That Wow! Moment

This past Monday, together with countless people around the area and the country, I looked up at the sky. While I remember the last solar eclipse, from 2017, pretty well, this was the first significant natural phenomenon I witnessed surrounded by young people. 

Being with my students for the eclipse was quite the experience. Even before we left our classroom and left the building, the exhilaration in the air was palpable. The hallways were positively vibrating with the students’ excitement and curiosity. As the afternoon wore on, students began to notice it getting darker outside, the shadows on the ground outside our windows becoming more pronounced. 

By the time we went outside, my students couldn’t wait to put on their viewing glasses and look at the sky. They had discussed how eclipses work in their science classes earlier in the day and were prepared for what they would see, but then they looked at the sky and were blown away. 

After a moment of awe-filled silence, middle school excitement took over, with students calling out updates on the moon’s transit across the sun. We soon began playing with our phones, figuring out how to hold the viewing glasses over our camera lenses and adjust exposure levels to get the best shot, and sharing our best pictures with each other. 


When I teach about tefillah - to students of all ages - I speak about the different emotions our traditional prayers express. There are the prayers that say, “Please…” And those that say, “Thanks.” There’s also, “I’m sorry.” And, “Wow!” This one was definitely a “Wow!” moment.

When we have “Wow!” moments, especially when those moments center on things we experience in the natural world, we often give voice to them through the modality of reciting berakhot, blessings. Over the past few weeks, there has been much debate and discussion in a number of rabbinically-minded groups I participate in about the proper berakhah to say upon witnessing the eclipse. 

It’s not such a simple question. Our earliest sources, similar to many other ancient cultures, saw eclipses as a potentially bad omen. They were meant to be endured, hoping that they would not be harbingers of difficult times ahead. Later sources discuss the possibility of reciting blessings for a wide variety of natural phenomena, with a number of suggestions for which blessing to say for which event, and not a tremendous amount of consensus.


I knew that I wanted to mark the moment of seeing the eclipse by saying a berakhah. For me, reciting berakhot is a regular part of my practice, a moment of mindfulness I take many times a day. So when I was outside looking up at the sky on Monday afternoon, I spent a few moments watching the eclipse as it moved toward totality, allowing my “Wow!” to build, and then I said: 
בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה׳  אֱ׳לֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, עוֹשֹה מַעֲשֹה בְּרֵאשִׁית.
Praised are You, Adonai our God, Ruler of the universe, Author of Creation.

In that moment, as I saw the moon and the sun in close interaction (at least from my vantage point), I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Torah’s account of the fourth day of Creation: “God made the two great lights, the greater light to dominate the day and the lesser light to dominate the night…And God set them in the expanse of the sky to shine upon the earth…and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that this was good.” (Genesis 1:16-18) Reciting the blessing I chose helped me give voice to my sense that I was witnessing something ancient and mysterious, something that reminded me of the earliest days of the world. 

I’d love to hear from you about your eclipse experiences. What was your “Wow!” moment? What were you feeling and thinking as the moon passed in front of the sun? How did you give voice to it? Please drop me a line and let me know!

May we keep the memories of our “Wow!” close at hand as we close out our week. Shabbat shalom.

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