Israelis sometimes make fun of Americans for being excessively polite. We say please and thank you constantly. We soften requests. We circle around what we actually mean because we do not want to offend anyone. Israelis, famously, are not always quite so delicate.
And yet there is another side to the way people speak here that I have come to love. Israeli conversation can be extraordinarily full of blessings. As I write this sitting in a cafe, I can hear snippets of phone calls around me. Men who sound as though they are discussing plumbing repairs, deliveries, or business are wishing each other health, a good year, and only good things. Someone can spend five minutes arguing over a price and then finish with, “May you hear only good news. Okay, I’ll see you at four to fix the toilet.” There is a certain flowery quality to it that still catches my American ear.
My fourth-grade son’s teacher sent a message like that to the parents after meeting us at the beginning of the school year. She wrote how happy she was to finally meet the “trees” standing behind the “fruits” in her classroom. We, the parents, were the trees. Our children were the fruits she had already begun to know. She described them as sweet, cared for, and deeply invested in, and wrote that, with God’s help, we would continue to see them grow and flourish.
Then, between reminders about missing school supplies, signed forms, health declarations, and the very serious warning not to send peanuts to school, she quoted Psalms:
I know this verse well. It is part of Psalm 126, Shir Hama’alot, which we sing before Birkat Hamazon on Shabbat and holidays. Birkat Hamazon is the series of blessings traditionally recited after eating a meal with bread. I have probably sung it hundreds, maybe thousands, of times. I had also always understood it in a fairly straightforward way. You work hard. Sometimes raising children is difficult. Sometimes teaching is difficult. You invest, you struggle, and eventually you get to see the fruits of that labor. It is a lovely idea.
But when I looked more closely at the traditional commentaries, I found something less sentimental and, to me, much more interesting. Radak connects the verse to the line immediately before it: “Restore our fortunes, O God, like streams in the Negev.” The image is of a farmer standing in dry land with seed in his hands. The seed itself is valuable. He could keep it. He could eat it. Instead, he puts something precious into dry earth without knowing whether the rain will come.
That is the source of the tears. Not simply because farming is hard. Not because struggle is noble. He is giving up something valuable and placing it into circumstances he cannot control.
There is so much of parenting in that image. We pour enormous amounts into our children: our time, our values, our expectations, our mistakes, our prayers. We send them to teachers. We send them into friendships. We try to teach them how to behave when we are not there to correct them. And at some point, we discover that investment is not the same thing as control. The farmer can sow carefully. He cannot command the rain.
There is another reason this interpretation feels particularly fitting. Psalm 126 is not primarily a psalm about parenting or education. It is a psalm about returning to Zion. It begins, “When God restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like dreamers.” And then, only a few verses later: “Restore our fortunes, O God.” We have returned. Please bring us back. Both statements exist in the same psalm.
That feels familiar to anyone living in Israel. There are moments when I am acutely aware that my children are living inside something generations of Jews could only imagine. They speak Hebrew. They go to Jewish schools in the Land of Israel. Their teacher can quote Psalms in the class WhatsApp group and assume that the words belong there. At the same time, anyone living here knows that arrival is not the same thing as completion. There is still uncertainty. There is still grief. There is still so much that remains outside our control.
Maybe that is why I hear the verse differently now. The promise is not that if we work hard enough, everything will turn out exactly as we hoped. The farmer is not given that kind of certainty. He is asked to sow anyway, to take what is precious and entrust it to a future he cannot fully control.
Which, come to think of it, is not a bad description of parenting. Or of living in Israel. Or, apparently, of fourth grade.
