But when all the containers have been seriously examined, brushes hurled to the floor, and wisps of paper left to ornament the bathmat, my daughter will wave her arms to the music's beat and I will pick her up. In the interlude between my toilette and the babysitter's arrival, we dance.

Sometimes we dance to the celestial music of Domenico Scarlatti. Sometimes we are closer to home, with Salamone Rossi's "Song of Songs." More often, we dance to the niggunim of Bratslav, whose rough-hewn devotion is the most transporting.

As she wriggles with pleasure, I find recompense for the anguish I felt when I prayed long ago in the old Bratslav shtiebl in Jerusalem, standing, often alone, in a bare cement room so that I could peer through the sole window to hear the ardent singing of the Bratslaver and their guests, welcoming the Sabbath bride. This is your inheritance, I think as the baby claps her hands. No one can take it from you.

At the end of the dancing, we pray. That is, I pray, and the baby keeps me company. Precisely a year ago, I was pleading with God, my hands pressed against the kicking feet inside me, for my child's safe arrival. I was saying with intent the words at the opening of the Siddur, "God, the soul you have planted in me is pure," for my soon-to-be-born baby was, literally, an additional soul within. And when she was born, my heart replete with thanksgiving, I began to pray that she be granted a first year of tranquillity and peace, after which, I promised myself, I would remember to rejoice.

Now, in my morning prayers, I try to adhere to my resolve — to move from beseeching to gratitude. And so, after naming the ill people for whose recovery I do petition God, I thank our Creator for the gift bestowed upon me, the third child, the wished-for child, given to us in our forties after the conventional mandate of one-boy-one-girl had been fulfilled.

Of course, my baby's brother and sister were as rich a blessing — eliciting our heartfelt thankfulness. But the decision to have a third child in urban New York and, especially, the knowledge (available to parents only in this century) that this baby is our last child lend to each moment a wondrous, aching poignancy.

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik wrote, in an essay about mourning, that only when someone dies do we understand the full measure of his or her worth. Death is the most egregious of endings to lend us the gift of heightened awareness, but it is not the only one. After the baby's birth, the knowledge that every new stage banished the previous one seemed unbearable. As my daughter outgrew her first clothes and I folded them to give away, I longed for another baby in an inexpressibly tactile way.

Today, however, I am content with my lot, and the paradoxical beauty of endings fills me with acute delight. I suppose that the most evolved religious personalities are able to know each minute that the earth is full of God's glory and can experience the Infinite a breath away from the finite present. Such perception is the goal of consciousness, attained by most of us, alas, only in slanting glances, too often obscured by mundane exigency.

A blessing stops you in your tracks, banishing the past, deferring the future, to locate the "eternal life planted within." That is what our saying a brachah before eating or action is meant to do, and that is what a living brachah — a child — can be, the embodiment of the pristine divine image, the daily representation of our journey from the Garden to a redeemed world.

We have danced to the end of the first year. One hundred and nineteen more years of grace and mercy. Happy birthday, little girl.

Nessa Rapoport is the author of a novel, Preparing for Sabbath, and of A Woman's Book of Grieving.




Reprinted from The Jewish Week. Used by arrangement with the author.
Copyright © 1999 by Nessa Rapoport. Do not reproduce without author's permission. All rights reserved.