I’m at a point with both the state of the world at large and the state of my affairs personally that I am leaning. Hardcore. Leaning, lest I be crushed under the weight of it all. You see, the bane of a Jewish educator these days is that your job is to help all of your students attempt to make sense of incomprehensible information and keep their cool, when all you really want to do is scream nonsensically. For better or worse, I have a lot of students, ranging from Kindergarten through 12th Grade, so, it’s a lot. I’m managing overall, and some days are better than others. Heck, some hours are better than others. I have great art classes and compassionate conversations with the kids and then cry into my sandwich on my lunch break. Ya know. Balance.

Well, not balance, not really. Because I am leaning. My soul, and frankly my body too, are so weary and so damn sore that they cannot remain upright these days. I’m no longer in a position where I can say, here I stand. Nope. Here I lean, people.

But you know what I’ve realized about leaning, as a concept? If you’re leaning, it’s in some sort of direction. Even the Leaning Tower of Pisa specifically leans south-ish. As such…I suppose if I have to lean, if I need to be in such a a position where someone or someplace or something is helping bear the burden of all this heaviness, which way I end up leaning is pretty much up to me.

For the most part (and in spite of everything), I’ve always tried to lean into good things, instead of burrow into sadness. Over these last two weeks, I’ve had to make a lot of room for bone-deep heartbreak, because it felt utterly invalidating to try saying anything positive to counter that heartbreak. The heartbreak needs a vessel; indeed, it needs thousands of vessels by the most recent count of dead, wounded, and kidnapped. It has felt so absurd to try to keep moving and uphold some semblance of normal life routine amid everything that’s been happening, but, here in the U.S., that’s the case (it’s the expectation, anyway).

So here I lean, in my routine, and I’m choosing to lean into whatever positive things I can find, even while I’m also operating as a vessel for so much pain. A broken vessel, but a vessel nonetheless. (There’s actually a saying from Midrash that goes something like, G-d only operates through broken vessels, or something like that.)

My kid attended a birthday party this afternoon. Two hours of young children playing on a bounce house and enjoying a magic show with balloon animals and devouring cotton candy and popcorn and cupcakes. Shrieks of delight and laughter everywhere. And plenty of adults, all doing the same thing I was doing. Leaning. Leaning on each other, leaning into the unadulterated joy in the gymnasium which I can never, ever take for granted, knowing how many children in Israel were just brutally murdered and how many were stolen from their beds and have been held hostage going on two weeks now. (And yes, leaning on the bleachers or walls, because we are all so damn fatigued, even on a good day, and these days have not been so good.)

I’m leaning into every success, great or small, that a student experiences in school. I’m leaning into every single moment of kindness I encounter, whether it involves me or not. I’m leaning into gratitude that my family is with me and healthy and safe, gratitude for the medication that keeps me alive and relatively stable and the hot showers and heating pad that help keep my muscles from seizing up entirely. I am grateful for my friends who have allowed me to lean on them over these last two weeks, while both a war in Israel and a personal war of my own have proceeded almost simultaneously.

I am leaning, hardcore. I refuse to fall, or to lay down; it feels akin to giving up, which isn’t in my blood. And so I lean. If you’re in a position like mine, and standing fully upright is just no longer an option, go right ahead and lean. The trick, such as it is, is to lean in the best direction possible. I welcome you to lean alongside me.

I am leaning. But, thanks be to G-d, I am here.