Time to dive….

Last night was another one of those waking at 3 a.m., from a nightmare, shaking in fear, nights. In this nightmare I was witnessing the attempted annihilation of our people….as I have in too many dreams since the inception of this war. Just as we have all witnessed hourly on our screens.

I do not need to dream about it when I see it daily. And yet it is in my dreams, unbuffered by daylight, where the direness of our situation most clearly presents itself. Perhaps it is my anxiety exaggerating the danger. But I sense it is something more than mere anxious dream rambling. The fact is we are fighting against several entities that are set upon our annihilation. This is not an anxious exaggeration. How we best process that horrific truth is the task at hand. A sobering task indeed….

In my dream I descend to a deep place of reckoning; like the depths of an ocean. From there I mustered a prayer that is a category all its own. I’ll call it ‘mimaamakim’ ~ depth prayer. It is a tenor of prayer that I have touched only a handful of times in my life. Like the time I was swimming in the Mediterranean and pulled out by a tide I realized I may not be strong enough to survive.

The prayer one prays when facing death is its own species entirely. Perhaps you have tasted it too….this Jacques-Cousteau-of-prayer, this Challenger Deep of prayer.

We are countless fathoms deep in this place. It is a very hard to inhabit terrain. And yet, the Jewish people are swimming at this nautical depth right now. We are counting our mounting dead; reckoning with the trauma to our children; attending funerals; caring for evacuees. This descent is not for the faint of heart. We are drenched from it.

If you are part of Am Yisrael then you know exactly the mimaamakim I am talking about. If you are not in deep waters right now you may want to ask yourself why. What is keeping you shallow as our people are fighting for their very existence?

Please excuse my pushiness, but this is my loving nudge for you to dive.