Yotzer Or

by Rabbi Amy Josefa Ariel
for Trans Day of Visibility, March 31, 2024
with gratitude to Rabbi Ariel Tovlev

The sun’s first rays refracting and scattering through the atmosphere.

The moment, just before sunrise, when gold and pink and azure bloom into
the inky blue and indigo of the night.
Morning twilight.

Now and then.
Here and there.

That is who we are.

All of us.

All the time.

We are water and land at shoreline and wetland.

We are raindrops dancing in the sky and
bubbles floating up and up and up through the ocean.

We are the place where the thin film opens and the air inside becomes sky and

the place where the drop becomes sea.

Ma Rabu Ma’asecha Shechina.

We are the moment before the touch,

We are the warm settling in of skin on skin,

We are the lingering arc of shimmering electricity.

All at once.

We are our loves and our genders and our roles and our intersections.

We are all of our places and all of our spaces.

We are all of our moments and all of our memories.

We are where we’ve been and where we are and where we are going.

All of us.
All the time.

We are and aren’t certain.

Our soft centers reach wide.

We glow with primordial light
from the time before there were
luminous bodies in the heavens.

Brucha atah Shechinah Eloheinu.

Blessed is the Darkness in the Light,
Blessed is the Light in the Darkness,

and Blessed are We, 

in and of it all,
in this ever-unfolding Universe of You.