Watch & Listen
The Song
❖ ❖ ❖
The candles were lit just before sundown, the way they were lit every Erev Shabbat and every week of the year, and in the small house by the stream that fed Cold Water Pond, the work of the world stopped.
Ruti drew the match across the stone. The first wick caught, then the second. She passed her paws over the flames once, twice, three times — the slow encircling motion her own mother had taught her — and brought her paws to her face, covering her eyes. The blessing she sang into her own paws was sweet — sweet in the way honey on the tongue first thing in the morning is sweet — and the room received it the way a small house receives the smell of bread baking.
When she opened her eyes, the table seemed brighter.
Tovi watched from his place. He had watched this from his place for as long as he could remember — sitting at his mother's left, near enough to feel the small movement of air her paws made when they passed over the flames. Tonight, the air felt the same. The candles looked the same. The two loaves on the cloth looked the same. The wine in Yonah's cup looked the same. He kept testing this, and it kept being true: the Shabbat was the Shabbat, the way it had been the Shabbat last week, and the week before, and the week before, all the way back through the part of his life he could remember and the part he couldn't.
Something else was different though, and he kept testing that too.
His grandfather Gilad sat across from him, on Ruti's right. Gilad always sat there. Gilad was a little quieter than usual before the candles, the way he sometimes was, and Tovi had stopped expecting an explanation for it years ago — Saba was Saba, and his quiet at the start of Shabbat was its own kind of quiet, neither asking to be filled nor minding that it wasn't.
Now Yonah reached across the cloth and laid his paw over Ruti's. He did not say anything for a moment. He just held her hand, a slight pause as he thought of her before he spoke, and the room quieted — the way a stream quieted just before it went over a small fall. Then Yonah spoke.
"An excellent wife, who can find?"
His voice carried: not louder, not slower, not particularly anything. Just his. Tovi had heard him say these words so many times that he could mouth them along, and sometimes he did.
"For her worth is far above jewels."
Ruti's other paw came to rest on top of his.
"The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain."
Yonah continued — most of it, not all of it; some Erev Shabbats he said the whole passage, some he said the opening and the closing and let the middle sit — and at the end he said the line Tovi most knew:
"Charm is deceitful and beauty is fleeting," Yonah said, "but a woman who fears Adonai, she shall be praised. Give her the fruit of her hands, and let her works praise her in the gates."
Ruti's eyes were a little bright. They were always a little bright at this part, and Tovi had stopped pretending he didn't notice. Their hands stayed where they were.
Then it was Ruti's turn.
She looked at Yonah for a long moment before she chose. Tovi had figured out, a year or two ago, that in that pause she was choosing. Some weeks she said Psalm One — the planted-tree psalm, the one about the man whose delight was in the Torah of Adonai. Some weeks she said Psalm One Hundred Twelve — the one about the man who feared Adonai, whose heart was steadfast, who would not fear evil tidings. Which would she pick tonight?
Ruti started Psalm One Hundred Twelve. The light-arises-in-the-darkness one. Yonah smiled a special way when she chose that one. Their paws had not moved since they joined earlier. They stayed together through the whole psalm — Ruti's quiet voice, light arises in the darkness for the upright, the words coming up out of the place where her paw held.
When she was done, Yonah lifted his paw from hers, slowly, and looked at Tovi.
For as much of his life as he had been alive, Yonah had said different words at this part of the table. Yonah would lay his paw on the top of Tovi's head, the broad calm paw with the slight rough on the pads from the wood of the workshop, and he would say, May God establish you like Ephraim and Manasseh. That was the blessing. That was the words. That was Tovi's place at the table, since before he could remember, and the paw and the words were so much one thing that Tovi had not, until lately, known they were two.
After his Bar Mitzvah, Yonah had said different words.
This evening Yonah said them again.
"How blessed are those who dwell in Your House."
Yonah's paws now rested not on the top of his head but on his shoulders.
"How blessed is the person whose strength is in You. The highways to Zion are in their heart."
Tovi had been thinking, all week, about that line. He had been turning it inside his head while he walked to the stream and back and while he ate his honey at the counter and while he lay on his mat at night. The highways in their heart. He had said it under his breath two days ago and discovered that the words felt like wood. Not like air, the way other words were. Like wood. Like something that had been cut and joined and would hold weight.
