Within the past three days, here’s what’s been happening: I’ve ridden and absorbed advice from an insightful mare named Star, talked for a long-distance hour to an Israeli cousin in Vermont whose life has required her to make her way through thickly tangled layers of family fate, shared an hour of Torah Study by zoom with fellow students surprised by the death of a member of our group, spoken for an hour’s long-distance call to Chicago with a woman with whom I’ve been friends since we first met on our Fulbright year in Paris, and lastly had a trans-Atlantic visit by zoom this morning with a British philosopher friend in the U.K.

As a result, what I would really like would be to sit cross-legged in deepest silence for at least 12 hours.

That said, is there – can there possibly be? – any upshot that would harmoniously combine these consequential but quite disparate encounters? Can I somehow pull it all together? 

Let’s start with Star. She’s a “lead mare” who, in the wild, would take charge of the herd. She’s vigorous. You can’t go to sleep or daydream on her. Her messages (as translated by the young woman horse-whisperer trotting alongside) were strong, decisive and unambiguous. She’s apparently pegged me as a rather decisive character too. Says I should not pretend otherwise.

Next my Israeli cousin. When I first met her, at the home of her parents (my first cousin and his wife) in Tel Aviv, she was a long-legged, tanned beauty. When I last saw her in person, at the Bar Mitzvah of her sister’s son, she was still a beauty, though not of course (on that ritual occasion) showing so much leg. She’s older, has turned out highly competent, and multi-talented. Through the years, we’ve met only at long intervals. Her grownup pathway has traversed large, tragic losses. I’m grateful that, after all the life-storms, we still could talk in so loving and trustful a way.

At Saturday morning Torah Study, the group spoke up about our lost study companion, each in turn remembering. One by one, the speakers proved almost startlingly eloquent. We decided to write up what we’d spontaneously said and give the written record to his bereaved family.

With my Fulbright friend last night, we’d begun as woman friends before real life (aka “Life”) had happened to either of us. In Paris, we read Simone de Beauvoir’s Deuxieme Sexe at a time when American young women thought of feminism only as the movement that, long before our time, had got women the right to vote. All my American women friends in Paris read The Second Sex in French (it hadn’t yet been translated) and together pondered it. Before de Beauvoir, we hadn’t thought of our feminine situation as something requiring a political remedy.

So, last night, I asked my friend, what happened to each of us when we came home from Paris? How did reality compare with what we expected – or hoped – would happen?

For each of us, when we returned to our respective home cities, it was as if we’d walked into an up-and-down raking-over by enemy fire. The life we resumed turned out far, far harder than we’d anticipated. Yet she and I had each begun with shared romantic hopes – unlike our other women friends in Paris – and we’ve each essentially retained the attitude that we had at the beginning.

What about my English philosopher friend? Although not himself Jewish – of quite bloodthirsty Viking descent from what he tells me – we share a common concern about the shattering storm of anti-semitism that’s swept the planet since October 7. We agreed that God had made him non-Jewish so that his published anger and concern would not be discounted as special pleading.

So the three days have all been fine. The trouble is that any one of the encounters I’ve cited would have supplied enough emotional impact and food-for-thought to last me over the past three days and beyond.

As things stand, and as I’m constituted – with my thin skin and few natural filters – 

too much of a good thing

is still

too much!