Maayan Schoen’s 2022 Passover Message

Getting to the other side

I am writing this from the train on the way to my brother’s engagement. It is fitting, with Passover coming soon, that we all have love on the mind, as we read Shir HaShirim (Song of Songs) over Passover. Shir HaShirim is a poetic love story that we read as allegory for the love between people and G-d — though it certainly still serves as inspiration for love between people as well.

With the help of G-d, the love between my brother and future sister-in-law will carry them through the many, many wonderful years ahead of them.
Today is about them, and I can’t help also thinking about the love that I have for them, and for many other people in my life, that compels me to do something like get on a train and spend the day in New York when I have a difficult paper and a problem set for statistics due today.

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I will probably turn them in late. To me, this is “getting to the other side” — transcending the things that control me in favor of something more important. I cannot remember the last time that I turned in an assignment late because of something happy or because of being busy with something that I would rather be doing;

I have turned in plenty of late assignments (with extensions!) over the past several years because of illness, death in the family, or too much other work. But when you have someone to love, you have reasons to dote, to celebrate, and to choose to live on purpose. We have always needed this, but we need it so badly right now. I feel so fortunate.

Being loved is wonderful too, but loving another can bring out our best instincts in a unique way. So, my advice for “getting to the other side” is to find someone to love — a person (or animal) who makes you want to celebrate them, to put life aside to spend time with them, to be interested in the things that are important to them.

When I was feeling sick recently and was nervous about falling behind on my work, my mother told me to “take it one day at a time.” It was difficult then but is easy now to follow that sage advice; I want to take today to have a family simcha, and I’ll take tomorrow to catch up on my work.

My parting thought, then, is that you know you are getting to the other side when cliches such as “find someone to love” and “take it one day at a time” come alive with purpose and meaning. May we all continue to find such purpose and meaning to take us through every day.

Maayan Schoen graduated from Torah Day School and Atlanta Jewish Academy and studied in the Migdal Oz Beit Midrash for Women in Israel. She is a junior at Yale University.