Friday Dispatch: A Guest Post
Why stories can save us
Friday greetings,
If there is one thing I imagine most of us can agree on, no matter our political, religious, racial, or other differences, it’s this: Stories matter. They connect us. They humanize us. They challenge us and sometimes soften us. They let us see inside in ways that our daily armor and assumptions inhibit.
In a word, stories may be our salvation.
At a time when we are so focused on what sets us apart from each other, this belief takes on a nearly centrifugal force for me, especially when I notice my own spirit inclining towards separateness.
Perhaps this is why when my friend Avad sent me his stunning short story, I read it with such voracity.
But first, a little background.
I met Avad on July 12, 2024, in Jerusalem, when my friend Debi, a rabbi from southern California, and I were wandering around looking for a protest. We had been told it would be near the Prime Minister’s residence, but there was zero evidence of any protest when we got there. If anything, it was a bit deserted-feeling.
After some wandering, what we did find was a tent devoted to information about and advocacy on behalf of the hostages. Inside, I bought a red t-shirt that says KULAM HATUFIM – “we are all hostages” – all the funds were donations to the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.
A young man was sitting on a white plastic chair. We introduced ourselves. He told us his name, Avad, noting that it means “lost.” We laughed at the fact that we were, in fact, a bit lost, then agreed to share a ride to the Knesset (parliament building), where we had learned a protest was indeed taking place.
We chatted on the way there, learning that Avad was from Jerusalem and was home visiting family, but living and attending grad school in Europe. I remember him telling us that he was as progressive as it gets – “I don’t even believe in nationalities – people are just people” – but no matter. He had been turned away from parties on campus just for being Israeli and was feeling a similarly acute disorientation and isolation as we were back in the States.
For the next couple of hours, the three of us stuck pretty close together. Yellow flags - for the hostages – along with so many posters, so many faces – intermingled with Israeli flags. We saw young people whose peers had been murdered and kidnapped at the Nova festival, elders with unforgettable deep sorrow and weariness etched into their faces, organizers with bullhorns, activists with drums.
Almost immediately, Avad spotted some friends; I watched them run to each other and embrace in a way that only people with deep, shared experience and history do.
The next day, I sent him a few of my photos. He wrote back, “You guys are Jewish magic!!!” with 🌈 and ✡ emojis. And thus commenced a WhatsApp correspondence that’s now reaching the one-year mark. Our connection is a source of light and hope for me in these dark times, and I am deeply honored to share his short story, Yoni, with you today.
~
I would be remiss not to note that Avad, Debi, and I met on day 279 of the Israel-Hamas war. Tragically, today is day 623. There are still 53 hostages in Gaza, 29 of whom are believed to be alive. Please remember them. We must bring them all home.
~
Shabbat Shalom and love,
Jena
Would you love to have a space to write with fellow members of the Tribe? Join me for a new two-week group, Katavti: The Sound of Jewish Life Happening, which I am honored to be offering in collaboration with JUDITH Magazine. The deadline to sign up is this Sunday: www.jenaschwartz.com/katavti.
Yoni
“The more it hurts, the less it shows”
Yoni used to think he understood the architecture of love—its beams of loyalty, its columns of care. Then he met Francesco. Younger in years, yes, but there was something ancient in the way he listened. In the softness of his silences, Yoni found a shelter. And in the warmth of his gaze, a quiet resistance to indifference. It happened during a time when Yoni’s world was crumbling, not from within but from afar. A land where people wrote in winding letters that looked like ancient boxy script, where the language rolled like thunder over stone, where the sun was harsher, the soil thirstier, but the spirit—oh, the spirit was generous. That land had once embraced his ancestors like a mother desperate to save her children. And now it tore at his soul. The rupture did not come all at once.
At first, there were only hairline cracks—small debates, raised voices, uneasy dinners. Then the gap widened. Supporters of one side lined up like soldiers on one cliff, their opponents on another.
Yoni stood between them, still believing in bridges. But one morning, without warning, the bridge gave way. It did not break—it collapsed, as if exhausted by centuries of holding weight no one else dared to carry. No one has rebuilt it since.
The two cliffs remain, staring across the void. And Yoni—he went down with the bridge. He didn’t scream. He simply vanished into the valley of silence.
Francesco, The name means free man. Of Latin origin, borne on the wind from an old Europe, carried across time like a prayer. Freedom, fortune, lightness. With him, Yoni remembered what it meant to breathe. To laugh. To forget, even for a few moments, the barbed wire of political identity. With Francesco, Yoni wasn’t a symbol. He was just a man.
