yosef was summoned to solve it. Yosef then becamePharaoh’s chief adviser, implementing a plan to rescue the Egyptian peoplefrom seven years of famine. Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan tells us that Pharaoh gaveYosef a new name, Zaphnath-Paaneah, which means “revealer of secrets.”Creativity involves a similar process—the ability to dwell in and unravelmysteries. In this chapter we’ll look at different means of generating andenhancing creativity.Creativity as InvitationThe Chassidic masters tell us that everything that happens to us is a lesson.But it is also an invitation to create:One summer, I was driving behind a trailer truck that was transportinggiant blocks of limestone on its long narrow bed. The blocks looked likeenormous tombs. The truck inched forward slowly because of the weight ofits load, and it was impossible for me to pass it on the curvy road.That image stayed in my mind, and it wasn’t until I sat down to writethat it became a symbol of grief in my story “Jerusalem Stone,” which isabout a woman who is threatened by the heavy weight of the grief shecarries as a young widow, struggling to create a new life for herself and herson.Later that week I read a newspaper article about physicists who wereconducting experiments to create new chemical elements, explodingelectrons to create new atoms. I realized that my character would be aphysicist—even though I have never studied physics. The next day, I pickedup a woman hitchhiker from my community who, it turned out, was gettinga PhD in physics. I asked her how scientists went about creating a newelement, and then I wrote the story. A little scientific knowledge can go along way in writing fiction. I invented a narrator who was trying to explodeatoms in order to create a new element. That scientific goal became ametaphor for the narrator who also wanted to reinvent herself. I wovedisparate events in my life together to form a narrative that had its ownlogic and emotional momentum.WRITING EXERCISES: CREATIVEPLAYDifferent DomainsCombine two or three seed ideas that are not necessarily connectedand create friction.*13 See what emerges. Creativity often ariseswhen you bring different domains together, people or objects orcategories that are not generally associated with each other, forexample, as I do in this book— Kabbalah and essay and memoirwriting.For example, write three hundred words about bathing suits andthen write three hundred words about cake. Now write a third shortessay that brings these two topics together in some way.Enhancing CreativityStuart Schoffman, the late journalist who wrote a weekly column fora Jerusalem magazine for many years, told me that he made surethat he was constantly learning,that it was key to maintaining a longcreative life. Learn something new today.One way to stimulate creativity is to invoke the other side of yourbrain. Try writing with your nondominant hand for a few minutes.Doing this can help you bypass the rational brain, which wants towrite about what it already knows.Write about the block you grew up on, the games you played asa child.Write about money. A time you lost money. Found money.Worried about money. What money means in your life. Use thephrases: “Once I thought” as well as “But it is also true” in thetext.Write about noises. What noises soothe you? What noisesbother you?Write an essay that includes three different colors.Write about a gift you received. Or write about a gift you wouldlike to receive or give.Ross Gay wrote an essay, “Tomato on Board” about carrying atomato plant through an airport. Write about something youcarried—for example, a musical instrument, a suitcase, or acake.Write about an object that you lost.Cutting InWhen I was a graduate student, I attended a workshop with RobertBly who offered this exercise:Pick a fruit or vegetable. Describe it in detail. Now look at it anddescribe it again, this time comparing it to a parent or child or friend.How is it similar? Dissimilar? Next cut the fruit or vegetable open.Describe your relationship with the person you chose by writingabout what you see inside. What do you discover?PromptsWriting prompts are phrases and sentences that stimulate you towrite. You can incorporate them into your text: in the beginning to getyou started or in the middle to keep you going or at the end to find away of closing. Or in all of those places. Pick one of these and begin:His feet pounded the pavement.It wasn’t real.What wouldn’t you do?Five minutes ago, they’d had so much to say.There wasn’t a moment that she didn’t have the same thought.Aging isn’t a horse race.The man looked like somebody she used to know.Her son slammed the door shut.You could use some lipstick.It wasn’t my favorite holiday.I was in a workshop with Linda Stern Zisquit, a Jerusalem poet, whoasked us to write ten words or phrases about faith. Then she asked us towrite ten words that pertained to hope. We used these phrases to kickstartpoems or essays.AphorismsWhen I was in college my professor, Albert Goldbarth, assigned thisexercise for writing a poem, but it also works for essays.Think of an aphorism, which the dictionary defines as “a tersesaying embodying a general truth”: for example, you can’t have yourcake and eat it too. Now create your own aphoism, but by the end ofthe poem or essay, reverse the aphorism.I still remember what I wrote forty years ago. I started with thisaphorism: dancing is taking off from the beat and arrived later atdancing is landing on the beat.ClusteringClustering is a technique of doodling where you visually brainstormthe associations that flow from an idea. Begin with a word (forexample, hair) and write it in the middle of your page, drawing acircle around it. Then free associate by writing other words andexperiences that you associate with the word hair, drawing circlesaround those words and phrases. Draw lines between the circlesand scribble connecting phrases and sentences there.When you are ready to write, pick some of those words andphrases and see how they fit together and keep you writing (adaptedfrom an exercise by Gabriele Rico in Writing the Natural Way).ImplementingThe sefira of yesod is also the ability to implement. Yosef wasn’t just adreamer: he also organized the Egyptian people and economy to weather aseven-year famine, storing food so that everybody would be able to eat.We need to send our work out into the world, to find our audience. Youmay start a blog or join a writers’ group or send your work to friends beforeposting it online or in newspapers and journals.Don’t think you have to publish right away in the most prestigiousnational literary journals. Think local. Years ago, I had an essay publishedin the Washington Post but was having problems finding publishers for myother work. I spoke to an acquaintance, Tovi Glasner, who was a puppeteer,and she told me: write for the Jewish world. I immigrated to Israel soonafter, and before I left, I spoke to Eric Rozenman, then the editor of theWashington Jewish Week, who offered me a column, writing about our firstyear in Israel. What was amazing: I discovered even hard, tryingexperiences could be used for material. It was much easier to wait in theInterior Ministry for hours when I knew I could use the experience as acolumnist—and be paid for it!Find an outlet for your work. Post or submit something today.10RULERSHIP MalchutMALCHUT MEANS KINGSHIP, which we can think of as authority orrulership. This sefira is associated with voice, your unique take on theworld: your language, tone, enthusiasm, patience, maturity, humility,humor, crankiness, and passion.Malchut is the sefira connected to King David, who was a poet. Malchutis usually depicted as residing at the feet, but it is also sometimes describedas centered in the mouth, the voice. King David gave voice in the Psalms tohis difficult and dramatic life: He fell in love with Bathsheva, a marriedwoman, and sent her husband off to battle to die. Bathsheva gave birth tohis son, but the baby died. King David’s son Amnon, by his second wife,Ahinoam, raped his half-sister, Tamar, David’s daughter. Avshalom, anotherson, killed Amnon in vengeance and tried to steal King David’s leadership.It’s not surprising that the Book of Psalms contains a full range of feelings:poems of deep despair as well as immense gratitude.As the last sefira, malchut receives from and is derived from all of theother sefirot. You have learned to engage keter, your will and desire towrite. You have found inspiration (chochmah) and developed your writingin a comprehensive way (bina). You’ve written from the fullness of yourheart and have found the heart of your essays (chesed). You’ve learned tocreate boundaries (gevurah), editing based on the theme and purpose ofyour writing. You’ve emerged from conflict to find points of insight andharmony (tiferet). You’ve persisted (netzach), believing in your projects,and at the same time, you’ve surrendered (hod) to allow the writing tospeak to you. You know the difference between forcing the text and waitingfor its spirit to reveal itself. You’ve found sources of creativity (yesod).Now is the time to take command of your kingdom. The word author isconnected to the word authority: a call toward mastery, command of ourimaginative powers, judgment, and creativity.In this chapter we’ll first look at topics that we have “mastered,” as wellas the way writing allows us to master time. And then we’ll turn to thevariety of voices available to us.Becoming an ExpertWe all have subjects in which we are experts. My students are artists,dancers, writers, teachers, and former high school principals; all havewritten beautiful work on these subjects. Because I live in Israel, I have anauthority to write about life in Israel, about being an immigrant. I can alsowrite about Torah and religious subjects and yoga. I am also an expert ingrief and mourning—and resilience.Once I asked a group of adult students: “What are you experts in?”They had a hard time answering because they didn’t think of themselves asauthorities. But when I said, “I am an expert in being messy,” one said thatshe was a master in procrastination, another a master in suffering. One saidthat she was very good in surrendering her own needs even when sheshouldn’t. Those were all topics that they didn’t at first consider worthy.Write a list of ten topics that you feel that you are an expert in or wouldlike to be an expert in.Playing with TimeMalchut allows us to transcend time because we can master time in ournarratives: we enter the present, the past,and the future at will. We canspeed time up or slow it down. We can focus deeply on a few minutes or anhour. We can write about two days ten years apart as Virginia Woolf does inTo the Lighthouse. A minute can take ten pages. Ten years can go by in onesentence.For example, Joyce Carol Oates begins her novel The Gravedigger’sDaughter with a thirty-page description of a girl’s half-hour walk next tothe Erie Canal. The girl worries that she’s being stalked by a man in apanama hat, that she’s in danger of being raped or killed. The readerexperiences the girl’s anguish, anxiety, and terror as time slows down andalmost stops.Ian McEwan slows down time to describe the terrifying split-secondmoments of a car accident in The Child in Time:He was preparing to overtake when something happened—he didnot quite see what—in the region of the lorry’s wheels, a hiatus, acloud of dust, and then something black and long snaked through ahundred feet towards him. It slapped the windscreen, clung there amoment and was whisked away before he had time to understandwhat it was. And then—or did this happen in the same moment?