The Sea and the Endless Waves

By Joseph Berger

During the time of corona and since, we in our part of Netanya have been privileged to have the sea right beside us, and to be able to walk on a tayelet or on the beach itself, and I have done that for many months.

We know that water, especially the great oceans, cover a significant part of the surface of our planet earth. The estimate is about 71%. Much of that is one big ocean that we conveniently divide into different sections such as Pacific, Atlantic, etc, but is actually continuous, and it is this water that may be the essential reason why there is life on this planet and not on any other, and as religious Jews we can certainly thank Hashem and say this is Hashem’s special blessing to us.

Walking along the beach next to the sea inevitably makes a person aware of the constant rhythm of the sea. Even someone caught up in thoughts about issues in their lives, hears and sees the waves that keep rolling in, at times more strongly, crashing against stone walls that have been set up to protect against erosion.

What a person walking along the beach must surely be aware of, some of the time, is how this sea was here long before me, and will still be here long after me. Whether in fifty years time Netanya will be a city of ten million people, or whether Netanya will have become a suburban part of the spread of the Greater Tel Aviv area, the sea will still be here.

Many North Americans who have visited the Grand Canyon in Colorado agree that it is probably the most beautiful and spectacular of Hashem’s creations here on earth. (Brits, South Africans, who haven’t seen it, should.) But if you listen to or read about some of the explanations about its formation, and if you are standing at the top and look down to the path of the Colorado river, you can understand why people who study Geology and Geography, and Engineers who study the effects of different pressures that lead to erosion, will mostly suggest that the erosion caused by water carved out

these fissures, these spaces in the earth that we call canyons.

You don’t even have to go as far away as Colorado to see such beauty. Drive past Beersheva in Southern Israel, and you will see there canyons or craters, and especially in the smaller ones you can see how a river carved a path over a long period of time. In the Negev it is between stretches of dry sand. But in the North of Israel, these paths are usually filled with some water and are therefore called םילחנ.

The Rosh Kollel of the Kollel Avereichim in Toronto, a talmid chacham, highly respected as the ultimate authority on halacha in that city, is a firm fundamentalist. The world was created 5781 years ago, no debate, no discussion.

There is another rabbi, solidly orthodox, but who also had the benefit of secular education in areas of science related to zoology and anthropology. He has been the recipient of vehement critical attacks from the Rosh Kollel. There have been many debates over the years between fundamentalists committed to the belief in the short age of the earth—or is it of human life, as we know it?—and other very religious Jews with secular education, who seek understandings that will make comprehensible the disparities between scientific perspectives and the fundamentalist view.

The debate may never be resolved, essentially because no-one was present at The Creation, no-one filmed a video of our earliest ancestors. We rely on our faith to accept that there are some things we shall never understand. In the meantime the waves of the sea keep crashing on the shore and against the stones, as they have done for thousands of years before us, and will continue to do so for millenia after us.n

Dr Joseph Berger is a Psychiatrist who made Aliyah two years ago. He has published two books on Psychiatric topics, the second “Life’s Lessons: How We Cope With Life’s Challenges” (Amazon. 2018) was based upon his experiences with his patients during more than forty years practice. More recently he has been writing short stories, his first collection titled “Twenty Seconds... and Other Psychological Dramas” was published as an e-book by Kindle, and as a paperback, this year.