Tag Archives: fathers and daughters

October 13, 2025 · 7:30 am

Our stories forever intertwined

by Lillian Farzan-Kashani (Santa Monica, CA)

How many more tears

do I have left for a home

I’ve never been?

Longing to see where my mother

played when she was just

a daughter.

The other boys left as my father,

named after Elyahu, ventured into the water, 

seen as dirty, I’m afraid, his name a tricky thing to hide.

And where my grandfather took a routine beating

on the way to school for being a Jew

in Tehran.

How many more tears

do I have left for Palestine?

They say thirty percent of the deaths are children alone.

Aid distribution a catastrophe,

a needlessly fatal obstacle course for the hungry.

How can the extremists live with themselves?

I hear the stories, read the poems,

and feel changed. Please don’t look away

for too long.

We must know

the horror

to alter it.

Suddenly, reservoirs of tears

I thought had emptied

appear replenished.

How many more tears do I have left to cry

for the hostages– their families, the honorable peace builders–

even that poor dog, killed.

From Be’eri to DC, followed by chants of “Free Palestine!”

This–this is not how you liberate,

though I myself have no answers beyond love.

That is the antidote I hold onto tightly

mistakenly thinking I could leave it

to the political experts.

How many tears do I possibly have left

listening to one of the survivors

after all she has lived through on her kibbutz lately.

Vehemently stating how unwelcome the PM is

like a bad word, I do not wish to give his name

the time nor the space.

Of course the last thing on earth she would want to do

is pose with him. What— for optics?

You really want to discuss the optics right now?

How much longer will I be chained to the news

eagerly awaiting the latest episode of Amanpour?

This is my least favorite addiction.

But who else can I trust?

Am I supposed to go about as normal?

The whole of it has been tossed upside down, to be reductive.

Trying to gather a morsel of control:

listen, dialogue, donate, organize, protest, build peace.

Rinse, Repeat.

While my family and my love hide in the mamads.

Bombs where there should be falling stars

over your home and mine.

Giving way to a day when we share

the bounty of olives,

laugh over Turkish coffee, the irony.

Together in the shuk

bound, our stories

forever intertwined.

Lillian Farzan-Kashani is an Iranian American and Jewish therapist, poet, and speaker based in Los Angeles, CA. Much of her work is rooted in being a child of immigrants and is reflective of her intersectionality. Read more about her professional and creative pursuits at https://www.lillianfarzan.com/

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May 6, 2024 · 7:30 am

Thirsty roots

by Jane Schulman (New York, NY)

We buried my father on a rise  

under a jack pine where steam rose 

from the fresh-dug grave, colliding  

with January air.  

My sons unloaded the casket  

from the back of a pickup and walked it  

to the open grave, a Star of David  

carved on the coffin lid. 

For years my father railed against  

synagogues, Zionism, all kinds  

of God talk – evangelical  

in his atheism.  

But in the end, when I asked  

one last time if I could bury him  

when he died, he shrugged and said 

if it means so much to you.  

It did.  It does. As his last gift,  

he let me bury him a Jew.  

Now the Star of David rests  

above his chest as thirsty roots 

of the jack pine mingle  

with heartache and nettle. 

Jane Schulman is a poet and fiction writer. She works as a speech pathologist with children with autism and cognitive delays.  Jane published her first book of poetry, Where Blue Is Blue, with Main Street Rag in October, 2020.  Her writing has appeared widely online and in print. She was a finalist for the Morton Marr Prize at Southwest Review.     

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March 4, 2024 · 7:30 am

Sestina On Changing The Name                                         

by Roseanne Freed (Burbank, CA)

for my Dad. Maishie.     

When my Dad left Israel at nineteen he changed his name

and I was his link to the past as I look like his mother.

This is Dad’s story from the grave:  Born in bed—

no need for details—we never had enough food

to eat. Like beggars we slept in the clothes

we wore all day. A religious man Tevya, my father

had nothing. God forgive me if I don’t praise my father—

but he never achieved anything, and I had to share his name.

