By Rabbi Miriam Berger, Director/Founder WellspringUK a centre of wellbeing with the ritual of mikveh at its heart

 
Emerging from the Depths to Begin Again

There were many moments that brought me to tears as footage emerged of the hostages being released, but a father’s desperate embrace of his son as he recited the shechechiyanu summed up everything for me.

All the desperation, the hopes and prayers of the previous two years were encapsulated in that hug.

The desperate need that those families had been holding for so long to dampen down the unthinkable worst-case scenario that must have kept trying to overwhelm them, the despair of the possibility that they would never see their son again, only made this moment feel miraculous in the literal sense when the time finally came.

The blessing of the shechechiyanu was truly at its essence, thanking God for bringing them to a time that they feared they would not see. For the hostages it was a physical as well as a metaphorical reemergence from darkness to light.

It’s impossible not to see Parashat Noach through this lens this year. The story of Noah emerging from the ark with his family and all the living creatures to a world forever changed. You can imagine them blinking as they “remove the cover” from the ark and see dry land after all this time (Genesis 8:13). Surveying the devastation, starting to comprehend the extent to what’s happened while they were locked away.

On the one hand the flood waters act as their Mikveh. Transitioning them from one state of being to the next. The ark dives deep leaving behind them a world of evil, the only life they’ve known. Time on the ark established a new behavioural norm where everyone had to care for each other to ensure survival and take their responsibility over the care of the animals. Then finally they can look to the future with a renewed sense of responsibility, this time to populate a new world, to start a new life within a new context.

For us, we live our lives through events where we too need our own personal waters. Not flooding the world as we know it but making a separation between life as it was and life as it will be. We need to be allowed to reemerge in order to begin again.

So many of the hostages were released into a devastating reality that their barbaric captivity had somehow managed to protect them from. Released not into the world they had been plucked from but a world that had subsequently taken spouses and partners, parents and children, friends and whole swathes of their community. And yet they emerged into life. Life they thought they might never see again.

Noah teaches us an even more important lesson. When people emerge from their own flood waters, they need time to heal, to be loved, cared for and supported back into this new chapter. We are immediately told that Noah turns to wine, perhaps to numb the survivor’s guilt or because the responsibility of what lies ahead, when he has already endured so much, feels more than he can cope with. Perhaps Noah is the one who teaches us about the awful reality of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). The numbing drink, the sleep, the inappropriate behaviour, all ways of escaping the grim challenges of this new beginning.

The beautiful moment of the dad’s shechechiyanu blessing is mirrored in Noah. Emerging from the ark he makes a sacrifice and prays.

When we are ready to go from darkness to light, from the pain which keeps us in captivity to lightening our load, from feeling like the flood waters are crashing over us to reemerging to begin again, we take our moment of ritual before the healing starts so that we can start to live with the humble gratitude of being brought to this moment, for the blessing of life.

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