An Erev Shabbat Story

It’s Erev Shabbat, and I’ve just said goodbye to my husband who left for work, leaving me to watch the Dawn as I drink my tonic of coffee.

Soon I’ll be going to the DMV for some much needed name changing…stuff, cleaning our home, get my hands covered in dough kneading challah, cooking dinner, preparing myself — all in anticipation of greeting the Sabbath.

Except now as I sit in the stillness, I need to find silence.

I need to quiet my soul.

It is the month of Elul, a time of returning home. My weary heart longs for the days of peace which fill the coming holidays; though, only after a great deal of chaos. I know we’re all exhausted of hearing it, but this pandemic has been nothing less than difficult. Often times I find myself wondering if I have done enough to counter it? If I have served enough to accommodate it and all these changes it brought?

The short answer is no, I haven’t, but there’s a reason for that. It is not only my husband’s unexpected health condition (not COVID-19 related) which has debilitated us since January. It is not the required social distancing and quarantines. It is not my own selfishness either; well, at least not entirely.

What then have I been doing all this time? What could I possibly be spending all my abundance of time on since the shutdown? Easy: writing.

Today, in spite of the other questions or unresolved issues I have clamouring in my soul for attention, for my energy, my emotions, I am able to silence them with the knowledge I have been labouring to finish my manuscript.

Years ago — like four, not fifty — I sat in a touring center in Israel at the excavation site of the original Shiloh (Tel-Shiloh for all you scholars). As I watched this film reenactment of the story of Eli, Channa, and Shmuel, I wept. I asked HaShem, “Why? Why these tears? Why here? I’ve never felt drawn to this place before?” And in that stillness I felt Him whisper to me that, like Channa, it was because I laboured to birth a story He began forming within me as He knit me together in my mother’s womb. A story I’ve carried all these years. A story which I still feel today, even deeper than my kishkes, I was born to tell.

Yesterday, I finished my manuscript.

After fourteen long years, all revisions, all edits, all of it is done. Finito. Next week, I’ll resubmit it.

And I’m terrified.

I’ve been an emotional wreck these past few months as I made the final polishes to my manuscript, and this week it nearly unraveled me.

But I finished. It’s done.

Even if the agent I’ve corresponded with chooses not to represent me, even if I have to start querying all over again, even if it’s months before I ever get representation, even if I never get representation, even if I never get published — it’s been worth it. To write, to birth, this story.

I (and my husband) frequently remind myself that even if only one person’s life is changed by my novel, it is enough. Even if that person is me.

My life has been changed since I decided to write. It may not be my career [yet], it may not be my profession, some may just consider it my hobby, but to me it’s defined and helped me become who I am today. I think — I know — I’m all the better for it.

Thus, as Shabbat comes, as I feel the eagerness swelling inside, I feel immense relief.

Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson said:

If you see what needs to be repaired and how to repair it, then you have found a piece of the world that G-d has left for you to complete.

Rebbe Schneerson

I hope this story, then, is that bit of light I have found and uncovered in the darkness, to repair what I see as broken. Even if only within me.

Shabbat shalom.