I’m in Jerusalem, and I need some water.
It’s late afternoon, the sun gently glows as it prepares for dusk, lots of people milling around the Mamilla area.
As I head to the grocery store (run by the same Arab man I’ve known for 20 years), I’m thinking only of quenching my thirst.
But I’m distracted because I’ve had this lifelong habit of reading everything.
Put words in front of me—an ad for Dior, an announcement of the Messiah, a warning about slippery stairs—and I’ll read them.
The words I see now are on the back of a white t-shirt worn by a cool-looking guy in sandals walking his dog.
“I Live Now.”
The lettering is slap-dash, as if a kid had scribbled it in a few seconds. This is no slick branding campaign from the Gap.
The phrase is awkward, almost too simple.
I understand “live for the moment,” but “I live now”?
Of course you live now. We all live now.
Still, I can’t get these awkward words out of my head.
At night, at a Shabbat dinner in the Old City, the words find me.
We’re with a large, eclectic group, with visitors from around the world mixed in with IDF soldiers.
Before dinner, the hostess invites a group of female soldiers in uniform to join her for candle lighting.
She’s dressed in all white. Her eyes meditate. The words flow out of her mouth. Elevation. Holiness. Transcendence.
What is most moving is the scene itself— a group of armed female soldiers in a semi-circle facing an army of beautifully lit candles listening to a woman share her Shabbat wisdom with the echoes of our biblical Temple not far away.
It’s easy to get lost in the moment, and my friend and I do.
Then the moment shifts.
One of the soldiers moves closer to the candles and speaks to the hostess about a close friend and fellow soldier who was killed a few days earlier.
We’re transported to another place and time— to a tragedy in a war that seems far away.
I can only imagine how many Israelis have been transported to such moments since October 7—someone, somewhere, reflecting on the loss of a cherished soul.
The soldier chokes up as she talks about her friend.
She is crying about losing a friend in the past, and how much she’ll miss that friend in the future.
And yet, right now, she is neither in the past nor in the future– she is in the here and now energy of Shabbat.
Sensing this, the hostess suggests we dedicate our Shabbat gathering to the fallen soldier. A feeling of peace arrives to perfume the air, as if emanating from the glow of the candles. We’re back in the moment. We’re back in Shabbat, bringing the fallen soldier with us.
Later that night, I start to understand the “I live now” phrase on the t-shirt.
We can grieve the past, we can feel anxiety about the future, but “now” and “life” are really all we have.
Israelis seem to have a special affinity for that electric energy of the here and now. Maybe that is how the country has made it this far— millions and millions of “What do we do now?”
What do we create? What do we fight? What do we sing? What do we pray for?
Shabbat, a time when creation stops, ironically may be the ultimate messenger of now. By liberating us to feel each moment, it gives us the now in all its glory.
Yes, we can’t live without the memories of our past and the dreams of our future. But as we go through our daily lives, whether we are poets or soldiers, Shabbat reminds us that in the end, we have only life, we have only now.
That cool guy with the “I live now” t-shirt didn’t just choose life. He chose a view of life when we are aware every minute of the miracle of life itself.
Maybe that is what I was thirsting for.
