In the weekday morning service there is a section traditionally called Birkhot HaShahar, the Morning Blessings. In the prayerbook of one Reform congregation I know, this section has been renamed Ha Nisim B'Kol Yom which that community translates as "the miracles of everyday life." While I certainly understand and appreciate the more widely-used traditional name for these blessings I have loved thinking about, and teaching about, this particularly progressive interpretation as it seems much more accessible to me.
Among its fifteen blessings the traditional liturgy thanks God for community, freedom, strength, glory, vigor, guidance, and self-identity. While lofty, all of them, I will be honest and tell you I don't spend a lot of time on a daily basis even considering much less reflecting on my own vigor, except maybe right before Hebrew class on Monday and Wednesday nights when I've found a cappucino can be very helpful for keeping my energy up. So instead of formulaic morning repetitions expressing gratitude for ineffable things like "glory", it seems more real to me to observe and appreciate the miracles of everyday life...like the other day at the bakery when in the change I received for two potato pastries and the aforementioned cappucino I got back the rare and beautiful 2-shekel coin with its image of pomegranates--kind of like getting a two-dollar bill. Crowning Israel, in all her constant turmoil, with glory as the Birkhot HaShahar praises is a powerful thing quite worthy of thanks, and maybe this just betrays my simple-mindedness at times but seeing this new piece of Israeli life that I had never known existed in the form of a 2-shekel coin felt miraculous to me.
What's the connection? Many people who read this blog send me email, telling me that they enjoy my stories or my reflections, long and rambling as they can be. I love to tell stories and they have even earned a special name over time from someone who first got to know me just by reading them: "Sarah soliloquies" they have been called, in half-joking reference to the fact that they can be both piercingly descriptive in their detail and mind-numbingly arduous in length. So today instead of stories I am taking the suggestion that has been offered recently via email by those who read my soliloquies and for once I am not writing about the morning blessings of my life here: the community of my funky global household, the freedom I have as an American to travel unquestioned wherever I want to go in this troubled land, or the self-identity I have examined and developed during my time here...all recent blog topics. I posted some photos last night, and when I get home from school today will post some more, of the miracles of my everyday life in Jerusalem: what our street looks like, how I know which house is mine when I come home in the dark at night, how I dry my constant loads of laundry. Baruch Ata Adonai Eloheinu Melech HaOlam, blessed are you our God, ruler of the universe who gives us the miracles of everyday life.
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