About Ta'ir

When I was a little girl I used to dance around the living room imagining a class of girls in front of me, following my lead. I thought I might become a dance teacher one day.

What I became instead was a couples therapist. That work kept leading me somewhere I had not planned to go. Couples came in about one thing, and underneath it, again and again, was their intimate life.

I found I could talk about it. Dutch culture treats these subjects as ordinary, as things that can be named without embarrassment, and I think I absorbed some of that growing up there. The people sitting across from me often had no such ease, and no language for any of it.

That is not only a matter of personality. It is also that there is so little honest Torah conversation about what a Jewish marriage looks like from the inside. There is plenty about the halachos. There is plenty of "you should." Meanwhile we absorb a great deal from the world around us about sexuality, and some of it has quietly settled into the way people understand Jewish teaching, while being nothing of the sort. Couples are left confused, with nowhere to bring the questions.

That gap is what I have built my work around, b'ezras Hashem.

I live in Petach Tikvah with my husband and our seven children, bli ayin hara. I am better at making things than at running a household, and given the choice between another load of laundry and something creative, the laundry usually waits.

Lately the creative outlet is mostly AI, which I enjoy far more than I expected to. And when I give myself the gift of going to the sea, summer or winter, to watch the waves and look for shells, that is where I feel most connected.