*A Door of One’s Own | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | 20.2.2026*
This Tuesday I drove north to Kibbutz Gesher HaZiv for a lecture that they had been trying to set up with me for six months. Once, I lost my voice and had to cancel. Another time it seemed the war was heating up again. We kept following the news. I always travel to meet audiences across the country, but for the past two and a half years almost every event I’ve scheduled has come with a small asterisk beside it. The asterisk of “depending on the situation.”
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So when I walked into the Mateh Asher Regional Library this week, I felt that slight sense of victory in my body, the kind you feel whenever you manage to preserve some routine inside a chaotic reality. And when I sat down on the high chair and opened the poetry books beside me, I thought to myself that this was the perfect act in the face of headlines that had once again announced that negotiations had collapsed.
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Then, at the end of the lecture, I invited the audience to write - something I never used to do in the past, but have been doing more often lately. Maybe because I feel that we are constantly being told and shown - opinions and headlines and commentaries - and time passes and the war stretches on, and they continue telling and showing us opinions and headlines and commentaries, and sometimes, like this week, the headlines grow louder, and within all that noise our inner voice begins to disappear. In short, because of all the noise outside, I’ve begun inviting my audiences to write something at the end of each meeting, something different every time, the main thing being to hear, for a brief quiet moment, your own voice.
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And so I asked the people of the north to write a few lines, a small story about their land. The land from which they were evacuated, which they then longed for, felt certain about or filled with questions about, the land they returned to. Then I asked to hear a few of the pieces that had been written.
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It was so beautiful. They wrote about the soil they returned to and planted their garden beds in again. Or about the contractor who mixed construction debris into the earth and they felt something was wrong, that the soil was no longer their soil. Or about the ants that enter the house, only now, after two years of evacuation, they are back in their own home, and these are their ants, so they do not chase them away. How beautiful. Every woman in the audience had a small story about her land.
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At the end of the evening some of them brought me the notes they had written. In the taxi, in the dark on the way home, I read them. Each text felt like a small door opening and hosting me for a moment in another place. By the time we reached Tel Aviv, I had opened many doors. Then I opened the door to my own apartment. It was almost midnight, and I went to sleep.
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In the morning I woke up with all those doors.
I love doors.
And I believe in their power.
Especially in the power of closing a door behind you.
It sounds like a trivial matter, but it may be that the door is one of the most important inventions for creative people. And for people who are not creative. And it seems to me that for women even more so. And of all women, perhaps most of all for mothers.
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Anyone raising small children knows they follow you everywhere, even to the bath or the bathroom. So you can almost never close the door behind you and be alone. I have an unproven feeling that this is a story mothers know more than fathers. And since this stage lasts two or three years with each child, I suspect that personally, in total, I did not close a single door behind me for an entire decade.
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But even when small children grow up, mothers rarely close a door and allow themselves to be alone. Maybe because we are expected to care and to be available. Or because of the feeling that everything rests on you, or that there is no one to rely on. The fear that if you close a door something terrible will happen on the other side. And you will not notice. Maybe this is how we grew up - to mothers and grandmothers who almost never closed a door and asked for privacy within the home - and we continue in the same way. The Guardian of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps, and of course she does not shut herself in a room without staying alert to what is happening outside.
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Even now, when I invite my students to close a door, even for forty five minutes for a Zoom lesson, I see how difficult it is for them. Some remain available the entire time to whoever is around them - family members, dogs, cats, delivery people at the door, who and what not.
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Once I came across an interesting article written in Japan that asked what guilt costs us - us, meaning mothers. Alongside various prices mentioned there, such as mothers being less likely to accept a promotion at work or a relocation opportunity, it also spoke about this simple cost - the price extracted from you when you are never simply with yourself. In private. In quiet. Away from your surroundings. The price you pay when for years you do not hear your own inner voice.
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This week many small doors opened before me, doors into the souls of many beautiful women from the north. And I was left with thoughts about doors and with the question of how, even with something seemingly so simple, we can tell a new story and change something for our daughters and our sons.
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So I will end today with these lines, from Feminism as I Taught It to My Daughters, which are, of course, about a door:
“Sometimes my daughters ask me, why is it so important to you to close the door and write even when we are home? And I tell them, one day you will be exactly where I am. You will have sweet little children. You will have ambitions and desires. The children will want you for themselves. Everyone will tell you that a good mother is a mother who devotes herself to her children and gives herself up. No one will ever tell you to go write or fulfill yourselves in another way. Try to remember what you saw at home. What I am doing now is for me, but also for you: so that when the day comes, you too will leave the dishes and the laundry behind, go tend to your additional calling, and without guilt close the door behind you.”
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I wish us all Shabbat Shalom,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*