*Life Skills | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | September 25, 2026*
At the beginning of the week, we got an email from my daughter's teacher: every week she’ll be teaching the children in Grades 4 and 5 life skills. A different skill each week. Some weeks will be more challenging and some easier. And this week they’ll start with something simple: the children will practice how to politely say, “Excuse me, may I...?” when they want to get past someone or get someone’s attention. They’ll also learn to cover their mouths when they sneeze, cough, or burp.
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It sounds strange when you come from Israeli schools. In life-skills class at her school in Tel Aviv, my daughter learned, for example, how to deal with embarrassment or jealousy, how to have a conversation with empathy, as well as how to navigate the internet and how to keep her body safe. Until the war broke out, and the most important life skills became staying alive - how to get to a shelter quickly, how to protect yourself, how to cope with fear - and we almost forgot the small, simple life skills.
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And then this week came the teacher’s first email, reminding us that every country has the life skills it requires. The last time we lived here, my older daughters learned how to recognize bear tracks in the forest, how to tell different kinds of deer apart, and they went with their class to the supermarket to learn how to pay and how to wait patiently in line.
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And when we lived in India, they learned to eat with their hands, to take off their shoes when entering any place, and also how to say “no, thank you” in five different, polite ways.
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When I read the teacher’s email this week, I remembered how confusing it is to be a child who has to learn everything in the world, every smallest action, and how wonderful it is to have someone guiding you, telling you what to do and when. How wonderful it is that every question has an answer. And then I went back to being an adult, and the adult me gave a real sigh at the thought that she has no one, no teacher of any kind, to guide her in how to be right now.
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And it seems to me that this complicated “right now” is always.
Thinking just of this past week, there was a shooting outside a synagogue in eastern Canada on the eve of Yom Kippur, and another attack in England was thwarted at the last moment, and every group of Israelis living abroad that I belong to was talking about security - what kind of security there is or isn’t at synagogues over the holidays, and where. As if that wasn’t enough, in the province where we now live they are preparing for municipal elections - the elections that affect construction, transportation, roads, policing, property taxes - yet all the candidates see fit to state, of all things, their official position on the war in Israel... and it seems that voters will vote accordingly. And this story, of course, isn’t only Canadian. It is happening in major cities in the United States and Europe as well. Israel, and being for or against it, is taking center stage, while within Israel people hold completely opposing and completely adamant views about what should be done - and what life-skills class ever prepared us for how to navigate a world like this now?
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I would really love a class in Jewish life skills. How to be Jewish now. How to be a Jewish woman who is also Israeli in the world. And maybe because this is what I need most, it is the title I gave this week to the gatherings I am now arranging across the United States and Canada: How to Be Jewish Now? And it seems that this is how I will arrive at all the communities and audiences that have invited me - not with an answer, but with this urgent question, and with all kinds of loose threads to hold on to as we try to answer it together.
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And by the way, there is one sentence that has repeated itself among everyone who has contacted me over the past few weeks and invited me to come to their communities - in Hebrew or in English, at a university or a community center: “We are very worried.” And I nodded on the other end of the line. Yes, I am very worried too. Even when I am optimistic and believe in us, I am very worried. Even when, by and large, daily life in most parts of the country seems to be returning to normal, I am worried. And here too, every time there is news of an attempt to harm Jews, I am worried.
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But inside all this worry, I am very alert to the messages the world sends me. If you’ve been following me here for a while, you know how much I love communicating with everything. And this week I received two messages, both of them through books, and I want to share them with you. The first came through a book I pulled from a shelf in a secondhand bookstore called Good Poems for Hard Times - a hefty collection of hundreds of genuinely good poems. When I opened it to a random page, I landed on a familiar poem by Grace Paley, which is a kind of lesson in life skills for a poet, but not only for a poet:
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*The Poet’s Occasional Alternative / Grace Paley*
I was going to write a poem
I made a pie instead it took
about the same amount of time
of course the pie was a final
draft a poem would have had some
distance to go days and weeks and
much crumpled paper
the pie already had a talking
tumbling audience among small
trucks and a fire engine on
the kitchen floor
everybody will like this pie
it will have apples and cranberries
dried apricots in it many friends
will say why in the world did you
make only one
this does not happen with poems
because of unreportable
sadnesses I decided to
settle this morning for a re-
sponsive eatership I do not
want to wait a week a year a
generation for the right
consumer to come along
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So I read this poem, accepted its invitation, left the computer and went into the kitchen to stir the substance of this life a little, and ground myself.
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And the next day I opened another book that had arrived in the mail. It’s a book one of my readers here recommended to me and convinced me I absolutely had to read, and despite my usual habits and the queue of books piling up here, I bought it secondhand. Except that the cover wrapped around it had been put on upside down. So when I opened the book, it opened upside down, at its very last page. That blank white page at the end of a book that you never get to. Except that I did. And there, in handwriting, someone had written the sentence I most needed to hear: Everything will be okay. Period. I mean, they didn’t actually write the word “period,” but they took the trouble to put one at the end of the sentence.
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If the book hadn’t been wrapped upside down, and if I hadn’t opened it to its last page, I probably never would have seen that sentence. But I did see it. That sentence was written and delivered to me. Someone made sure I received it.
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And now I’m passing it on to you, too. Everything will be okay. Period. This sentence was written and delivered to you. If you’re reading it now, you probably needed to read it. And that, too, is a life skill - knowing how to receive messages, right?
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Wishing all of us Shabbat Shalom and a happy holiday.
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*Maya Tevet Dayan*