Storming (Psalm 29)

Revere the Lord, all you mighty ones. You who sit on high, secure in your dominion, bow before God’s raw power.

The voice of God thunders down the mountaintops, it roars from the waves. It whirls across the prairies. The voice of God incinerates everything in its path.

The voice of God arcs across the buzzing sky. It swells above the coast. The earth trembles at God’s voice, and all who hear whisper awe to the unfathomable.

The voice of God strips the suburbs bare. It disrupts the work of mighty cities—causing metropolises to stagger and buckle.

God in the flooding streets, God in the raging flames. God in the gray ash descending, in the gathering darkness and the searing flash.

And in the preternatural early morning stillness, it is the voice of God that silently whispers peace.

Distinction, המבדיל

First he washed and shaved and trimmed his nails. Then he pulled on a simple cotton robe, and his loved ones spread a prayer shawl above his head. Everything was prepared, because she had arrived.

She approached—also dressed in white. So beautiful that the rest of us had to turn away. She surrounded him, circled him and became his everything. With each step she took, he forgot a little more of the world beyond her embrace.

When she finally stopped before him, he placed all that he valued into her open hand. She scattered worldly concerns beneath his feet, where they lay motionless—brittle and fleeting. In the end she led him away. The rest of us remained behind, in bittersweet abandonment.

Fruit of the tree

The branches of the pomegranate tree sagged for six days while their yield ripened. By the final evening the murky red skin split, unable to stretch farther across the bulging fruit. The goldenrod sunset flickered through the branches, reflecting off the glistening amber-red seeds.

I did not pick the pomegranate. I left it where it had bloomed, though I did cup it in my hands. I pressed my lips to its edge and the skin trembled between my mouth and the fruit within. The seeds were still warm with the heat of the sun, not sweet as honey but tasting instead of themselves, tart and light and complex.

The evening dusk obscured my red mouth, my dripping chin. The fruit remained on the bough, still thick with promise but spread wide, open and depleted.

Eshet hayil

Have you ever seen anyone like her? She’s worth her weight in gold. By 5:30 she’s up, doing a load of laundry. She gets the kids off to school, and she studies with them after dinner. Late into the night she’s on the phone with clients, and her accounts are always up to date. She directs her employees with competence, and charitable foundations contact her daily. She is the first person her friends call when trouble strikes. (Does she ever sleep?) Though she provides luxuriously for her family, she never fails to put money aside for retirement and college tuitions. Her children are clean and well-behaved, and her husband is highly respected.

Her skills are unmatched, and no one else could take on all of her roles. And yet it is her open heart, her love and purity of purpose, that leads me to praise her valor.

Meeting the parents

It’s always awkward bringing someone home for the weekend. With Shabbat it doesn’t help that my parents don’t approve of how serious things have gotten. They tolerate her at least, and they do admit that they like her cooking. She’s doing the charming routine. I asked her not to be judgy—and I can tell she’s trying. At least Mom and Dad are talking to her.

Late at night Shabbat sneaks into my childhood room. I blush when she looks at the photos from high school taped to the walls, at the action figures prominently displayed in their original packaging. “Everyone was into them,” I whisper defensively when she starts giggling at my old CDs.

Having her here is awkward, but somehow—when she slides between polyester sheets and hugs her body against mine in the narrow twin bed—she seems to belong, even here.

Stopping by the bookstore on a snowy evening

Stopping by the bookstore on a snowy evening

(Just to browse for a while, because I’m already keeping one of the most important promises I’ve ever made, and I don’t have far to walk before I get to curl up under my comforter and sleep uninterrupted through the cold, still night.)

Pearl diver

The first time she saw Shabbat she stared, long and hard, but stayed at a careful distance.

Later, she poked her toes in. Stepped forward. Went up to her hips, to her neck, learned to float and sluice through Shabbat for hours at a time.

Eventually, she dove in. She may have been surprised at first at how easily she dipped below the surface of Shabbat. The skills she had acquired while she treaded above helped her go deeper, stay longer, explore.

How did she respond to the magical world below? To the colors, to the wholly different varieties of life? To the treasures she found deep below, obscured from the air-dried roads?

She still lives above (most of the time), but if you see her now you can’t miss the ropes of pearls she wears, gathered from the recesses of Shabbat during long years of exploration.

Off the runners

There are weeks when, even before you arrive, I feel the universe click into place and I know everything will go smoothly. We will be in step, like professional dancers or chess masters. Each subtle shift you make, every variation I try, is accommodated for and incorporated into our flawless but dynamic duet. We dip into each other.

This was not one of those weeks.