—the rear of the lorry made a complicated set of movements, abouncing and swaying, and slewed in a wide spray of sparks, brighteven in sunshine. Something curved and metallic flew off to oneside. So far Stephen had had time to move his foot toward the brake,time to notice a padlock swinging on a loose flange and “wash meplease” scrawled in grime. There was a whinnying of scraped metaland new sparks, dense enough to form a white flame which seemedto propel the rear of the lorry into the air.Writing can also slow down time for events that we celebrate. You canwrite about your child’s first birthday party, remembering the way that yougave each child a white belt made of crepe paper and taught the childrenkarate in the backyard. The almond trees were just beginning to blossom.When you imagine the richness of the moment, the smells and tastes andtexture of the air, what you and others were saying and doing, you enlargethe moment to emphasize it. Or you may speed up time to summarize fiveyears in a paragraph. In short, writing allows us to transcend time.Signaling Time ChangeAlthough we can skip around in time, writers should identify when now isin the text, a present moment from which the writer is communicating. Thereader needs to be situated in both time and place. As long as the writerlocates the reader in time, the writer can move backward into f lashbacksthrough the simple use of verb tense or markers like three weeks before. Thewriter can also advance into the future with signals: She didn’t know thatthree weeks later, the music teacher would ask her to perform in a concertand she would meet her cousin for the first time. The writer can also signalthat more than one event is occurring at the same time by using the wordmeanwhile. This magical word gives the writer the chance to layer the storywith concurrent happenings.WRITING EXERCISE: A MATTER OFTIMESlow down time. Write about a short period of time, five minutesof your life. Show us all of the telling details. Take your time. Fillin the picture.What is your notion of time? Are you always late? Early? Why?Write about missing something because you couldn’t get thereon time.The first commandment given to the Jewish nation in the Torahis the one to sanctify time by marking the month of Nissan, themonth that the Jewish people were liberated from their slaveryin Egypt. Pick a time in your life where you felt liberated fromsome type of enslavement. It could be an addiction, a badrelationship, a sense of hopelessness, or even boredom. Tell usthe story.Write an anecdote having to do with work. Then use the wordmean-while to tell another story that was happening at the sametime.WRITING EXERCISE: SCENE ANDSUMMARY*14Write about a mystifying or painful event that happened in childhood.Write about the next ten years in a summary. Speed time up in thissection: “For the next ten years, we would . . .” Now write about theevent from the retrospective perspective of an adult. Begin with“What I didn’t see or understand then . . .”PersonaIn Hebrew the word for face, panim, is plural. We have many faces.Although we aim for authenticity, when we write an essay or memoir, wemay also create a dramatic persona to convey our truths. As Phillip Lopatewrites in his piece on writing essays, “On the Necessity of Turning Oneselfinto a Character”:A good place to start is your quirks. These are the idiosyncrasies,stubborn tics, antisocial mannerisms, and so on that set you apartfrom the majority to establish credibility, you would do well toresist coming across as absolutely average. Who wants to read aboutthat bland creature, the regular Joe? The mistake many would-beessayists and memoirists make is to try so hard to be likable andnice, to fit in, that the reader, bored, begins craving stronger stuff (atthe very least, a tone of authority). Literature is not a place forconformists and organization men.One writer describes his voice as the ability to pretend that he isspeaking to somebody after his second glass of wine: in other words, hisdefenses are slowly stripped away and he becomes more authentic. Youdon’t have to stand naked, but you do have to take off your coat.If you are the mother of young children, let yourself be the mother ofyoung children, the uber mother. Tell us about your disappointments andfears and conflicts and victories but make them big.While some writers have naturally distinctive voices, we can alsoconstruct dramatic voices by reading and learning and experiencing, bytrusting in our own authority. As Sarah Manguso notes, in her New YorkTimes article “Green-Eyed Verbs”:My least favorite received idea about writing is that one must findone’s voice, as if it’s there inside you, fully formed and ready to turnon like a player piano. A voice is what emerges from an informedintelligence as it reaches toward accurate perception.In other words, you don’t suddenly discover your voice. You build itover time. You think, read, and write. You study the world and a voiceemerges from inside of you. In her article “When You Write a Memoir,Readers Think They Know You Better Than They Do,” Dani Shapiroobserves:I am striving to make order out of chaos, which is the sweetestpleasure I know. When I succeed, I have a thing, this story, to offer.It isn’t me. It isn’t even a facsimile. I have used my life—rather thanmy life using me—to make something more beautiful and refinedthan I could ever be.After I wrote my memoir, The Blessing of a Broken Heart, many peopleexclaimed that I was so honest in my book. But the book is only a part ofmy story. I left a lot out of that book, pages where I was crying out in totaldespair. I didn’t tell everything, and the voice I adopted while telling thestory is only a part of me—a wiser more patient woman than I was at thetime. Still, the narrator I crafted was a help to me because she offered mewisdom in a period of darkness and chaos. I crafted that book, and its orderand authority offered me temporary control and solace. In shaping thatbook, I also shaped myself.WRITING EXERCISE: PERSONA:WHO IS THE NARRATOR?In the beginning of her memoir Wild, Cheryl Strayed writes:I’d been so many things already. A loving wife and anadulteress. A beloved daughter who now spent holidaysalone. An ambitious overachiever and aspiring writer whohopped from one meaningless job to the next while dabblingdangerously with drugs and sleeping with too many men. Iwas the granddaughter of a Pennsylvania coalminer, thedaughter of a steelworker turned salesman. After my parentssplit up, I lived with my mother, brother, and sister inapartment complexes populated by single mothers and theirkids. As a teen, I lived back to the land style in the Minnesotanorth woods in a house that didn’t have an indoor toilet,If you’re writing to make money or for fame, you may have to wait along time to achieve either of them. But if you’re writing because you wantto understand the world and yourself, if you need to compose your worldthrough your writing—and I mean compose in both senses of the word, toarrange and re-create but also to calm and quiet—then writing itselfbecomes its own reward.Of course, sometimes life presents such interesting stories that you wantto grab them and hold on to them, examine them and share them. Yet manyof us write because we have painful stories that need to be expressed,traumas that need to be addressed. We desire to share our stories, and wewant to be listened to, not only to express our pain but also as a way toacquire wisdom and healing.Sometimes we write because we are longing for something. The wordlong is derived from Old English langian, which means both to “grow long,prolong” and “dwell in thought, yearn.” We long for something far away.We want. Yet, sometimes we don’t even know what it is we are longing for.When the Hebrew people who left Egypt wandered in the desert and weregiven manna to eat, they did not have to labor for their food. The mannatasted like whatever the people imagined. Yet the people claimed that theycraved the meat that they had eaten in Egypt. Some commentators say thatthey craved desire. They craved a craving. We are created to desire. When aperson has no desire, it’s often a sign of depression.I understand that lack of desire. In 2001 my son Koby was murdered byterrorists when he was thirteen. He and his friend Yosef Ish Ran cut schooland went hiking in the canyon near our home in Israel. They were accostedby terrorists who beat them to death with rocks. Of course, my life stoppedeven though I had three other kids and a husband and friends. I wanted todie. I had no desire because the only thing I wanted was to have Koby back.With a lot of support from my husband, friends, family, and my communityand with the help of writing a spiritual memoir about our loss, I was able toreturn to life.Longing is related to the word belonging. We search to feel connected,to feel part of something larger than us. We long to belong; we long forrelationship, for love, for friends and family, for a community. Some of usyearn for a relationship with the divine, with the eternal. We want to feelGod in our lives, to know what the divine wants from us, to see some sortof truth that is eternal and transcendent.Desire is wired into us. It makes sense that narrative often grapples withlonging and takes place in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in ourstumbling attempts to achieve our desires. “Not to have is the beginning ofdesire,” says the poet Wallace Stevens in Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.Our writing does not have to solve our desire; it only has to fully express it.Sometimes a story is about a narrator who desires not to change, not tobe affected by others. For example, in Raymond Carver’s short story“Cathedral,” the narrator eats and drinks himself numb, disdaining andmocking others—a classic wise-guy. But when a friend of his wife, a blindman, visits his home, the narrator is exposed to a world that is moremeaningful, elevated, and loving. By the end of the story, the narrator findshimself late at night drawing a cathedral he sees on the television for theblind man, the blind man’s fingers riding his own. The narrator recognizessomething stirring beyond himself. In fact, the last statement of the narratorin the story is: “It’s really something.” The narrator has at last brokenthrough the defenses that prevented him from feeling any lack in his life.He finally experiences something exalted and sacred beyond the barriers ofhis abrasive, defensive personality.As readers, it’s not just desire that interests us but the quality of thatdesire. If we write about searching for designer shoes, a reader may have ahard time relating to us. (Except if you’re Nora Ephron. Let’s face it: if awriter charms us or makes us laugh, we’ll follow her anywhere.) Somethingimportant and emotionally urgent should be at stake. It helps to think of theissues you’re writing about as life and death matters. That’s why moviesand TV shows are often battles of life against death, but emotional stakescan be just as urgent. In Alice Munro’s stories, for example, charactersoften struggle with shame and betrayal.My teacher, fiction writer Steve Almond, points out that in order for thereader to care about the main character in a story, the character also has tocare passionately about something. In an essay the narrator becomes thecharacter who wants and desires and cares. If the narrator doesn’t careabout something deeply, even desperately, then the reader won’t care aboutthe narrator.WRITING EXERCISE: YOUR STORYWhat is the story you wish you could read? What kinds of books doyou like reading? Describe the memoir you would like to read in afew sentences. Perhaps that is the book that you could write.In 1996 I had a burning desire—to save my father’s life. Obviously, a lotwas at stake.That February, six months after my husband and I and our four childrenmoved to Israel, my mother called me and told me that I should come homebecause my father wasn’t doing well. He’d been diagnosed with thymoma,cancer of the thymus gland, a few months earlier. I flew from Israel where Ileft my husband and children and landed in West Palm Beach, Florida. Itook a taxi to the white brick, two-bedroom apartment in the Pines ofDelray Beach, Florida, because my mother could not leave my father topick me up. He had endured an operation on his thymus gland. The tumorwas removed, and he had been sent home. The doctor said he was fine; theoperation was a success. The minute I saw him, a frail man who had onlymonths before been strong and vital, I knew he was dying.It was as if he were disappearing before our eyes. He couldn’t eat. Heweighed less than 120 pounds. The thought of food made him gag. Myfather had previously had a huge appetite. He would cook soups and stewsfor us, and he would have many servings. Now he sat in an upholsteredlounge chair in the living room watching TV. He couldn’t shift the back ofthe chair into a reclining position because he was so weak. One morningsoon after, when a caretaker arrived, my mother and I drove to a furniturestore to buy him a padded chair that would be more comfortable for hisskeletal body.We wanted him to eat, but he had no appetite. The HMO doctor finallyprescribed Marinol, a marijuana