*The Power of Truly Great Sentences | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | May 30, 2025*
This week, I stood before a crowd of several hundred people at Bar Ilan University and asked them: What sentence did your grandmother or grandfather—or anyone who raised you—once say to you, that has stayed with you ever since? It was the opening of a large conference, and in response, these hundreds of people immediately smiled in their seats. Because sentences from grandparents still have that power—to make us smile. Even when those who once said them are no longer with us.
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I offered them a sentence I carry with me, one I got from my own grandparents. They were the tailor and seamstress of Kibbutz Kinneret, and their world of metaphors came from the world of sewing. Whenever something unsettled me—whether personal or in the news—my grandfather would say: Don’t take it to heart. Take it to the button.
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He meant, of course, the button on a shirt—just a few millimeters away from the heart.
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What a sentence, right? I’ve whispered it to myself countless times over the past year and a half. It’s helped me stop things, at the very last second, from entering my heart. And as I told the audience about it, I remembered another sentence, this one from my great-grandmother, Rosa. She was a colorful Tel Aviv character, full of life, with a million neighbor-friends who would pour out all their troubles in front of her. And she would listen, in full detail. But the moment that neighbor walked out the door—no matter how awful or heartbreaking the story had been—my grandmother would straighten up, shake herself off, and declare: Well, it’s not mine to carry! and go right on with her day. As if she hadn’t just heard a thing.
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How many times in this war have I pictured her doing just that—straightening, shaking off, saying not mine? And how hard, and necessary, and again—how hard—that has been!
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These sentences carry real power because they contain a firm decision to protect oneself, to not take it to heart. Yes, to be empathetic, to listen, to care—but not to adopt it all into your own body. Safta Rosa passed away at 82. Saba Yaakov and safta Rivka from Kibbutz Kinneret passed at 97.
Maybe that too had something to do with their approach—how fiercely they shielded themselves from the immense sorrow and pain that life had dealt them?
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The audience shared sentences from Grandma Teti, and Grandma Joyce, and Grandpa Shmuel—and I especially held on to one from Grandma Flora, Shoshi’s grandmother, who, whenever pain or worry surfaced, would say to her granddaughter, Come sit at the table. She created, around that table, a different space. A guarded space. A buffer from the outside world.
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And so, this week, in the middle of Bar Ilan University, I sat on stage in front of hundreds of people, and together we gave voice to powerful and wise sentences that, most of the time, live quietly inside us—as an inner voice. It’s a kind of wisdom that doesn’t appear in academic literature. Wisdom you won’t learn in a university. But in this past year and a half, as we’ve had to shield ourselves again and again—we’ve used it. More than any academic book on the shelf, that’s for sure.
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The people before me—Geriatric researchers, Gerontologists and clinicians—shared how much strength they themselves have drawn in this time from their elderly patients—men and women who, over the course of long lives, rose up from frightening and destabilizing life events. How important that reminder is—that we have the capacity to rise. That completely ordinary people have done it before us.
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And how important it is to remember not just the immense power these sentences have over us—but the power we have ourselves now, when we speak to the children we are raising. I know my daughters, along with their whole generation, are watching us now—learning from our responses, how we hold on, how we rise. I know that what I say to them now will become their inner voice. And that carries so much responsibility.
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Sometimes I even think that this story we’re living through—will one day be studied, in both its good and its bad, by generations to come. In that sense, we are the sages of the future. There is such power in what we choose to say and do right now.
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I’ll close with a poem from The Wandering Jewess—about those voices in our lineage. A list of sentences I heard again and again, always with good intention, even if not all were brilliant. All were spoken by women who truly loved me.
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*They Told Me What’s Mine Will Come to Me*
Maya Tevet Dayan
There’s no need to chase anything.
Sit still. Wait.
They told me not to marry
before thirty.
Nor after. They urged me to abort,
not to give birth alone. It will happen when it’s time.
What’s mine will come to me.
They told me to keep my daughters close.
But also, to learn to let go.
They didn’t say exactly how,
or when. They were my mothers.
Not all of them gave birth to me. They spoke
of their own mothers. And the mothers
of those mothers.
With that long line of lineage,
they were multitudes.
They lived through wars, they were orphaned, they held up men,
they made meals out of nothing, they remembered
stories that never happened to them,
they stood on couches in Tel Aviv and sang,
their hands grew old
before the rest of their bodies.
They had living babies
and dead babies. Maybe that’s how they learned
that what’s theirs will come.
Sit still. Wait.
They told me not to rely
on a man. But yes, to make space for him.
They told me that the day he stops sleeping with me
to get up and leave. That I am allowed to grieve,
never to stop eating.
When my heart broke they fed me soup
with tiny spoons. They told me to get out of bed
even if outside there’s a chasm. To always smooth the blanket, fill
the fridge, walk tall
They walked tall, even when they were
very short, even when the sidewalks were gray
and twisted in the summer,
they walked through the fog of past and present.
They were my mothers,
they made space in the world, their voices
are still heard in the rain,
in the air and in the bones.
They told me we don’t die
so fast. To stop worrying.
Sit still and wait.
Beneath the white sheets
Their bodies emptied like hollowed skins,
after the leaving of a great wind.
Wishing us all a peaceful, quiet Shabbat,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*