Selling the World | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | January 9, 2026
This week I heard Julia Louis-Dreyfus describe on her podcast how their house burned down in the massive fires in Los Angeles, and how together with the house more than ninety enormous family photo albums burned as well, albums she herself had sorted, organized, and arranged. Their entire life was documented in those albums - baby photos of her children, of herself, even photos of her parents and grandparents. A legacy of generations reduced to ash. And as she told this story, for a moment she could not speak. Her throat tightened, and an unfamiliar silence settled in, the kind we are not used to hearing in podcasts. Then she swallowed and went on.
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In that episode she was interviewing the photographer Annie Leibovitz. Sometimes it is when you lose your photographs that you understand their value. The two of them agreed that many photographs “work” because they reflect back to us the way we would like to see the world. Or ourselves. Or because they give us hope that the world really can look this way, as it is photographed, with vast landscapes and human kindness. And sometimes they give us hope that this is how we ourselves might look, or live.
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That conversation reminded me of a folder I keep on my phone - photographs of random older women who, in my eyes, are simply aging beautifully. I called the folder How to Age. Some of these women are Asian. Or Indigenous. The chances that I will age in an Asian or Indigenous way are practically nonexistent. And yet their photographs work not because I want to imitate them, but because every time I scroll through them I am simply moved by the possibilities they present.
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It also reminded me of how my mother used to destroy photographs of herself in which she did not think she looked good. That memory came back when Annie Leibovitz spoke about photographing her own mother at the age of seventy-five, and about how worried her mother was that she might look old. Her mother had been a dancer and always smiled in photographs. My mother was simply beautiful, and as she grew older she became disappointed with more and more photographs that did not turn out as she was used to, and so she tore them up, into tiny, tiny pieces.
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Both Annie Leibovitz’s mother and my own mother feared old age. They tried to cling to their younger beauty. But my mother never truly reached old age. She died at sixty-four. I mentioned her tearing up photographs in my poem “Evidence,” and here are a few lines from it:
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My mother would destroy any photograph / where she didn’t think she looked pretty enough./ She eliminated with precision / any remnant that might remain after her,/ examining every finger print / she had left behind in the world. /I remember her ripping up photos /of herself into small pieces like confetti,/ a multicolored rain of memories erased,/ one long celebration flowing from her palms,/ swallowed into the forgetful abyss /of our kitchen garbage can. /On her face, the smile of a small victory /in the obliteration of evidence./ (From “Evidence” by Maya Tevet Dayan, translated by Jane Medved)
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From my mother, I understood that you can feel a sense of victory not only in front of a good photograph, but also when you destroy a bad one. And this is no longer only about photographs, but about the story we want to leave behind, and the stories we do not want to leave behind. Because regardless of what happens in the world, what truly stays with us is the story we told about it. And it matters that we tell that story precisely.
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This week I asked the community that studies and writes with me to upload photos from their phones - any photograph that, when they look at it, makes them feel that the world is a beautiful place. In response, nearly two hundred photographs were uploaded, in which beauty appeared in a wide range of forms - sleeping babies side by side, an open field, a road, blooming mustard flowers, a corner of a home. Looking at all of them in sequence worked on my consciousness no less than reading two hundred frightening news items. And it was a good reminder that the news about the world is no more real than the photographs of this world that appeared this week in my community.
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I asked them to upload these photographs because we wrote about beauty this week. We wrote inspired by images, but also inspired by a wonderful poem that I will place at the end of this column. A poem that is a reckoning by a young mother about how she presents life and the world to her children - what she tells, and what she hides.
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It seems to me that this is a subject that we are all familiar with. Because we all know the quiet, maternal trauma of war. Which is also a paternal trauma, and a grandparental one. Not the great, unimaginable trauma of heroic parents who have lost sons and daughters, or of those whose children were kidnapped, wounded, or fought and returned with combat trauma. But the trauma of that large, quiet circle of parents who carry the war into routine life. Into the everyday.
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Those who try to hold and balance tender children within an impossible reality. Who find themselves every day at countless crossroads of decisions about what to tell and what to hide. Even when the missiles are roaring. And what kind of adults will grow from these children if I tell, or if I hide. Mothers who question not only what kind of world these children are growing in, but also what kind of story about the world they’ll be hearing?
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My mother, for example, did not only destroy photographs. She also insisted on telling us the world through its beautiful sides. The innocent ones. The kind-hearted ones. The ones full of grace. That is where she aimed the beam of her story. And I, on the other hand, keep even the most awful selfies, and when it comes to the world, I show my daughters its less flattering selfies as well.
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And even I, since the war, find myself hiding in front of my daughters. Hiding and lying.
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And so I bring this beautiful poem by the American poet Maggie Smith to close the column. A poem that explains why we need this hiding, and these lies, even in times without an ongoing war, even in places that are not Israel, and not only with our children, but also with ourselves. Why our story about the world matters - a story that allows us to settle into it, and to change it, despite the facts and the news. And how all of this is connected to beauty -
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*Good Bones / Maggie Smith*
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
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Way we all have Shabbat Shalom,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*