But understanding everything — my goal as a teenager — no longer seems as necessary. What has changed is that my ardent, yearning self has been seasoned by unexpected humor. Even in times of terrible pain and uncertainty, God's hand in my life amuses me. I pray, I pray fervently for something that seems to matter above all, without which my journey will be incomplete. And God hears my prayers, answers them — sometimes directly, leaving me with the burden of gratitude, and sometimes so obliquely that I understand finally why my mother used to say to me: Kol mish'alot libech l'tovah — that the longings of my heart should be fulfilled for the good, not fulfilled simply because I asked.

I try not to do all the asking, to remember increasingly what is asked of me, to recall even in difficult hours the continuous blessings God has bestowed upon me, more than I deserve. I see Judaism as an aristocracy, and chosenness as a cloak of royalty that any human being on any path toward truth can warrant, accept and enact. Sometimes, walking down the street on an average day in an average frame of mind, I remind myself that I am the daughter of a king. Neither the daughter metaphor nor the king one perturbs me. I no longer mistake my God for my father, and do not feel that being a creation of an all-mighty God diminishes me.

As my reverence for any human being declines rather precipitously, as I recognize that even great men and women are fallible, as I no longer need to idolize flesh and blood, in precisely the same proportion has my awe of God's sovereignty been magnified. I do not want a mortal king or queen, but I find God's majesty paradoxically sustaining.

I, along with my generation, love the small, still voice. I love the tenderness of a merciful God; the aspect of shechinah; the God within who is all being. I am in debt to the theologians who have restored those facets of God to us. But when I feel my own frailty, when I see how meager is my capacity to avert the harsh decree, I find a harbor in contemplating God's immensity, in knowing my power is finite next to God's infinity.

This awareness is comforting not because I expect that the decree will be reversed in any simplistic way, but because I know that even at the moments of greatest loneliness, of crying out to God in anguish, that God is strong enough to take in all the pain, to return to me a measure of that infinite strength, to take me from the constraints of narrow places to the eternal, ever-present love in which we can dwell and which we can manifest.

As the millennium turns and the paper reports that Christians are newly interested in learning Hebrew in order to deepen their understanding of the Bible, it is time for Jews to reclaim the centrality of love in our tradition, to proclaim by the lives we lead that law is love, not its opposite.

We know that love partakes of the divine. We know that at wordless moments of love our soul expands beyond our mortal frame to reflect the One in whose image we are formed. We know it from the lives of our bodies and from the associations we have been taught — the extra soul of the Sabbath, the Song of Songs.

When I was young, my repertoire was limited. I knew the exaltation of romantic love. I knew the irreplaceable love of a great friend. But I did not understand God's unmediated love. Now, farther along my journey, I have been granted the ability to reflect God's image by my own creating of life. Motherhood has allowed me to be loved past my faults and has provided an immeasurable augmenting of my own ability to love. Motherhood has allowed me to return to my parents, return as teshuvah and return to them an inadequate portion of the love I now know they had for me all along.

When I was young I did not understand how at desperate times in our history Jewish parents would choose to die with their children rather than live on without them. At some point on the path to adulthood I saw with wonderment that so my parents felt for me and my sisters. Now, I am a mother, and I know. And know, because of it, that every living thing is a created being, brought into the world in the image of God and worthy of love, no matter how broken, how bereft. Covenantal justice, which the Jews invented in partnership with God, is the medium of that love.

What have I learned? That God is with us not only in celebration, which I always knew, but in sorrow, in the dark, solitary places where we continue to wrestle with our angel, where, alongside the harsh decree, we all live in God's generous bounty, gift after gift after gift.

Before Yaakov met his angel, he was terrified of what his brother, Esav, might do. But when his body had been marked and morning had broken, his blessing won, his name changed, then Yaakov-Yisrael could come near his brother without fear. And his brother could run to him, and embrace him, and fall upon him, and kiss him. And together they could weep.

Terror is the prelude to love. Solitude and struggle, darkness and injury. But day breaks. The sun dispels the night. The adversary does not prevail. The wound becomes the sign of aristocracy. And I, in the middle of my years, read as if for the first time past the story of the lonely night, past the confrontation in the dark, to the story of chesed, of grace and lovingkindness, in which Yaakov, the accumulator, the hoarder, can meet his brother face to face and say: Take my gifts. Take my blessing. Ki yesh li kol. I have enough. I have all.

For the giving and receiving of love is everything.

This article was adapted from a presentation at a panel on "Godwrestling: Personal Theological Journeys" at the Wexner Graduate Fellowship 1999 Summer Institute. Nessa Rapoport is the author of a novel, Preparing for Sabbath, and of A Woman's Book of Grieving.




Reprinted from The Jewish Week. Used by arrangement with the author.
Copyright © 1999 by Nessa Rapoport. Do not reproduce without author's permission. All rights reserved.