Tic Tacs and Torah: My Grandmother’s Loud Devotion

I am a rule follower. Put me in a hushed synagogue, add a Tic Tac box perched on the edge of my great-grandmother’s hand, and watch her attempt to unleash the minty pellets like she’s playing a tiny percussion instrument—then you’ll see the true, terrified, rigid version of me.  

It is an annual occurrence: the tiny cascade of mints rattles and rolls across her hand, an avalanche of motion that shatters the slow, solemn rhythm of the room. Two hundred people woke up at 7:00 am, dressed in the stiff, square type of dress shoe that can only be tolerated once a year, and battled morning traffic to welcome the new year at the synagogue. And to pray. In quiet. But today, they cannot find this peace. Apparently, my great-grandmother (who we all simply call Grandma) didn’t get that memo. She wrestles with the clear plastic box, fishing out a mint before shaking the whole container in a loud pursuit of a second. The little pills tumble out like tiny hailstones, bounding against her palm. They scatter across the pleats in her dress pants and tap against the reddish polished wood of the seat before sticking themselves in the crevice between the velvet seat cushion and the chair's leg. She mutters frustrated syllables—ones that most definitely aren’t found in her siddur—before carefully depositing each mint back into the box.  

She doesn’t react to the glances of the man in front of her. I, on the other hand, could dissolve into my seat. My eyes dart from the gallery of stares to the bimah, which held an array of authority–rabbis, cantors, and congregants–none of whom I wanted to meet my gaze. I hated that her noise made us so visible.  

For Grandma, this noise at the temple is not new. Long before she sat with her great-grandchildren, she sat beside her own grandmother, the only person to read Hebrew in the women’s section. The other women couldn’t follow the black square letters on the siddur pages, couldn't read the prayers aloud or respond to the rabbi’s call, but still, their voices managed to fill the space. Grandma told me that, when the women grew lost in the service, they would “just chat.” 

And that chatter was no mistake—it was no interruption to the service; no impediment to the prayer. Between whispers and little laughs, they filled the gaps of the siddur they could not read, claimed corners of the room that prayers left behind, and somehow, made the rhythm of gibberish words and unfamiliar rhythms their own. Because, still, Grandma tells me she “doesn’t care to know every bit and piece.” Instead, she “cares to care about the Jewish people.” 

Those women, long before I arrived with my rigid attention to detail and insistence on rules, had discovered how to transform a room built to highlight what they could not do into a stage for what they could: engage, build community, and find belonging. The women’s murmurs, their small laughs, were declarations of presence and ownership spilling in places meant to remain empty.  

Grandma did learn Hebrew herself, but not because anyone had handed her a tutor or a neat little workbook. She had eavesdropped on her brother’s lessons, leaning close enough to catch the sounds of words that should be uttered from her mouth and the shapes of letters that should bleed from her pen. The lessons meant for someone else became her personal game, one of deciphering, mimicking, and improvising. She wasn’t bitter that only her brother had a teacher; in fact, she found it brilliant—no homework, no deadlines, no one assessing her work. She stitched up her knowledge in secret, on her own terms, and in doing so, turned what could have been exclusion into invention. Prayer was her playground. 

I’ve watched her behavior for years, and for years I resisted understanding it. As much as I respect her, as much as I adore her, I am horrified. In the hush of communal prayer, her Tic Tac box percussion trespasses; each beat and each whispered sideline comment made my chest tighten. And yet, that jolt of nerves was also the beginning of a lesson, one gathered in small increments, first from a box of mints, and later, from Grandma’s story-filled phone calls, how she chatted on Friday nights and stitched Hebrew together for herself. I began to see her devotion not as carelessness, but as care expressed in movement, in improvisation, in insisting on presence rather than perfection. 

I’ve come to see that my rule-following gaze was and remains limited. The chaos I once feared was not respect but vitality. That Tic Tac box was the clearest punctuation mark on a slower discovery: devotion thrives not in obedience, but in embodiment, in claiming space despite imposed limits. Care for the Jewish people and Jewish tradition is not measured in perfect pronunciation or neatly folded hands, but in motion, in breath, in the small chaos that signals life. I see it in the tilt of Grandma’s head as she surveys the room, in the subtle tap of her foot against the carpet, in typos and mispronunciations, and certainly, in the clatter of a Tic Tac box.  

It is dizzying, exhilarating, and terrifying all at once, the realization that respect and love can be loud, messy, and irreverent. And still holy. I want to shush her, to quiet her drumming. But I cannot, because I understand, in a quiet, crooked corner of my mind that came straight from her, that devotion, like Grandma herself, cannot be contained.