Follow the Blessings
Finding her voice: In this excerpt from her book “Bylines and Blessings,” Judy Gruen reflects on how she came to embrace her calling as a Jewish journalist.
Editor’s Note: I've known author and journalist Judy Gruen for a few years now. We met when she asked me to help edit her book, Bylines and Blessings: Overcoming Obstacles, Striving for Excellence, and Redefining Success. I was immediately struck by how similar our paths had been, straddling the secular and Jewish media throughout our careers. In the end, Judy discovered that the Jewish media was her true home. As the mainstream media becomes increasingly siloed into left and right, she has found fulfillment in telling the stories of the Jewish people. However, as this piece shows, it took her a while to get there. — Howard Lovy
Talent is God-given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful. —John Wooden
Jewish sages teach us to “flee from honor,” but today, everyone is a self-promoter. If you have a business or product, you need to let the world know about it, hourly if possible. Glamour shots for your website, even if you’re a dog groomer, may be recommended. The last time anyone could simply hang the proverbial shingle announcing their new stationery store or insurance brokerage and wait for the public to storm the battlements, gas was cheap and climate change meant the November wind was blowing and it was time to button your jacket.
This teaching to flee from honor is obviously wise: self-regard can quickly become an addiction, leading to dangerous cravings for flattery, fame, and tribute. On the other hand, authors need to sell their books. “Books don’t have legs,” one publicist told me. “You’ve got to keep working it over and over again for at least one year after publication. Keep promoting, keep writing, and keep making sure your byline includes the ‘author of’ attribution at the bottom. Talk it up wherever you go, post on social media, pass out bookmarks. Stay positive.” In other words, don’t flee from honor, stalk it at every opportunity!
I was pumped for the game after my first few books. I believed in my work, in the therapeutic power of humor, in the value of intelligent, family-friendly writing that could entertain and inspire. I burned through a lot of cash on publicists and burned through a lot of psychic energy from my efforts following their directives. Yet I began to feel like the proverbial hamster on the wheel. The media world was evolving at breakneck speed and so were the rules about how to “grow your brand” as a writer. I was advised to blog three times a week (supposedly a magic number); offer giveaways on my home page to capture email addresses; and become a topic expert for reporters, replying to their queries through member-only PR sites.
Given my strong beliefs about what our culture was doing to our kids, I promoted myself to parenting expert, frequently offering bite-sized commentary to reporters. My contributions were picked up on occasion, but my overall batting average was low, the return on investment hardly seeming worth my time. I contacted book reviewers, social media influencers, and other potentially friendly media outlets about my books—and about me! As the meme goes, “But enough about me; what do you think of me?”
I threw myself into it, chasing book reviews, interviews, and buzz. Honor didn’t exactly flee from me, but it hardly threw its arms open wide, reaching toward me with a beguiling smile and asking, “Darling, where have you been all my life?” I did my job cheerfully for a long time. Then I did it dutifully. Then promotion began to feel like a heavy lift. I was supposed to engage with my audience to foster a sense of connection and trust. But connecting takes time, and I was also juggling paid writing and editing work and family responsibilities. I enjoyed the engagement, but it sure would be easier to continue building credibility and awareness through being published regularly where my readers could be found.
Once I ran into an acquaintance who had—almost on a lark—written a book about marriage and had signed with a respected traditional publisher. When I asked her how she was promoting her book, she shrugged. “I wrote it and I believe it’s good, but I can’t get into all the work of publicity,” she said. This shocked me and I imagined her publisher wasn’t too thrilled about it, either. It was a wasted opportunity because her book contained valuable messages that could touch people’s lives. Part of me admired her sangfroid, which contrasted dramatically with my own angst and nervous energy in trying to build my books’ fortunes.
After so many years of hard, relentless work, my following still was relatively small, so I reminded myself of another Jewish teaching: I have everything in my life that I need right now to fulfill my mission. What is meant for someone else is not meant for me. I worked to cement this idea into my head; it felt true and wise and necessary for me to grasp. Besides, what number of books sold or number of fans would have satisfied me? I didn’t even know! My definition of success had been evolving, and I understood that it could not be quantified only by hard numbers of books sold, readers reached, and social media affirmations. People told me that my writing mattered to them, either in person, through emails, social media, in letters to the editor or in online comments about my stories.
