Here’s my answer: everything in the story could have happened, even if it didn’t
You never know what you’re going to find when you start writing a story.
Oh, you have some vague ideas. You want to explore how the trauma of the Spanish expulsion informed the messianic fervor that swept through the Jewish world, culminating in the debacle of Shabtai Tzvi. How the golden era of Tzfat was born from the brokenness and destruction of Spanish Jewry.
As I wrote this serial — it’s a two-year process, beginning with research, and culminating with those two words that you can’t quite believe as you type: The End — I held some questions in my mind.
Can we heal after our trust in the world has shattered — and if so, how? Can we forgive ourselves if we do the unthinkable? What do loss, trauma, and failure do to a person? What we read about as a collective trauma — events that take place to us as a nation — is magnified in each person’s life, and becomes an individual struggle.
This one’s in print. Some of our best stories live in the magazine — subscribe to get Mishpacha every week.