pill to help his appetite. Frantic to help myfather, my mother and I left my father at home and drove to every drugstorein Delray Beach and Boca Raton with the prescription, waited on long lineswith gray-haired patrons in numerous pharmacies, but there were noMarinol pills available. Then I got the idea to call Roger, a boyfriend fromhigh school who I knew was now living in Florida, to ask him if he knewwhere I could get marijuana. If I couldn’t get the pills, I would try the realthing.I don’t recommend calling old boyfriends after twenty-five years. Istood in my mother’s kitchen in front of the electric stove, the clock aboveme the square yellow one from my childhood. Roger’s wife answered andgave me his number at the restaurant he managed. He was, of course,surprised to hear from me, especially since I hadn’t spoken to him for aquarter of a century, and here I was asking him for marijuana. But he saidthat he would do what he could and get back to me. I didn’t hear from him.But late that night, I answered the phone at my mother’s house, and anangry voice asked for me: “Who the hell do you think you are? What areyou doing calling my husband? Don’t you dare call my husband fornarcotics. I’ll send the cops to your house.”She hung up on me. I told my mother that Roger’s wife had threatenedme. We laughed nervously and locked the front door.The gap between my franticelectricity or running water. In spite of this, I’d become a highschool cheerleader and homecoming queen, and then I wentoff to college and became a left wing feminist campus radical.But a woman who walks alone in the wilderness for elevenhundred miles. I’d never been anything like that before. I hadnothing to lose by giving it a whirl.Your reader probably doesn't know who you are. Write down atleast six things that you want your reader to know about you, forexampleI am a mother and a bereaved mother. I am a good wife intraining. I am a pastoral counselor who is tired of counseling. Ilike doing headstands, but for short times. I worry that therewill be enough food for the holidays. I have a dog who keepsrising from the dead.ToneAs writers, we cultivate voices that gush and confess or voices that restrainthemselves with dignity or detachment—or travel between both states. Wecan be cranky, disturbed, and neurotic. We can be funny, silly, forgiving,understanding, and learned. We can be broken, revealing disappointmentand rupture. We can be literary. We can be coarse. We can take a measuredview like E. B. White, be vulnerable and intimate like Anne Lamott, or bebold and elegant like Joan Didion.In the essay “Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street,” E. B. White writes as athoughtful, reasonable gentleman, perplexed by the steadfast weight andpower of material objects as well as the sadness in life. He creates a personathe reader feels is trustworthy:For some weeks now I have been engaged in dispersing the contentsof this apartment, trying to persuade hundreds of inanimate objectsto scatter and leave me alone. It is not a simple matter. I amimpressed by the reluctance of one’s worldly goods to go out againinto the world.His diction is elevated, for example he uses the word dispersing instead oftossing. His tone is one of genial amusement.Ross Gay’s book The Book of Delights is a record of things and eventsthat delight him. In one essay in the book, “Inefficiency,” Gay usesparentheses, many clauses, repetition, incomplete sentences, andinterruptions like “I should say,” to create an engaged . . . vivid persona.I don’t know if it’s the time I’ve spent in the garden (spent aninteresting word), which is somehow an exercise in supremeattentiveness—staring into the oregano blooms wending through thelowest branches of the goumi bush and the big vascular leaves ofthe rhubarb—and also an exercise in supreme inattention, ordistraction, I should say, or fleeting intense attentions, I should say,or intense fleeting attentions . . .Gay begins with doubt, a statement of uncertainty as he admits that hedoesn’t know if it’s the time in the garden that has made him pay attention,an act of supreme attentiveness, which as he states, is also an exercise insupreme inattention, or intense fleeting attentions. Notice how he qualifieshimself as he writes, including the reader in his quest to understand thesublime nature of inefficiency.Joan Didion’s tone in “Why I Write” is unapologetic, bold:Of course I stole the title for this talk, from George Orwell. Onereason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write.There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound,and the sound they share is this:IIIIn many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneselfupon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, changeyour mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise itsaggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses andqualifiers and tentative subjunctives . . . but there’s no gettingaround the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secretbully.In an interview with the Paris Review, novelist Elena Ferrante statesthat she begins with a composed narrator who gradually loses control sothat a more agitated voice emerges. She explains:I only know one thing for certain—it seems to me that I work wellwhen I can start from a flat, dry tone, that of a strong, lucid,educated woman, as many middle-class women are today. At thebeginning I need curtness, a terse, clear, unaffected language,without ornamentation. Only when the story begins to emergesafely, thanks to that tone, do I begin to wait for the moment whenI’ll be able to replace those well-oiled, quiet links with somethingrustier, raspier, and with a pace that’s disjointed and agitated, evenat the growing risk of the story falling apart. The moment I changeregister for the first time is both exciting and anguished. I enjoybreaking through my character’s armor of good education and goodmanners. I enjoy upsetting her self-image, her will, and revealinganother, rougher soul underneath, someone raucous, maybe evencrude. I work hard to make that change in register come as asurprise and also to make it seem natural when we go back to amore serene style of narration.We all have civilized and uncivilized voices battling for control insideus. Tone, conveyed by syntax, word choice, pacing, and imagery, is amarker of that tug-of-war inside us, a kind of face-off between the superegoand the id. Yet even when the reader feels that the narrator’s mask has beenremoved, and the narrator is no longer trying to save face and is showingherself as raw, real, and authentic, the narrator’s persona is still usuallycrafted and composed.WRITING EXERCISE: EXPERIMENTWITH VOICEEmotional ToneWrite about a childhood experience. Now write about the sameexperience from the perspective of a very angry child or as anagitated adult.Write a love letter that is sickeningly sentimental.Write a hate letter that seeks vengeance.Write an essay where you use a phrase that you heard often inyour childhood. Repeat that phrase at least three times in theessay.Write about a time that you felt powerful. How did you use thispower? What happened afterward?Are you fed up? Write a rant about something that you can’tstand and won’t put up with anymore.AuthorityWrite about authority in your life. Write to somebody who hadauthority in your life. Let that person know the effect he or shehad on you.Think of what knowledge or skill you are completely confidentabout. When do you speak with authority? Write about that.PersonaAt a workshop Brandel France de Bravo gave us this exercise:Think of a story that has a lot of emotional resonance for you,that is still charged in some way. Now meet with a partner andtell the other person your story. The other person doesn’t speakbut takes notes. Switch. Then write up your partner’s story butnarrate it so that you create a persona who is telling the story.Try to pour emotion into the story. Imagine your way into yourpartner’s story. Feel free to add what you need to create adramatic narrative from what they have shared. Use poeticlicense. Read the story to your partner.In Psalm 118, it says, “Today is the day that God invented.Rejoice and be glad in it. As Ross Gay does, write aboutsomething you see today that delights you. Use repetition,interruptions, and interjections to create a breathless, excited,enthusiastic persona.A FINAL WORDIN THE TORAH GOD SAID, LET THERE BE LIGHT, and there was light, creation.We too create our own worlds with words. We write to illuminate thoseworlds. Olam, the word for “world” in Hebrew, also means “hidden.” Byengaging with the sefirot, what was hidden in your life may becomerevealed, manifest.Nobody else can tell your truth. Rabbi Nachman says: “Each shepherdhas his own special song as does each blade of grass.”“Everything in the world can be imitated except truth. For truth that isimitated is no longer truth,” says Rev. Menachem Mendel of Kotzk.Take the words and experiences and knowledge that God has granted you,your truth, and write your memoir. Be bold, creative, patient, free, andfocused as you craft your life into art. Your readers are waiting for you.WRITING EXERCISE: YOUR BOOKLAUNCHEnvisionyourself holding a book in your hands as you give areading. What is the title of the book? As you introduce your work,what will you say to your audience?FOOTNOTES*1 A ritual bath.†2 The Zohar is an allegorical and mystical commentary of the Pentateuchthat serves as the principal text of the Kabbalah.*3 Megillah is one of the five sacred books of the Ketuvim (writings), thethird division of the Old Testament.†4 Bamidbar Rabbah is a midrash of rabbinical interpretations of the Bookof Numbers.*5 Adapted from "Your First Kitchen" by Robin Hemley in Now Write!Nonfiction.*6 Adapted from "Three Things That Stopped Me in My Tracks" byMichael Steinberg in Now Write! Nonfiction.*7 Adapted from an exercise in Wishes, Lies and Dreams byKenneth Koch.*8 A twenty-four-hour candle lit on the anniversary of the death of aloved one.*9 Adapted from "Creating Shape in Scene" by Patricia Foster inNow Write! Nonfiction.*10 Rabbinical literature that explicates and illuminates verses fromthe Torah, adding extra-textual commentary and stories.*11 From The Art of Fiction by John Gardner.*12 Selections from the books of Nevi'im (Prophets) that are publiclyread in synagogue on Shabbat and holy days after the Torahportion.*13 Adapted from "Smushing Seed Ideas Together" by DavidMichael Kaplan in Now Write! Fiction Writing Exercises.*14 Adapted from "Moving through Time" by Nancy Reisman in NowWrite! Fiction Writing Exercises.BIBLIOGRAPHYAmichai, Yehuda. “Tourists.” In The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai.Translated by Stephen Mitchell. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1996.Appelfeld, Aharon. The Story of a Life. New York: Schocken, 2006.Atwan, Robert. “Foreword: Confessions of an Anthologist.” In The BestAmerican Essays. Edited by Edwidge Danticat. 