*About Renewal | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | July 24, 2026**
This week, almost two years after the missile struck near our home, we finally gathered the courage to deal with the last place that had remained untouched: the storage room. The blast had practically exploded it from within, but only now were we ready to see what had survived, what had not, how the survivors were doing, and how we were doing.
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We had stored mostly my mother's belongings there, along with several boxes of books. Most of the books did not survive. The explosion ripped open the plastic containers, water and insects found their way inside, and it was almost impossible to tell from the covers what books had once been there. But my mother's boxes survived: the box with her journals, the box with her photographs, and several boxes containing clothes we had kept from her wardrobe.
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My mother loved delicate fabrics and gentle colors. Folded inside those boxes were thin camisoles, lace sleeves, painted jeans, silk nightgowns - all the clothes that, even now, thirteen years after her death, are the clothes I imagine her wearing whenever I picture her.
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But my daughters never really knew those clothes, or at least they did not remember them. They were very little when she died. This week we opened the boxes, and they began pulling out all the pale blues, buttery yellows, whites, and turquoise pieces that had survived as though nothing had happened. As though the years had not passed. As though there had never been that terrible explosion. As though the world around them had never fallen apart again.
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They were completely fresh, my mother's clothes, almost as if they were happy to stretch themselves awake once more. Then my daughters started trying everything on, delighted to discover that every single piece fit them perfectly. Exactly the right length. Exactly the right width. "What did you expect?" I laughed. "You're Grandma's granddaughters."
Everything fit them beautifully. Each of them made her own pile of clothes, and then I heard them saying to one another *"Tit'chadshi!"* - the Hebrew blessing you offer someone when they have something new to wear or enjoy
*"Tit'chadshi!"*
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I have not been able to stop thinking about that phrase since. How is it possible that they were *renewing themselves* in clothes my mother may have bought twenty years ago? Clothes from a world that no longer exists, in every possible sense. From a life we once had, before everything changed.
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And yet my daughters truly had something new. Their wardrobes filled with new colors. New silhouettes. Their mornings and nights were refreshed by all these new possibilities that had suddenly become theirs. Even the embrace of their grandmother, arriving wrapped inside her clothes, carried something entirely new.
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And we are living through a time when renewal feels almost impossible. There is no shortage of news, of course, but the news has been repeating the same headlines for three years now. At best, it feels as though we are standing still. At times it feels as though history itself is repeating. So where is renewal? When will it finally arrive?
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That is why this week I found myself returning to one of the most beautiful lines in the morning liturgy, from the blessing *Yotzer Or*:
**"Who, in His goodness, renews each day, continually, the work of Creation."**
It is a sentence that offers an entire worldview. God does not merely refresh the world each day. He recreates it. Every morning is, in a sense, Creation itself all over again. Which is why, every morning, we remind ourselves that the world only appears to be the same one we saw yesterday. It only seems to contain the same mountains, the same trees, the same sun. The same landscape outside the window. The same headlines in the news.
In truth, the world is being created again and again. Renewed again and again. Renewal is God's nature, and therefore the world's nature.
Is it ours as well?
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Buddhism, too, teaches that the world is in constant flux, that nothing truly endures, no matter how permanent it appears. Our bodies look the same, yet millions of processes are transforming them from the ground up, again and again. The flame that passes from one candle to another is not the same flame. And we, like everything else in existence, are entirely new in every moment.
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In a world that is forever changing, as Buddhism teaches, or in a world that God recreates anew every day, we are offered an extraordinary opportunity each morning: to renew our relationship with that world.
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As for me, I have always loved beginnings. Someone once told me it is because I am an Aries. I do not know whether that is true. I am simply one of those people who loves the first days of school, the first page of a notebook, and yes, the first time you wear something new.
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But perhaps loving beginnings is the easy part. The real challenge is learning how to renew the beginning even on the notebook's second page, or in the middle of the school year, or in a relationship, or with a piece of clothing. I am reminded of something I learned years ago while studying Zen Buddhism, a saying that goes something like this:
**"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few."**
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When I think back to myself at my daughters' age, I remember how many possibilities I could imagine in every situation, and how those possibilities gradually narrowed over the years, the more I became someone who supposedly *understood* things. Whenever I remember that, I hold this sentence close.
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This week I watched my daughters look at my mother's twenty-year-old clothes, and in their eyes those clothes became countless possibilities. For a brief moment, their grandmother became vividly present again. The entire living room seemed somehow renewed.
Perhaps renewal has nothing to do with something new arriving from the outside. Perhaps it can emerge from things that are not new at all. Perhaps it begins with an inner decision, or simply with a different way of seeing.
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It reminds me of a poem I wrote in Canada after we moved into a new home that was, in truth, a very old one. It was later published in my book *Wherever We Float, That's Home*, and with it I will end this column:
*Moving To A New House / Maya Tevet Dayan*
[translated by Jane Medved]
How can you say “new”
about a house that was built in 1926?
The kitchen shelves are designed
for jars in a size they don’t make anymore.
In a time before phones, many hands
must have knocked on the door.
Who died in this house?
Who was born here?
Which dresses hung in the bedroom closet
in the 1950’s, in the 1930’s?
What discussions raged in front of the fireplace
after the invasion of Normandy?
While my forefathers were imprisoned in camps,
the living room window stayed watchful,
like now, turning towards the bright mountains.
This house was built the same year my grandmother
was born. She left her body.
The house is receiving its new residents.
Wishing all of us Shabbat Shalom,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*
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