*How to Recharge Yourself | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | May 8, 2026*
This week I listened to a lecture by Professor Rachel Elior, and one sentence stayed with me: she said that the story of the Jewish people has always been written out of moments of crisis. Out of losses, disasters, destruction - it began with the voices that asked: how did this happen to us? And who will we be from now on? And it was precisely around these questions that the people came together. The trauma did not break the people apart - it led them to tell a new story.
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I listened, and felt a certain sadness about the disaster-educated people that we are, about all the questions we now have to ask, and who even has the strength. And at the same time, I felt how pleasant it was to listen to all this knowledge. To learn. Simply to sit, on a sun-soaked afternoon, to listen, and to refill myself again.
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How long has it been since I nourished myself? The past months and years feel like an eternity. And that eternity has filled me mostly with reports, with fear, with headlines, the wail of sirens, the echo of interceptions, the fall of missiles, and of course, with stories of heroism and of grief.
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And suddenly, this week, it was clear that the most urgent thing is to fill up with other things. That is, to empty out of these and make room for something else. Only time has passed. My sense of well-being has grown accustomed to being glued to the well-being of my people, my country, and even to the well-being of Jews everywhere, and I could no longer quite remember how to begin. That is, what do you actually do in order to recharge yourself? What do you do right now?
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So I turned to my favorite wisdom - the wisdom of crowds - and asked what you are doing to fill up right now. No one asked for clarification - it seemed everyone understood exactly what I meant. And hundreds of responses began to pour in.
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There were answers that felt less realistic for me personally, like: “I run in nature. I enjoy sunrises, the quiet, the animals I see - deer, foxes, porcupines,” simply because I don’t run, and the last time I encountered foxes was in a dark playground in Berlin, and it honestly scared me.
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But hundreds of other responses immediately stirred the motivation to begin something in me, and here is just a small glimpse of some of them -
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Smadar: “I go to a concert. Preferably rock. Preferably songs you can fall apart in: either dance wildly or cry and be moved.”
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Shelly: “Especially these days - strength training twice a week. It literally saves me and helps me leave the house, lift myself, or lift life, off the floor.”
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Sivan: “I scheduled appointments for everything that falls under the category: caring for body and soul. (Mammogram and breast check, weekly acupuncture!, massage, a vacation, dermatologist, cosmetics, gel manicure, blood tests, menopause specialist - all this in addition to my psychologist and yoga, which are with me all the time anyway).”
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Anat: “I try to meet with people who recharge me. I really choose carefully those I know I will leave with energy from - as opposed to those who drain me.”
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Amira: “In my balcony garden - tending, renewing, watering. More sports. I started a new guided nutrition plan. And because of the constant alertness and urgency that took over during the war, I now do everything slowly. And I breathe that slowness. Because I realized that this is what is good and precise for me.”
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Leah: “Conversations with friends, and every now and then I take a deep breath.”
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Ziva: “I see a lot of art. Because art is first and foremost heart, soul. Only afterward comes the mind.”
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Hailey: “I love. Him, them, the flowers and the sunsets and the music and the new mugs. And my child who is calling right now from the army. More than anything else - and with all the schmaltz and stickiness - love fills, while everything else threatens to empty.”
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Inbar: “An hour of Qigong practice by the sea every day. A 45-minute walk along the shore, grounding in bare feet. Breathing deeply. Sitting in meditation. Exposing myself to the morning sun. Preparing healthy meals. Taking care of the house, the plants, the garden.”
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Anat: “I sink into my clinic with my little patients - there, you forget the outside world.”
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Merav: “I went back to folk dancing - it revives the soul. Coloring by numbers - meditative. Sticking ‘diamonds’ by numbers onto a picture of Frida Kahlo - Sisyphean but calming. And I go to Tel Aviv just to wander, simply because I can.”
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Nava: “I’ve just created a new ritual for myself - once a week, before going home and getting pulled into chores and tasks, I sit with a glass of wine and a book at a neighborhood bar.”
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Riki: “I went back to embroidery. Something I last did at twenty. Somehow, embroidering in the evening distracts from the pain a little.”
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Efrat: “I really ‘work’ at recharging, because otherwise I fade and get pulled into sadness and worry. I meet friends I love. I go to stand-up comedy shows, concerts, exhibitions and gallery talks, and I remind myself every day of the good things in my life.”
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So I read the hundreds of responses , which became a pile of optimism, motivation, and devotion to ‘choose life,’ and I remembered that in nature nothing stays full for long, and nothing stays empty either. The tide in the ocean recedes in order to return, the tree sheds its leaves to make room for new growth, the earth dries and then absorbs, and the moon, of course. The body works through an inhale coming in and an exhale going out, the heart works through contraction and expansion. In other words, when I finished reading this list, I remembered that emptying is not a loss - it is part of the deep rhythm of life, and there are so many exciting ways to fill up again.
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At the end of her lecture this week, Professor Elior said another beautiful sentence: that for Jews, the story is the sacred thing. The first writer is God. And He grants us, too, the ability to create and to write and to name things. He was the first author who engraved on the tablets, and now it is our role to continue composing. To write the story.
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And I leaned back and said to myself - well, that’s what I do. I do it with hundreds of people, and it is also the thing that fills me the most these days. There were seasons of inspiration that were about survival in hard days, and now the time of recharging has come. And in a month, a new season will open. If you feel that this is what you need right now, you are warmly invited to refill yourself with me - through learning, inspiration, and writing in the summer season that will open in June - to take, once a week, time that is yours and yours alone, and to actually do it, with me and with a large community. It colors the entire week. Expands, a little more and a little more. The mind and the heart and the writing hand.
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And here we are, as Rachel Elior said, composing the story.
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Wishing all of us a Shabbat Shalom, and that each and every one of us will fill up in whatever way suits them,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*