lifewaters

Oysters can only be harvested at low tide. I arrive an hour or two before lowest tide, driving out to the bay in the cool predawn light of mid July. Wading through knee deep water, we haul out our tools – saw horses, plywood boards, buckets, a shucking knife – everything we need to build makeshift tables out on the sandbars where the oysters are farmed in the waters of the Delaware Estuary. Setting up our stations, we arrange buckets for sorting– market, jumbo market, too small and needs to keep growing, or already dead, shells flopping open and vacant. Who by water and who by shucking knife, who will return to the waters and who off to the market. An unetaneh tokef for oystering.

Standing at our stations, facing the horizon, the water lapping at our feet gets slowly lower and lower until we are standing on bare sand in the middle of the bay. Then, a rushing, a sound or some sensation in the wind shifts, the waves hasten, and the lapping waters start rising, slowly climbing again up our calves. We come to know these signals intuitively and begin packing up our things and finishing our day's work. We tie down the bags of oysters meant to grow more in the rising waters and haul back to shore our supplies and the hundreds of oysters from our morning’s harvest. Every day this happens. In our oceans and our estuaries, our bays and our tidal marshes, this happens every 6 hours. The coming in and the coming out, the changing of the tides.

In my regular work life, I support other bodies of water. I support them as they squeeze and contract, as they shake and bellow. I support bodies as they move between realms, arriving through gushes of water, waves of contractions, through profound moments of transition and change. I work as a doula and I bear witness to humans as they are born, messy and wet, teeming with life. Amniotic fluid, our original sea, is primarily water but also contains the electrolytes sodium, chloride, and potassium. The levels of these electrolytes are crucial for fetal development and while the overall salinity is lower than seawater, the relative proportions are the same.

Childbirth and oystering. Each labor is done at a change of tide, in moments of turning and transition, in spaces of in between. To be born, to arrive through the portal, through the mouth of the well, is nothing short of what we might call a sea change. I don’t know how many here are familiar with the physiological stages of labor, but towards the end there is a phase called transition: that phase of birth, though shortest, is hardest and most extreme. It wracks your body against the tumults of labor, it is the time when so many say I cannot do this anymore. It is that moment of greatest struggle, that time that feels like the lashing of the harshest waves, right before our children are born. And here we are. Today, on Shabbat Shuva, the shabbes between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. That tidal turning of the year when perhaps the waters are lowest, when we are invited to humbly lower ourselves to the ground, when our transgressions are laid bare, visible for a moment on a sand bar in the bay before the waters of the year rush back over them.

Oysters, as a creature, are environmental powerhouses. They are resilient, adaptable, and have incredible capacity to clean and restore the health of our damaged waterways. A single adult oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water per day. They are able to process and absorb excess nitrogen from fertilizer runoff and septic tank overflow, and incorporate it into their shells and tissues as they grow. When returned to the water, their shells are used to rebuild shorelines, rehabilitate reefs, and protect coastal communities from erosion and flooding. The power of oysters to offer sustenance is profound – providing nourishment, cleaning the waters, architecting our shorelines – no doubt a well of merit in the wilderness.

In a recent essay on grief and the ocean, writer and social worker Jessica Dore describes the extent to which the sea and its sustenance have been systematically targeted in Gaza as a tactic of war. She writes, “How depraved it is to ban starving people from fishing the seas that are home to them when they are starving.” A recent United Nations report titled Building to Starvation: Systematic Attacks on Fishing in Gaza states, “the targeting of Gaza’s fishers and fishing infrastructure by the Israeli military has contributed directly to risk of famine, creating conditions which threaten the survival of Gaza’s population.” Understanding how life giving the sea is, Israel has intentionally desecrated its waters and its shores, its people and its creatures. In January of this year, the Israeli military declared Gaza’s waters a ‘no-go zone,’ banning fishing, swimming, and sea access. To Palestinians living in Gaza, the sea is literally lifewater, a primary source of food and livelihood. To deny access to it is deprivation of life. As a people who wandered the desert for 40 years, surviving only on account of a woman’s well that wandered along beside us, who are we to sever a people’s access to their waters?

It may occur to some that giving a d’var torah about oysters on Shabbat Shuva is less than kosher. I remember the time my dad famously boycotted my childhood synagogue when the rabbi gave a drash about working on a pig farm on Yom Kippur. However, I am also keen to lean into the larger symbolism of what it is to learn from teachings of treyf on our highest of holy days. There are Jewish spaces in which it is still treyf to speak about Gaza. The word treyf, meaning food that is not permitted to be eaten according to Jewish dietary law, originates from the Hebrew word ‘treifah,’ which describes an animal that has been torn or mangled. What of the tearing and mangling of human life in our name, what of the sustenance and food not permitted to enter Gaza. What does it mean to turn towards that which we have collectively decided to forbid, to welcome into our homes that which has been deemed unclean.

Childbirth and oystering and war. What wilderness. Something I haven’t told you yet about oysters is that in the last century, the native population of east coast oysters was decimated due to pollution, overfishing, and disease. Through the remarkable efforts of scientists and environmental advocates over the last 2 decades, we have been able to breed a native disease resistant population of oysters, clean up our waterways enough to better support aquatic life, and rely on the tremendous power of oysters themselves to filter and clean the waters they live in. The oysters are once again becoming immense. In a collection of essays on grief, change, and sacred transitions, therapist Francis Weller describes what he calls “becoming immense.” Becoming immense, Weller says, is “to recall how embedded we are in an animate world—a world that dreams and enchants, a world that excites our imaginations and conjures our affections through its stunning beauty.”

For me, the moment that feels most stunningly immense when standing on the bare bar of sand in the Delaware Bay, hands full of oysters, is the moment when the water begins to rise again, slowly at first, the waves and wind quickening and blustering, and then all at once. The thing about tides is they are always returning, low to high and high to low. The pendulum never stops.

Remember the oyster, that creature that can only be harvested at low tide. Low tide shows us the bottom, the scattered debris. It makes it possible to pick up the once submerged pieces, all that was, until recently, out of reach.

Remember the moment of transition in birth. The moment that feels most immense and most awful, the moment when it all feels too much to bear. And then. On the other side. An emergence. An arrival through the waters. A rushing in. A new life is born.

Remember Gaza, the torn shore and some ancestral knowing of water as birthright. Remember the well, the sacred sources of sustenance that follow us through the parched and barren lands.

To return to the idea of immensity, in a recent interview Francis Weller added clarification to his definition. He said, “we only put our arms around hope, positivity, growth, improvement. But what immensity means is I also have to get my arms around fear, around loss, around death, around grief, [around] shame. We have to get our arms around everything. To become immense means nothing is excluded from our embrace."

How do we welcome it all? The possibility of harvest at low tide. The lashing intensity of transition. The desecration of the sea and the people of Gaza and also the return of the once decimated oyster. The treyf at the doorstep of the place of prayer and the intention of being washed clean all together. The possibility that life does return, even, and especially, after the moments when we say, I cannot do this anymore.

And, how do we know where we are in the cycle of things? How do we know when we are at a change of tide, the moment when the water shifts and once again begins to rise. What can we listen for, what shift of breeze, what quiet lapping, what almost imperceptible but also deeply obvious signs can signify a sea change?

And when that moment comes, when we are standing in the changing waters, what do we do? Do we stand there in the ocean of our grief, suddenly adrift and carried along by the tide, threatening to drown as the waters rise? Or do we collect our harvests, return to shore, and know that in another 12 hours, we will be able to step out again, into the opening of the sea.