O the Kinneret, which is the lake to be found under the Sea of Galilee…the Mediterranean Nile, the Mississippian Jordan, the Sambatyon, the Dead Sea, the Red Sea of Reeds — there is no greater justification of the Fall than our naming of water. All our rivers, streams, lakes, and even the seven oceans, too, are but a oneness of an ocean and God. There is no better evidence of our corruption than our calling of water by name, no better argument for the sundering of the covenant, the flooding of creation again. And then there’s the weather, the question of what to call that, also, of how to give name to a flux, not to instability but to its opposite, stability, the greatest — which is a station founded upon motion, fundament on wandering, on being everywhere at once and so nowhere, forever. How to call a cloud, a nesting of cloud, clouds, a sky, a giant rumbling then a flash bound as one. Though we have the name Storm, we are still destroyed, foundered upon the world we call rock. No invocation will save us. A sky, get inside; stay there and stay honest. Rage all you want with wind, with light and with wetness, there’s no saint to invoke, there’ll be no salvation. We call it a crow’s nest, though it’s crowless; that bird is off mating with the doves in a land not so cursed. Its perch eclipses the moon — and the world finally, opens. An immense downpour at middlenight, suffusions of lightning like daylight, and the ships shakes, rocks, is thunderously rolled to a sink, hits near a glacier then gets turned around, hits another then is turned round again, swirled as if at bottom’s a drain or a flush — prodded then whirled in a hurling, thrown up then dashed back down to the white of an ever new wave, again. A Shabbos midnight of rainsnow, of snowhail, howling around the hull’s nidified mute…and then settling with it — gradually locking the ship, stilling it in ice made. Immovable. Through the night as the temperature drops, even into the next day — to be captive to the calling above, its lash at the foremast, its whip to the mizzen. Then, toward evening of the end of Shabbos, which reigns upon sea as it reigns upon land, which reigns in the air, too, and then everywhere else there be God, there’s a last bolt of lightning: it pierces the sky, strikes down to smash the ice up ahead, splits the ocean entire…sundering the horizons one darker, one lighter, while the middle melts away into grays — into soon, a steady, steadying pure, the moving water moving, again. And one tribe, and only one tribe, may pass.
