One of my dreams, for this week in California, was to manage to daven one morning on the beach. As it turns out, it's only about a block from the friend's house where I've been staying to the edge of the Pacific.

As we walk down to the beach, the sun is shining brightly in a sky of pale robin's-egg blue. As we draw closer to the water, the wind lifts up my featherweight rainbow tallit around me like wings. 

We settle on the sand. Whoever feels moved offers the beginning of a prayer -- either a beloved melody, or the beloved lilt of weekday nusach -- and the rest of us join in. We work our way through the whole matbeah, the ancient ladder of the prayer service.

At the appropriate moment I chime in with part of the Song at the Sea, because -- well, here we are, at the seashore on the cusp of Pesach. Ozi v'zimrat Yah -- "My strength is in Your song..." Next time I sing those words at havdalah they will have a different feel.

Seagulls fly overhead. A sandpiper pecks at the wet sand by the water's edge. Two wetsuit-clad surfers paddle out into the water, and from time to time I see one of them stand and glide a ways in toward shore.

We move in and out of nusach. We have moments of silence which I spend beaming. We sing "Mi Chamocha" to the melody of "Adir Hu," a Pesach song, which evokes years of Passover memories. When we rise into our amidah, our standing prayer, I have a shivery moment of recognition. Recently I had a mental image of a doorframe on the beach at the edge of the sea. Suddenly the sea ahead of us here reminds me of the view through that door.  

We close with "Eli, Eli," a setting of a poem by Hannah Szenes. In English, it can be rendered as "My God, my God, I pray that these things never end: the sand and the sea, the rush of the waters, the crash of the heavens, the prayer of the heart." As we walk away from the beach, the prayer of my heart is a fervent Thank You. Thank You. Thank You.

Four happy daveners, primed now for fabulous morning meetings!

(L to R: me, Rabbi T'mimah Ickovits of Holistic Jew, ALEPH's Rosh Hashpa'ah Rabbi Shohama Wiener and my co-chair Rabbi David Evan Markus.) 

Many thanks to the kind stranger who graciously snapped our photo so we could all be in the picture.