What My Mother Said to the Sea

How do we praise the positive in the middle of life’s storms? My mother taught me this lesson.

On a stormy winter day in 2014 my mother and I stood on the seashore, just north of Tel Aviv, wind gushing and waves wild. It had just been 30 days since my father had died and to mark this ongoing process of consolation and healing I drove my mother to when of her favorite places - the beach. It was cold and windy but my mother stood facing the sea and spoke out loud a Hebrew verse she’d known from childhood and recited during one of her favorite prayers - the Hallel Psalms of Praise:

לֹא־אָמ֥וּת כִּֽי־אֶחְיֶ֑ה וַ֝אֲסַפֵּ֗ר מַעֲשֵׂ֥י יָֽהּ׃

I shall not die but live

and proclaim the works of Yah.

Ps. 118:16

It was an astounding, deeply moving moment. Just one month into her widowhood, after 50 years together, my mother was beginning to re-imagine her life, and the familiar word came to her as an affirmation of life and of resilience.

What’s further fascinating about this verse are its last words. The original Hebrew means - I will proclaim the works of Yah — which is one of our oldest names for the divine.

But if you connect the last two words you get another Hebrew word - Ma’asyiah - which means a fable, or a story.

In some way my mother spoke to the sea — I’m alive, not dead yet, and I got a story to tell, many more to live and tell.

A few years afterwards she did complete her memoir.

There are moments in our lives, when are deep in grief, or heartbroken, or in the middle of a war, when there seems to be no horizon. Yet what does it mean to stand in the middle of the storm and affirm what is positive? What we keep believing in and living for?

This week we’re wrapping up the section of the Psalms which includes the Hallel poems - the series of praises so much part of our ritual liturgy lives. I’m grateful to my mother for modeling how to use them not only during formal times of worship but on the beach, mid-grief, mid-life, mid-being.

I hope we each find the ways to praise the positive, lift up what helps, whenever and however storms will surround us, wild like winter waves.

Next week - more psalms! Including the longest one, and the next series of 15 songs of ascent.

Thank you for joining me below the bible belt.

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