A man with bruises, with longing, with hands that still reached out in the dark. He had loved that faraway land—not blindly, but with the loyalty of a child to a homeland that had once whispered to his ancestors: You may be different, but you are safe here. That was her gift. Not prosperity, not power, but the dignity of being oneself. Now, Yoni wonders if that gift has expired. Or if, perhaps, it was never truly his to begin with. He had read about Weltschmerz in books, that untranslatable German sigh of the soul. The pain of the world. He had admired its tragic elegance from afar, like a painting in a museum—distant, beautiful, safe behind glass. But then one day, he woke up with it pulsing beneath his skin.
Yoni had always believed that words could be lanterns in the dark. So he lit them carefully, one by one, and placed them along the path, warning those around him: This road we’re on, can’t you see where it leads? Can’t you smell the smoke of old pages burning? But most people were too busy, too comfortable, or too tired to look. They mistook his urgency for drama, his fear for exaggeration. They rolled their eyes. They walked on. He spoke anyway. And for that, he paid. Quietly at first—less eye contact, fewer invitations, a coldness so polite it almost passed for kindness. Then, louder. Opportunities dried up. Doors gently shut. A creeping exile from the very spaces he once called home. Still, he held on. Because there was Francesco.
Francesco, whose touch felt like the sea after years of desert. Francesco, who made the world less cruel, less lonely. Yoni clung to him like ivy to an old wall, believing that love could outlast the storm. But love, like architecture, needs columns. And sometimes, even the strongest ones crack under pressure. It happened on a Wednesday.
Francesco looked at him, eyes full of what Yoni later realized was premeditated guilt, and said the words that shattered the last fragile beam.
“I’m sorry. I don’t think I can do this anymore. The timing is just not right.”
No thunder. No sirens. Just that sentence, small and devastating. And just like that, the center collapsed. His world, already eroded by politics, silence, and loss, was sucked into a black hole. Not explosive—no. Black holes don’t explode. They swallow. Quietly, ruthlessly, elegantly. They erase.
In that moment, it didn’t matter who was right. Or what he warned. Or where the world was heading. It only mattered that he had no one left to tell.
Yoni didn’t say anything back to Francesco. He just looked him in the eye—calm, unreadable.
“Listen, I know this came out of nowhere, and I understand the confusion,” Francesco said. His voice carried a softness that wasn’t there earlier. He kept speaking, eyes clouded with something like guilt. But the words lost shape. They blurred. Sound faded, like it had slipped underwater. Shadows in the city grew longer, thicker.
Then, suddenly, the world tuned back in.
“Maybe just go home and rest now. We can talk about this later.”
Yoni nodded. He still hadn’t said a word.
I have to fight for him, he thought. Not because the situation made sense. Not even because he believed it would change anything. But because silence had never been his language. Acceptance had never come easily. He was a fighter—people had called him that since he was a child. It wasn’t about temper; it was about the way he refused to look away when things felt unjust.
That same instinct had pushed him into university politics, had gotten him in trouble more than once. He knew the cost. But this was different. This time, it wasn’t about a cause— this time, it was about him.
The breakup came early in the evening, quiet but devastating. Like a bomb dropped without sound. No sirens. No warning. Just impact. The fall didn’t just shake him—it landed somewhere deep, where words didn’t reach.
That evening, he didn’t go home. His emotions had taken hold of him completely, leaving no space for reason. His body felt detached, like it belonged to someone else—moving on its own, without instruction. But why? he asked himself, the question sharp with anger. But even that gave way quickly, swallowed by a quieter desperation.
The cold outside was biting. On any other night, he would have rushed home, hiding from the Milanese winter beneath blankets and hot tea until the morning light returned. But tonight, the coldness in people’s eyes—and in Francesco’s silence as he stood with them—made the winter air feel almost gentle by comparison.
But I can still fight back. The thought flickered through him, lifting his spirit for a brief second. The idea of not losing Francesco gave him something to hold on to.
That night, emotion ruled him. Thoughts tangled and raced. Confusion folded in on itself. He didn’t remember how he got there, but he found himself in a park, somewhere in the city. His hands were so cold it hurt to move them. He tried, but they resisted. His breath came in uneven bursts, each exhale rising like smoke into the air—visible evidence of heat leaving his body.
He found a bench and sat down, gazing up at the cloudy sky. The city lights shimmered against the low-hanging clouds, casting a pale glow overhead. Milan—how much he had admired this place. He had spent hours reading about its history, tracing the lines of old maps, uncovering the hidden stories that never made it into tourist guides. It had felt like a city that revealed itself slowly, in layers.
