In the first pew, Beamer and Jenny couldn’t move. They had watched all this, as the understanding of what had really gone wrong in their lives revealed itself to them, which was that the tide pool you’re born into is only manageable if someone gives you swimming lessons. Or, put more simply, in order to be a normal person, you had to at least see

you could do what Jenny did, which was fight. You could fight against the whole diaphanous premise that they based their greed and clannishness upon: that whatever they had to do for money was justified because once, a long, long time ago, Jews trusting the world and playing by the rules didn’t go so well. But this didn’t stand up to Jenny’s

Ouroboros!

What is it about shame, that a teaspoon of it weighs so much more than a teaspoon of happiness or any other innocuous emotion? What is it about shame that it always feels like the truth?

“First they came for my yoga symbology,” Jenny said. “But I was fairly inflexible and so I said nothing.”

The advantage she had of having roughly twelve concentrations across college made her into quite a pantomath, which was a word she learned when she’d flirted with concentrating in classics.

“You are entering into a tradition of manhood, or personhood, in this troubled world,” Hershey said. “You are taking a full responsibility for the Torah and its laws, and you are responsible not just for perpetuating Judaism but for making sure that there are still Jews in the world. On this day, we ask of you that you build a Jewish home, that you

There has never been, in the history of all human interaction, a way for a woman to explain effectively that she’s calm when a man has suggested she isn’t.

But the people who rise to success on their own never stop feeling the fear at the door, and the people lucky enough to be born into comfort and safety never become fully realized people in the first place. And who is to say which is better? No matter which way it is for you, it is a system that fucks you in the ass over and over, in perpetuity,