*Getting Back on Your Feet and Starting to Walk Again | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | 24.4.2026*
Sometime in June 2024, I came across a post in one of the Tel Aviv groups on Facebook: someone was recommending the best pedicurist she had ever been to. She was from the north. An evacuee living in a hotel, of all places, right in the middle of Dizengoff Street. It was a chance to support a woman displaced from her home. And it was time for a pedicure. I called and made an appointment. Her name was Batya.
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She met me in the lobby and we went up together to her room. A tiny room, it should be said. Somehow, beside the bed, she had arranged two stools, a basin of warm water, the TV in the background constantly reporting the news, and between the newscasters, the warm water, and the double-paned window facing the street, she gave me the best pedicure I had ever had.
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It wasn’t easy to get an appointment. After the post in the Tel Aviv group, her schedule filled up, and Batya was in shock at the number of women, the number of feet, and the pace of the city in general. That’s how I learned she was from Kiryat Shmona. When they were asked where they wanted to evacuate to, she chose Tel Aviv. Her daughter and grandchildren chose to stay in another community in the north. Her sister lived in a room on the floor below and somehow managed to set up a whole cooking operation there. There were also two sons. I remember breathing it in, thinking about this capacity to adapt - when you have no idea how long you’ll be living like this. How long it will go on.
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I don’t remember how many months she stayed in that hotel. At some point during that long stretch, a neighbor called to tell her that her house in Kiryat Shmona, which included several rental units, had taken a direct hit. She began traveling under fire back to Kiryat Shmona to meet with the property tax authorities. Everything was falling apart in her hands. The house. The tenants who had been evacuated. The rental income that stopped coming in. The community that had unraveled - a community she had belonged to since birth. She had no idea where in the country her doctor was, the man from the bakery, the mail carrier. And when I asked her how she was doing it - holding on like this, working, continuing - she said, because this is life, and you always have to stay on your feet.
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I remember thinking it was bitterly funny, that phrase, “stay on your feet,” while we were literally dealing with feet. And Batya said, don’t laugh, in the end it’s the most important thing. Our stability is in our feet. In our feet is our ability to get up and start walking. To leave when we need to, and to return when the time comes. And then she told me she had also studied reflexology, and that’s how it happened that I stayed another half hour and received another treatment.
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The second time I came, we were already talking about love. About how she was widowed at a young age, from a husband who had been with her since she was a teenager - if I remember correctly, the love of her life. She told me how they met, what a life of love together looked like. The children born out of that love. And also about her attempts to love again after she was widowed. But mostly we talked about how she runs her business, manages her home, tenants, finances, and most important to her - manages the career of her youngest son, the wonderful singer Achi Natan.
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And so it turned out she was also fluent in recording studios, mixing, music production, marketing, public relations, sound - everything.
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All that time she was looking at my feet, and I was looking at her - it seemed as though she had light under her skin, she was simply radiant. In that little room, and the war, and the hotel, and her family and community that had fallen apart, and the house standing ruined somewhere in the north - I don’t know how she shone. But now when I think of her, the first thing I see is that light.
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The third time I called her, it was no longer about a pedicure. We had gone through an Iranian missile strike, and Batya was the first to guide me on what to do, how to even begin handling it, and who to turn to. At some point I also wrote a Facebook post about her, and once again her little room filled with clients. At some point she sent me a WhatsApp message in response to my 6 Minutes on Friday column, and that’s how I discovered she had started reading my stuffe.
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Since then, every time Kiryat Shmona made the headlines, I would ask myself how Batya was. Had the house been restored? Had her daughter and grandchildren returned? How was this iron woman of light, this fearless woman, managing, while I kept trembling again and again at the situation? Once she wrote that she was coming to Tel Aviv - a general message to clients - and I was abroad, it wasn’t relevant, so I didn’t even reply.
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On Memorial Day this week, at night, a post appeared on my screen, in front of me by someone who wrote that his mother had died. He wrote, “You chose to go on Memorial Day.” I have no idea how that post appeared for me, or why I stopped scrolling, or why I read the small print. And how I discovered the writer’s name was Achi, and I told myself how many people could there be with that name. It was Batya. It was her son, writing to thank her, and what a privilege it had been to be her son. And I understood what he meant.
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Even though I didn’t really know her. Someone had written that she was the best pedicurist she had ever met. But when I got to her, I quickly forgot that she was a pedicurist at all, and now what I have in my memory is a kind of iron woman, lit from within, running businesses, a mother who melted with love for her children and grandchildren, and for her son’s talent, unafraid of money, of men, of missiles, who gave me a blessing through my feet, reminded me that you have to know how to stand on your own two feet in any situation. And then you have to know how to get up and keep walking.
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These are familiar sentences. But when you hear them at the right time, from the right person, they sound different.
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So I wanted to pass them on today. A small living testament from Batya Natan, who passed away this week. In the sharp transitions of our lives at this time, and especially in these weeks, it is a truly great thing - to know how to stand on your own two feet.
And certainly, to rise and keep walking.
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May her memory be a blessing.
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And may we all have a Shabbat Shalom,
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*Maya Tevet Dayan*