I didn’t know people slept in special clothes

called pajamas—we only survived because of my mother’s

tenacity. Always hungry, you feel cold without food 

and Jerusalem is cold in winter—a thin blanket on the bed

to cover us, we four children sharing the one bed.

His only job to sit with the dead, my father

earned a pittance, so our stomachs cried for food.  

I’m the first one to change the name.

Cleaning houses of the rich my mother

worked for a dentist’s wife who gave us clothes.

We didn’t go to the dentist but wore his childrens’ clothes.

No furniture in our room except the two beds—

one night, falling asleep on top of the baby, my mother 

smothered it. If he got carpentry work at night my father

bought us herring and pita. I didn’t want his name

when he’d wake us up after midnight to eat the food,

but not all of it — god forbid—we had to save food

for tomorrow. We were shnorers, our clothes

full of patches, I couldn’t wait to change the name.

My poor mother, I never saw her resting in bed.

I had to go work at thirteen because my father 

couldn’t feed us. On special holidays my mother 

cooked meatballs, oy such delicious rissoles my mother 

made, my mouth waters to think of the food.

After I emigrated I celebrated my freedom from my father 

and his religion with bacon on Yom Kippur. I bought clothes

for the trip —a double-breasted suit. I never went to bed

hungry after I moved to South Africa and changed my name.

When I married at thirty I had a successful factory making hospital beds.

My four children and their mother always had food and clothes, 

and clean sheets. I hope my kids aren’t ashamed of their father’s name.

Roseanne Freed grew up in apartheid South Africa and now lives in Los Angeles, where she takes inner-city school children hiking in the Santa Monica mountains. A Best of the Net nominee, her poems have appeared in MacQueens Quinterly, ONE ART, Naugatuck River Review, Silver Birch Press and Verse-Virtual among others.  

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August 7, 2023 · 6:30 am

Connections

by Liz Paley (Concord, MA)

There’s a certain time of day when the light comes in my kitchen that reminds me of my childhood home. Only recently did I start to notice it. My father died in January, on New Year’s Day, and now he and the house are gone. I miss him terribly. It’s during the late afternoon when this light comes in, and it’s the same time of day that I usually called my dad. 

“Well, good afternoon,” he always said, when he picked up his old landline. 

My father grew up in the Bronx, in a segregated neighborhood; Jews in one area and Blacks in another. So, at an early age, he understood injustice. He was the first in his family to attend college and after marrying my mother, who was not Jewish, they moved to Long Island. They built a life there for my sister and me and he was deeply rooted in the community. A local newspaperman, my father was fair and forward thinking. 

He ran for town supervisor in the 1960’s. He was a Democrat in a Republican stronghold, but also a Jewish Democrat in a predominantly Irish and Italian community. He told us that when he campaigned he would introduce my mother using her maiden name, a recognizably Italian one. It was a strategy, he said matter-of-factly. He knew he was up against antisemitism and he wanted the Italian vote. He still lost. It took me years to recognize the vulnerability and courage it must have taken for him to run for office.             

Our family embraced our different backgrounds but most of what I learned about Judaism was from my mother, not my father. He was a man who had faith in family and community, but not in religion. My mother, the daughter of immigrants, grew up in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She went to Brooklyn College where she met my father who was seated alphabetically next to her. A schoolteacher, she tried her best to teach us about Jewish holidays and tradition. Growing up, we would celebrate with both sides of our family, and it was fun – Seders with some cousins and Easter egg hunts with others. Sometimes, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins from both sides would gather at my parents’ house. What we all had in common was a connection to each other. 

For me, though, there were times I felt I belonged to both traditions and other times when I felt as if I didn’t have either fully. I watched my mother hide the Christmas wrapping paper when she brought gifts to my Jewish grandparents because she didn’t want their neighbors to see. And I remember when the Rabbi in our town told my sister she could no longer attend Jewish youth group because a parent had complained she was there. These experiences were all part of my foundation. 

