In the early days of my own parenting journey, my mother-in-law shared a powerful tidbit with me that has since become a mantra, a daily truth. Two things can be true at the same time. You can be thrilled to move back home to Israel and heartbroken to leave your family in America. You can be excited for the first day of school and terrified of it. This sounds simple, but the profundity of the statement is so precise. It carries me through my days. “And” is a powerful word. It holds the hard part, the most challenging part, without erasing what is and can be good.
I think about resilience constantly, both as a mother trying to raise sturdy kids and as a student of the Hebrew Bible. For years, my working theory was that resilience meant laughing through hard times. Sarah laughed when she was told, at ninety, that she would become a mother. She named that son Yitzchak, which means “he will laugh.” Generations later, the Psalmist described the Jewish people’s eventual return from captivity this way:
Every time there is a flare-up of war in Israel; Iran sends missiles? My social media fills with dark, clever memes within the hour. Laughter is the release valve in the pressure cooker of Israeli life. I was recently listening to Bible scholar Yael Leibowitz on the Orthodox Conundrum podcast however, and she described a different way we have learned to be resilient. And this one is no laughing matter.”
Jeremiah’s Letter to the Exiles
In 597 BCE, the Babylonian empire exiled a wave of Judeans to Babylon. The prophet Jeremiah sent them a letter. He did not tell them to fight, mourn indefinitely, or wait passively for rescue. He told them to build.
Leibowitz calls this a kind of spiritual inoculation. The exiles had no precedent for surviving outside the land. Their instinct was likely rage, and the book of Psalms preserves some of that rage in raw form. Jeremiah’s letter did something different. It gave the exiles a plan: put down roots, work for the good of the place you are in, and hold onto hope without pretending the hardship away.
I grew up learning plenty about what led the Israelites into exile. I learned far less about what carried them through it. That imbalance matters, because Jeremiah’s letter is not a message about clenching your teeth and enduring. It is a message about acceptance paired with forward motion. This really happened. Now plant a garden anyway.
Esther and the Long Game
Leibowitz’s reading of the book of Esther, read publicly on the holiday of Purim, adds another layer. Esther is not simply a story about a brave queen. It is, in her reading, a field guide for the kinds of non-Jews you encounter in exile. There is Haman, who wants to destroy you. There is Achashverosh, the king, who is indifferent to your fate, easily swayed by whoever has his ear last. And there is Harbonah, the king’s chamberlain, who speaks up at the critical moment and helps tip the story toward salvation. The famous celebration at the book’s end is not an unqualified happy ending. In the book of Esther, every party marks a shift in power just before someone loses it. The message is not “relax, you have arrived.” It is “stay awake, because diaspora life is unpredictable by nature.”
It turns out my mother-in-law was onto something that modern therapists have a name for. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, known as ACT, is built on the idea that people who let hard feelings exist, instead of fighting them, and still take action on what matters to them, build real emotional strength. Acceptance is not the same as giving up. It is what makes the next step possible. Jeremiah was telling the exiles the same thing twenty-five centuries earlier. Feel what you feel. Then build, plant, and pray anyway.
As humans, we are all constantly filling our own toolbox, some tools we pack ahead of time to prepare ourselves, others we pick up from the experiences we survive along the way. Mine has room for both approaches now. Biblical therapist may not be an official license, but the Hebrew Bible has been handing out sound emotional guidance since the beginning of time. Sarah laughed. Jeremiah planted gardens. Esther stayed alert. Put together, they teach one clear lesson: resilience does not mean choosing between laughter and acceptance. It means holding both. Grieve the hard thing. Build anyway. That is how you grow roots of resilience, even in exile.
