Monday, September 22, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Furrow
Thus says Cyrus, king of Persia:
‘All the kingdoms of the earth
the LORD, the God of heaven, has given to me,
and he has also charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem,
which is in Judah.
Therefore, whoever among you belongs to any part of his people,
let him go up, and may his God be with him!
Thus ends the exile in Babylon announced by God to Jeremiah seventy years earlier. The Persians conquered and absorbed the Babylonian empire, and King Cyrus, the conqueror, wanted his Hebrew exiles to return to their country and pray for him, because he himself was not a follower of the One God Yahweh.
When the LORD brought back the captives of Zion,
we were like men dreaming.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with rejoicing.
Just now I was writing and found this quote from a book I like called For the Time Being by Annie Dillard. She says things I want to say but get tied up in words. She finds the words, at least sometimes. Here is what she wrote:
You cannot mend the chromosome, quell the earthquake, or stanch the flood. You cannot atone for dead tyrants’ murders, and you alone cannot stop living tyrants.
As Martin Buber saw it—writing at his best near the turn of the last century—the world of ordinary days “affords” us that precise association with God that redeems both us and our speck of world. God entrusts and allots to everyone an area to redeem: this creased and feeble life, “the world in which you live, just as it is and not otherwise.”
“It is given to men to lift up the fallen and to free the imprisoned. Not merely to wait, not merely to look on! Man is able to work for the redemption of the world.”
The work is not yours to finish, Rabbi Tarfon said, but neither are you free to take no part in it.
“In our hands, the hands of all of us, the world and life”—our world, our life—“are placed like a Host, ready to be charged with the divine influence.”
I saw to the south a man walking. He was breaking ground in perfect silence. He wore a harness and pulled a plow. His feet trod his figure’s blue shadow, and the plow cut a long blue shadow in the field. He turned back as if to check the furrow, or as if he heard a call.
Again I saw another man on the plain to the north. This man walked slowly with a spade, and turned the green ground under.
Then before me in the near distance I saw the earth itself walking, the earth walking dark and aerated as it always does in every season, peeling the light back: The earth was plowing the men under, and the spade, and the plow.
No one sees us go under. No one sees generations churn, or civilizations. The green fields grow up forgetting. Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don’t fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under.
While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat’s stem slits the crest of the present. – pp. 154-156
God insisted that the Hebrews remain walking in the desert between Egypt and Canaan for forty years, a sort of purification time before they entered the Promised Land. Hundreds of years pass. Now the deportation to Babylon ends after seventy years – another opportunity for these chosen people to renew their faith in Yahweh, the One who chose them.
Although they go forth weeping,
carrying the seed to be sown,
They shall come back rejoicing,
Bringing in the sheaves.
But who can see past their own nose? “No one sees generations churn, or civilizations.” As we look through Ezra’s eyes as best we can, the limits of our own time-bound twenty-first century vision distort the past and obscure the future.
But we can breathe, and breathe again, and “while we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass.” We follow this furrow, as it appears and disappears in the wind, and reappears once more. “The green fields grow up forgetting,” but we trust our Pathfinder one step at a time.
No one who lights a lamp conceals it with a vessel
or sets it under a bed;
rather, he places it on a lampstand
so that those who enter may see the light.
For there is nothing hidden that will not become visible,
and nothing secret that will not be known and come to light.
(Ezra 1, Psalm 126, Matthew 5, Luke 8)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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