In the last few years of my father’s life, we sat quietly in the house he had lived in for over sixty years. It was the one I grew up in. I can picture him sitting in his worn black leather chair holding a pencil nub, working on a Sudoku puzzle in the New York Times, and sipping lukewarm coffee from a mug he’d poured earlier in the day. The afternoon light would fall across the room. I found purpose and love in those visits, and my father and the house anchored me. 

After my mother’s death, a few years prior, I often felt powerless. I turned to family recipes as a connector with my father. I made the dishes for him that my grandmother had made when I was a young girl. I’d make her matzo ball soup, challah bread (to mixed reviews) and sour cream cake, carefully following her cursive notes in an old cookbook. I’m not all that sure of the connection my father felt with his parents. His emotion was often kept at bay. My grandfather had failed my father in many ways, mostly through his absence. But the food helped me feel connected to my past, my Jewish heritage, and most of all, my father. 

I have unanswered questions about what my father’s Jewish identity meant to him. I feel a sense of loss now in not having discussed it more with him. I do, however, know what his identity as a newspaperman meant to him. My father instilled in me a love of words and using them to somehow try to make sense of things, even if we got parts wrong. He modeled a life of curiosity and reflection. Today, I continue to question the role of religion in my life but I do have faith. I also follow in my mother’s footsteps by trying my best to pass down Jewish traditions to my daughters. 

New Year’s Day seems like an odd day for a life to end; it can be a time of anticipation and hope. It was one of my mother’s favorite holidays and I’d like to think they spent this past one together. Someone once told me if you’re not looking for signs, you won’t find them. So I look. I notice the afternoon light coming in and wonder what my father would think of this exploration of our family’s Judaism. I watch shadows dance across the floor and listen closely for my father’s, “Well, good afternoon.” 

Originally from New York, Liz Paley worked in social services for many years. She now lives in Concord, MA where she teaches preschool. Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe and Ruminate Magazine. She was a finalist in Ruminate Magazine’s 2021 William Van Dyke Short Story Prize. She has two grown daughters.

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January 9, 2023 · 6:30 am

Sanctuary

by Alison Hurwitz (Cary, NC)

Incongruous, that towered height among the holly, butternut, 

hydrangea, along the oaks, camellias, black-green laurel hedge —

there it rose, so tall it steepled everything, as if to say, remember,

pray to what grows green above us.

A field-worn, furrowed man called Shorty came knocking once. He said

when young, he’d planted a young redwood seedling there, brought back

from California, vaguely hoped that it would someday grow to be 

a landmark. He’d removed his crumpled hat, his hand a map of years, 

his eyes as wide as forests, asked if he could go and touch the trunk, 

already girthed to temple, breathing dusk. My mother understood,

she a tree parishioner, so both of them remained a while in silence.

When Shorty went away, he left his story grafted to its branches. 

Dad cut back the deck each year, to give the redwood room to ring. Rare 

days when grandparents sat dappled on the deck, polite and tightly furled,

Jews and Catholics baffled past translation, they sat in shade below it, and 

in stillness, shifted into softening; green a common tongue between them. 

At seventeen, I’d park with my first love across the street, and kiss until the night 

dipped branches dark with longing. When, same car, same street, same boy, 

time wrenched us into ending, the tree stood by to witness, a shelter until 

my loss let go its spores, until my heart referned with undergrowth.

Ten years later, beneath the tree, my new husband and I stood quiet while my parents, 

faces filigreed with leaf-light, planted blessings in us. They prayed we’d tend

a sapling, make a small repair, something to green the broken world. My parents’ hope 

could sing the music out of wood.  Mitzvot and Meritum. Their reverence, ringed.

The day after my father died, when all I had was absence, I stumbled out to sit 

below our redwood tree. There, grief burrowing among its roots, I stayed until 

I found a seed and held it in my palm. I breathed and felt the way that branches 

lifted into blue, its birds built nests, the fledglings flew, each ending bending to beginning: 

holy as the timeless sky.