In a culture where traditional values about marriage, family, education, patriotism, and religion were mercilessly and endlessly mocked by cultural arbiters in journalism, publishing, and the entertainment industries, my articles helped other like-minded individuals feel more supported and less alone. A few college-aged women emailed me to say they related to my work and in particular, my fifth book, a memoir called The Skeptic and the Rabbi: Falling in Love with Faith. “I feel like you are writing my story,” one twenty-two-year-old college senior wrote. “I also have a boyfriend who is becoming Orthodox, and I’m getting into it but also not sure if I’ll change my mind later. You’ve given me a lot to think about. I’ll keep you posted!” Notes like this made my work so worthwhile. You couldn’t put a dollar value on playing a role in helping someone clarify their goals.
Still, I couldn’t slay the dragon of career ambition, that sense that the success I felt I deserved—ill-defined and perhaps shallow as it was—would continue to elude me. In fact, certain goals I had nourished for years were receding out of reach. Traditional print newspapers were folding by the hundreds each year, so I stopped pitching newspaper syndicates. Pay scales for online writing were even more pathetic than they were in most print journalism outlets, and hundreds of journalists were nimbly transitioning into “content creation” or other types of writing for corporations and institutions that would pay enough for them to survive.
When I’d become grumpy about all this, Jeff did his best to encourage me. “Your work will never be measured by dollars and cents or even by the number of books you sell,” he’d say, reiterating the lesson I knew but struggled to accept. “Your work inspires people, and in some cases, you actually change lives. I just run a small sign company. My work is a means to an end—nothing more.”
I’d immediately argue with him. “Your work is much more than that. You have succeeded through your intelligence, hard work, industry knowledge, honesty, integrity, and ability to communicate well. Your services and consulting help other people run their own businesses and organizations. And your stellar reputation is a kiddush Hashem (a credit to God’s name, so to speak) because everyone knows you are an Orthodox Jew. These are not small things. They’re huge.” Every once in a while, we’d reprise this same friendly argument, each of us needing reassurance about the larger impact and meaning of our work.
After one such discussion, before my doldrums had fully lifted, I decided to consult with a woman named Rachel. Like me, Rachel had become Orthodox in early adulthood but unlike me, had raised her family in Israel, where she studied Judaism from a mystical angle. Personally, I am mystically challenged and hadn’t planned on attending Rachel’s classes when she visited Los Angeles during a speaking tour. A friend raved about her, though, and I figured, why not? Rachel’s topic for the class I attended was the Jewish perspective on male-female polarities and the creative forces and energy associated with women.
Rachel explained that men often contribute the raw material of life—the potential—while women are the ones who actualize that material, turning it into something tangible. This is an obvious truth in procreation, but even when women also contribute the raw material (such as money earned to support their families) they are also the ones who most often actualize it: shopping for groceries, doing most of the cooking, and making most home-based purchasing decisions, from furnishings and décor to children’s clothing and selecting extracurricular activities for the children. Through their material and spiritual priorities, women set the tone of a home and family life. This has an enormous impact on each family member, and that impact is carried through future generations.
I was drawn to Rachel’s understated tone and deep wisdom. While some of her ideas and practices felt too traditional or mystical for my taste, her fundamental idea about male-female polarities and women’s creative potential rang true. After class I made an appointment to speak with her the next day.
When I arrived for our meeting, she greeted me with a smile that felt like a hug. We sat down in the comfortable living room of the private home where she was staying during her trip. I knew full well that Rachel was undoubtedly counseling other women seeking advice on far more urgent problems than mine, problems relating to their marriages, kids, financial pressures, or spiritual crises. I felt a flush of embarrassment at my “first world” kvetch: You see, Rachel, I’ve been working so hard to become a successful writer, but I’m not successful enough! I want to be successful in the material sense of the word and I can’t seem to tame the beast of my ambition, which is suffocating my deeper wisdom. Can you help?
But there I was, and I began to talk. Unexpectedly, I began to cry. Rachel leaned slightly closer to me, her eyes kind and empathetic.
