How Hanukkah's Message Helps Us All (Especially Writers!)

... and how I learned to rebuild.

At my kids’ school this morning, a downtown rabbi came and spoke. He asked the audience of lower schoolers and parents, “Have you ever made something, like a Lego structure or artwork, that somehow ended up getting destroyed?”

Everyone in the audience raised their hand, the kids tittering.

He went on: “And maybe you got really frustrated about it? But then eventually you decided you just had to build it again?”

Lots of nods, murmurs, and raised hands.

“That’s what the Maccabees did with their temple. They built a beautiful structure, had it torn down, and then decided to rebuild it. That’s what we celebrate during Hanukkah. The instinct to rebuild after things fall down.”

I hadn’t thought about Hanukkah in that exact way before. For me, it has always been more conceptual: People tried to destroy us, but we wouldn’t let that happen! We persevered! We’re still here! We took our limited resources and made it against all odds! The act of rebuilding the temple was only one part of it, the action item under the larger moral.

But the rabbi’s speech made me sweep my zoom lens to refocus on the actual construction of the new temple and how that act alone was so powerful.

Had I had created something that got destroyed? Of course!

Two things came to mind.

The first. When I was at sleep-away camp at age eight, miserable, homesick, and eagerly anticipating Parents Visiting Day midway through my eight-week sentence, I made a poster. In fact, I spent the entire week before visiting day obsessing over it, designing the most detailed, colorful poster possible with “Welcome Parents” in big bubble letters.

Me at sleep-away camp

The morning of visiting day, I proudly taped the sign up on our cabin door. There were six girls in my bunk. Two of them hated me — and everyone else. They hung our counselor’s bras from the rafters and tortured her enough that she quit. They taunted all of us. Fortunately, I had two allies in the cabin, but it wasn’t enough to offset the incessant, indiscriminate bullying.

After I taped the sign up, I went off to do something else. When I came back a few minutes later, I stopped in my tracks. My sign was in shreds. The strips fluttered below the masking tape in the Maine morning breeze, smaller scraps swirling around the cabin floor. The girls had destroyed it. On purpose.

I burst into tears.

After crying and regrouping, I decided I’d have to remake the sign. Which I did. It wasn’t as good as the first one, but it was still up there when the parents arrived that day.

I rebuilt.

The second time. I tried to sell a novel titled Off Balance (think: thinly veiled memoir) back in 2004. I wrote it after graduating from Harvard Business School in 2003.

Me in 2004. A baby!

It never occurred to me that it wouldn’t actually sell. I told everyone I knew that I was writing a book. Whenever I ran into someone, they’d ask, “How’s the book going?”

Even though I got an agent, it didn’t sell.

Rejection. Rejection. Rejection.

And I didn’t rebuild.

Not for a while. It took years to get over that gut-punch. Maybe I was no good? I thought. I should stick to short-form. Go back to marketing. Entrepreneurship. Other things I enjoyed.

Twelve years later, I started my next novel, Forty Love. It was also rejected. Admittedly, I did send it out to publishers on March 9, 2020, but the two editors I spoke to about it suggested diametrically opposed solutions. I tossed the whole project.

Two years after that, I sold a memoir. When pub day was imminent, I pitched my editor the idea for a novel — and she bought it. Now, Blank is coming out in less than three months.

Blank.

My first novel. In 2024. Not 2004.

But I rebuilt.

To be a published author, that step is required. Regularly. It’s the writers who stop rebuilding, who yield to the rejections without forging ahead, that end up unpublished.

Almost every author who comes on my podcast says the same thing. I joked with Jamie Varon, author of Main Character Energy, about that this week. We both laughed thinking about how after each rejection we think, “That’s it! I’m done! I just won’t be a writer anymore.” And how after those tantrums, we always end up calming down and ending up at our desks anyway, writing again. It’s what we do.

This Hanukkah, things are quite different from when I graduated from business school. For one thing, Harvard University, always enjoying its leader status, has demonstrated an unfathomable level of antisemitism. The university president was raked over the coals by Congress this week for not condemning the brutal destruction of the Jewish people called for by some of its students. Unthinkable.

Another difference? I’ve built up my own “platform” and career. I’m not “only” trying to be an author. Writing a novel is one thing of many that I do like podcasting, publishing, and owning a bookstore. With pub day less than three months away, I’ve already secured press and a book tour, plus other things I wouldn’t have known how to get.

Imagine if I had sold my first novel as an unknown 28-year-old, trying to make headway in the wind tunnel that is publishing. It’s hard to hear anything. Maybe the timing all worked out the way it was supposed to.

After I rebuilt.

And rebuilt.

Funny enough, I was pitched a novel by one of those camp bullies for my podcast. The publicist sent me the pitch and when I asked her to see if the author was the same person who attended my specific camp, she put us in touch directly. It was!

The bully wrote me first.

“What a crazy way to be in touch!” she said.

“Too funny,” I wrote back. “Long time, no speak! Do you have any memory of me from camp? I definitely remember you. I was only 8 years old that summer! I remember, sadly, having my ‘welcome parents’ sign ripped to shreds by the girls in the cabin. Very hurtful at the time. Our counselor even quit! I never went back.”

I tried to give her an out. She finally wrote back and sort of apologized saying, “I do remember. I regret my behavior that summer. I had a lot going on in my own life at the time.”

Not. Good. Enough.

I emailed the publicist back and passed on the book. I may forgive, but I will never forget.

We will never forget.

We rebuild.

It’s what we do. It’s how we survive. It’s how we succeed.

One novel, one sign, one temple, at a time.

Happy Hanukkah, readers.

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