Alison Hurwitz’s work has appeared in Global Poemic, Words and Whispers, Tiferet Journal, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Anti-Heroin Chic, Book of Matches, and The Shore, and is forthcoming in Amethyst Review, Rust and Moth, Thimble Magazine, Academy of the Heart and Mind, and SWWIM Every Day. She writes gratefully in North Carolina. To read more about her and her work, visit alisonhurwitz.com

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December 6, 2021 · 7:30 am

When I Think About Prayer

by Rachel R. Baum (Saratoga Springs, NY)

We did not belong to the synagogue my grandparents attended

On the High Holy Days I stood next to my father

Surrounded by anonymity in dark suits

He mumbled the Hebrew fussed with the slippery borrowed tallis

As I followed the dots and lines of text with my finger

My father elbowed me “Look at that” he stage whispered

A diamond ring my sister would call a third eye

Dangled from a well-dressed woman’s finger

“I’m her” he teased, knowing how the benediction he bestowed

On any female with enviable money, talent, beauty, would be

Hurtful to my sister and me, and then “Read! Read!” he insisted

Though we both knew we were there to gossip not to pray

Real prayer was the cluster of swaying bearded men

We were observers gazing from the rim of an alien civilization

Although we rose for the silent Amidah

We vied to be the first to finish and sit

My mother admonished us for our whispered disregard

She turned the pages of the Siddur

As she would an album of photographs

Reciting the Hebrew from transliterated words

We left early to avoid the rabbi’s sermon

The Bema a distant stage with its costumed Torahs

An usher collected the pledge envelope

At the tollbooth of a sanctuary door

At home, another yarmulke was added to the drawerful

That my father forgot at shul to remove and return

Evidence of our yearly pilgrimage

Marking the passage of time and of faith.

Rachel R. Baum is a professional dog trainer, former librarian, licensed private pilot, kayak angler, and Covid Long Hauler. She is the author of the blog BARK! Confessions of a Dog Trainer and the editor of Funeral and Memorial Service Readings: Poems and Tributes (McFarland, 1999) Her poems have appeared in High Shelf Press, Ariel’s Dream, Drunk Monkeys, Wingless Dreamer, New England Monthly Poetry Digest, Poetica Review, Bark magazine, and Around the World anthology. To learn more about Rachel’s work, visit: https://rachelrbaum.wixsite.com/my-site

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July 26, 2021 · 6:55 am

The Sacred Snuggle

by Nina J. Mizrahi (Northbrook, IL)

I didn’t wear a tallit until my first year of rabbinic school when I lived in Jerusalem.  It never occurred to me to wear one until  I saw other women  wrapped in tallitot during prayer. I sensed their closeness with the Divine.  A yearning to share in this experience, to be enveloped by the wings of the Shechinah, arose from the depths of my soul.  Soon after, I remember shopping for my first tallit at Yad Lakashish, which means “lifeline for the old.”  The tallit was made by Jerusalem’s elders, giving them “a sense of purpose, self-worth and connection…through creative work opportunities…”  This added meaning to my Shehecheyanu moment.  

Returning from the Old City to my apartment, I unpacked and examined my new tallit. Aware that this was a significant moment in my spiritual life, I recited the Shehecheyanu, followed by the bracha for donning a tallit, kissed the two sides of the atarah (neckband), and then wrapped myself from the head down.  It was as if I were encasing myself in a sacred cocoon, imagining that I would emerge as my authentic self and be ready to commence my rabbinic studies. 

At first, having no words for that moment, I stood silently in this sacred, intimate space. At some point, powerful, unsummoned memories brought me to tears as I recalled how my father, zichrono livracha, would wrap me in his tallit.  I like to think that his deep faith in God, woven into the very fabric of his tallit, was now woven into mine.  I bathed in the warmth of the memory of these sacred snuggles, feeling deeply loved, protected and safe.  My heart overflowed with profound joy, flowing first to my father, then spilling into the universe, forming a deep connection to something greater than myself. 