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New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.Young, Molly. “Letter of Appreciation: Kneipp Herbal Bath Oils.” NewYork Times Magazine, April 17, 2015.ABOUT THE AUTHORSHERRI MANDELL is an award-winning writer who has contributed tonumerous magazines and journals, including USA Today, The Times ofIsrael, Hadassah Magazine, and the Jerusalem Post. She is the author ofseveral books, including a spiritual memoir, The Blessing of a BrokenHeart, which won a National Jewish Book Award in 2004 and wastranslated into three languages. It was also produced as a play that touredthroughout America and Israel. Her other books are The Road to Resilience,providing seven spiritual steps of resilience, and Reaching for Comfort,documenting her experience as a pastoral counselor working on the cancerward in a hospital in Jerusalem. She is also the author of two children’spicture books and teaches writing workshops online.Mandell holds a master’s degree in creative writing and studiedKabbalah with teachers in Jerusalem. For the past 20 years, she and herhusband have directed the Koby Mandell Foundation in Israel whosehttps://www.innertraditions.com/author/sherri-mandell/flagship program is Camp Koby, a therapeutic sleepaway camp forbereaved children. She lives in Israel.About Inner Traditions • Bear &CompanyFounded in 1975, Inner Traditions is a leading publisher of books onindigenous cultures, perennial philosophy, visionary art, spiritual traditionsof the East and West, sexuality, holistic health and healing, self-development, as well as recordings of ethnic music and accompaniments formeditation.In July 2000, Bear & Company joined with Inner Traditions andmoved from Santa Fe, New Mexico, where it was founded in 1980, toRochester, Vermont. TogetherInner Traditions • Bear &Company have eleven imprints: Inner Traditions, Bear & Company,Healing Arts Press, Destiny Books, Park Street Press, Bindu Books, BearCub Books, Destiny Recordings, Destiny Audio Editions, Inner Traditionsen Español, and Inner Traditions India.For more information or to browse through our more than one thousandtitles in print and ebook formats, visit www.InnerTraditions.com.Become a part of the Inner Traditions community toreceive special offers and members-only discounts.http://www.innertraditions.com/http://www.innertraditions.com/https://www.innertraditions.com/mailing-list?utm_source=eBooksSignup&utm_medium=eBook&utm_campaign=eBooks_SignupBOOKS OF RELATED INTERESTEnsouling Language On the Art of Nonfiction and the Writer's Life by Stephen Harrod BuhnerScripting the Life You WantManifest Your Dreams with Just Pen and Paper by Royce Christyn Foreword by Mitch HorowitzThe Kabbalah of Light Ancient Practices to Ignite the Imagination andIlluminate the Soul by Catherine ShainbergKabbalah and the Power of Dreaming Awakening the Visionary Life by Catherine ShainbergThe Kabbalah of the Soul The Transformative Psychology and Practices ofJewish Mysticism by Leonora Leet, Ph.D.Write Your Memoir The Soul Work of Telling Your Story by Allan G. HunterTarot and the Gates of Light A Kabbalistic Path to Liberation by Mark HornKabbalistic Tarot Hebraic Wisdom in the Major and Minor Arcana https://www.innertraditions.com/books/ensouling-languagehttps://www.innertraditions.com/books/scripting-the-life-you-wanthttps://www.innertraditions.com/books/the-kabbalah-of-lighthttps://www.innertraditions.com/books/kabbalah-and-the-power-of-dreaminghttps://www.innertraditions.com/books/the-kabbalah-of-the-soulhttps://www.innertraditions.com/books/write-your-memoirhttps://www.innertraditions.com/books/tarot-and-the-gates-of-lighthttps://www.innertraditions.com/kabbalistic-tarotby Dovid KrafchowINNER TRADITIONS • BEAR & COMPANY P.O. Box 388 • Rochester, VT 05767 1-800-246-8648www.InnerTraditions.comOr contact your local booksellerhttp://www.innertraditions.com/Inner TraditionsOne Park StreetRochester, Vermont 05767www.InnerTraditions.comCopyright © 2023 by Sherri MandellAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized inany form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, includingphotocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrievalsystem, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cataloging-in-Publication Data for this title is available from the Library of CongressISBN 978-1-64411-610-4 (print)ISBN 978-1-64411-611-1 (ebook)Yehuda Amichai, excerpt from “Tourists” from The Selected Poetry ofYehuda Amichai, University of California Press, 2013. Reprinted bypermission of University of California Press.James Wright, excerpt from “A Blessing” from Above the River: TheComplete Poems and Selected Prose. Copyright 1990 by James Wright.Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.James Wright, excerpt from “Lying on a Hammock at William Duffy’sFarm in Pine Island” from Above the River: The Complete Poems andSelected Prose. Copyright 1990 by James Wright. Reprinted by permissionof Wesleyan University Press.Larry Levis, excerpt from “Winter Stars” in Winter Stars, copyright 1985.Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.Terry Tempest Williams, excerpt from “A Letter to Deb Clow,” from Red:Passion and Patience in the Desert. Originally appeared in Northern Lightshttp://www.innertraditions.com/magazine, summer 1998 edition. Reprinted by permission of Brandt andHochman Literary Agents, Inc. All rights reserved.Elizabeth Bishop, excerpt from “The Fish,” from Poems, Farrar, Straus, andGiroux, 2011. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.The author made every attempt to credit appropriately and seek permission,where necessary, for quotes used in this book. Any oversights or omissionswill be corrected in future editions.To send correspondence to the author of this book, mail a first-class letter tothe author c/o Inner Traditions Bear & Company, One Park Street,Rochester, VT 05767, and we will forward the communication, or contactthe author directly at www.kobymandell.org/sherri-mandell.http://www.kobymandell.org/sherri-mandellINDEXAll Pages numbers refers to print edition of this titleAaron, 110Abraham, 55–56, 73, 74Almond, Steve, 9Amichai, Yehuda, 111–12Ammons, Archie, 13, 58anaphora, 49anger, 25, 61annoyances, 22aphorisms, 124apologies, 72Appelfeld, Aharon, 89argument structure, 108–9“Art of Being Still, The” (House), 116Art of the Personal Essay, The (Lopate), 17Art of Time in Memoir, The (Birkerts), 76Atwan, Robert, 22Atwood, Margaret, 114audience, 100authority, 126, 127, 136Baal Shem Tov, 34Bachelard, Gaston, 64Baker, Will, 81Baldwin, James, 92Barry, Lynda, 69beauty, 100–101belonging, 8bina, 29Bird by Bird (Lamott), 75, 77Birkerts, Sven, 76, 79Bishop, Elizabeth, 95Blake, William, 117blank page, 57–58Blessing of a Broken Heart, The (Mandell), 4, 62–63, 70, 131Bloom, Amy, 95Book of Delights, The (Gay), 61, 133–34Borich, Barrie Jean, 79boundaries, 3, 73–86fear related to, 85–86language essentials and, 84–85narrative structures and, 75–84writing practice and, 85Bradley, Butch, 56braided essay, 81Buber, Martin, 3, 120Burshtein, Rama, 119Cameron, Julia, 85Carver, Raymond, 9Castellani, Christopher, 115Chekhov, Anton, 97, 115–16chesed, 55–56, 57, 73childhood images, 71Child in Time, The (McEwan), 128chochmah, 21, 29chronological structure, 75–76Circling My Mother (Gordon), 46, 51closure, 30–31clustering, 124collage structure, 81complaint, letter of, 109comprehension, 3, 29–54contradiction and, 40–41detail and, 32–36explanation and, 38, 39hints and, 37–38negation and, 49–52questions and, 45–47, 48reflection and, 42–49, 54repetition and, 47–49, 50–51, 52secrets and, 53theme and, 38–40, 42confessions, 23–24conflict, 96–97Connelly, Michael, 32contradiction, 40–41contrast, 81–82counterfactual reality, 64–67creativity, 4, 53, 120–25Crichton, Michael, 63curiosity, 21Cusk, Rachel, 94David, King of Israel, 126Davis, Lydia, 98–99, 109desire, 7–12details, 32–36devotion, 106–8dialogue, 96–98Dickey, James, 93Didion, Joan, 48, 133, 134Dillard, Annie, 14Dinesen, Isak, 70discipline, 57, 85discorddialogue as mode of, 96–97exercise on music and, 99discouragement, 12–13divine providence, 20Doctorow, E. L., 29Doty, Mark, 32, 93doubt, 15–16Douglas, Mary, 75drash, 31, 38–53dreams, 28, 121Dubus, Andre, III, 35Earling, Debra Magpie, 64egotism, fear of, 16–18Elbow, Peter, 59Elephant in the Sukkah, The (Mandell), 107Eliot, T. S., 18, 29emotional tone, 135–36encouragement, 12–13endurance, 4, 103–9argument structure and, 108–9devotion related to, 106–8focus and, 108enlargement, 91–93Ephron, Delia, 84Ephron, Nora, 9, 56, 67, 84, 92–93epiphany, 22, 53, 54episodic structure, 80essayskindness in writing of, 59–60narrative structures for, 79–84pattern for developing, 31–54Essays after Eighty (Hall), 41Ethics of the Fathers, 30, 32expertise, 127explanation, 38, 39faith, 12Faulkner, William, 56fear, emotion of, 85–86Ferrante, Elena, 94, 108, 134Feuerman, Ruchama King, 63Fisher, M. F. K., 83flash essay, 79focus, 108food narrative, 36France de Bravo, Brandel, 52, 136Franklin, Jon, 43Freeman, John, 63free writing, 58–59Fremon, Celeste, 32Freud, Sigmund, 50Fuentes, Carlos, 47Gardner, John, 39Gay, Ross, 61, 123, 133–34, 136generosity, 4, 55, 56, 58Gessen, Keith, 51gevurah, 73–75, 83, 84, 85Gilbert, Elizabeth, 57Giraldi, William, 91Gladwell, Malcolm, 106Glasner, Tovi, 125Godard, Jean-Luc, 76Gold, Judy, 83Goldbarth, Albert, 124Goldberg, Natalie, 58Gopnik, Adam, 94Gordon, Emily Fox, 23Gordon, Mary, 46, 51Gould, Joe, 76gratitude, 117Green, Adam, 78Greer, Andrew Sean, 23Gross, Terry, 28Hall, Donald, 41Hands (Kooser), 67harmony, 3, 87–102audience and, 100beauty and, 100–101dialogue and, 96–98enlargement and, 91–93metaphor and simile as, 93–96music of language and, 98–99truth and, 90–91Havatzelet, Ehud, 115healingimagery for, 68–72writing as means of, 61–72Hemingway, Ernest, 32, 96hermeneutics, 31Hiestand, Emily, 65Hill, Kathleen, 18hints, 37–38Hiss, Tony, 21hod, 110, 111, 117, 119Hood, Ann, 36House, Silas, 116humility, 111–12Hunt, Laird, 66Hutner, Rabbi, 45imageryessay structure and, 82–83healing power of, 68–72writing exercises on, 71–72imperfection, 101inglenook, 26–27Inner Space (Kaplan), 55 insecurity, 22inspiration, 3, 19–28curiosity and, 21insecurity as, 22methods of, 25–27obstacles to, 23–25, 28writing exercises on, 21, 27–28Isaac, 56, 73–74Jacob, 87, 90Jazz (Morrison), 96–97Johnston, Bret Anthony, 95Jong, Erica, 105juxtaposition, 81, 91Kabbalah, 1, 2, 28, 33, 70Kahneman, Daniel, 43Kaplan, Rabbi Aryeh, 55, 87, 121Keats, John, 21Kekulé, Friedrich August, 28Kephart, Beth, 24Keret, Etgar, 112keter, 6, 12Kincaid, Jamaica, 50–51kindness, 3, 55–61blank page and, 57–58essay as form of, 59–60free writing and, 58–59loving narrator and, 60–61Kingsolver, Barbara, 46Kiteley, Brian, 38Kittredge, Bill, 75Koby (author’s son), 4, 8, 62, 70Kook, Rabbi, 4, 73Kooser, Ted, 67Lacks, Henrietta, 88Lamott, Anne, 75, 77, 133languageartful use of, 84–85harmony and, 89–90music of, 98–99Last of Her Kind, The (Nunez), 92Leggant, Joan, 115Leiner, Rabbi Yaakov, 22Leonard, Elmore, 56Letters to a Young Poet (Rilke), 46Levi, Primo, 83Levine, Sara, 59Levis, Larry, 118Liberman, Avi, 106limits. See boundariesLindbergh, Anne Morrow, 83literary reality, 64–68Lodato, Victor, 94longing, 8–9Lopate, Phillip, 17, 39, 44, 57, 84, 130Lost, The (Mendelsohn), 30Luria, Rabbi Isaac, 1Lux, Thomas, 36lyric essay, 80Macdonald, Helen, 37malchut, 126–27Malcolm, Janet, 111Mallarmé, Stéphane, 39Manguso, Sarah, 131Martin, Lee, 41, 82Mayan, 26–27McEwan, Ian, 128McPhee, John, 76–77meaning, 39, 42–43, 44, 98Medved, Jane, 25memoirsexercises on writing, 10, 18narrative structure in, 75–76, 77privacy related to, 24memories, 38, 52, 53, 69Mendel, Menachem, 74, 137Mendelsohn, Daniel, 30metaphors, 93–96Michaels, Leonard, 98mikveh (ritual bath), 1Miller, Brenda, 40, 49, 81, 118Mirsky, Yehuda, 4mistake admission, 117-19Montaigne, 17Moore, Dinty, 79Morgan, Robert, 32Mori, Kyoko, 36Morrison, Toni, 96Moses, 44–45, 105–6, 120Munk, Rabbi Elie, 87Munro, Alice, 9music of language, 98–99My Brother (Kincaid), 50–51Nabokov, Vladimir, 32Nachman, Rabbi, 89, 137narcissism, fear of, 16–18narrative structures, 75–84chronology and, 75–77essay writing and, 79–84story arc and, 77–79writing exercises on, 83–84negation, 49–52, 53negative capability, 21netzach, 103, 106, 107, 108, 109Norton, Lisa Dale, 18Notes of a Native Son (Baldwin), 92Nunez, Sigrid, 92Oates, Joyce Carol, 62, 128Oliver, Mary, 21Olswanger, Anna, 107originality, 53O’Rourke, Meghan, 62Orwell, George, 39Paley, Grace, 30pardes, 31, 53, 54Paris to the Moon (Gopnik), 94passion, 14past, changing one’s, 64patience, 119Pennebaker, James, 63people, particulars about, 35–36Percy, Benjamin, 78persistence. See endurancepersona, 130–32, 136personal history, 18, 93Pinchas, Rabbi, 2–3Pinter, Harold, 76Poe, Edgar Allan, 94point of view, 112–15Pollock, Jackson, 50Powers, Richard, 116prayers, 5, 21privacy, 24prompts, 35–36, 123–24pshat, 31, 32–36Purim, 12questions, 45–47, 48, 52Ramachandran, V. S., 69Re-Authoring Lives (White), 44reflection, 42–53, 54negation and, 49–52questions for, 45–47, 48repetition as, 47–49, 50–51remez, 31, 37–38repetition, 47–49, 50, 52retrospective awareness, 44reverie, 64Rico, Gabriele, 124Rilke, Rainer Maria, 46Road to Resilience, The (Mandell), 88Robbins, Apollo, 78Robinson, Marilynne, 58Rosenfeld, Rabbi Joey, 28Rozenman, Eric, 125rulership, 4, 126–36expertise and, 127persona and, 130–32, 136time mastery and, 128–30tone and, 133–36run-on sentence, 72Sacks, Oliver, 82–83Safekeeping (Thomas), 80, 113sapir (sapphire), 5Schappell, Elissa, 60Schneerson, Rabbi Menachem, 6Schoffman, Stuart, 122“Second Person” (Havatzelet), 115secrets, 23–24, 53, 63sefirot, 2, 3–5, 137self-compassion, 57shame, 25Shapiro, Dani, 131Shields, David, 80Silverman, Sue, 43, 82similes, 93–96Skloot, Rebecca, 88Smith, Zadie, 82sod, 31, 53Soyinka, Wole, 47Stevens, Wallace, 9Strayed, Cheryl, 132Strunk, William, 32surrender, 4, 110–19gratitude and, 