The Journey of Souls in a Taxi at Night | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | July 4, 2025
Let me tell you a story. Right before the war, I was invited to a dinner in Jerusalem. When I got into the cab, the driver—a woman—looked at me from behind the wheel and said, “Maybe sit up front?” So I moved to the front seat. There are so few female taxi drivers, and so few chances to ride with one, that the entire ride to Jerusalem I asked her about her life—how she ended up driving a cab, and what it’s like to be a woman doing this job.
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Only toward the end of the ride, as we navigated the streets of Jerusalem, she told me she had recently returned from a few weeks in India. She didn’t say “I returned”—she said “we returned.”
By that point, I already knew she was divorced. I had heard about some of her dates. I knew she was a mother. So I asked, curious: “Who took you to India?” She pointed to a photo dangling from the mirror above the dashboard and said: “Him. My son.”
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The photo showed a beautiful, smiling young man sitting cross-legged. A mother-son trip! I thought to myself with a smile. “But how old is he, that he’s taking you to India?” I asked. “Tomorrow is his birthday,” she said. “He would have been 22.”
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And that’s how I learned that my driver that night was also a bereaved mother. Not the kind we hear about in wartime—whose numbers, heartbreakingly, grow by the day—but the other kind. The kind of grief that happens even in times of peace. Her son had died five years earlier, from illness.
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“So how did he take you to India?” I asked. Suddenly I regretted spending the whole ride asking about other things. She explained that she had gone to India with a group of bereaved mothers like her.
“You understand,” she said, “I don’t have to explain anything to them. They understand when I cry. They understand when I laugh. They understand the guilt, the regret, the rupture. They just get me—without words.”
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I understood. Of course I understood. To this day, when I meet a mother without a mother, I feel like she understands me better than anyone. Orphanhood has its own language. Every loss has its own language. And the driver whose cab I got into, and whose side I sat by all the way from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—she spoke that language.
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So it happened that on the way back, on the road from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, with night falling late and deep, we left the small talk behind and started talking about souls. A book called Letters from the Afterlife was lying on her backseat, and I told her about Journey of Souls—a book that documents thousands of hypnosis sessions, and from which I learned that before we’re born, we choose how and when we’ll die, and who will die on us—and when. That idea saved me in the early days of my grief.
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I told her that in our house, the dead don’t exactly rest in peace. My mother, my grandmothers, my friend Orit—they’re all present with us, even without bodies. I can tell my daughters, “Grandma’s horrified you haven’t showered in two days,” and in the same breath, “That thing you picked out is too expensive, but look—Grandma says she’s buying it for you.”
We laugh with our dead, we applaud them, we include them in our plans. They’re available 24/7, and they’re not wrapped in sorrow, but—as much as possible—full of life, just like they were when they were alive.
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The driver said that just like me, she sometimes feels that nothing essential is buried in the grave. And still, tomorrow she will go there. She’ll go up to her son’s grave. Alone—not for a memorial. It’s his birthday. With a bouquet of flowers, and with a balloon. Because how do you celebrate your child’s birthday without a balloon?
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By then we had reached Tel Aviv. It was a few minutes past midnight. The date had already changed.
I turned to glance at the backseat, and saw it was full—beyond what’s legal. Her son was sitting there.
My mother was sitting there. Orit was sitting there—on the very day that the war with Iran broke out, it had been five years since she died. There were grandparents. All the people we’ve lost had crossed the night with us in that car. Quiet, invisible, buckled into the backseat, bodiless.
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Sometimes, when I’m on stage, I like to look out at the audience and imagine how many of us are really there. How many transparent souls each one of us brings along—around us, beside us, within us. And sometimes when I think that way, I can actually see it—the hall packed to the brim. Even the spaces between the seats, even along the walls.
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When we stopped in front of my house, I kissed her on the cheek and wished her a happy birthday—and that somehow, she might make it through the day. She drove off, sliding down the road into that long, unbearable day that had only just begun. That picture still swinging on the front mirror of her cab.
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All week, I carried her story with me—along with the dead who stay close, and the souls of all of us, still journeying. And since I’ve been trying to read here from The Wandering Jewess, my new book, each week, I’ll end today with this poem, which I wrote on one of my mother’s birthdays—twelve years after her death.
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My Mother and I Make Schnitzels / by Maya Tevet Dayan
Since she’s a candle now
I place her on the kitchen counter
between the bowl of breadcrumbs
and the plate with the paper towel.
My mother is pleased:
at last I’m adding mustard to the egg mixture.
Why did it take you ten years to do what I told you?
It’s hard for me, Mom
I tell her.
Your recipes are delicious
but the memories are killing me.
Look how the candle wax is green
like your eyes. The ones you had.
The ones you might still have? I’m not
a candle, my mother answers,
and you fuss too much with rituals.
Don’t overdo it.
I look straight into her flame,
burning now for 36 hours.
She’s right.
No need to overdo it.
But what am I supposed to do?
Last night, my little girl woke up in a panic—
my mother was flickering
on the ceiling, on the walls,
and from every bedroom in the house
you could feel it. We'd never seen
a flame like that.
I held my daughter close and said:
Grandma never sat still.
Now my mother says to me:
Mykey, if we’re done with the schnitzel,
bring me to the table.
Make some warm milk with honey for your throat.
And take care of your voice.
She’s right.
I’ve started to lose my voice.
I whisper to her:
Buddha lit a candle
using another candle, and asked—
Is the new flame the same as the old one,
or completely different?
That’s very beautiful, my mother says.
But you’re overthinking again.
Now drink the warm milk.
Get some rest.
And try not to take it too hard
when I go out.
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This column is dedicated to the soul of Shaked, who took his mother to India, and to the souls of all our beloved ones.
May we all have a peaceful, quiet Shabbat.
*Maya Tevet Dayan*