So, there I was, a Jewish woman studying in Jerusalem, standing alone in an apartment that had been converted from a bomb shelter, wearing my tallit, holding its four corners in my hands.  It was a lot to take in, and I considered how the mitzvah of tzitzit requires us to look at the strings, knots and twists of the tzitzit with intention and a sense of sacred obligation.  

Committing to the mitzvah of wearing a tallit is both humbling and empowering. Since that first moment in Jerusalem forty years ago, I have wrapped myself in a tallit for prayer and hitbodedut (a solitary, intimate form of prayer offered by pouring one’s heart out to God).  I have wrapped my tallit around or held it like a chuppah over the heads of individuals, couples, families, lay leaders, teachers, and students as a way of welcoming, honoring, blessing, and celebrating. 

In Ahavat Olam, a prayer recited before the Shema, we gather the tzitzit and, imagining being united in peace, we say,”V’havienu l’shalom m’arba kanfot ha’aretz v’tolichenu komemiut l’lartzeinu — Bring us to peace from the four corners of the earth and lead us upright to our land.” 

Decades after my ordination, I attended Shabbat services in a small community where tradition was woven together with new rituals. Just before the Shema, everyone stood up and handed the tzitzit on one corner of their tallitot to someone on their left and another corner to someone on their right.  What a beautiful statement about the importance of joining together in our prayer and in our lives, which is not an easy thing in our complicated world.  Collected into one, we chanted words that the medieval Jewish mystic, Rabbi Isaac Luria (known as the ARI) is said to have recited before praying each day: 

Hareini mekabel alai (Behold, I hereby take upon myself

et mitzvat haboreh (the instruction of the creator)                         

v’ahavta l’rei’acha kamocha (“You shall love your neighbor as yourself”)

Whether or not wearing a tallit is part of your tradition or practice, it is a symbol of the transformative power of Chesed — acts of loving kindness.  We read in the Book of Psalms (89:3): “The world is built through chesed.” 

Acts of chesed precede all others because they alone are unconditional and unmotivated.  We read in the book of Psalms (89:3) that “The world is built with chesed” (Psalms 89:3) — acts of kindness.   

Rabbi Menachem Creditor, a social justice activist and founder of Rabbis Against Gun Violence,  wrote a beautiful song about this verse when his daughter was born right after 9/11:

I will build this world from love…yai dai dai 

And you must build this world from love…yai dai dai 

And if we build this world from love…yai dai dai 

Then God will build this world from love…yai dai dai 

(VIDEO: http://rabbicreditor.blogspot.com/2012/12/olam-chesed-yibaneh-with-newtown-in-my.html)

I’d like to invite you to wrap yourself in your tallit (or one that you can borrow for a moment). As you wrap yourself in a sacred snuggle, I encourage you to try sending compassion first to yourself and then to others, possibly beginning with those for whom you have positive feelings, and then to those with whom you are struggling. 

You may find your own words or adapt the following phrases as you see fit.  Begin by setting your intention for the recipient of your meditation and repeat this meditation silently: 

May …I/ you/ they……..be safe

May …… I/ you/ they…..be happy/content

May ……my/your,/their  life unfold with ease

May………………….

Click here for a beautiful lovingkindness meditation offered by Sylvia Boorstein, author, psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher.

May you be blessed by who you are and may you always bring blessing to others.

Rabbi Nina J. Mizrahi, a spiritual leader for 35 years, gleans wisdom from ancient and contemporary sources to inspire personal growth, with the purpose of understanding the mystery of being alive and human and celebrating life more fully. If you’d like to read more of Rabbi Mizrahi’s work, visit her website. And if you’d like to reach out to her, you can write via e-mail: ninajanemizrahi@gmail.com.

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