July 19, 2025
Author(s): Rav Hazzan Aliza Berger,
Parashat Pinchas
The Tooth Fairy
July 19, 2025 – 23 Tamuz 5785
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
The most amazing article appeared in the New York Times this week titled “The Tooth Fairy is Real. She’s a Dentist in Seattle.[1]” No seriously, I am not making this up. Apparently twenty years ago, when Purva Merchant was applying for dental school, her boyfriend set up an email account for her using her nickname “the tooth fairy.” Ever since, she has received somewhere between three to five emails per day from desperate parents and adorable, sometimes disbelieving children. And she has personally responded to each and every message.
The article is full of amazing email exchanges. There is the letter from the mother who forgot to exchange a tooth two nights in a row, who writes to the tooth fairy to let her know that there has been a misunderstanding and to ask if she could stop by while her son was at school. There is the letter from the child who received $100 for her first tooth, but then a much lower sum for each subsequent tooth and is very upset at the injustice of it—shouldn’t teeth all be worth the same amount of money?! And then, just some adorable little notes:
“My tooth got pullen out at the dentist today and I am excited for you to cone to my house and give me a surprise for being a brave girl.
I am sleeping in my mums bed tonight and my tooth is silver so you can zee it and it’s under the black pillow and it’s in a dog box wrapped in a tissue”
and
“I’m so sorry I swallowed my tooth. And I love you. XXX OOO”
Reading these letters stole my heart. I love the whimsy of every exchange. The parents who, long before the advent of AI, were emailing random tooth fairy addresses in the hopes that somewhere, somehow, someone would save them and preserve the magic of the tooth fairy for their child. I love the image of parents sitting down to help their children write to “the tooth fairy” only to receive a real response in exchange. Can you imagine the squeals of joy?! The fact that these letters are all written by a pediatric dentist makes it even better.
I have a personal connection to the tooth fairy. In my family, my grandmother, my mother, my sister and I all received letters from Rosalie Fairy. They were so thoughtful and so personalized that when kids at school said the tooth fairy wasn’t real, my immediate response was that I was sorry they didn’t get a good fairy.
Every time I lost a tooth, Rosalie Fairy left me a quarter and a beautiful, hand-written letter that was magically about whatever lesson I was learning then. I remember one time, I stayed up into the middle of the night trying to wiggle out a tooth, desperate to hear from Rosalie Fairy. It was about 2 or 3 in the morning when I finally succeeded, and I remember the excitement of putting it under my pillow and trying to fall asleep. I was devastated to discover the next morning that Rosalie Fairy had not come.
That night, I again placed my tooth under the pillow and awoke to a thoughtful letter from Rosalie Fairy. She explained that, knowing my tooth wasn’t scheduled to come out for another few days, she had been away on a business trip and wasn’t able to get back in time when she found out it had come out early. The letter was all about how important it is to be patient and to let life take its course without pushing the river.
Before I started high school, I will never forget the night my parents sat me down. My grandmother apparently had told my mother I absolutely could not start high school still believing in the tooth fairy. To this day I’m not sure why she thought high school students would be sitting around comparing notes about the tooth fairy, but she wanted to make sure I wasn’t socially disadvantaged. That night, my parents told me the truth about Rosalie Fairy. It was the most profound loss I had experienced since my grandfather died after my bat mitzvah. I sobbed. My parents explained that my dad had spent hours painstakingly writing out letters from Rosalie fairy so that I would have an experience of the magic that is possible in the world. They said that even though Rosalie Fairy wasn’t real on her own, they hoped I would remember the magic of finding those letters and that I would find ways to recreate that magic in my own life.
In a very real way, I think Rosalie Fairy is the reason I am standing here today. What I learned from Rosalie Fairy and what I have learned from Judaism is that a simple act of love can transform an ordinary moment into a moment of extraordinary possibility.
We’ve all lived this. When you celebrate Shabbat, Friday isn’t just the last day of the work week, it becomes a gateway to shabbos kodsho, a magical experience of rest, rejuvenation, and togetherness. When you say a blessing before a meal, the food is no longer just sustenance, it is an opportunity for gratitude and connection.
This week, I was remembering a young man I used to meet with when I first came to Temple Emanuel. At the time he was finishing high school, and his parents were going through a very painful and protracted divorce. I’ll never forget the first meeting. It was in the fall. He had just gotten back from camp. And he shared that he learned something so powerful. While he was at camp, davening every morning, he noticed that he felt better. It didn’t change the pain of his family or the challenges at home, but somehow those morning prayers made him feel more able to cope with what was happening. And so, he wanted to learn how to put on tefillin. That student built a powerful davening practice. Every morning, he woke up early and put on his tefillin. And what he said was that those minutes wrapped in prayer equipped him with the strength he needed to face the challenge of his day.
Today, as our world feels more intense by the minute, all of us need a little more magic. We need rituals to help us process what is unfolding around the world; we need Jewish traditions that open up the magic of time. And we need to remember, that each one of us has the ability to create a miracle for someone else.
Which brings me back to Dr. Merchant. In 2008, she received a letter from a distraught child who had somehow, while on vacation in Singapore, accidentally dropped her tooth into the drain outside her hotel. Her father sat her down in front of the computer and they wrote an email to the tooth fairy asking if the tooth fairy could manage to retrieve the tooth and exchange it for a reward in the proper currency when she got home.
Seventeen years later, this young woman was reflecting on that poignant moment in her childhood as she prepared for dental surgery. On a whim, she wrote to the same tooth fairy email address, thanking her for her kindness and support and saying “17 years ago, you wished me a happy growing up, and now at 23, I’m excited to report that it definitely has been 😊”
A few minutes later, an email popped up on her screen from the tooth fairy. “Thank you for reminding me that kindness, no matter how small, leaves a lasting impact on the world. I REALLY needed that reminder today.”
The tooth fairy may not be real, but the magic we can create for one another definitely is.
[1] The Tooth Fairy Is Real. She’s a Dentist in Seattle. – The New York Times