117humility and, 111–12mistake admission and, 117–19patience and, 119point of view and, 112–15writing process and, 115–17swerves, 82synesthesia, 95talking to yourself, 97–98Taymor, Julie, 83Tedeschi, Richard, 47themes, 38–40, 42Thomas, Abigail, 60, 80, 113tiferet, 87–88, 90, 100time mastery, 128–30Tippett, Krista, 28Tobin, Deborah Risk, 45tone, 133–36“Tourists” (Amichai), 111–12truth, 90–91Twain, Mark, 38uncertainty, 45, 101, 119Vital, Rabbi Chaim, 1voices, 116–17, 133vulnerability, 16, 117What Comes Next and How to Like It (Thomas), 60White, E. B., 17, 32, 39–40, 133White, Michael, 44Whitman, Walt, 60“Why I Write” (Didion), 134“Why I Write” (Williams), 48Wild (Strayed), 132Wilder, Thornton, 23will, 3, 6–18desire and, 7–12doubt and, 15–16encouragement and, 12–13fear of narcissism and, 16–18writing process and, 14Williams, Terry Tempest, 48Williams, William Carlos, 32willpower vs. will, 14“Winter Stars” (Levis), 118wise narrator, 45wishes, 5, 68Woolf, Virginia, 19, 107, 128Wright, James, 30, 117writingfree, 58–59healing through, 61–72sefirot related to, 3–5spiritual truth of, 2–3surrendering to, 115–17Year of Magical Thinking, The (Didion), 48 Electronic edition produced by Digital Media Initiativeshttps://www.dmi.systems/Cover ImageTitle PageEpigraphAcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1. Will / KeterDesireEncouragementThe Writing ProcessObstaclesThe Fear of NarcissismChapter 2. Inspiration / ChochmahCuriosityInsecurity as InspirationObstaclesA Few Methods of InspirationA Warning about InspirationChapter 3. Comprehension / BinaChapter 4. Kindness / ChesedThe Blank Page and KindnessFree WritingThe Essay as a Form of KindnessThe Loving NarratorHealing through WritingChapter 5. Boundaries / GevurahFocusing on Narrative StructureLanguageFinding Time to WriteFear and AweChapter 6. Harmony / TiferetTruthHarmony and EnlargementMetaphor and Simile as HarmonyDialogue as a Mode of DiscordMusicThinking about AudienceBeautyA Lack of CertaintyChapter 7. Endurance / NetzachDevotionFinding a FocusThe Structure of an ArgumentNetzach as A More Expansive ViewChapter 8. Surrender / HodHumilityPoint of ViewSurrendering to the MaterialVoicesGratitudeAdmitting Our MistakesPatienceChapter 9. Creativity / YesodCreativity as InvitationImplementingChapter 10. Rulership / MalchutBecoming an ExpertPlaying with TimePersonaToneA Final WordFootnotesBibliographyAbout the AuthorAbout Inner Traditions • Bear & CompanyBooks of Related InterestCopyright & PermissionsIndexdesire to save my father’s life and the wifewho thought I was out to corrupt or steal her husband is the backbone of anessay.By the way, we finally obtained the Marinol, and my father ate a bowlof chocolate ice cream. We watched TV that night in my parents’ bedroom,my father in his new chair, me lying on the bed. While we were watchingthe evening news, my father laughed and said: “I can’t tell if I’m watching acomedy or a tragedy.” I felt like he had reached an elevated spiritual truth,similar to the state that people are supposed to feel on Purim, the holidaythat celebrates the salvation of the Jews in the days of the Persian empire.What was supposed to be the extermination of the Jews proved to be theirdeliverance. On the holiday there is a commandment to eat and drink untilyou don’t know the difference between evil and good.WRITING EXERCISE: DESIREWriter and critic Charles Baxter describes a literary scene as thestaging of a desire.Write about something you desired as a child or young adult.What happened?What is your greatest desire today? What steps could you taketoward fulfilling that desire? What prevents you from workingtoward fulfilling that desire? What would happen if you achievedit? Write in the present tense.EncouragementThe sefira keter is related to faith. We want to have faith that our storiesmatter, yet it is very easy to be discouraged. I’ve had many students tell meabout English teachers who criticized them. Sometimes it is only aftertwenty-five years that they find the courage to write again.Once, a few years ago, I was tap dancing in Philadelphia in a park—just for fun—while I was on a book tour. An older woman walked by meand said: “Aren’t you too old to do that?” Talk about a slap in the face. AndI didn’t even know her. Why is it that we remember when someone hasjudged us harshly? So many of us can tell stories of people who damagedour desire and talents in some way.Yet it is important to recognize the people who support us. ArchieAmmons, a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, my creative writing professor atCornell University, encouraged me to keep writing. I wasn’t an Englishmajor like most of the other students in my class. Instead, I was in theagriculture school studying natural resources, ecology. One day toward theend of the semester, Professor Ammons asked me to read all of the poems Ihad written that semester aloud to the class, all ten poems. After I read eachpoem, he said: read another poem. And then, another. He nodded after eachpoem. “I like that,” he said.He helped me keep my will to write alive. I notice with many of mystudents that there is often a teacher in their past who has been a mentor andtold them that they have talent. Sometimes all we need is a littleencouragement. Who in your life has encouraged you?WRITING EXERCISE:DISCOURAGEMENT ANDENCOURAGEMENTWrite about somebody who discouraged you. What did thisperson say to you? How did they harm you? Tell us. Now writeback to them. Let it all out. Tell them what you couldn’t say then.Now write about somebody who encouraged you. What did thisperson’s encouragement mean to you? Encouragementincludes the word courage, which is derived from the word for“heart.” In what way did they give you heart?How do you encourage yourself? How do you listen to your ownneeds and desires and cheer yourself on? Do you have a voiceinside of you that provides a sense of support?You might also want to write about the encouragement that youprovide to other people. Who in your life do you encourage? Tryto describe a specific incident.The Writing ProcessIn order to write, we need to engage our will, but there’s an importantdistinction between will and willpower. I always make myself a cup of teaas an incentive to trick myself to start working. Writing can be a difficult,occasionally excruciating experience, but it can also be calming andpleasurable. Annie Dillard, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Pilgrimat Tinker Creek and has written many other books, says that “writing a bookis like rearing children—willpower has very little to do with it. If you havea little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only onwillpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, the baby will starve. Youdo it out of love. Willpower is a weak idea; love is strong Caringpassionately about something isn’t against nature, and it isn’t against humannature. It’s what we’re here to do.”In other words, the will to write comes from love. We love language andseek patterns and coherence in our work. With time, often a lot of time, welearn to crave the solitude of writing, connecting to and nourishing an innervoice that emerges on the page. On the other hand, our need to write canalso stem from anger or jealousy or from simple persistence. Writing is anopportunity to take the passion and love inside you and focus it, transformit, and share it with a reader. What do you care about passionately? What doyou find intolerable? Tell the world.WRITING EXERCISE: PASSION ANDWILLPOWERWhat role has willpower played in your life? When did you try toexercise willpower and how did the experience turn out?What is your passion today? What do you love or hate? Writeabout it.ObstaclesEach sefira has a quality that opposes it. Doubt blocks will and desire.Doubt can prevent us from defining and expressing our will in the world.Almost all of us doubt ourselves at times, some people more than others.We doubt our worth, our right to speak. Who will care about our thoughtsand ideas, our stories? We’re afraid we’re wrong or we’ll make a mistake.We’re afraid to stick up for ourselves. And if we do write, we may notbelieve in the validity or power of our expression. Whenever my studentsshare their work aloud in class, for example, they almost always start withdisclaimers like these:It’s just totally nothing.I’ll read it, but it’s really not very good.I didn’t have a lot of time.I didn’t do it the way it’s supposed to be done.I didn’t know what I was supposed to write.I really don’t think this is very interesting.I don’t know why I wrote this.I don’t like what I wrote at all.I tell my students: no more disclaimers, no apologies. But they still want toapologize. I do, too, when I share my work. It’s hard to take ownership ofour intimate expression. We want our work to be interesting, intelligent, andplayful, but we are so imperfect. We fear exposing parts of ourselves thatwe would prefer to keep hidden. We may feel like imposters. Yet writingdemands a large degree of exposure.It’s important to know that doubt does not always have to beextinguished or vanquished. Expressing doubt can be a useful technique forwriting essays because it’s authentic, and when we disclose our worries,we’re vulnerable and real. It’s when doubt paralyzes us because we don’thave the courage to talk back to it and overcome it, when it stops us ratherthan challenges us, that it becomes destructive.In fact, vulnerability allows us to be soft and to wonder in both sensesof the word. To look at the world with wonder. And to wonder as areflective action. To wonder how things could have been different, forexample. To wonder how we became the person we are.WRITING EXERCISE: DOUBTS ANDVULNERABILITYCreate a list of all of the reasons that you can’t write. Let themall out, all those negative critical voices that live inside you.Now write a letter to that cramped, narrow part of yourself—thejudgmental, critical, nasty voice that says that you have nothingto say and no right to say it. Tell that voice off, put it in its place.Stand up to that voice and say: I am going to do this anyway. Iwill be faithful to my calling.Write about a doubt that you had, an experience where youvacillated between two opinions. Let yourself be of two minds:on the one hand this, on the other that; maybe this, maybe that.Don’t decide anything.Write an essay abouta time when you felt vulnerable. Includesentences like this: “I don’t like to admit that . . .” or “It’s hard forme to admit that . . .”The Fear of NarcissismAnother obstacle to implementing our will to write is our fear of egotism.Some writers fear their own self-importance: Why should my ego takecenter stage? Some are afraid to write because they think it means thatthey’re selfish, taking the time to express their inner life. In this age ofTwitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, when everyone has a blog and aperson’s every move, meal, and meeting is documented, this may seem anoutdated concern. And yet, if you are serious about your vocation as awriter, you or others may question your intent. Who are you to carve outtime for yourself to sit and write? Who are you to voice your opinions,ideas, imagination? Who are you to pay attention to your will to think andwrite?In the introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology fromthe Classical Era to the Present, Philip Lopate points out that the well-known essayist and writer E. B. White, author of Charlotte’s Web and StuartLittle, grappled with the issue of egotism. White wrote:I think some people find the essay the last resort of the egoist, amuch too self-conscious and self-serving form for their taste; theyfeel that it is presumptuous of a writer to assume that his littleexcursions or his small observations will interest the reader. There issome justice in their complaint. I have always been aware that I amby nature self-absorbed and egotistical; to write of myself to theextent I have done indicates a too great attention to my own life, notenough to the life of others. I have worn many shirts, and not all ofthem have been a good fit. But when I am discouraged anddowncast I need only fling open the door of my closet, and there,hidden behind everything else, hangs the mantle of Michel deMontaigne, smelling slightly of camphor.Montaigne, who lived in France in the sixteenth century, is known asthe first modern essayist because his essays trace the meandering stream ofhis own