Sharing the Light: What a Mezuzah Can Hold Before and After October 7

Sharing the Light: What a Mezuzah Can Hold, Before and After October 7

For twenty-five years, I’ve made things meant to be touched. A mezuzah isn’t meant to sit behind glass — it’s meant to be brushed with fingertips on the way in and out of a home, hundreds of times a year, until the gesture becomes as automatic as breathing. That’s always been the quiet argument of my work: that Jewish light isn’t abstract. It’s something you can hold, hang, and live beside.

Before October 7, 2023, I thought of this work mostly as devotion — a way of honoring my grandparents, who survived the Holocaust and handed me their tools along with their story. I made mezuzot, Priestly Blessing bracelets, Shabbat candleholders, believing that if I made the object beautiful enough and true enough, it would speak for itself.

Since then, something has shifted. Not in what the mezuzah means, but in how urgently I feel the need to share that meaning — and how much harder, at times, it feels to be heard.

What Changed

I won’t pretend the last few years have been easy to sit with. There is real grief in watching the world’s attention narrow to the worst moments of this conflict, and real exhaustion in trying to hold both truths at once: that Israel’s story includes immense pain and 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.

That’s the spirit I want the mezuzah to carry right now.

An Object Built for This Moment

A mezuzah holds the Shema — words about paying attention, about love, about binding something sacred to the ordinary places of a life: a doorway, a hand, a home. It is, at its core, a technology 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.*

That’s part of why the tradition allows — even welcomes — a mezuzah given as a gift to a non-Jewish friend. It isn’t a loophole. It’s an old, deliberate opening: a recognition that this light was never meant to be hoarded. 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.

I think that’s what I want people to take from my work right now, more than ever. Not a symbol to display, but a practice to internalize. Not a talking point, but a doorway.

Why I Keep Making These

I’ll be honest: some days, this work feels like shouting into a canyon. Twenty-five years is a long time to keep believing that beauty and craft can move something that politics and 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. That moment doesn’t happen in an argument. It happens at a doorway.

So that’s where I’ll keep working — one mezuzah, one bracelet, 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 door, 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.