There are things the body recognizes before the mind has a language for them.

When I was a child in El Salvador, I attended a small church with my mother. It was not a Jewish place. It did not call itself that. And yet, there were moments—small, unannounced—when something unfamiliar would enter the room and settle in the air as if it had always belonged there.

We sang songs I understood, at least on the surface. They were in Spanish. And yet, something in them felt distant—not foreign, but older, as if they carried a weight that did not belong entirely to the room we were in. One of those songs was “Hatikva” — “La Esperanza.” I did not know its name then. I did not know where it came from, or what it meant beyond the words I could follow.

Not in the way one knows facts, but in the way one recognizes a face in a crowd without remembering where it was seen before.

I remember the feeling more than the sound. Something in me settled when the melody began, as if a question I did not know I had was being answered in a language deeper than comprehension. The adults around me sang with intention. I listened without knowing why it mattered.

Outside that church, the country was still at war. Helicopters crossed the sky often enough that children learned to........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)