consciousness. Some may find him tiresome, yet Montaigne isalways citing other writers, having a conversation with other voices, evenwhen he is speaking about himself.So even when self-absorbed, if a writer is in conversation with whatothers have said and has the ability to look beyond himself, if he is curious,then though he is writing about himself, he is also expanding the reach ofhis own consciousness and awareness. And ours. Opening a larger windowto the world. I tell my students to look at the bigger picture: How does theirpersonal experience fit into a larger context? Essays that are a conversationwith what others have written or thought about the subject are often themost powerful and interesting. The writer is not alone. As T. S. Eliot writesin “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: “No poet, no artist of any art, hashis complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is theappreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.”While you are writing, read other books that pertain to your topics andsee how they inform your text. You can include biblical, mythological, orother literature that parallels, amplifies, or contrasts with the meaning ofyour own story. Connect to history or what is happening in the outsideworld as you write. Quote or paraphrase other writers and thinkers in youressays. Engage with what other people have said, but add your uniqueperspective. Readers want to know your story.WRITING EXERCISE: RESPONDINGTO LITERATUREKathleen Hill’s memoir She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons: A Lifein Novels interweaves her own life experience with literature thatmirrors and focuses her life experiences. Pick a book that hasprofound meaning for you and respond to its themes or its languagein an essay.WRITING EXERCISE: AN OUTLINE FOR YOUR MEMOIRWrite your autobiography in one page, a list of ten experiences orturning points that comprise your personal history. This isn’t arésumé but an emotional or spiritual history, events that shaped yourbeing and caused you to change. Make a list of those events thatcall you to write about them because they have emotional heat risingfrom them. Writing teacher Lisa Dale Norton calls these “shimmeringimages.” One way of shaping each experience into a series ofessays is to focus on desire as well as conflict. What did you want?What did you get? What occurred as a result of or despite your willand desire? Return to these experiences when you need writingideas. They can form the rough outline of a memoir.2INSPIRATIONChochmahWE OFTEN BEGIN WRITING BECAUSE SOMETHING INSPIRES US, touches us orinterests us. We’re curious, open to experience. The word inspirationderives from the Latin inspirare, “breathe or blow into.” In the Torah we aretold that man was created by God by breathing or blowing into him. “AndGod formed man, dust of the ground, and breathed the breath of life into hiscountenance and so man became a living being.” Inspiration is sourced inthe divine.Inspiration gives us the gift of being alert to our world: divinity may behiding anywhere. Too often we belittle the topics that surround us. Forexample, we may not think it worthwhile to write essays about the tediousaspects of raising children or doing laundry or driving to work. But almostanything—a game of touch football or weeding in the garden—can becomean opening to a larger truth.In her essay “The Death of the Moth,” Virginia Woolf observes a mothfluttering about her windowpane, which leads her to reflect on theoverwhelming majestic powers of life and death. She wonders about deathchoosing a common moth as an adversary.When we pay attention to the glory and mystery of the ordinary, weenter our lives more fully. We may collect bits of experience and ideas thatinspire us—from our reading, thinking, and activities—which cant then bewoven together in a way that surprises us. This amassing of material,almost like raking or gathering, can feel like a form of divine supervision orhashgacha pratit, which means “divine providence.” The image orinformation you need for your essay appears as if by magic. An idea foryour essay floats into your head when you’re walking or listening to apodcast. Sometimes the best creative gifts are small ones that we receivewhen we are not expecting anything, like the Ferris wheel that I noticed lastweek when I drove near my home, which had magically appeared on thehorizon, delighting me with its sudden unlikely appearance.We may think that we have to write about dramatic events and wait forthem to occur, when all around us, still, small stories wait to be noticed andrecorded. In the Book of Kings, we learn about Elijah, a fiery prophet whofights against idol worship and who is also a miracle worker, able to travelbetween this world and the next. Yet when Elijah meets the divine, God isnot in the mighty wind or the earthquake or the fire that God sends to him.God is in a still small voice.In this chapter you’ll learn about inspiration—how it can be sourced inthe mundane or in beauty or in discomfort. Yet the nature of inspiration canbe problematic: it is exciting and attractive, even compelling, yetuncontrollable and evanescent.WRITING EXERCISE: SMALL GIFTSWrite about something small that happened to you this week thatmight have just passed you by, that you might have forgotten. Itcould be something simple, like the way the sun rose so early and itsblazing light was so overwhelming that it woke you at three-thirty inthe morning. You could write about a change in the landscape, aconversation that you had with your son, or a decision that youneeded to make. You could write about the way people wait for abus. Try to sense what was unique in the experience, its small andshining significance.CuriosityInspiration is often sourced in curiosity. Chochmah literally means “thepower of what.” Mah hu: What is this? In an essay called “Wonderlust,”Tony Hiss speaks about deep travel, the ability to journey somewhere newand see vividly and wonder: What is this thing that my mind or eyes or earsalight on? What does it look like? Smell like? Sound like? Feel like? Whatdoes it remind me of? What is it made of? How did it get here? Deep traveldoesn’t require a trip to India or New Zealand or Africa—which is luckysince as I’m writing this, very few planes are flying because of thecoronavirus.Writing can provide an opportunity to immerse ourselves in the presentso that we see things as if we’ve never seen them before. Maybe this isclose to what Keats refers to as negative capability: “when a man is capableof being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without an irritable reachingafter fact and reason.” We see differently because we shed ourpreconceptions and certainties. We reject the commonplace. In her poem“The Summer Day,” poet Mary Oliver wonders if this close attention is aform of prayer.WRITING EXERCISE: OBSERVINGAND APPRECIATINGInspiration can be found in nature and in the everyday: “Today is theday that God created. Let us rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalm 118).Take a walk in nature and observe your surroundings. Use yoursenses. What does a small slice of nature look like, smell like,feel like? Listen to it. Touch it. What do you see that you neversaw before? Write a detailed description.Write about something that you are inspired by today in thepresent tense. You can describe an unexpected moment ofbeauty or insight.Insecurity as InspirationAs beauty can serve as inspiration, so can our insecurities. Robert Atwan,series editor of The Best American Essays, writes: “I’m not usually sold onepiphanies, especially of the life-transforming type. I’m more interested inthe opposite experience: not those rare moments of startling insight orrealization, but—what I suspect are more common—those sudden flashesof anxious confusion and bewilderment. I distinctly recall one of thesereverse epiphanies (is there a word for these?) shortly after I began highschool.”Rabbi Yaakov Leiner, whose teachings are gathered together in a bookcalled Beit Yaakov, teaches that small annoyances should not be dismissed:“We must believe that in such times, when one has no inner peace—thenmost of all one’s position is infinitely more profound and superior to the(times when the) intellect reigns. Indeed, God wishes, through them, toteach one new and holy lessons and appreciation of His ways.” Even thoseexperiences that seem annoying and insignificant may be filled with God. Ican’t help thinking about the coronavirus, a very big global annoyance andfor many a tragedy. Yes, many of us who sheltered were annoyed andfrustrated. But this time was also one of revelation: understanding what isreally important to us, who we love and how we want our lives to be. Somepeople also discovered activities that they didn’t have time for before—likedrawing or prayer or meditation or listening to the birds. One day during thepandemic, I was doing dishes, rushing through them, and then I realized: Iam in no hurry. I can enjoy this chore. This global annoyance and tragedyhas given those of us who are well the gift of time.WRITING EXERCISE: ANNOYANCEAND CHALLENGEWrite about something that bothers you, a moment of confusionor bewilderment, rupture or uncertainty. Let that moment inspireyou.Write about the coronavirus. What was a particular challengeyou faced? One of my students wrote a beautiful essay abouther coronavirus insomnia—the anxieties that woke her andplagued her (pun intended) at four in the morning.ObstaclesDifficult emotions can inspire us to write, and yet sometimes we don’t wantto admit how resentful, jealous, or angry we feel. However, when a writer iswilling to voice and explore darker feelings like fear, jealousy, humiliation,or anger that are not always shared in ordinary life, the reader may feel thegreat pleasure of intimacy, the confirmation of his own fears and shadows.Less, the 2018 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Andrew Sean Greer,tells the story of a minor novelist’s travels to writing events around theworld to escape his former boyfriend’s wedding. The narrator reveals aseries of humiliations, but he leavens it with so much intelligence andhumor that the reader can’t help but take pleasure in the cascade ofembarrassing and defeating encounters.We may also resist inspiration because an inner voice says that we don’thave permission to speak. Our narrative is dangerous. We suppress the storybecause we are afraid of revealing too much, harming others or ourselves,betraying even those who have hurt us. One needs to hold back and yet thestory must be told.