Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 101: Zach

Prompt: "A song that feels specifically written for you"

Selected by Zach

"תוכו רצוף אהבה" (He Is Filled with Love)"

Ishay Ribo

Pachad Gvahim, 2016

I've been to two Ishay Ribo concerts. They are among the most spiritual experiences I've ever had.

It's less a concert, more a collective prayer session. People wring the emotion out of themselves. Sometimes they put their arms around one another, sometimes they bolt out of their seats and dance. Everyone sings along. Because if you're praying together, you better know the words.

This is my favorite song of his. I can't help the tears from springing to my eyes the second those first piano notes hit. It's an ethernet cable carrying encoded information directly to my soul.

"He withholds His tribe, without withholding His love

He holds out His wand, to whoever reaches out their hand

He never turns a blind eye, over His followers

Even when we're a wreck, we're still His most precious piece

For He is filled with love, filled with love"

My relationship with God is certainly fraught. For a long time, I thought the whole idea of God was weird. I didn't much care if God existed. It wasn't something that occupied me. These days, I formally pray three times a day, and I also try to talk to God on the side. I hope He exists. They say it's okay that bad things happen, that that's a precondition of the world's creation, that these bad things might not even be so bad in the grand scheme of things. I don't know. The Holocaust was pretty bad, and yet there are lots of people who try to give answers for why it had to happen. None of them really satisfy me. There's a lot of pain and suffering in the world and I don't get how it's justified, how it's all part of some bigger plan and worth it. Tell that to a mother whose child was killed; tell that to someone wracked by impossible physical pain. 

But every once in a while I'll hear a song like this. Or something will just hit me, out of the blue. And it's clear in those few and far between moments that there's something unexplainable there. That something I will never understand is being touched inside me, beyond comprehension, beyond the ability of any human to comprehend. And it's in those moments that I'm more sure than ever that God exists, and that he's pulling strings that need to be pulled for me and for me alone. That I feel something that can't be put into words. 

This song touches the thing that sits deepest inside me and brings it into the real world. I don't understand it, but there's no denying its existence. I'm angry at God often, or frustrated at all the demands He makes. When I hear this song, though, I can only be held with love, the way a father holds a newborn, the way a mother watches over her young.