Tzipporah and my Mother

Tzipporah, the wife of Moses (who may or may not have been the Cushite woman of whom/on behalf of whom* Miriam and Aaron complained), was a woman of decisive action. She had to be. When a life threatening illness attacked both Moses and their newborn child, Tzipporah herself had to circumcise them in order to save their lives, declaring Moses to be "A bridegroom of blood you are to me", and then, when neither he nor the child perished, she added " because of the circumcision."

I am in the mourning process for my mother, whose Hebrew name is ( it still hurts to say "was") Tzipporah: bird. Her Yiddish name, Feige, means the same thing. She and my father had many, many arguments during my childhood and after, but they loved each other passionately and always "kissed and made up." Their love was never eclipsed.

As I watched the eclipse this week, I thought of the Exodus, and the fact that we feed the birds on the Sabbath of Song, Shabbat Shira. Why? Because birds sing: but at the time of the Exodus, God caused a cloud to cover and hide the former slaves' exact position. This probably confused the birds so that they didn't know whether it was time to sleep or time to wake up! Time to sing or time to be quiet. Perhaps the miracles, all laid upon each other, involved those things I witnessed during the eclipse: strong winds, birds seeking shelter, being quiet, coolness and dark (as if hidden by a cloud), and then, as the eclipse lifted, roosters starting to crow, the heat of the sun returning,etc. The miracle was that it happened at the right time and the right place and lasted long enough for the former slaves to pass through the Reed Sea unharmed.

My prayer is that having experienced the dimmed but awesome light of the eclipse will show us the light of God within each of us, that we may come out of our own narrow places into the light.