Spirit and Story Archive
Welcome to Spirit and Story, where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the contours of our contemporary spiritual journeys. Every other week you will find something new and (hopefully) engaging here!
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A Year of Special Blessings
By Janet Kirchheimer
When asked how they are feeling, how's everything, what's doing, etc., some people answer, barukh Hashem. The translation is blessed is God, but its popular usage is closer to "Thank God, everything is fine." It's not the way I usually answer this question, but I've never said barukh Hashem as much as I have this year or meant it as much. During the past year, I've watched my father battle his way back from an illness that the doctors only gave him a ten percent chance of surviving, let alone recover.
When people ask me how he is doing, I now answer barukh Hashem. Sometimes I'll add that he's doing well, or he's feeling better. Sometimes I don't feel the need to add anything. Barukh Hashem is enough because I now know every moment has the potential to receive blessing and I want to be open to it. When I say barukh Hashem, I am not just saying that my father is doing well. I am affirming that he has received a special blessing, and so have I.
To be honest, had my father not survived, I don't know if I could answer the question of how I'm doing, by saying barukh Hashem. I can't honestly say that I would feel blessing in my life, but I am trying not to take blessing or the perceived lack of it personally or to make it conditional for my relationship with God. I do not want barukh Hashem to become "knock on wood."
The root of the word barukh, means to bless, but it also means to bend and as a noun it is the knee. The image that came into my mind was the way parents bend towards their children. We could make them reach up towards us, but we bend toward them. When I answer barukh Hashem I want it to mean that I am bending toward God and that God is bending towards me. It's God's hesed, the bestowal of blessing. Another image that comes to mind is God as the parent - God bending towards his children - in the same way we bless our children on Friday night. When my parents bless me, they bend towards me and I bend into them, letting their blessing and their love envelop me.
And I have been wondering about what it means to bend and how the only thing I know about physics is that light bends around an object and that God's first utterance in the Torah is about light and perhaps that is what blessing is. We are let into God's light - we are let into that God stuff - the life force of the universe. In prayer, during the Amidah we bend at the knee during the words, "Blessed are you," and raise up when we say God's name. Perhaps during the bending and raising, we are allowed access to that God space and we physically and mentally occupy a different space. It's a little like yoga - bending and stretching ourselves into another space.
After my father's surgery and his long and intensive recovery period, I am not the same person I was before. I'm in a different space, and I'm trying to see things differently as well. I'm trying to bend more, to be more open, to bend more towards that God space. I'm trying to let God more into my life by allowing myself to enter a different space, a space where I can bend and stretch. Even if saying barukh Hashem only lasts a moment, I've changed my space just a little bit and for now that's okay.
In Parashat Lech Lacha, God says he will bless those who bless us. The Bible uses the word barukh both for what people can do and what God will do. We have access to bless others in the same way God does. This is God's hesed to us, allowing us the ability to bless in the same way he does. God has given us an amazing gift, and when someone blesses us, be it our parents, friends, loved ones, perhaps the blessing is that they want us to be able to tap into that ability.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said "Just to be is a blessing, Just to Live is Holy". To me, this means that if my father had just survived, it would have been a blessing, but the fact that he was able to recover and resume his life is holy. The blessing is the stage setting - the opportunity, and the "living", the act of truly living a life, is what's holy.
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