Help me

Help me.

When all this is over. If I’m still here.

Help me over my fears, my yearning, my memories, the pain of loss.

But mostly,

Help me to remember, when all this is over, what I’m feeling right now, the last thing I could have expected:

Alive. Reborn. Amazed by the everyday.

This is my confession:

I never understood why prayers began You Are Blessed.

Until now.

A little while ago, the world I lived in all of my life, the world I knew so well, the world I was so very certain of, came to an end. Gone for good.

Now, outside this window, is a new world. Fearsome and gorgeous. Yet to be explored. Not one of us can claim to have even begun to know it.

Baruch Ata Adonai, Creator of Worlds.

Thank you for letting the young live through this.

May they go on to save Your Creation.

Tel Aviv's Yarkon Park

Tel Aviv's Yarkon ParkMeged Gozani

When all this is over, if I’m still here, help me to remember who I am. That I am not my tribe, my age, my color, my denomination, my station, my nation, my job.

Help me to remember who I am.

I am a member of a nuclear family called the human race.

When this is all over, if I’m still here, a handshake will never feel the same again.

Nor an embrace. And certainly, not a kiss.

Now, outside this window, nature has begun to become nature again. May it heal from this.

May we as well. All of us.

May we know that we are all of us, members of a nuclear family called nature.

Baruch Ata Adonai, Creator of worlds, and of our better nature,

Save us.

And, in return, when all this is over, if we’re still here, should You grant us a second chance, may we remember to bless You by doing what we so tragically failed to do for You in that world we thought we knew so well:

To save the world. As if it were ours.

(Bradley Burston, Haaretz: Three prayers, III)