“I really love the writing I do for Jewish media outlets,” I told her. “People in the community often stop me on the street or in shul or in the market to comment about something I wrote, and when they smile and tell me how much they enjoyed an article, I feel great. But when I see so many trashy or stupid books become big sellers, or books that were written to knock Jewish tradition or malign Israel, I become extremely upset, even angry. It’s so wrong and unfair. My books aren’t of earth-shaking importance, but they are well-crafted and lift people’s spirits. After so many years of trying, I still have to scrape for every review and endorsement.”
Oh man, I sounded like such a whiner! What would she think of me? Hearing my own bellyaching, I didn’t think much of myself at that moment. But the catharsis was desperately needed, and I felt an oppressive weight of angst lifting. Rachel listened as if my words were the most important ones she had ever heard. I stopped, feeling so self-conscious about my emotional rant, but she recognized that I had more inside and urged me to go on.
I told her of my growing disillusionment with the industry, including the impossibility of meeting marketing “rules” that were constantly changing. I told her that after finally breaking through to write for some of the biggest women’s magazines, which had been my starry-eyed goal for years, I found their editors ridiculously difficult to work with. Ironically, these women editors demonstrated some of the worst stereotypes about females, even as their editorial angles were strongly feminist: they constantly changed their minds about what they wanted after assignments had been defined and asked for numerous revisions without offering any justification or extra pay. This high-maintenance reputation was legendary among writers, and after only a few assignments, the bloom had definitely faded from the rose. A buck per word sounded like great pay until you were asked for seven revisions.
“I know I am meant to do this work,” I continued, “and I know I have something valuable to add to the cultural conversation, but the leftward agenda of nearly all of the US newspapers and consumer magazines makes it much harder to sell stories where I sold them before, even when the Jewish messages are subtle. Maybe I just can’t seem to get past the idea that money equals success, which Western culture has ingrained in me. Is it wrong to want to spread Torah ideas and to want to be commercially successful?” I dabbed at another tear and offered a small smile, feeling embarrassed and vulnerable.
Rachel’s frequent, subtle nods and caring expression assured me that I had come to the right address for handholding. I observed something else about her, too. Living in a city that might be the nipping, tucking, derma-filling, cosmetic surgery capital of the world, where looking older than thirty-five is a misdemeanor, Rachel—without any makeup and most likely in her late forties or possibly early fifties—was beautiful. I had observed a certain radiance and loveliness in many deeply religious Jewish women I had met whose focus in life is primarily other-centered, and specifically, God-centered. They are looking at the Big Picture—how to create a bit of heaven here on earth through actualizing the mitzvah, giving more than taking, and building their eternity. They exude an inner glow born of a spiritual centeredness that is almost palpable. Their faces reflect kindness, faith, and confidence. Like Rachel, they are often lovely and luminous.
When I finished emptying my cup of woes, Rachel lifted a cup of water to her lips. Before she sipped, she closed her eyes and quietly spoke the appropriate blessing: Blessed are You, God, King of the entire world, who makes everything according to His Word. She enunciated each Hebrew word with a level of consciousness and care I had rarely, if ever, witnessed before.
Her blessing humbled me. We are meant to recite one hundred blessings each day, a majority of which are covered through the morning, afternoon, and evening prayer sessions. I did not pray with that level of frequency and so far had been a chronic blessing underachiever. You’d think that for the blessings I did make, including those before and after eating and drinking, I could have mustered something close to a Rachel-esque level of kavana, or intent. But my mind was cluttered, often fighting off competing thoughts about my quotidian life while trying to make space to talk to God: Do I have enough panko for tonight’s schnitzel? When can I get to the store to get the rest of the materials for the school science project? Who should we invite for Shabbat dinner this week? What should my next column be about? I need a haircut; I wonder how soon I can get an appointment?
After Rachel set her glass down, she asked a profound question that no marketing expert would have ever asked me: “Tell me, Judy, where is the blessing coming from now in your work?”
I was stunned. I had appreciated the positive feedback and the affirmations about the meaning of my work, but never considered my “success” as Rachel had framed it. Instead, I kept fixating on the mundane and the materialistic: How many social media shares was I getting? How much does this outlet pay? When would I reach out to introduce myself to the editor at a new target media outlet?
