The Birthday of the Sun
Once every 28 years!!
In 2007, I visited the Kabbalistic city of Safed, in northern Israel, and enjoyed the New Year services at the amazing Beirav Synagogue, with its many great Shlomo Carlebach songs. Tzivia Polsky, the wife of one of its founders, told me that this next Birkat HaChama – which means in Hebrew "Blessing of the Sun" and happens only every 28 years – will be an exceptional one (the third most auspicious celebration since the creation of the sun). Immediately, I felt its crucial timing.
Later that spring, on Shavuot, I was driving from the Ma'arat Hamachpela in Hebron (the ancient tomb of our patriarchs and matriarchs) to Jerusalem. As the red sun was setting over the old city of Jerusalem, I had a strong feeling that we must gather all communities in the Holy Land and the world to open a gateway of hope and renewal for the next cycle of life, as the sun revisits the point of its creation (see Kabbalistic Sources). Safed felt like the ideal place to invite the sacred Shekinah in to its midst. I hope that we can unite all faiths, all walks of life, and people in all their diversity, as the Sun revisits its original place of birth.
The Birkat HaChama occured on Passover and Easter, in April 2009. Let us offer a special prayer of hope for a better world where we can finally inhabit the meaning of FREEDOM in ourselves, around us, for our neighbors, with our loved ones, and for the world in its fullest sense of manifestation. Those who joined us at the Sun Blessing event in Safed, renewed our individual lives, learned about innovative solar energy resources, and gained renewed faith in humanity, as well as joining its mystical power with other cities in the Holy Land, especially Jerusalem, and the rest of the world.
With Sun–filled Blessings, Eva Ariela Lindberg