*On That Dot Are All Those You Love | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | 8.1.2025*
The sentence that headlines today’s column was written by the astronomer Carl Sagan. He wrote it while looking at a photo sent by the Voyager space probe in 1990. The photo shows a vast expanse of space and, within it, a tiny speck—Earth—strung along a reddish beam of light. You can barely see it. But if you zoom in, and then zoom in again, you’ll find it, in the middle of all that nothing: a pale blue dot.
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“That's here”” Sagan wrote, “That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”.
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What a beautiful and poetic text.
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This week I looked at that picture again and thought to myself how much I dislike photos from space. Just recently they discovered that Earth might actually be located inside a black hole, and the day before yesterday, they reported the likely existence of life on a planet called K2-18B—which, by the way, is also blue. On ordinary days, I’d usually flip past those pictures, not wanting to think about how little we actually know.
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But not lately. Lately, I find myself looking at them. This harsh reality keeps stretching on and on, and I need perspective. Sometimes, to simply focus on a single dot. That dot could be like the one in the photo, a reminder that Earth is, in truth, a minuscule story. What’s the use of making a fuss over this or that statement made somewhere on the globe? And that dot can also be inside my own life. Instead of zooming out on Earth, I can zoom in on one flowering plant, a sentence from my daughter, a meal with my family, a single illuminated dot within life, and let it become a whole universe.
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Dots of light.
Sometimes I find them and devote entire columns here to them. Remember the one about the taxi driver who drove me from Jerusalem and taught me about life and death? Or Stacey Sims, who taught us how women are actually supposed to eat and exercise? Or the revelations I had from the story of Job, and from the “Woman of Valor” psalm? All of these were dots of light for me, and I try to gather them and write them down in order to expand and amplify that light (by the way, all those columns are saved on my website and on Spotify, links below).
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So why am I telling you this now? Because in recent weeks, without even noticing, I created, for myself, one of those dots of light.. At first, I didn’t even realize. It started when I opened my laptop in the heart of the attack on Iran, when I felt overwhelmed, and realized I wasn’t the only one. I invited people to join me to studying and writing. We met each morning, hundreds of us, and I didn’t think of it as a dot of light. I thought of it as one small thing I could give right now: half an hour of concentrated inspiration, a docking station in the space that is our life. I simply invited those who came to close the door behind them, to create a bubble within reality, and then read with me, listen, think, and write. The time between sirens was short, and to play it safe I decided the meetings would be just 30 minutes long.
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The faces on the screen in front of me were tucked away in bomb shelters, in dimly lit safe rooms. Later, a kind of routine returned, and I began to see summer behind their screens, heat, nature. At some dot, people started traveling again and I noticed a pool behind them, a hotel, an airport. Others slipped away from their summer-break homes and joined from their car, and there, between the window and the driver’s mirror, they read us what they had written.
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Writing is always an act of rebellion, a break from routine—and in wartime, all the more so.
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In war, there are also so many people who desperately need these anchor moments. They need the dots of light more than the rest of us: families supporting soldiers who were critically wounded for months on end, reservists’ wives, parents who’ve lost income. And often, it’s precisely those people who can’t afford to pay for such meetings right now. So I decided the community would be large, the fee symbolic, and that way, anyone who needs to can join for free—because the community will carry that and make it possible.
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And one morning in July, I looked at the many tiny squares on the screen in front of me, all writing, all calm, no difference between those who could afford it and those who couldn’t—and suddenly all the distressing headlines of that day disappeared. The fear, the heaviness, and I too had a dot of light. Something soaked in beauty unfolded before my eyes. It was simple. Beautiful and communal. Warm and intimate. It was all mine, and at the same time, entirely ours.
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I received many letters from participants, telling me about the sense of victory they felt for making time for themselves, about the flow that returned to their writing, the courage that returned to their voice, and how they’re unsure what will remain in their private memory from this war, but these mornings have already become an island of sanity and magic. I felt that myself. But this week, I came across the image of the “pale blue dot”- our Earth, which itself is a kind of dot of light in the vast black emptiness of space. And right after that, one participant sent me a message, in these exact words: “These gatherings began as a dot and turned into a wondrous emotional space. The exposure to incredible women and men, and to fascinating writing - it’s my sanity dot right now.”
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And suddenly everything in front of me became dots of light. I read what she wrote and answered her silently in my heart: It’s my sanity too. Mine too.
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All this to say - if you’d like to join our inspiration and writing sessions for Hebrew writers, you’re warmly invited. The fee is very symbolic, as mentioned, but if you truly can’t afford it right now, just message me privately, and I’ll happily welcome you into our dot of light. There’s room for everyone.
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Wishing us all Shabbat Shalom,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*