“Art is confession; art is the secret told. But art is not only the desire totell one’s secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time,” wroteThornton Wilder.Sometimes we want to tell our secrets. Yet if our desire is vengeance, ifwe are motivated to get even with somebody, the reader may sense thenarrator as bitter and untrustworthy.Yet divulging secrets does not have to entail a complete confession.Confession, while titillating, can sometimes be degrading or melodramatic.Writer Emily Fox Gordon distinguishes between a confession, which isblurted out to a person who has some power over us, and a confidence,which is written to a confidante or friend, creating an equal relationship.She explains that writing that confides, that whispers, that tells secretswithout hurting others has the advantage of offering a stable narrator whoinvites the reader in. The narrator is not interested in exposing everything—showing the guest his dirty laundry and garbage—but in providing arelationship.Privacy may be an outmoded term, but our privacy deserves respect.You can write a memoir without exposing family secrets, alluding to themwithout describing every detail—not because you can’t tell the story butbecause you choose to respect your own dignity. Not everything needs to betold. The world is one where God is revealed and concealed at the sametime. We may choose to do something similar in our work: expressing theemotions of our story while suppressing some of its secrets. Such essaysmay be even more powerful because the reader feels the undercurrents ofpain in the gaps in the story. Writer Beth Kephart calls writers who don’tdivulge every detail artful dodgers, trusting the reader with “secretunsaids.” You maintain the power of the emotion, the inner story, whileplaying with and transforming the outer circumstances.It’s a very hard balance, especially if you’re a parent. There are manythings I will not write about in a memoir because I don’t want my childrento read about them. I know this may be an unpopular position, but I find itnecessary. Another option for keeping one’s privacy is writing and sharing astory in a writing workshop with a small group of people who will keepyour confidence. Sometimes my students say, “This piece is only for ourclass. And thank you for letting me trust you with this story.” Yet anothersolution toward maintaining privacy is to transform elements of your storyinto fiction. In a novel I recently finished writing, the outer body of thestory has very little to do with my life, while the inner struggles of thecharacters are close to my own. In other words, you can change “the dress”but keep the fire of the inner conflicts—“the body.”On the other hand, you may choose to tell the whole story because youneed to and are willing to deal with the consequences. My friend, poet JaneMedved, got the following advice in a master class: if you’re going tojeopardize a relationship, make sure that it is worth it. You better have agreat piece of writing if you’re going to take such a risk. Your relatives maybe angry. An uncle may stop talking to you. A sister may write a competingmemoir.Or your family may not even notice.WRITING EXERCISE: SHAME ANDANGERWrite about an experience where you felt a sense of shame.Shame is one of the most powerful forces in our lives. Tell thewhole story. Next talk directly to somebody in the story. Tell himwhat you couldn’t say then. Now talk to your shame. What doyou want to say to it? Let the shame answer you. Use any ofthese sections in an essay.Anger can also serve as an inspiration. What makes youfurious? Tell the reader and let it rip. Don’t hold anything back.A Few Methods of InspirationOpen a book and read a few sentences. Put your finger randomly on asentence and see if that sentence speaks to you in some way. Respondto that sentence. When you are finished, you can flip the book openand find another word or sentence to use as a prompt.Eavesdrop. Make a list of ten phrases or sentences you overhear. Useone or many in an essay.Songs and scents are filled with strong associations, triggering theamygdala and the hippocampus, parts of the brain that spark emotionand memories. One of my former students, Stella, a widow in herseventies, wrote a wonderful essay inspired by a song called “Mambo8” that she danced to when she was a teenager in London fifty yearsago. At the time, she was fleeing the Jewish world of organized dancesfor the wild free atmosphere of a club. Write about a song or a scent.Or both.Write about somebody who inspired you. Who was she? What did sheteach you? How do you incorporate her teaching into your life?Write about a role model who ultimately disappointed you. How didshe inspire you at first? What happened to cause your disillusionment?Or perhaps the reverse happened: you were unimpressed withsomebody and then learned to be inspired by her. Tell us whathappened.Pick a sentence from the Torah or other spiritual text. Use thatsentence as the epigraph or first sentence of your writing, or thread thatsentence into your text when you are looking for inspiration. Repeatthat sentence or variations of that sentence in your text.Write about something you unexpectedly found or received. Oncewhen teaching a writing seminar for high school students, I found ablue diving flipper on the road in front of the school that morning andasked the students to write a story that included the flipper. That wastheir best work the whole semester.Let both an object and a word inspire you. Pick an object in the roomwhere you sit. Describe the object in detail. What does it look like?Sound like? Feel like? Does it remind you of a story? Allowunexpected connections to happen on the page. Next open thedictionary and close your eyes and thumb through the pages. Put yourfinger on a word. Open your eyes. Let that word inspire you. (If thatword doesn’t resonate with you, pick another.) Play with the word.Enjoy it. Riff on it. Improvise. See if you can connect it to your writingabout the object. Associations may be oblique yet surprising. Allowfor serendipity.The object Mayan writes about is a large papier-mâché sculpture of agiraffe perched on the ledge of the living room. The word she alights on isinglenook.After describing the giraffe, Mayan writes about her brother who diedrecently in South Africa. She tells the story of how years earlier, they hadgone on safari in the winter and seen giraffes. She remembered how theyreturned to the inglenook of his home and how warm and wonderful she feltwith him there. The word inglenook provides a safe entrance into the strongfeelings evoked by her brother and his death.Ruth doesn’t pick a word from the dictionary but responds to the puzzle thatis framed on the wall in the house where we hold class. She uses the wordpuzzle as inspiration and writes about traveling on a subway in Toronto andhow all at once a group of beautifully dressed young people entered thesubway car. One of the men grabbed the metal subway pole and spunaround on it in joy. The women were made up, perfumed, wearing gownsand high heels. Ruth was puzzled until she saw a photographer snappingphotos of a bride and groom in wedding clothes at the other end of the car.They were all part of a wedding party, taking pre-wedding pictures on thesubway. She framed the story around the fact that she was a widow, and theyoung people in the subway caused her to miss her husband and marriageand youth.Writing Exercise: FindingInspirationLet your name inspire you. In Jewish thought a name is a kind ofprophecy. What do you like about your name? Dislike about it?Why did your parents give you the name? What do you knowabout your name? How popular was your name in the year youwere born? Tell us everything you can about your name.It’s true that you should write about what you know. But you canalso write about what you would like to know. What topics areyou interested in knowing more about? Yoga, geology, nuclearphysics? These topics (and research) can inspire essays.What role has inspiration played in your life? Your work? Yourrelationships? Your travel? Your adventures? What have youlearned about inspiration?What are quotations or sayings that inspire you? Make a list ofthose sayings and keep them at your desk. Begin an essay withone of them.In the mid 1800s, Friedrich August Kekulé, a German chemistresearching the structure of benzene, discovered its ringlikemolecules only after he dreamed of a snake that was catchinghold of its tail, inspiring him to envision the structure of thechemical. Write about a dream you had and let it inspire you. Letyour unconscious speak to you. Explore a few possibleinterpretations.Listen to radio shows and podcasts where authors areinterviewed about their work. I enjoy Fresh Air, an NPR showhosted by Terry Gross, and Krista Tippett’s show On Being. Youcan also listen to great storytelling on podcasts, such as FictionPodcast, presented by the New Yorker magazine, and TheMoth. Rabbi Joey Rosenfeld has a wonderful podcast calledInward, where he explores the major works of Kabbalah andJewish philosophy.A Warning about InspirationInspiration can dissipate if it is not translated into action. We all knowplenty of people who are creative geniuses with amazing new ideas, yetthey are unsuccessful because they never transfer their enthusiasm andinspiration into practical activity. Don’t talk too much about your project.Write instead.Another obstacle to inspiration is the writer’s inability to finishanything. Obviously, writing requires not just inspiration but persistence (aswe shall discuss in a later chapter). It’s important to finish your work, evenif it’s not perfect. Once the imaginative process is complete, yourexperience and ideas expressed and transformed, you can leave them. Evenif they aren’t posted or published, the work is never wasted because itmoves you to the next writing project. Use some of the “leftovers” inanother text you write. Now your imagination is ready for new arrivals.3COMPREHENSIONBinaTHE NEXT SEFIRA, BINA OR COMPREHENSION, is the step beyond inspiration thatallows you to develop your initial ideas. While chochmah or inspirationcontains enormous potential, bina provides a framework to structure theemerging story. Bina is related to the Hebrew word boneh, which means “tobuild.” How do you advance your writing from one thought or image to thenext and, perhaps, to a resolution? The word comprehend comes from theLatin comprehendere, which means to “seize or grasp.” The narrator in youressay often journeys from confusion to clarity and understanding, graspingthe significance of the material.Bina is the process of intuiting one matter from another, the ability toweave a pattern, to discern a structure emerging from chaos and darkness.E. L. Doctorow describes it like this: “Writing is like driving at night in thefog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the wholetrip that way.”As artists, an integral part of our work is revealing patternsandoutcomes in our stories that seem inevitable but not predictable. In TheFour Quartets, T. S. Eliot writes: “In my beginning is my end.” By the endof the poem he tells us that “in my end is my beginning.” Sof ma΄aseh,b’machshava techlila are the words in a Hebrew song that is sung in prayeron Friday night, the Jewish Sabbath. The words mean “the end of the actionis already latent in the beginning of the thought”—the two are intimatelylinked.In Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers, an ancient book of Jewishmorality, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai asks his five most distinguisheddisciples: “What is the most important character trait to live by?” Accordingto the text, Rabbi Shimon’s answer is the most satisfactory. He says,“Ha’roeh et ha’nolad”—the one who sees what will be born.The ability to envision an outcome does not just entail reason but oftendemands patience and faith. We intuit the path of the text, sense itsdevelopment, as if our text has a destiny. We discover a design in our work.However, that doesn’t mean that the ending is a tidy solution. Sometimesthe ending may be a further complication, a question.The short-story writer Grace Paley says that a story is a circle thatdoesn’t close but leads toward something else. It can glance back at where itstarted, but the closing can surprise both the reader and the writer.In fact, complete closure or resolution may be a fiction because itimplies that all things can be processed, resolved, and comprehended. Thereare many writers who refuse to search for an artificial resolution to theirwork, mostly because life rarely offers those neat endings. DanielMendelsohn, for example, says that his book The Lost was not a search forclosure because so many of the people who died in the Holocaust diedwithout any sense of completion:I set out to write an anti-closure search narrative, in which Iforegrounded what I hadn’t learned, haven’t found out—the bestway of reminding readers of a crucial ethical and historical point:that most of the Holocaust’s victims and their stories were indeedlost.I’m very uncomfortable with the concept of closure. There is no way Iwill ever be finished with my son’s murder. Some things are so filled withhorror and pain that they demand respect: our intellect will never be capableof resolving such heartache. We don’t move on; we move with. There’s anongoing relationship with the person who died, rather than a completeseparation.Even in stories that are less fraught, we may not want to tie our storytight with a string or ribbon but instead may gently close it with a pinch, theway that the braids of challah dough are secured before baking. I’ve heardthat action described as a kiss.In this chapter we will look at how a Jewish model of hermeneutics,pardes, can help us develop our essays so that they are rich and textured.The Garden and the SagesA Pattern for Essay DevelopmentThe mystical pattern of pardes mentioned in the Zohar, a book of Jewishmysticism, offers a rich model for shaping, developing, and building ouressays, memoirs, and stories. According to the story of the pardes, foursages entered the pardes or garden, but only one survived and emergedunscathed. Ben Zoma looked and went mad, Elisha ben Abuyah became aheretic, and Ben Azzai looked and died. Only Rabbi Akiva entered in peaceand departed in peace, able to withstand the searing closeness of God’spresence.Pardes is the name of this mythical garden (related to the wordparadise), but it is also an acronym for pshat (the simple meaning), remez(what it reminds us of), drash (the interpretation), and sod (the secret thatwaits to be revealed), four levels of hermeneutics or biblical interpretation.These four components provide a conceptual map for analyzing anyexperience or encounter. They also offer an excellent structure for enrichingand developing our writing.DetailPshatPshat, which translates as “the simple meaning,” can be thought of as theconcrete experience, the whatness of the situation, the telling details: thewho, what, when, where. When we write, we conjure a world for our readerby describing the particulars of our experience. As Vladimir Nabokov says:“Caress the detail, the divine detail.”