Friday Dispatch: Slowing Down to the Speed of Life

Observations from a week of familiar faces

Nov 14, 2025

“If our spiritual work is to bear fruit, it has to be enjoyable and done with joy. Joy is the fuel that keeps love and discipline alive and gives us the energy and the heartfulness to persist.”

~ Brian Yosef Schachter-Brooks

Friday greetings,

I’ve broken up today’s Dispatch into five brief chapters. As always, I love hearing what resonates with you. Please feel welcome to leave a comment or email me!

Chapter 1: Unremarkable Things That Feel, Well, Remarkable

This week, I only had one Zoom meeting, with a long-time, ongoing client who uses our bimonthly calls to talk about her ideas and look together at essays-in-progress. Notably, I didn’t worry about not having more clients and meetings. (In the past, this would have panicked me. Now, I know it’s because I’m making room for new growth.) I finished Kabbalah for Beginners and started The Book of Letters: A Mystical Hebrew Alphabet (which I bought years ago but never read). I paid a visit to a friend who’d just had surgery. I even meditated for the first time in ages.

But the thing that really stood out to me when I sat down to write this week’s Friday Dispatch is that for the first time since we moved, I bumped into people I knew in our new zip code – and more than once!

This may sound unremarkable, but since we moved in June 2024, this experience hasn’t yet become commonplace. It feels like a turning point in a bloom-where-you-are-planted kind of way.

My sense is that by contracting my focus, I am seeing more of what and who is in my actual vicinity.

Chapter 2: Grounding Big Issues in Smaller (Even Napkin-Sized) Spaces

I recently went to a meeting of Jews, who, like me, are troubled by the rising beliefs that democratic values and Zionism do not go hand in hand, that fighting the rise in authoritarianism in our own country is separate from that same fight in Israel, and that a commitment to Zionism and Israel is anathema to progressive values. Each of these claims is simplistic; it’s no wonder they have spread like wildfire on the internets and spilled into real-life spaces from classrooms to town councils. In towns like Amherst and Northampton, known for their activism, being anti-Israel has become de rigueur – literally “required by etiquette or current fashion.”1

All of this is to say, it has been a topsy-turvy two years, as I have documented in this very newsletter, and I have had very few people with whom I’ve felt fully safe to wrestle with my own relationship to Israel and Zionism, both of which are as unwavering as they are multifaceted. Connecting with new-to-me people who are also impacted by and concerned about the rapid normalization (and minimization) of antisemitism has been a revelation.

At that first in-person meeting, we met a woman who lives in our new town. We chatted for a few minutes, and then at the end of the evening, she handed over a napkin with her name, address, phone number, and email address on it. I wrote down ours, in turn, the blue marker bleeding into the napkin. A few days later, we received an email from her inviting me and M.J. to a “Babka Bake” hosted by the local Chabad Women’s Circle.

Chapter 3: William’s Mom

Since leaving social media, I’ve been more intentional about which organizations, businesses, and groups I want to hear from, rather than passively exposing myself to whatever showed up in my feed.

That’s how I learned that Pulitzer Prize–winning presidential historian Jon Meacham would be speaking in neighboring Springfield. (His lecture, Hope Through History: How to Survive Turbulent Times2, was peppered with presidential in-jokes and self-deprecating witticisms. It lived up to its title and left me with much food for thought about cycles in history – Jewish and American alike.)

I got myself a ticket and emailed my parents to see if they might want to join me. Turned out they were already planning to go, along with a small group of fellow residents from their retirement community. (Joining them in the van was, as my mom might say, a hoot. I had an inspiring conversation with a 90-something-year-old who holds a Doctorate in Creativity, about stress hormones, loss, resilience, and the arts.)

When we entered the spacious lobby of Springfield Symphony Hall, who should I spot but my new napkin friend from the Jewish meeting!

I walked over to her and reached out to clasp her hand, thanking her for reaching out and explaining that I hadn’t had a chance to respond yet, but that yes, we would LOVE to bake (and, I hoped, eat) babka next week at the JCC. I also saw a couple of people I know from the Jewish Federation of Western Mass, which was sponsoring the event. Then we walked into the theater, where one of the ushers, though masked, looked familiar.

“Where do we know each other from?” I asked.

No sooner had the question left my lips than the delightful answer flew into my head. “You’re William’s mom!”

To which she exclaimed, “And you’re Chalupa’s mom!”3

Indeed, she walks her absolutely adorable floof of a dog past my house almost every day, and we have chatted many times. Little did I know she had other parts of her life; seeing her there gave me the sensation a child has when they spot a teacher in the wild. Like, wait, you exist?

Chapter 4: May It Never Not Feel Sweet

Yesterday, I decided to sit in Starbucks for a little bit before heading to lunch at Glenmeadow. When I walked in, I heard my name and looked up to see another Jewish community member. She was in the middle of what looked like a work-related meeting, and she kindly introduced me to her coffee date. This is the kind of ordinary thing I missed so much during the pandemic. May it never not feel sweet to me, the simple act of someone knowing my name, me knowing theirs, of saying hello.

Chapter 5: What Does the Math Mean?

I lived in the Amherst area from 1983-1991 and then again from 2012-2024, for a total of 20 years. That’s nearly 40% of my life.

By contrast, I’ve lived in Longmeadow for 17 months, or less than 3% of my life.

I also just did the math and learned that I spent 32% of my life using Facebook.

What does doing the math mean? Nothing necessarily, unto itself.

But these numbers point to some observations I hope offer something useful to you. Namely: Life has many chapters, including where we work, live, play, worship, and learn – and who we do these with.

When you make a big shift (fill in your own here) or when a big shift occurs that you didn’t initiate (fill in your own here, too), it takes time to settle into new rhythms, communities, and connections, while also doing the tender work of nurturing the old ones (or letting them go).

That bears repeating: It takes time.

This week’s encounters, while not earth-shaking, felt significant and special. They made me realize that little by little, familiar face by familiar face, I am indeed slowing down to the speed of life. And I like it. It feels, if you’ll indulge another cliché, like coming home.

Shabbat Shalom and love,

Jena

p.s. One more lovely encounter this week occurred at Glenmeadow yesterday. A resident came over to me during lunch and thanked me for inspiring her to leave Facebook! She also told me this newsletter is the only one she really looks forward to reading. Later, I received a notification that she had become a paid annual subscriber! Thanks, Cheryl ❤️.

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