'We Will Be Like Dreamers'

When I was growing up, on occasional Friday nights, my mother would have us take turns reading this poem out loud at our dinner table:

A Song of Ascents:

When the Lord brings Zion out of captivity,

we will be like dreamers.

Then our mouths will be filled with laughter,

and our tongues with cries of joy.

Then they will say among the nations,

the Lord has done great things for them.

The Lord had done great things for us

-we were happy.

Let our captivity, Lord, be a thing of the past,

like dried up springs in the Negev.

Those who sow in tears shall reap in joy.

The man who weeps as he trails his seed along will return with cries of joy,

carrying his sheaves.

(psalm 126)

There were a few odd things about this practice-

1. why read a poem at the dinner table?

2. why read a religious poem at the dinner table when we were not a religious family?

3. the book which contained it was thin and had an unmarked grey paperback cover. why didn't I ever both to look at the other pages of this pamphlet?

We had an extremely tenuous connection to Judaism in my home, due to the break from observance which happened at least 5 generations ago. This practice was one of the few things that trickled down to us, albeit it in distorted form.

For thousands of years, observant Jews have recited this poem, in Hebrew, prior to the blessing after meals (on Shabbos, holidays and special occasions- there is a different poem for weekday blessings after meals). My mother had misunderstood this beginning poem to be the entire blessing after meals. She also assumed that it should be recited during the meal, rather than after, and since we didn't know Hebrew, English it was.

The words were clunky, yet profound. I found out when I was 20 years old and studying the Jewish religion in a seminary in Jerusalem, that this was due to a translation from ancient Hebrew. This poem, completely by chance, ended up being the first Hebrew passage I tried to pronounce and read out loud to my tutor. The difficulty involved in reading and translating ancient Hebrew characters, coupled with my own shame at being a born Jew and struggling so much with an alphabet that should have been more familiar to me than my own name, caused tears to run down my face and blur my pronunciation. Months after passing this test, I was thinking about the verses, in Hebrew, and realized it was the dinner-table poem of my childhood.

It was from the Psalms, which I found out were not Christian, but Jewish, in origin, and written by King David (I didn't know he was Jewish either).

For many reasons, I feel like I am coming out of darkness and into a brighter and brighter light. As a child, I thought the happy period in the poem was reserved for other people in other lifetimes. But since then, I have seen over and over, in so many situations, how G-d has carried me on eagle's wings: from danger to safety, from isolation to connection, from density to clarity.

If I could go back to that dinner table and speak to my younger self, I would tell her- "we will be like dreamers" is a promise, to you, from G-d, the tangible, reliable force who exists for your benefit and protection. Things WILL get better and better from here.