"For Adonai God is a sun and shield. Adonai gives grace and honor."
Tovi closed his eyes.
"No good thing will He withhold from those who walk uprightly."
His chest did the thing again. Something it had been doing the last three weeks.
He had not known what to call it the first time it had happened. He still did not. It was not exactly happy. It was not exactly sad.
It was something more like the moment in early spring when he stepped out of the house in the morning and his lungs took the first breath of air that had warmth in it, and the air was the same air his lungs had been taking all winter, and yet his chest knew that something had crossed over. The smell of spring but more than that — something had been renewed as if freshly sprouted inside him.
The paws were the same paws. The slight rough on the pads from the wood of the workshop was the same. The calm was the same.
The words were different.
"Adonai of Hosts — how blessed is the person who trusts in You."
Yonah's paws lifted.
Tovi opened his eyes. Across the table, Gilad was looking at him in the way Gilad looked at him sometimes — not smiling, exactly. Something steadier than smiling. Something that had been there all along and was just being looked at now.
His mother was watching him too. He could feel that without looking.
Across the table, Doda (aunt) Shira had her paw in Dod (uncle) Eitan's. They had been quiet through the blessings, the way visiting family was quiet through a host's blessings — present, witnessing, not requiring anything of themselves yet.
Then Yonah lifted his paws over the whole table.
"Adonai bless you and keep you."
"Ken y'hi ratzon," Gilad murmured. May it be His will. He said it almost to himself, the way he always said it, as if he were not so much answering as assenting to something already true.
"Adonai shine His face toward you and be gracious to you."
"Ken y'hi ratzon."
"Adonai lift up His face toward you and grant you peace."
"Ken y'hi ratzon."
Yonah lowered his paws. Those around the table breathed out.
Across the table, Gilad's eyes found Tovi's. "Our Kings name spoken over us as in days of old while spoken over us and heard by us is heard by Him too," he said, quietly. "This day of rest of His how will it serve you?” His grandfather often asked these sticky questions, the kind that weren’t sappy but stuck with you.
Ruti reached and lifted the small woven cloth off the loaves — not quickly, not slowly — and out from under the cloth rose the smell that had been waiting there all evening, and the candlelight found the faintly shining tops of the two loaves where the cloth had been.
The cup and the loaves had waited. The blessings to the King were spoken — over the cup first, the wine drunk; over the bread next, a piece broken and eaten with salt.
Then Ruti said, "Shabbat shalom," in the bright clear way she always said it, and the room said it back, and Eitan and Shira said it from across the table, and even the two small voices outside the window — Asaph and Noam, who were just passing at that moment, the way they often did — said it back from the path. Shabbat shalom. Shabbat shalom.
The Shabbat had fully come.
Tovi sat with his paws on the edge of the table. He did not eat yet. He was waiting for something inside his chest to settle, and it was settling, slowly, in its own time, the way water settled after a stone had been thrown in it. He looked at Gilad's quiet face, and at his mother breaking the bread, and at his father's hands which had built things he had walked across all his life.
The highways in their heart.
The wood of those words was still in him.
Outside, the stream that fed Cold Water Pond ran down past the house, on its way to the pond and from the pond to the next pond and to a pond beyond that one Tovi had never seen, and the stream did not know it was Erev Shabbat. The stream just kept going. But inside the house, the work of the world had stopped, and a young otter whose Bar Mitzvah was just behind him was sitting at his mother's left, and his father had laid his paws on his shoulders and said the words of a single adult over him, and the wood of those words was settling in him slowly, the way a plank settled into the place a builder had cut for it, finding the joint.
In the morning, before the sun, Tovi would wake.
He would say the words a child of this family said in the dark before opening his eyes. Modeh ani lefanecha — I give thanks before You. He would say the close of the prayer too, the part about God's faithfulness — rabah emunatecha,abundant is Your faithfulness. He had said this every morning since he could speak.
And then he would sit up on his mat and look at the small jar of honey on the counter that Gilad always set there before bed, and on the morning to come — the sap was rising in the almond grove and the air was warming and a neighbor's voice would carry across a bridge — Tovi would dip his finger in the honey and discover that he could not yet tell whether sweet had changed or whether his tongue had.
And then his grandfather would stir in the back room.
And then they would walk.
…and the story would continue…
"For we are His workmanship, created in Messiah Yeshua for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them." — Ephesians 2:10