"Bevat Achat" Rivka Rosner's Book

Finding the Story

At the beginning of my relationship with Shiloni, I would constantly tell her:

"This isn’t my story. I can’t tell myself this story. We’ll have to part ways."

She would elegantly ignore the last part of the sentence and instead guide me through a kind of guided imagination:

"Close your eyes. Here we are ten years from now, in a house with a garden (ha, in our dreams), sitting with our two daughters (someday, someday, no, there’s nothing to tell yet), on the wooden swing sofa, talking about how the day went. Maybe friends drop by for coffee—or beer, why choose if we can have both? And you’re no longer eating at me and stressing me out." (Ha, in her dreams.)

At the end of each guided scenario, she would ask:

"Does this help?"

And I would answer:

"Yes."

For at least ten minutes, I was inside a story I could live with peacefully.

Learning Empathy Through Writing

About a decade ago, a friend told me her life had gotten complicated. She was in love. A charming, attentive man, with conversation, touch, and laughter she had never known. Amazing sex. Sounds great, right? Except for the small detail: she was married. Not to him.

"I felt I couldn’t look at her. I knew him, her sweet partner. I thought she was doing him a terrible wrong."

I realized the only way I could continue loving her was to truly understand her. In other words: to be her. I sat down and began to write—her, her voice, diving into her mind, heart, and body to feel what it was like from there.

After 7,852 drafts, it ended up as a novel called “You Know We’ve Arrived,” which Eshkol Nevo and Orit Gidali read and told the workshop participants:

"For a text like this, we set off fireworks."

In the end, the novel was shelved. But that didn’t matter. The imagined story restored my friendship. I understood her. I forgave her. I returned to loving her wholeheartedly.

Writing as a Way of Understanding

When I got entangled with Shiloni, I realized that, with all due respect to my psychologist—and there is respect!—my way to solve it for myself was:

• Pen and notebook, in the romantic version.

• Keyboard and back pain, in the real version.

Five years ago, I sat down to try to explain to myself why and how Shiloni happened to me. The answer was: I am the luckiest person alive, but I didn’t know how to say that then. I knew the only way to unravel it for myself was through a story.

So I wrote—a stream of swirling thoughts pretending to be a story. But it wasn’t a story; it was just eating at my brain on paper. It didn’t calm me.

I rewrote it: something with a clearer beginning, middle, and end, and a little less “but what do I do, but what do I do, but what do I do” in the middle.

One editor told me about a slightly more polished draft:

"I don’t know your family or your life story, but I tend to believe you haven’t removed your testimony dramatically… I urge you to release it and be true to the text, not life. In the end, we’re reading a story, not a person."

I listened. Version by version, draft by draft, I distanced myself from both myself and Shiloni to reach Naomi, Sela, and their story. The frame stayed the same—a woman who overthinks meets a stunning curly-haired photographer who opens her heart and collapses her identity—but most details became fiction.

The fiction allowed distance, and distance allowed me to finally see clearly what had been too close to bear.

Naming the Unspoken Pain

Gradually, I found words for:

• The loneliness of being single, which I hadn’t dared acknowledge before.

• The grief of an aging body without being loved, a grief I knew but ignored.

• Family relationships, close, loving, painful, intertwined.

• Friendships, the ones that sometimes keep us sane.

• Self-deprecating humor, the key to surviving life.

• The search for love, in all its forms—the thing we all do here constantly.

Literature as Witness

Slowly, the story became one that explained far more than Shiloni and I ever could. French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard says that literature’s role is to give voice to the unspoken:

"The role of the philosopher, historian, and artist is to witness the suffering or loss that has no expression within the rules of common discourse."

There are a million books about searching for love, I know. But there was no prose book I had encountered that voiced:

• The solitude of a single religious woman over thirty

• The silent yearning for touch

• The weekly search for a Shabbat meal

• Conversations about children’s welfare to which one has nothing to contribute

• Fluid sexual identities

• Women’s fragile self-image at every age

• The joy of discovery mingled with fear

• Self-deprecating humor—the very things that make life possible

No book giving voice to the suffering of religious women in silence.

A Message for the Reader

I hope you find in the book a voice of your own that has yet to be heard. And if not, I hope it helps you understand someone near you, close by, who hurts even while hiding it.

I hope you find, after the pain and grief, love, comfort, and laughter.

Because that’s life—everything mixed together, sometimes all at once.

Revekki Rosner, author of “All at Once”, PhD in Hebrew Literature, lecturer at Bar-Ilan University and Hebrew Union College, researcher at the Hartman Institute. Mother to Ruth and Hillel.