What a Mezuzah Can Hold Before and After October 7

What a Mezuzah Can Hold, Before and After October 7

For over 30 years, I’ve made the case for the mezuzah– a Jewish ritual object meant to be affixed to the entrances and doorways of your home.   Placing a mezuzah on a doorpost isn’t to merely “check off” fulfilling a commandment, nor is it meant to sit covered in obscurity. Its purpose is to help create sacred intention in your space.  Some people even touch it on the way in and out of a home, thousands of times a year, until the gesture becomes as automatic as breathing. Ever since I was old enough to remember my first Passover Seder– that’s when I realized that the Jewish religion and history are REAL.  That’s always been the deep underlying meaning of my work: that Jewish light isn’t abstract. It’s something deep you can hold, engage with and share.

Before October 7, 2023, I thought of this work divine inspiration.  My calling even.  That has not changed.  It was one way of honoring my grandparents, who survived the Holocaust and handed me their tools along with their harrowing story.  It became a way for me to use Judaica to create more understanding, love and hope in the world.  I made mezuzot, menorahs, torah adornment, Priestly Blessing bracelets, shabbat candleholders, seeing that if I made the object beautiful enough and true enough, it would speak for itself.

Many times it did.  It attracted people from all walks of life, many asking questions and engaging with the work.  I was amazed and inspired further at my shows and in interactions with the Judaica and the general public.  I felt that sharing Judaism in this artistic and nontraditional way,  not entirely without potential problems nor accepted by all forms of Jews or non-jews for that matter, was a risk worth talking because it was a new approach that was making a real difference.  Not once was I accosted, humiliated, accused or harassed for being Jewish openly, in public and sharing our teachings.  Not once was I pressured to denounce the existence of Israel– the world’s one and only Jewish state.  I experienced the opposite result.

Since then, a lot has shifted. Not in what the mezuzah means to me, but in how urgently I feel the world needs to deeply understand its meaning.  But my circumstances have changed too.  I have a new career– a licensed landscape contractor.  This has enabled me to stay out of harms way– masses of anti-Israel haters and unrelenting bias in the media– and into nature and developing people’s gardens.  This has made my posts and exposure to the public much less frequent.  I struggle to understand how I can help share the mezuzah, and prayers for peace in a productive way– now that there’s so much open hate, and I am no longer scheduling shows.

I won’t pretend the last few years have been easy. All my anti-semitism triggers in full view every day, sometimes multiple times per day.  I’m speechless watching the world’s attention narrow to the worst moments of this conflict, denying the very right our people have to exist.  Many of us have real exhaustion in trying to hold both truths at once: that Israel’s story includes immense pain and excruciating defense, and that it also includes an enormous amount of light — religious freedom, plurality, resilience, joy — that rarely makes the news. I’ve felt, more than once, like the loudest voices in the room are the ones least interested in nuance, from every direction.

But grief has never been the whole story for me, and I don’t think it should be the whole story for anyone. My grandmother’s yahrzeit and Yom HaShoah have landed close together on the calendar before — close enough to feel, some years, like mourning and continuation sitting right next to each other, the way they do in a life. She didn’t survive so that the story would end in fear. She survived so it could keep going.  She would say that my life was a victory over Nazi brutality.  She put everything she had into the next generation– and into gratitude for the simple pleasures in life– her garden, her cooking, her books, her friends and family.

That’s the spirit I want the mezuzah to carry right now.  The spirit of love, oneness, human dignity and the creation of sanctuary every day, even in the midst of so much fear.  A mezuzah holds the Shema — words about listening with your heart that we are all one,  about how to love G-d, about binding something sacred to the ordinary places of life. It is, at its core, a gift for remembering who you want to be every single time you cross a threshold. You don’t need to be Jewish to feel the pull of that. Anyone walking into their own home, distracted and tired, could use a small object that says: *pause. remember. this space matters and that there is more to life than possession– a safe and sacred home are everything.*

That’s part of why the tradition allows — even welcomes — a mezuzah given as a gift to a non-Jewish friend.  There’s a story of a king and Rabbi.  The king gives the Rabbi a gift of a diamond.  Such a valuable gift, he says.  But the Rabbi gives the king a mezuzah– and explains that it is a gift worth thousands of diamonds in its deep spiritual meaning.  When a mezuzah crosses into a non-Jewish home through friendship, it carries something with it that a transaction never could — a relationship, a story, an invitation to understand and create community.

Some days, weeks, months– I fall silent.  Unable to speak for fear that anything I say will draw some sort of ugly backlash or be twisted and distorted into some sick caricature or conspiracy theory.  Truth is, thirty+  years is a long time to keep believing that this work can move something that politics and raw headlines can’t. But I keep coming back to the same conviction — that most people, given an honest, close encounter with something real, respond to it with curiosity rather than hostility. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve watched someone touch a mezuzah for the first time, ask what’s actually inside, and light up learning it’s a handwritten parchment with words about love. Those moments are magic.  I miss them– I wish for this kind of magic to neutralize the acid that infects humanity in the name of religion. I long to share the love that connects the Jewish people so strongly– because it’s helpful for us, it can also be helpful for friends outside of our Tribe.

So that’s where I’ll keep working — one mezuzah, one conversation at a time. Not because the world has gotten easier to reach since October 7, but because I think the reaching still matters, maybe now more than ever.  If you have a mezuzah on your doorpost, I hope you’ll pause at it today. If you don’t, I hope you’ll consider what it might mean to put one there — and what it means that someone, somewhere, wants to give you that light freely.

 

With Love and Gratitude,

 

PHOTO:  Mezuzah in pewter created for Or Shalom Jewish Community in San Francisco.  This blog post does not necessarily reflect the views of Or Shalom, just mine.