A Prayer for Jerusalem, Born of the Deep

God of the beating heart of Jerusalem,
Source of her breath and being,
You who formed her hills from the ancient sea,
Who set her foundations in the bones of the earliest life,
Who carved her valleys with the memory of water—
I call to You now.

For before there were stones, there was sea,
Before there were walls, there were waves, before there were Angels there were Mermaids.
Before there were battlements, there was only the deep.

Jerusalem rose from the waters You gave and withdrew, and still that sea remains, hidden in her bones.
In the limestone that once cradled shells,
in the fossils pressed into desert rock,
in the hush before the rain when the air tastes of salt.

The tides abide.

God of the depths and the heights,
God of the wellspring and the wilderness,
Help us remember:
Jerusalem was first a place of gathering—
Not of dividing.
A place where waters mingled—
Not where blood was spilled.
A place where the great currents of the deep
Moved together in harmony,
As we, too, must learn to be carried and moved.

For even now, the sea is in us.
It is in the thrum of the market,
In the rise and fall of voices in the shuk,
In the shifting tide of feet on stone,
In the rhythm of prayer, of argument, of song.
It is in the spice merchant measuring zaatar and rose petals,
The weaver tying knots into fabric,
The map seller tracing his finger along the roads that have carried generations home,
for here we are.

God of the first waters,
God of the rivers that remember their way back to the sea,
Gather us together as You once gathered the depths.
Let us meet as the currents meet,
not in conquest,
but in the knowing that we are of the same source.

Infinite You.

For we are the children of this city’s dust and water,
of its sorrow and its splendor,
of its history and its hope.
We are the shopkeeper handing warm bread to the hungry,
the artist who gathers shattered glass and makes it whole again with molten gold,
the teacher who helps the lost child find the thread of meaning in the words.

We are the mother pressing her palm to the Western Wall,
And the father waiting at the bus stop, looking for his son’s face.

We are the student on the train,
reading scripture beside the soldier who dozes,
beside the grandmother who hums an old song, beside the dreamer who has journeyed a lifetime just to be in this place.

God of the deep past,
God of the future ever flowing,
Teach us to remember what came before
So we do not drown in what we have built.
Remind us that the walls are not what make Jerusalem—
It is the water that still moves beneath them,
It is the people who carry her story,
It is You, the beating heart of this city,
Still pulsing beneath our feet.

Let us listen through our seashells ears.
Let us hear the hidden waves,
The echo of the sea within the stone,
And within each other.
And let that be what draws us together—
Not fear, not fire, not war,
But the knowledge that once,
Before all this,
We were all part of the same sea.

And if we listen, if we look,
Perhaps we will remember how to move as one again, together.

Amen.

A later version of this appears in Az Nashir: Between Silence and Song

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