This was the kind of week when some grease drips in the oven and fills the kitchen with smoke. When everyone brings salad to the potluck. When I spend twenty minutes waiting for you while you stand on the porch, fuming and pressing the broken doorbell.

So we look at each other and shrug, because what else can we do? We both know the other one meant well. Our relationship is stronger than these minor debacles.

We’ll try for better next week.

Too far

I lit every candle in the house, hours before sunset. You probably felt like I was holding my finger down on your doorbell, or yelling up at you from the courtyard. I don’t know if you thought it was endearing and cute or really f-ing annoying.

It’s hard to tell with you sometimes, and I don’t always think it’s fair. You demand so much of me that I sometimes wonder if I’m losing myself in you, but if I do lose track of me in the day-long spans of you, then there you are shaking your head and muttering that I don’t get it at all. But the second I do something you don’t like, you let me know. Boy, do you ever let me know.

If I tried too hard this time, then I hope you don’t mind. I just wanted to make you smile.

Quiet spaces

Shabbat loves the quiet spaces, you know.

Sure, you expect to see him in big, boisterous rooms filled with laugher and singing, sitting at tables warping under the weight of good food, writing guest lists a mile long that keep growing with every somebody who looks a little lonely on the way home.

But Shabbat also likes the quiet spaces.

He likes big, yawning chambers, with maybe two or three people talking earnestly in the corner. He likes simple companionship, the silence between good friends. Shabbat values quality above quantity. He would rather have all your dreams than everyone’s favorite movies.

When you see him laughing in a crowded room, you might notice that he’s not always all there. He likes the bluster and the mirth—

But he loves the quiet spaces.

Garden fantasy

After a long afternoon of reading stories with the kids, I started to imagine Shabbat visiting the community that crawls and slithers around my garden. When evening sets in, the earthworms stop working the soil just long enough to poke their heads aboveground. The more refined cicadas climb out of their drab weekday dress for the occasion. The ladybugs gather, catching up on local news and munching aphids while they wait.

And then Shabbat arrives on nimble feet, a tiny Thumbelina in a cottonwood gown. Or maybe she’s a frog princess, vivid in yellow and red.

The spiders have covered the meeting space with a latticework of webbing that drips with flower petals, plump flies and other tasty treats. When Shabbat looks up through the impermanent ceiling she might see fireflies blinking in and out in time to the cricket philharmonic.

Rehearsal

The evening was already half gone when Shabbat staggered in, charming as usual but a little distracted. She looked wan and washed out in her unabated white, and when she smiled in the receiving line her eyes had a faraway and wistful quality to them.

All through the night her lips moved as though she were memorizing lines, and in off moments she hummed long, clear notes that arched upward near the ends toward the wide, black sky.

At the end of the day she flitted out quickly, with barely a goodbye. Later this week I expect to see her among the angels, singing her heart out in seraphic devotion and shining in dazzling purity among all the other promises I have tried to keep.

Coming full circle

Evening arrives with a soft hum, slowly expanding to the O of a conch.  It thrums and vibrates down to the toes, it whirls as it grows, circling, eddying, rising around itself in a ramhorn spiral, warning that the day is closing and giving a cochlear reminder that another rotation is nearly complete. 

The last pre-Shabbat moments tumble too fast around the clock face, egged on by the high drone of whirring food processors, blaring vacuums, curling blow-dryers.  The frenetic preparations crescendo, the windows shake as the air blasts with warning, until no one can ignore Shabbat’s siren song.  With a sharp upturned ripple the day/the year/the moment passes, and Shabbat swirls in—plump and curvaceous but nevertheless eclipsed by the new moon.

Water damage

Sometimes life slams into you like raging floodwaters, ripping up your most carefully laid plans and clearing away the collected dust and debris of the years.

Sometimes life seeps in, boring subtly through the hidden cracks to drip questions and new growth into your unsuspecting world.

That might be why Shabbat sometimes appears slowly, like a gathering of gray clouds on the far horizon, and sometimes with the immediacy of a lighting bolt ripping through the retaining walls.

Invisible royalty

Because Shabbat has no physical form, it instead imposes reality upon the pre-existing world around it. It smoothes over rough walkways, adding a sheen and a softness to cement and filling out the missing branches of storm-damaged trees.

This improved world is only visible to those whose hearts beat in time to Shabbat’s singular destiny. Their neighbors must think it odd see otherwise rather sane individuals carefully pulling off coats and gloves as though they were made of ermine and velvet, and raising plastic cups of juice in tribute as they would goblets of gold-flecked ambrosia or sparkling Champaign in the hall of the king.