*The Ground We Need to Break Through | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | 28.11.2025*
I read an interview with biology researchers who explained that every seed sprouting underground and striving to reach the light above must summon immense forces of resistance to push through the cracks and shove aside the heavy layers of soil covering it. They argued that this is nature’s way in general: in order to grow you must resist.
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Such a simple idea, something we learned back in preschool.
And still, from the moment I read it phrased this way, I could not stop thinking about it.
That in order to grow you have to resist, move against the heavy weight blocking you, rebel against the order of the world. If you aspire to reach the light you must begin with a serious effort made quietly, in the dark.
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I remembered the story on my great-great grandmother and how, in a time when girls did not attend school, she read and wrote because at night, after everyone fell asleep, her mother, my great-great-grandmother, would light a small oil lamp for them and whisper-read with her Tzena U’Rena, a book of selected Torah verses with commentaries and haftarot, written in Yiddish and intended for women.
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But how did that great-great-grandmother know how to read? Who taught her? And when? I picture a lineage of women learning at night and find myself hiding a tiny smile. How many generations passed like this in the underground world of reading in the dark before the earth finally broke open? And here I am, the first woman in my family to complete a PhD.
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Since that subversive seed, I have been trying to count everyone who acted subversively in ways that made my very existence possible. The seventeen-year-old boy who left his parents’ home against their will and fled Poland right before the war. The sixteen-year-old girl who left everything and joined a Zionist training commune in Lithuania. The young woman who, against all expectations, took her young children by ship from Chile to Israel. And the eighteen-year-old boy who left the kibbutz and never looked back.
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And these are only the close stories. How many Jews throughout history stood up and did the opposite thing, left one place, and in doing so saved usall? And how many subversive figures do we even have in the Bible? Shiphrah and Puah who refused Pharaoh’s order to kill the Hebrew infants, Yocheved and Miriam who saved Moses, the daughters of Zelophehad who demanded to inherit, and of course Yael who changed the course of war and Hannah who changed the nature of prayer. And more and more.
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It is harder for women to resist than it is for men. Because society expects women to be good, pleasant, accommodating and devoted. So a woman who rebels becomes a double and triple offender: she is condemned for defying conventions and social expectations, then condemned again for violating an ancient gendered image of the good and devoted woman, and often she will be seen not only as immoral but also as unwomanly.
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Men who defy conventions might be regarded at best as bold and strong-minded, and at worst as mischievous boundary-pushers. But subversive women are seen as dangerous and unpredictable. Case in point, try thinking of T-shirts with images of revolutionary men. Now try to think of T-shirts with images of revolutionary women.
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Personally, I have seen T-shirts of Che Guevara, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Gandhi, Mandela. But for a revolutionary woman to become iconic enough for a T-shirt she has to also be a beauty ideal (like Frida Kahlo), or else not be visually represented at all (like Rosa Parks, Simone de Beauvoir, Angela Davis).
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Yes, there are shirts with the wonderful line “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” But the woman who said it, an American historian named Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, has herself been mostly forgotten by history.
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This week on Facebook I asked you when have you dared to go against convention, and in response I received hundreds of stories: coming out after years of marriage, marrying a disabled partner despite harsh family criticism, a relationship with a man fifteen years younger, stopping breastfeeding or breastfeeding until late childhood, homeschooling, and even boldness expressed through clothing choices like entering the kibbutz dining hall without work clothes despite the judgment that you might be lazy, or arriving at synagogue in nontraditional colors. And Inbal reminded us of the saying “Only by swimming against the current will you reach the source.”
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Suddenly I found myself thinking with compassion about acts I did against conventions, but entirely for my own sake. When I left my degree halfway and traveled to Australia for two years, a journey without which I never would have reached a doctorate. Or when we moved to live at the edge of the forest in Canada, while everyone around us was horrified. And also when I published posts, essays and a feminist book. Every piece of writing like that is an act of resistance against the existing order, with no shortage of frightening reactions. But even they are simply layers of soil on the way to the light.
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One of my favorite rebellions to this day is teaching on Sundays. I am always told it is the least convenient day. The start of the week. Peak pressure. Why not write together when it is easier and calmer? At night, for example, when everyone has finally gone to sleep? And I explain that writing is a deeply subversive act. No one ever designed a world in which a woman can sit down calmly and write. She is always required to check off a million tasks before she can “allow herself to steal a little me-time”
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My act of resistance is to refuse that. And miraculously, not a single participant has ever canceled. On the contrary, this discovery transforms their lives and they continue reserving Sundays even after the workshop ends, to begin the week by listening to themselves, creating, and being quiet, which is the right energy to start a week with.
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And if once I did this with small groups, now I already influence the Sundays of hundreds of learners and writers, and this is how we start the week.
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Even now, as I write this, a tiny smile rises in me.
That smile that forms in you when you act resistantly in order to grow.
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I will end this time with a poem by Rachel Halfi, a rebellious poem about a mother who can only manage true closeness with her child at a fast food restaurant, and who, thanks to the fast food, finally has the space to write a poem:
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*Love at McDonald’s / Rachel Halfi*
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I love my child at McDonald’s
love him fiercely
freed from the burdens of donkey-work kitchen chores
from the chilling responsibility of healthy nutrition
he devours a dripping double meat sandwich
and I smoke a chain of cigarette chips
he gulps down a gallon of cola
and I pour a third coffee into my belly
suddenly I have time to look
straight into his eyes
suddenly I have time to write
this little confession
how freeing
a shared sin can be
how much this cosmopolitan establishment
contributes to the calming of the family cell
in the large windows shimmer
tiny cold neon lights
and beyond them the city signals
with friendliness
everything
everything appears for a moment
like an ally.
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The next inspiration season with me in Hebrew will open on Sunday, of course on Sunday! with the option to join online sessions in the morning or the evening, as you prefer. You are warmly invited to join me, to begin the week together the way a week should truly begin, to resist together from within our homes and writing desks what is expected of us, and to grow together through learning and writing.
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Wishing us all Shabbat Shalom,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*