Figure of a Female Diving
- Figure of a Female Diving
A figure of a diving female was discovered at Tel Marar according to the Times.
I imagine how she must have looked: a posture needle-straight and focused, poised to split the waters in a single stroke, breathing below the increasingly irregular waves, the ripples of her wake.
I imagine her alive, diving into the Mediterranean Sea, wide ocean in the middle of earth, for fish, for pearls, for pleasure, to find her mother or her girls. [End Page 85]
I hear her laugh, deep from her throat, a sound like bells or teruah, calling us, creating laughter in an echo of her own, creating sadness when she gets lost beneath the surfaces that follow her descent.
I envision the creator of this iconic form, the power that she made this diver for. I read the text again. I missed by just one letter, it was the figure of a female divine. [End Page 86]
Steven R. Weiner “I am a nurse practitioner, a hospital administrator, a father, active in Pleasantville Community Synagogue, NY, a poet and a writer. My mother, Ruth, z”l, was raised in an Orthodox home in Brooklyn but resented the mikvah and mechitzah she experienced, and the contradictions between spirit and deed she witnessed. She left Jewish ritual behind, and spoke to God in her own time and words (addressing God overhead as Gottenu, the Yiddish familiar). Now I also speak to God in my own time and words, finding my way on the path she left, the cycle of my own life marked only in part by rituals of faith, but inscribed deeply by my family’s love and by faith itself.”
