Today, a letter was waiting for me in my mailbox in Berkeley.
Not an email.
Not a WhatsApp message.
Not a little heart emoji sent quickly between school, meetings, and Zoom calls.
A real letter.
Handwritten.
From my Yael.
It had traveled all the way from Israel to California — across continents, airports, sorting centers, and distance — until it finally landed here, in my small mailbox in Berkeley.
During this sabbatical, I have had a quiet companion: loneliness.
Yes, I meet new people.
I sit in cafés, attend conferences, write, think, give talks, hold Zoom meetings, and keep myself busy.
From the outside, everything looks full of movement.
But inside all that movement, there is also silence.
And inside that silence, there is longing.
Longing for home.
For a language that requires no effort.
For the sound of children in the living room.
For the small daily routines we never appreciate enough while we are living them.
And then a letter like this arrives.
A few handwritten words from a child, on a piece of paper, carrying an entire world inside them.
That is one of the miracles of writing.
A handwritten letter is never only words.
It carries the pressure of the hand, the rhythm of the person, the pauses, the hesitation, the little imperfections that make it alive.
A screen can transmit information.
A handwritten letter transmits presence.
Suddenly, the distance becomes shorter.
Suddenly, Berkeley and Israel are in the same room for a moment.
Suddenly, loneliness steps aside and makes room for something simple, pure, and exact:
love.
There are things all the technology in the world still cannot do.
A handwritten letter from a daughter to her father is one of them.
