*The Healing Power of Cuteness | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | July 18, 2025*
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We got our dog after we were severely hit by the recoil of an Iranian missile, back in October. For most people, that one-off attack passed unnoticed. But for us, it turned our lives upside down. For several hours I couldn’t even close my jaw—I was stuck with a look of pure shock. For days, the girls and I couldn’t eat a thing. Then we traveled. And then, we brought the dog home.
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She was the opposite of an Iranian missile. The opposite of a massive hollow pipe of metal, of a deafening sound, of a thousand shattered pieces of glass. She was soft and curly haired, warm and good-natured. She peed everywhere. The world was her bathroom and her playground. She was thrilled by every leaf, every bird. She couldn’t stop rubbing herself against grass and fences, as if her entire mission in life was to touch absolutely everything, all the time.
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Exactly the opposite of how we felt: desperate to hide from the world, from anything that might touch us.
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The dog pulled us outside. We had no choice. Five times a day we took her out for potty training. Outside we met people, sunshine, grass, and the world. We remembered how to move again. The dog was cute, and people constantly stopped to pet her. And while they did, they talked to us. They told us about their own dogs—how their dogs saved them. Some neighbors became regulars on our daily route, waiting for the dog with some small surprise. Eventually, we looked forward to seeing them too.
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Little by little, the world started to seem like a treasure trove of small joys. It was hard to believe. It had nothing to do with the news, the headlines, or even the terrifying events that came after that Iranian attack. Many more frightening things have happened since. But whenever fear struck, one of us would go curl up against her fur, which had grown thicker and bigger over time. Much bigger. She became large enough to form a soft, furry wall between us and reality.
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And just to be clear, on a normal day, I’m the last person looking for a wall between me and reality. And under normal circumstances, I had no intention of adopting a second dog. But this war brought many unplanned things into our lives. One of them had a tail.
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It reminded me how, a few weeks after my mother died, I found myself wandering into the gift shop at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and buying myself beautiful things. Things I didn’t need. A few colorful pouches, a notebook, a pen, a pin. As I paid, I asked myself: what do I need this for? But for months afterward, every time I opened my bag, it made me happy. My bag had become a treasure chest full of beautiful things. And every time I needed to see something beautiful inside a world that felt colorless and sad, all I had to do was unzip it and look inside.
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When we traveled to Canada, the impulse was similar: to look at life against a beautiful backdrop, to surrender to postcard-like beauty and let it seep in. Just as, for years, so many difficult, sad, and ugly things had seeped into the soul. By then I had already learned: beauty heals. It’s not a luxury. It’s not a privilege. It has real healing powers. And in this war, I’ve come to understand that cuteness has healing powers, too.
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The problem is that “cuteness” has a bit of a PR problem. It’s associated with bunnies, plush toys, hot guys and little girls. You’re supposed to outgrow it by age eight or nine, because life is made of serious things. Big, consequential things. And we surrendered to those big and serious things with all our might, until this very cute dog came into our lives and reminded me that cuteness, too, can heal. Since then, this is how I see the world: when I’m scared, I remind myself: being scared is human, tender, and cute. And when I make mistakes, I remind myself: that, too, is human, tender, and cute. When people near me are being cute, I say so. And if they make a face, like “what does cute have to do with this?” I explain it to them, too: cuteness heals.
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Anyway, I read somewhere that dogs aren’t just cute by accident. They’re wired to communicate with us hormonally. They can detect our moods, our energy, even our physical state, and respond. They’re love seismographs. Through evolution, they’ve learned which look makes us produce oxytocin and love them more. There’s a reason for the phrase “puppy eyes.”
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This week, I was photographed for an interview that will run next week in the newspaper. The interview is about my new book, The Wandering Jewess, about journeys, returns, and the unplanned places this war has taken us. When it was time for the photos, the photographer asked if I had any ideas for the shoot. I told him I thought I should be photographed with our dog. He didn’t get it at first. Asked to see a photo of her. I sent one. He replied immediately: Ohhh. She’s so cute!
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We’re living in a time that is anything but cute. Everything feels like it’s falling apart, on the outside and the inside. Nothing has been gathered or rebuilt yet. On the contrary, every wave of collapse seems to trigger another. We’ve lost thousands of people to death, and tens of thousands more to injuries and trauma. Even beyond our borders, the ground keeps swallowing unbearable amounts of death and pain. When I asked myself how to stay whole in this, how to survive each day, I didn’t have a clear answer. But I looked at our dog curled up beside me. At her cuteness. And my heart filled with gratitude.
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I’ll end with this poem about her, which appears in The Wandering Jewess:
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*She Must Have Done Something Big for Humanity, And Then* / by Maya Tevet Dayan
After she died, God
told her: choose what you want
for your next life. Even two things.
And she immediately said she wanted
to be a golden retriever mixed with a poodle—
because just saying “a dog”
doesn’t guarantee a thing. You could
end up in a soup bowl in Thailand.
But as a goldendoodle,
there’s no way you’ll end up on the street.
“And the second thing?” God asked.
She said, “If you insist,
give me straight hair.”
That, God understood immediately,
and sent her back—
straight hair covering round doodle eyes—
And placed her
right in our apartment in Tel Aviv.
It probably has to do
with sins from our past lives.
It was decreed we would serve a dog,
pad our home with hypoallergenic pillows, smoked
bones, and deer ears.
Place our trust
in the great divine plan, surrender
to it, and obey.
And so we do—
diligently rubbing coconut oil
into her paws, flying with her around the world
in soft carriers, shampooing
her holy fur with blueberry soap,
clearing the center of our bed for her,
listening in reverence
to the sacred puffs of air
from her blessed, twitching snout.
And she, in return,
is so unbelievably cute,
that for one moment
there is no war, no Jews,
no worry, no fear.
It really does feel,
as the cliché goes,
like a blank page,
like being a child again.
Maybe it’s her cuteness.
Maybe it’s because she reminds us
of God.
Or maybe those two
are the same thing.
Either way,
we serve her.
And she,
for her part,
redeems humanity—
which is us.
*Wishing you Shabbat Shalom and quieter days*,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*