08/23/2026
A woman wrote to me. Her initials are G.A. She asked me if I would write a post about mental health in the Chassidic community. And about children with special needs. Learning problems. Struggles that do not have a clean name.
I wrote back that I am not the person for this. I am not a therapist. I am not a rabbi. I am a woman with a kitchen table and eleven mouths at it and I know what I know from where I sit.
She said, write it anyway.
So here is what I know from where I sit.
I know a woman on my block whose husband did not get out of bed on Sundays for almost a year, and nobody in the building said anything, and she carried it alone, and one day she told me at the mailboxes and started crying and I did not have anything useful to say and I said so and I think that was the right thing to say.
I know a mother of a boy who does not read the way the other boys read. She has known since he was six. She has not said it out loud in her community and she has said it to me maybe three times, in three years, at three different kitchen tables, in three different ways, and every time she said it like she was still deciding whether to trust me. I have never told anybody until right now, and I am not saying her name, and if she is reading this she knows.
I know that in my world we do not talk about these things the way the outside world talks about them. This is sometimes bad and it is sometimes protective, and I am not going to sit here and pretend it is only one of those things.
Here is what I am pretty sure of, and it is the whole reason I decided to write G.A. back and try.
There are people, quiet good people, who have been doing this work in our community for a long time. There are Chassidic therapists. There are Chassidic special-education teachers. There are organizations that are ours, that speak our language, that understand what a Chassidic family looks like on Shabbos and what a Chassidic mother is afraid of when she picks up a phone. They exist. I am not going to list them here because I am not the right person to make that list, but I promise you they exist, and if you write to me I will tell you where to start asking. If you are a woman in my community carrying something heavy and you have not told anybody, you are not the only one. You are not the only one on your block. You are not the only one in your building. You are not the only one in your family.
I am going to say the thing that everybody outside our community says and half the people inside it will not. There is no shame in this. There is no shame in a woman who is not okay after her third birth. There is no shame in a child who does not learn to read at the same speed as the other children. There is no shame in a husband who cannot get out of bed on Sunday. These are not spiritual failures. These are people, in a community, who need help that is available.
G.A., I hope this is close to what you were asking for. It is the best I could do without pretending to know things I do not know.
Have you carried something like this quietly? Do you know a woman on your block who is carrying it right now?
I am not finished. I want to write more about this and I do not want to do it wrong. If you want the next part, tell me in the comments what you would like me to write about next. I will listen.
Come back tomorrow.
Picture created with AI for obvious reasons.
Send me a note. My husband does not check. If you are the woman on the block, write to me. I will listen and I will not repeat it.
