The Wave and the Cry: A Jewish Tale of Crisis and Response

Inspired by, and dedicated to, my teacher Dr. Melila Hellner-Eshed. See her teaching, Spiritual Sustenance in a Time of Crisis, here.

It was a glorious day on the water. The sea was filled with sailboats and kayaks and motorboats. People swimming at the beach. A child shuttled back and forth from his sandcastle to the water’s edge with a toy boat.

An elderly woman was taking a walk along the shore. She lifted her gaze to the horizon, but something didn’t look right. The edge of the sea looked as if it was curling up.

A mile offshore, the captain of a fishing vessel also saw it. It looked like white fire was burning on the edge of the sea.[1] By the time he realized that a giant wave was coming, it was too late. He put out a mayday call. And then the sailor’s ship was engulfed.

The wave was so high that everyone disagreed about how tall it was. Some said 100 feet, others said 100 stories. It was impossible to tell. Everyone who saw the wave believed in their heart they were about to die.

In the shadow of the giant wave, parents grabbed their children. Lovers clung to each other. Sailors and kayakers prepared to be tossed into the sea.

The wave was quick. It swallowed everything in its path. Under the water, the child with the toy boat felt weeds tangling around his head,[2] like they were trying to choke him. Under the water, the elderly woman was tossed about, over and over, like clothes in a washing machine.

Somehow, there were survivors. One by one, they broke through to the surface, gasping for air. Rori, the elderly woman, was coughing up water. Someone was yelling at her. Rori thought to herself, ‘How am I alive? I can’t even swim!’

The voice came again. “Lean back!” Rori leaned back and looked up. A man was trying to buckle a lifejacket around her. He clipped the strap. Rori bobbed in the water. “I’ll come back later to check on you!” the man called out as he sailed away.

Rori looked around. She saw a kayak full of water. Over there was an ice chest. A few yards away was a wooden plank, probably from a boat, and she decided to make her way toward it.

An hour later, the sailor came back. It was a small boat with a single sail, but the sight of it was exhilarating. He had a child with him. The sailor placed the child in the submerged kayak. “Stay in this kayak, and stay with this woman,” he instructed.

Rori saw the fear in the child’s eyes. So she mustered some courage. “I’m Rori. It looks like this nice man has saved both of us.” The child looked at her and cried.

The sailor looked at Rori. “There are two hours left before sunset. I promise I will return by then.” Then he sailed away, a second time.

Rori and the child, now alone together, distracted themselves with a game of searching for floating objects. ‘What do you think that one is?’ Rori would ask. The child would guess, then Rori would guess. And they would make their way over to the object to see what it was.

As Rori floated on the plank, and the child rested in the kayak, she remembered a story she had learned when she was a child. “There was an ancient rabbi whose ship wrecked on the open sea. I think it was Rabbi Akiva. He was tossed into the open sea, but he survived.”

The child asked, “How did he survive?”

“A plank from the boat floated by. He grabbed it, and to every wave that approached, he nodded his head. Eventually, he washed up on shore.’”[3]

The child said, “so then I will hang on to my wet kayak and I will nod to every wave.”

The Sailor returned as he had promised, this time with a third survivor. Tied to the back of the boat was a floating junkyard.

Rori looked at the survivor and saw that she was pregnant. Probably in her third trimester. When the boat was close enough, she called out, “I’m Rori. And this is Jonah.”

The pregnant survivor called out, “Hi…I’m Hannah. We found a toy boat for the child.”

Together, the four of them, the elderly Rori wearing her lifejacket, the young Jonah, pregnant Hannah and the Sailor, assembled a makeshift raft.

When the sun started to set, Hannah asked the Sailor, “Which way is the shore? How far did we get pushed out?”

The Sailor was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Based on the sunset, the shore should be in that direction. But I haven’t seen any sign of land since the wave came.”

The first night was interminable. Jonah was afraid of monsters in the sea. Rori and Hannah were worried about rolling off the raft while they slept. But there was one part of that night they would never forget. The stars. Other than the Sailor, they had never in their life seen so many stars. As she tried to make sense of what had happened, Rori thought, “Why did it take a tragedy like this for me to notice the beauty of these stars?”[4]

Early the next morning, Jonah saw a blinking light in the distance. After a short discussion, they decided to investigate it. Using the sailboat as a tugboat to carry their raft, they headed toward the blinking light. Then the Sailor noticed something odd. The light wasn’t bobbing up and down like it should if it were on a floating buoy. When they arrived at the blinking light, they found a thin metal tower, bent and leaning, with the light on top.

The Sailor’s eyes followed the line of the tower down into the deep. “Oh God,” the Sailor whispered to himself. He suddenly realized why they couldn’t see the shore.

“What?!” Hannah asked.

“That’s an aviation warning light. It’s a blinking light they put on towers to keep airplanes from hitting very tall objects. Yesterday, that tower was on dry land. The reason we can’t see the shore…is because there is no shore anymore. Somehow all of the dry land is now hundreds of feet directly below us.”

As Hannah, Rori, Jonah and the Sailor peered down into the depths of the sea, their spirits sank.

After a week, a rhythm emerged. They learned to catch fish for food and found vessels to collect rainwater to drink. They built up their raft.

Early one morning, Jonah awoke just before dawn. Something deep in the water was glowing. He felt a sense of wonder, and a sense of dread, as he stared at the light. Actually, he noticed, there were two lights close together. He tried to show Rori, but by the time she woke up, the lights were gone.

