Writer Efrat Barzel dedicates this column to Shahar, a woman she first met years ago at a lecture in Caesarea, where Shahar was a teenager and the eldest child in her family. Shahar’s mother, Yifat, later died after a serious illness. Barzel says the family lived in a religiously committed community in Caesarea, where some residents are returnees to observance and others were raised religious and became more observant, and where many devote themselves to helping children reach suitable schools.
Years later, Shahar is now a mother herself. Through her and her friends, Barzel says she came to see a deeper, inner holiness in Jewish family life, and she describes looking at Yifat’s photo album as though Yifat were speaking to the mothers who remained: to keep caring for her children, enjoy the grandchildren, tell them about the grandmother they never met, and speak truth to them. Barzel calls that feeling almost a mandate or testament, and says children need mothers, while mothers need reassurance that their children are safe across generations.
The column then turns to a question Shahar asked after reading an earlier Passover piece about a lesson in cleaning, in which a helper had told Barzel, “The secret of cleaning is soaking.” Shahar asked why it is so important to return, to stay with difficult emotions, and not flee from fear, shame, pain, or sadness. Barzel says the question reaches into therapy, healing, relationships, parenting, and human development, and that it is a central principle in many methods that help people strengthen their inner and spiritual lives.
Barzel says she addressed the same issue last week at a respite event for Ezra Mitzion families at Kibbutz Hefetz Haim, where she spoke about shame. She explained that as children people fear rejection, erasure, and losing their place or home, so they invent protective strategies to avoid shame. Over time, she says, adults can return to those old defenses, understand them, and turn them into wider, wiser, calmer paths. On stage she connected the Hebrew root for “return” with healing the root of shame, and told Shahar to keep asking questions because both the child we once were and the adult we became matter to God.
