Roses, Thorns, and Buds
One of the many glues that binds our family together is our love of storytelling. We rarely miss opportunities to replay our highlights (and lowlights), reveling in the snowball effect as the stories gain meaning, matter, and momentum with each retelling. And because of a reflection ritual that we’ve shared at our dining room table, dinner time has become a sort of writer’s room for new stories to enter the canon.
While words and photos will never be able to capture the experience of totality, a few thoughts came to me after driving fourteen hours over two days with my family for this scientific and awe-inspiring pilgrimage.
Predictability and the Unforeseen
The solar eclipse itself was completely predictable from an astronomical perspective – there was even an article from an Ohio newspaper from 1970 letting people know that “the next showing [would be] in 2024.” And if airlines and hotels actually did book travel twenty years in advance, you could know right now that you should travel to Tulsa, Tampa, or Orlando on August 12, 2045 to be in the path of totality.
Rise. Take three steps backwards – one with each of the first three words in Hebrew. Take three steps forward with each of the next three words in Hebrew. Bend your knee with the word “Blessed,” bow with the word “You” and stand up straight with the word “God.” Continue singing words of prayer, bowing at the allotted times, rising at the allotted times, carefully pronouncing each word – all the while racing through prayers and melodies, like familiar paths through a corn maze, which never seems exactly the same twice. Affirm relationship with God. Choose your theologically preferred language about the messianic era. Call forth a blessing for rain or dew in the Holy Land, depending on the time of year. Make requests of God – if it’s not Shabbat, when God also needs rest. Pray silently, filling just the right amount of time with prayers of the heart. Return to communal prayer with melodious aspirations for peace. Oh yes – and do all this while wearing a prayer shawl and/or phylacteries, if it is the designated day and time of day, and is your custom. All of this in hopes of resembling the angels and mirroring an anthropomorphic human projection of a God who might also don these sacred objects.
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