“The greatest writers,” according to William Strunk and E. B. White,authors of the classic style manual The Elements of Style, “are effectivelargely because they deal in particulars.” William Carlos Williams, aPulitzer Prize–winning poet (and a doctor) from New Jersey, says: “Noideas but in things.” Hemingway says: “Abstractions are the lies of a dyingcivilization.”Poet and memoir writer Mark Doty refers to description as the ability topour into the now, submit to the moment, an immersion that offers us toaccess deeper perceptions. For example, in Now Write! Nonfiction, CelesteFremon recounts that when mystery writer Michael Connelly worked as acrime beat reporter in Florida, one day he noticed the worn grooves in thetemples of a detective’s glasses. The detective put the glasses in his mouthand bit on them when he was working an investigation. That powerful detailrevealed the detective’s concentration as well as his anxiety. RobertMorgan, author of Gap Creek, a novel based on his grandparents’ marriageand their hardscrabble life together, writes: “I tell my students that you donot write living fiction by attempting to transcribe actual events onto thepage. You create a sense of real characters and a real story by putting downone vivid detail, one exact phrase at a time.”To evoke a world for our readers, we may begin by thinking aboutplace. “For there is no person who has not his hour, and no thing that hasnot its place” (Ethics of the Fathers, chapter 4). I just spoke on the phone toa friend who is very ill, suffering from respiratory problems. She was takenfrom the hospital to a rehab center, and she told me anxiously that shedoesn’t know where she is. Knowing where we are is our first step in beingpresent in the world.Furthermore, it may be that in describing a place, we also in some smallway help rescue it. The Kabbalah tells us that the world could not endurethe overwhelming nature of God’s light so the light shattered all over theworld, and in each place it is our job to gather the shattered pieces. We canthink of place not only as a background or setting but as a locus awaitingattention, concern, and even redemption.As writers, we root the reader in a specific time. What is the month?The year, the hour? You can provide a setting for your reader in the veryfirst sentences: It’s 10:03 on a Sunday morning, and I write from my officein Tekoa, which also functions as a guest room and a cheder maamad, ashelter in case of war. The room, built from reinforced concrete, has a heavymetal door that could close and trap me because the clunky metal doorhandle has fallen off.We create a scene, the essential building block of writing, by writingabout concrete details. What is the light like? The weather outside? What dothe people look like, the furniture? What are the sounds and sights andsmells? What covers the windows? What is on the table? What color is thecouch? What are people drinking? What is the headline of the newspaperthat day? Small children are often admonished “not to make a scene.” Youhave permission now to make a scene come alive by recording the tellingdetails.Significant details also help us describe a character. We can learn more,sometimes, by the way somebody stands or clenches their hands when theyspeak than from what they say. I’m reminded of the fact that in jobinterviews, a person is judged in the first fifteen seconds, and most of that isby the way he carries himself. When writing about a character, imagine thatperson. (When I’m in a café or other public space, I like to look at people soI can work on describing people’s physical details, especially their faces.)What does her nose look like? His lips? What is the mostobvious featureon the person’s face or body? What is he wearing? Are there stains on herclothes? What does she do with her hands? A telling physical detail cansometimes intimate the inner character of the person. Laurence Olivier saidthat to unlock a character he always started with the shoes.Pshat allows concrete details to speak to us. What was in your father’spockets? What did he smell like? (Smell is the hardest sense to describe,and for that reason, it’s often helpful to use a metaphor.) What did you eatfor dinner and where and with whom? When you were a child, who wokeyou up in the morning? My father woke me up with a cup of coffee and thesong, “Lazy Bones.” However, don’t think that when you describesomething you should always amass a catalog of detail. It’s important toselect the details of pshat according to the mood, feeling, and theme youwant to convey in your text. Description can be thought of as anothercharacter in the narrative, which shares in building the emotional tenor ofthe story.WRITING EXERCISE: NOTICINGDETAILSAccording to the Baal Shem Tov, the great rabbi and founder of theChassidic movement, everything we see and hear can be thought ofas a message from God. By writing about these details, we respondto and appreciate God’s nudges and hugs. Observing and describingin detail the ordinary can be the gateway to something deeper, evendivine.Describe your parents’ kitchen or your own kitchen. Slow downtime. Use all of your senses. The scene is like a close-up, a camerazooming in. Put yourself in that room.*5What is the hour, day, month, year?Where is the scene set?What do you see from the window?What is the weather like?What is the light like?What objects and appliances are in the room? Their sizes andshapes?How is it furnished?What do you hear? What do you touch? What are the textures?What is the smell? What does the smell remind you of?Is the room tidy or untidy? Is there something unusual in theroom?What’s on the walls?Are there knickknacks around?What is in the cupboards?What is under the sink?Is there a clock ticking? What does it look like?What do the curtains look like?In my mother’s kitchen, old dried-out teabags lounged in a chinacup over the sink because my mother liked weak tea and reused herteabags. A plywood plaque near the pantry closet had these wordspainted on it: Who’s in the doghouse? Five dog medallions inscribedwith the words mom, pop, sis, sis, brother hung from metal hooks,although we had no use for the brother medallion. Only onemedallion could be hung in the doghouse at a time. My grandmothersat at the kitchen table, reading Agatha Christie mysteries andsmoking Viceroys, her ashtray a yellow candy dish patterned withflowers, adorned with a silver handle.WRITING EXERCISES: PROMPTS TOPRACTICE PSHATParticulars about PeopleAndre Dubus III offered this exercise at a writing conference Iattended:Write about five people and describe them by their smells.Pick three of these people and describe them by the lightaround them.Pick two of these people and describe them by the sounds thatyou associate with them.Now choose one person and write a scene that includes manyof these sensual details.Food NarrativeWrite a narrative about food and include a recipe. Did anythingweird, funny, or unusual happen to you while cooking, shopping,preparing a meal, or feeding your family or guests? You couldalso write about your mother’s cooking, your child’s cooking, anycooking or baking for that matter. Set the scene first. What doesthe table and the kitchen look like? Smell like? What’s thelighting? Who is in the kitchen? What are people wearing?Thomas Lux wrote a magnificent poem called “Refrigerator,1957.” Write about a refrigerator from your childhood. Describewhat was always in there or write about an item in it thatsymbolizes that era for you.Large and SmallDuring a workshop at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, I heardmemoir writer Kyoko Mori say that, of course, you can write aboutloss and trauma but don’t torture your audience. And I would add,“Don’t torture yourself.” You can write about the death of a loved oneby writing about something particular and concrete associated withthe person. For example, write about her hair or the pipe he smoked,or the scarf she gave to you. Let the object carry the weight andburden of the emotion. Writer Ann Hood says that you can writeabout something small at the same time that you are writing aboutsomething enormous. Eventually, the two will merge.HintRemezRemez means “hint,” as in textual connections and associations. Instead ofwriting a simple anecdote, investigate its greater significance. Didsomething similar happen to you years ago? What connects the two events?Does your story remind you of a scientific study you read about? Ahistorical event? Don’t be afraid to explore biology, history, chemistry, orphysics to expand your narrative. Not only do you present interestinginformation but you also become a more reliable narrator, a fascinating tourguide, because you demonstrate your interest in the world by amassingknowledge and information that you share with others. In addition, theresearch often suggests meanings that you may not have even considered.As the poet Horace said about poetry, educate and delight.Here is British author and naturalist Helen Macdonald writing about themigration of birds (from H Is for Hawk):Watching the cranes at dusk, I see them turn first into strings ofmusical notation, then mathematical patterns. The snaking linessynchronize so that each bird raises its wings a fraction before theone behind it, each moving flock suddenly resolving itself into afilmstrip showing a single bird stretched through time. It is anastonishing image that makes me blink in surprise. Part of the allureof flocking birds is their ability to provoke optical illusions. Iremember my astonishment as a child watching thousands ofshorebirds flying against a gray sky vanish and reappear in aninstant as the birds turned their counter-shaded bodies in the air.The birds remind the author of startling images—musical notation andmathematical patterns. They also evoke a memory from childhood, herastonishment at seeing shorebirds disappear and then appear again.Here’s another example from an essay in the New York Times Magazineon bath oils where the writer, Molly Young, is reminded of a novel she read:A slug of liquid poured into the tub will release healthful vapors andstain the water brightly: orange, mauve, spruce, blue. Doing thisbrings to mind a line from Dodie Smith’s novel “I Capture theCastle.” In it, a character dips her handkerchief into a vat of fabricdye and observes: “It really makes one feel rather Godlike to turnthings a different color.”Incorporate your memories into your essays. You add texture to thewriting as you probe and explore the way that memories reverberate withevents in the present.ExplanationDrashDrash literally means “to explicate and explain.” What are the ideas you aregrappling with in your work? These ideas become your themes—the core,the heart, the things that you as a writer have come to say. What hauntsyou? What arouses you? What upsets you? What frustrates you? What isyour passion? Your obsession?Your theme may not be stated explicitly, but you might want to state itfor yourself: What is the question at the center of your text? What idea areyou trying to get at? In The 3 A.M. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing ExercisesThat Transform Your Fiction, Brian Kiteley suggests that we are writing tolearn, not to teach. In this way, as writers, we seek meaning, but we do nothave to arrive at a definitive answer. In fact, our theme does not have toconvey a moral message. Here is Mark Twain’s wonderful warning in hisintroductory note to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “Personsattempting to find a motive in this narrative will be