*Longing for Beauty | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | June 19, 2026*
This week I was scrolling through Instagram, the kind of mindless, boring scrolling where you pass by countless posts and none of them make you stop. They were too commercial, or too predictable, or too loud, or simply posts for the sake of posting. And that was fine. I wasn't expecting anything. In the background, the usual news cycle played on - attack or no attack, agreement or no agreement - and I was glad to give my eyes something to stare at. Until suddenly one of those posts stopped me. It was exactly the kind of post I always scroll past, and yet my hand, almost on its own, stopped and began swiping through the images.
.
What was in it? A photo of a modern streetlamp next to an old one. Then a photo of a modern building façade next to a Victorian façade. Then a modern staircase next to an old staircase. A modern door next to an old door. Even a gutter next to a gutter. A baby toy next to a baby toy, and a light switch next to a light switch. You get the idea.
.
It was a terrible post. I really don't like these comparisons between the present and the past, especially when they lead to longing for only one of those two times, the one that has passed and will never return. And yet something in my resistance softened when I reached the photo of a modern key next to a key from seventy years ago. Then the sofa. And finally, the windowsill. I had never noticed the tiny details of a windowsill before.
.
And then it landed on me. The understanding of why my finger had stopped on that post despite all my resistance. It was because people once invested enormous amounts of time and effort in adding beauty to things that didn't need beauty at all. And because at some point efficiency and functionality became the goal. Beauty became optional. Often abandoned along the way. And because beauty is not something superficial, despite what we are sometimes led to believe. And on that day this week, when my finger chose for me what to linger on in Instagram, I felt especially aware that I was suffering from a severe deficiency of beauty.
.
Like a deficiency of vitamin B. Or iron. Or zinc. Only beauty.
.
And I remembered how, when my mother was very ill, I walked into a shop at the university and bought all sorts of little things for my bag, things I didn't need at all. I bought them simply because they were beautiful, because I wanted to know that whenever I needed beauty, I could open my bag and breathe some of it in.
.
And perhaps people in the not-so-distant past worked so hard to decorate everything, from a door handle to a streetlamp, not because it was a matter of style or culture or a particular era. Perhaps they understood that beauty is a deep psychological need, a deep physical need. Perhaps they knew what we have forgotten: that every object around us, every street corner, everything we carry in our bags, has a direct effect on how we feel. In other words, beauty is not a luxury. It is a genuine human need, like food or shelter or water.
.
That day this week I felt so profoundly deprived of beauty that even silly Instagram posts like that one were filling something within me. The truth is that it no longer seemed silly to me. It stirred a sigh. And after the sigh, a thought. Then an understanding. And finally a decision: to start looking for beauty, and quickly, because my condition seemed serious.
.
Since then, I have decided to be more attentive to every expression of beauty that crosses my path. I understood that it would not simply arrive on its own. And the moment I decided to look, I began to find it.
.
At first I found beauty in little things I heard that made me laugh, except this time I made an effort to remember them. For example, when my older daughter's friend summed up that Sunday's round with Iran by saying, "It was like the Six-Day War, only minus five days."
.
After that I found beauty on a Zoom screen. Yes, really, a Zoom screen. On Sunday evening, while everyone was talking about another expected attack, and at the height of the tension, somehow - I still don't know how - nearly two hundred writers from Season of Inspiration gathered and wrote together. And everything was filled with a kind of sweet determination and a stubborn insistence on life over fear.
.
Then I found it in a tray full of cinnamon-and-sugar rolls that my daughter baked.
.
And I would like to bring you two more beautiful things. The first is this poem by Mary Oliver:
.
On Travelling To Beautiful Places /Mary Oliver
Every day I’m still looking for God
and I’m still finding him everywhere,
in the dust, in the flowerbeds.
Certainly in the oceans,
in the islands that lay in the distance
continents of ice, countries of sand
each with its own set of creatures
and God, by whatever name.
How perfect to be aboard a ship with
maybe a hundred years still in my pocket.
But it’s late, for all of us,
and in truth the only ship there is
is the ship we are all on
burning the world as we go
.
And finally, I'm leaving you with a link to a performance overflowing with beauty of the song They Say There Is a Land - a recording from the president's house this week. The singer is Hadar Elad Ben Harosh, the widow of the late Daniel Ben Harosh. At the piano is Yotam Alon, a musician from Kibbutz Be'eri. And alongside them is the wonderful Aviv Bachar.
.
In short, listen to it. It's full of beauty:
.
And if you've come across beauty, please send it to me. I seem to need it very much right now.
.
Wishing all of us a peaceful Shabbat,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*