I have thought about writing a parenting book for a long time, and toyed with various ideas for expressing my views.
The format I kept coming back to was poetry.
I have always enjoyed creating rhymes, and often find myself composing verse in my head. I felt compiling a bunch of short poems on the various aspects of motherhood would resonate best with my audience.
It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m catching up on Facebook after spending a lovely morning disconnected from technology and reconnecting with my body and soul.
I was blissfully unaware of the ugliness happening around me. With a quick scroll through Facebook, that ignorance quickly faded away.
I read post after post about Virginia. I see pictures of young men who would rather I not be in this country, let alone exist. It doesn’t matter that I’m a third generation American — more than many of them, I’m sure. It doesn’t matter that both of my grandfathers fought for the United States during World War II. I’m Jewish, so that’s just not good enough. My family isn’t good enough.
The fear, worry and anger of my friends is reflected online. As I scroll through my feed, my heart sinks. This is not the world I want for my kids.
Judaism is a religion of numbers. Every aspect of life is marked by an important numerical value. We wait eight days to celebrate the birth of a baby boy. We find our moral code in the ten commandments. We read from the five books of the Torah. At Passover, we even sing a song, “Echad Mi Yodaya (Who Knows One?),” detailing many of the important numbers of Judaism. From one to 101, every number has a deep, spiritual meaning.