I just had to share a treasured chapter from My Grandfather's Blessings written by Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.. This particular chapter is included in the book's section titled, Finding Strength, Taking Refuge. The chapter is titled, In the Beginning:
I did not speak at all until I was almost three years old. The pediatrician caring for me had told my parents that they must not expect too much as my birth had been difficult and I had been so terribly premature. I might be late in speaking. Or I might never speak at all. My parents became frantic with worry. They did everything possible to help me to speak, pointing to objects and saying their names, repeating words slowly and carefully and reading to me for hours. There was talk of mental retardation, but my grandfather would hear none of it. "Look into her eyes," he would say firmly. "She is there." He always spoke to me as if I understood everything he said. As it happens, I did.
To everyone's great relief, I said my first words at a Thanksgiving dinner a few months before my third birthday. I was usually fed in the kitchen, but because of the holiday I was allowed to eat in the dining room with the grown-ups. Seated at the table on two telephone books, I turned to my mother halfway through dinner and said, "MAY I HAVE THE SALT."
I have heard this story about my first words many times. When I was a child, it would make me smile because these were not my first words at all. My first words were in Hebrew, patiently taught to me by my grandfather when I was about two years old. For countless generations, Orthodox Jews have taught these same six Hebrew words, the Sh'ma, to tiny children as soon as they are able to speak. Translated into English, they are "Hear, O Israel, the Lord God, the Lord is One." Traditionally the Sh'ma is also said in times of great danger and at the moment of death. It is a statement of the fundamental nature of the world.
These words were the first of the many secrets that I shared with my grandfather. When I was older, I asked him to explain to me what the Sh'ma really meant. "Neshume-le," he answered, "to me these words have always meant that despite suffering, loss, and disappointment, life can be trusted."
Puzzled, I asked him why he had taught me this when I was so small. He smiled and said that perhaps the most difficult thing we are asked to do is to choose to live as a person. Being a person is hard on the soul. It takes great courage to live as a person, and sometimes souls who know this may delay their decision to be here or may be simply overwhelmed to find themselves here in a body.
"Your birth was very difficult, Neshume-le," he said. "And so your soul discovered how hard things could be from the very beginning." He had thought that because I had been born so far ahead of time, perhaps my soul had even been taken by surprise and had not been ready to choose life. In the time I had been in the incubator, it wavered back and forth between staying and leaving. Even afterward, it had been fearful and cautious, like a little bird. He had felt its uncertainty, its indecision. He told me that he had taught me the Sh'ma because in those long months before I spoke, it had seemed to him that my soul had been listening for something to hold on to. He had hoped that once I found this, I might be willing to begin.