Later that afternoon, the sailor went on his daily search for survivors and floating resources. When he returned, his boat was moving faster than usual. Jonah noticed the sailor was holding his fishing rod tightly. The boat was being pulled by something massive on the end of the fishing line.

Suddenly the surface of the water was very turbulent and two giant cones pierced the water’s surface. When the cones were twenty feet high, a mass the size of a small house emerged.

Rori grabbed Jonah’s hand. Jonah yelled out, with a voice of awe and wonder, it’s…a giant sea monster!

The sea monster spoke. “I am not a sea monster. I am a sea-goat. My name is Ilyam. We provide food for the Leviathan.”[5]

Jonah started at the sea-goat. “Your eyes — those were your eyes I saw glowing in the deep this morning. Are you going to eat us?”

The sea-goat shook its giant head.

“That’s good. They why are you here?” Jonah asked.

The sea-goat spoke again. “I have always been here. Your maps will not work here. You will need new wisdom and new directions. Come, read my horns.”

The sea goat lowered its head and came close to the raft. Jonah sensed that Ilyam wanted him to jump onto his head, so he jumped. The sea-goat raised his head out of the water, with Jonah on top.

Jonah said, “There is something engraved on the horns. He brushed off the seaweed and some barnacles. This one says, The cry that protects.” Jonah carefully made his way over to the other horn. “And this one says, Cracks are openings.”

Ilyam the sea-goat lowered his head so that Jonah could return to the raft. Hannah turned to Rori. “What does that mean? The cry that protects….Cracks are openings?”

Rori watched the turbulent water turn calm again as the sea-goat descended into the deep.

A month went by. It was a quiet morning on the raft. Hannah spoke. “I think I’m going crazy.”

The Sailor replied, “We’re all going crazy.”

Hannah continued. “I’m angry. I’m sad. I’m exhausted. I feel trapped. And I’m scared.”

The Sailor thought he could listen for a while, so he decided to start with the first one, “What are you angry about?”

“I’m angry that my whole life is gone. I’m angry that all those people died.”

“What are you sad about?” inquired the Sailor.

“I miss my friends. I miss…the little things. I miss taking a walk in the morning. I miss walking! There’s no place to walk on this raft! The only thing we can do to move around is swim! I used to love swimming, but now…I’m not a fish!”

The Sailor thought to himself, ‘We’ve eaten so much fish that we might actually be becoming fish.’ But he decided to keep the comment to himself.

“What are you scared about?” he asked Hannah.

Hannah went quiet for a moment. “I’m scared about how I am going to care for this baby on this ramshackle raft. And I’m scared about…what will happen if, if… I can’t breastfeed?” Tears started running down Hannah’s face. “Do you see a hospital? There’s no doctors here. I’m scared that something bad is going to happen during delivery and there will be no one who knows what to do.”

Rori sat down next to Hannah. “Hannah.” she said softly. “Ki chayot henah.” It’s one of my favorite verses in the bible. It’s from the Exodus story. Pharoah told the midwives to kill all the boys delivered to Hebrew women. But the midwives couldn’t do it. They let the babies live. When Pharoah realized what was happening, he summoned the midwives and accused them: ‘Why are you letting the boys live?’ Those midwives were smart. They told him: ‘ki chayot henah’ — the Hebrew mothers are vigorous. They give birth to their babies before we can even arrive.’[6] Hannah, you are like those vigorous Hebrew mothers. Young mothers have been giving birth to their babies for thousands of years without doctors or hospitals.”

Hannah turned to Rori. “Yes, but many of those babies and their mothers died.”

Rori looked into Hannah’s eyes. “That’ true, but it wasn’t just the Hebrew mothers who were vigorous. Those midwives were vigorous too, for standing up to Pharoah. We will all be your midwives. Me, the Sailor, and Jonah. We will be ready to help you deliver your baby.”

Two months later, the time came for Hannah’s baby to be born. Rori, Jonah, and the Sailor were by her side. They had done everything they could to prepare. But there was one thing they were not prepared for, and that was Hannah’s cry. As she labored, Hannah’s cry went out like the sound of the shofar. Her cry vibrated across the surface of the sea in every direction. Her cry rose to the heavens. Her cry sunk to the deep. And just when she had nothing left to give, a smaller cry was heard, emerging from her exhausted womb. Rori caught the tiny bundle of new life. The Sailor massaged his aching hand, bruised from Hannah’s grip. When he looked out at the horizon, he saw dry land.

Originally told to the community gathered for Kol Nidre at the Jewish Center of Princeton, September 28, 2020.

[1] Rabbah bar Bar Hanah: Seafarers told me, the wave capable of sinking a ship looks as though a white fringe of fire is at its crest. B. Bava Batra 73a

[2] Jonah 2:4

[3] B. Yevamot 121a.

[4] I fell to my knees to gather / shards of a horizon shattered to bits. / Only then did I lift my head / to inhale into the depths of my heart / the entire canopy of the stars. Yehezkel Rahamim, “What Might Come After Storm and Dissolution”.

[5] BB 74a: R. Safra taught: Once, while traveling on a ship, we saw a fish that raised its head out of the sea. It had horns on which was engraved: “I, one of the lesser creatures of the sea, am 300 parasangs long, and yet I can fit into the Levithan’s mouth.” R. Ashi said: this fish was a sea-goat. Ilyam = (איל-ים)

[6] Exodus 1:19. For an example of how distress is described as not having enough strength to make it through the moment of childbirth, see Isaiah 37:7.