This time the tears were from God

Yesterday I finally cut loose a lifetime of spiritual longing and pain. Of always feeling outside. Of always searching elsewhere and refusing to trust that divine intuition. Of being deliberately, defiantly, insistingly lost, always wandering, parched, in the desert of my own creation.

Last year, when I finally came here, to Israel, I was still caught in my own crossfire, not fully Yael, my given first name still on my old passport, Yael my middle name. I was not integrated yet, not whole.

This trip I arrived (!!) with a newly issued passport, Yael my first name, with entry into Israel its first stamp. The beginning of the ending of my disconnect.

It's no accident that my Hebrew birthday is the day before Erev Shavous. 4 Sivan. It's also no accident that this trip I landed just two hours before Shavous ended, and began this journey watching the sunset on the day Jews essentially became officially the Jewish Nation.

I had this fleeting image right at the beginning of reciting Ana Becho'ach yesterday of a barge piled high with all the issues I have been holding on to, the ones I've let fester inside, being set alight and drifting out to sea. My stubborn insistence of my outside-ness was the top heap on that burning barge. I remember thinking how tantrum-angry my separate self was at being no longer wanted, necessary or needed.

It was a momentary visualization and I didn't even remember it until today at the Kotel.

This morning I took the direct bus to Jerusalem and made my way to the Wailing Wall.  As I began to write my prayers to leave in the many overflowing crevices of the wall, along with so many others, it began to rain: huge, giant raindrops falling in a short, almost hot rain, a brilliantly timed downpour. Gesh'em. I tried to shield my letter from the rain, lest the ink run, and for a moment I felt like a little child afraid that God would not be able to read the smeared words and therefore not grant what I so long for. But it was perfect.  The rain blessed me and my prayers, permanently ending my parched wanderings and washing away any last bits of ash that might have fallen on me from the barge's final inferno.