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Then, without checking the time, without thinking of what came next, he slowly lay down along the bench. There was no plan. Just stillness. He drifted off like a soldier after a battle—not defeated, but wounded, and finally still.
He laid there— his thoughts racing just as much as his heart. He was never good with expressing his emotions to other people around him, which has made it hard to express them even to himself. He’s not only feeling lonely but alone in this cold night.
An irrational thought comes up, I wish I don’t wake up tomorrow.
Then he falls asleep carelessly about what the next day holds for him.
_______
The year had passed slowly, like a river carving out new paths through familiar landscapes. The pain had softened into a low hum, no longer a sharp, immediate ache, but a persistent background presence that reminded him of how deeply he had once felt, how much weight each moment had carried.
The city’s skyline had changed slightly in the months he’d spent running from his own reflection, but Milan still held the same pull, the same beauty that had once captivated him so fully. It felt different now, though, as if he had learned to breathe in its streets and silence more consciously.
He had started waking up in the mornings and giving himself time—time to breathe, time to think. At first, the mornings were hard. The memories of Francesco and the cold bench, the weight of the night he couldn’t escape, still hovered at the edge of his consciousness. But he had learned, through books and meditation, through the quiet practice of slowing down, that the emotions were real. His body had felt them. The physical impact of his emotional life hadn’t been something to dismiss or minimize, as he had once done. It had been as much a part of him as his bones, his muscles, his breath.
It was one of those mornings, after a long hike through the rugged terrain of the Como mountains, that Yoni found himself standing at the peak, looking out over the vast expanse of blue lake and green hills. The world stretched before him, impossibly wide, and in that vastness, he realized just how small he was in the grand scheme of things—but also how, in some quiet way, how significant he had become to himself.
The wind stung his face, a familiar coldness he had come to appreciate. He hadn’t climbed the mountain for the view, though it was breathtaking. He had climbed it for the solitude, for the space to reflect on everything that had happened. He thought about Francesco again, about the coldness of that night. He thought about how deeply he had hurt, how everything in his life had felt like it was suddenly and violently out of his control. But then, without even realizing it, the memory no longer hurt as much. He could still see it—still feel it—but it was no longer the defining moment of his existence.
The shift had come gradually. A year before, the pain of Francesco’s absence had felt like a gap too wide to cross. Now, standing at the top of the mountain, Yoni understood something his younger self would never have believed possible: that the world hadn’t collapsed when the rug was pulled from underneath him. It had hurt, yes, but it hadn’t been the end. And more than that—it was only through the disruption of that moment that he had been forced to explore the boundaries of his own heart.
Self-discovery had come through small things. Through meditative walks in the park, through books that made him question his own assumptions, through late-night conversations with people who challenged him. And through quiet moments alone, where he had learned that his own company didn’t feel so lonely anymore.
His thoughts drifted back to Francesco—not with anger, but with a sense of gratitude. He had never intended to be a teacher, this boy who had hurt him, but perhaps that was the lesson. The lesson wasn’t in the pain itself—it was in the survival of it, the growth that came in the silence after. Francesco had unintentionally pushed him to build something within himself, something that no external force could take away. In a strange way, the separation had been a form of freedom. It had forced him to look inward, to stop relying on other people’s validation, to find a foundation he could stand on by himself.
He exhaled deeply, watching his breath rise and dissolve into the crisp air, his chest rising and falling in rhythm with the world around him. He realized, for the first time, that he had learned to feel everything fully—without running away, without numbing himself. In a time when so many men struggled to express their vulnerability, Yoni had allowed himself to be broken. He had let the world in, let it shape him, let it teach him. And in doing so, he had created something sturdy within himself—something that could withstand more than a heartbreak, more than the chaos of other people’s judgment.
The mountains stretched out before him, vast and unyielding. He was not the first person to stand here. Many had come before him, had climbed and fallen, had lived and died. And yet, he stood there, in his own quiet way, knowing that in that moment, in the stillness of the landscape, he had become something more than he had been a year ago. He was no longer just a collection of reactions to the world around him, no longer at the mercy of the next emotional storm. He had learned to be his own foundation, steady and unmoved by the shifting tides of other people’s lives.
And as he began his descent down the mountain, the sunlight casting long shadows behind him, Yoni felt something he hadn’t realized he’d been missing: peace. It was peace he had found within himself, in the space he had carved out alone, without the need for anyone else to validate his existence. He smiled quietly, letting the wind whisper against his skin, knowing that for the first time, he was enough.
About the Author
I loved this beautifully bittersweet story.