The answer came immediately: “The blessing is coming from my work in Jewish media.” As soon as the words left my mouth, both her question and the answer seemed so obvious. I had welcoming editors who provided straightforward assignments and direct, blunt feedback, great freedom about what I wrote about, and an impressive platform for my work.
I had always loved writing profiles and discovering the fascinating stories of people’s lives. Ahuva Gray was a Black former preacher who converted to Judaism and moved to Jerusalem. Dr. Edith Eger barely survived the Holocaust and became a prominent psychologist specializing in PTSD. In her nineties she published the remarkably powerful book, The Choice. The rock group Eagles of Death Metal chose to play a concert in Tel Aviv just months after surviving a terrorist attack by Islamic terrorists during a performance at the Bataclan Theater in Paris, owned by a French Jew. The terrorists killed ninety and wounded hundreds more, including some band members. These are just some of the inspiring people I’d had the privilege to learn and write about. Research I did for my stories expanded my knowledge and my world. And it would have been churlish of me to deny that my steady publishing credits were adding to my name recognition in Jewish circles. The Jewish outlets consistently welcomed me, allowing me to create in the way I was meant to create.
I left my meeting with Rachel feeling lighter for my whinging session. Ever so slightly, I felt even more successful. Neither Rachel nor I could solve the growing obstacles to my breaking through to a larger audience. Publishing and journalism were becoming siloed into the political left or right. Most journalists and editors in the legacy media were increasingly arrested by storylines that validated leftist talking points and jeered traditional religious values. Articles began to appear in women’s and parenting magazines celebrating parents who supported their nine-year-olds who had decided they were now a boy, not a girl, or vice versa. These were kids who were not old enough to pick their own bedtimes. Magazines for teen girls promoted promiscuity, with no warning about the well-documented psychological harm that frequently resulted from that behavior. While sinking educational outcomes for kids in public schools was a growing problem, no one at the Washington Post covered stories about the success of kids who were homeschooled (usually from religiously traditional families) or the success of kids in charter schools, where minority children often thrived outside the chokehold of terrible public schools. Rap singers with long rap sheets were interviewed by reporters who seemed awed by the singer’s toughness and who asked no hard questions about the singer’s violent past. The bias was incredible and nearly universal.
I could not afford to waste my time and chose to scale back my efforts to write for the secular media, only looking for opportunities to write on health, relationships, and aspects of culture where I could sprinkle in some subtle Jewish wisdom. For the most part, my professional contributions to tikkun olam would have to be “locally sourced,” writing for Jewish media outlets with a broad and growing audience. It was my responsibility to take action to achieve important goals. I could only hope my work would have some impact.
Judy Gruen writes to find meaning, hope, and laughter in a complicated world. She is the author of two heartfelt memoirs, Bylines and Blessings and The Skeptic and the Rabbi. Judy has also published three humor books, including a multiple-award winner, and co-authored a guide on MBA admissions strategies with Linda Abraham. An award-winning columnist and book reviewer for the Jewish Journal, her essays and features have appeared in Aish, Jewish Action, The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and many other outlets. In addition to writing, Judy is an experienced book editor. Notable titles she has edited include Gershon Schusterman's Why God Why? How to Believe in Heaven When It Hurts Like Hell and Ruchi Koval's Soul Construction. www.judygruen.com.
Five tiny delights
Watching my first cup of coffee brewing into my cup from my Keurig each morning and inhaling deeply.
Finding I'm able to hold certain positions in Iyengar yoga better than I thought I could have.
Curling up to watch a favorite show at night. Current favorite: All Creatures Great and Small
FaceTime with grandchildren who live out of state.
Nightly Wordle and Connections games with my husband.
Five tiny Jewish delights
Lighting Shabbat candles and taking time to bless each family member by name, including all the grandkids.
Savoring delicious, fresh, warm challah at Shabbat meals.
Welcoming guests for meals or overnight hosting on Shabbat, especially when we've never met them before.
Discovering new Jewish-themed books to read (and sometimes review).
Shopping at the kosher grocery stores. Crowded, but filled with a sense of community.
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This is so wonderful. Thank you, Judy!