A Bridge Year Blessing

Sometimes, when lying on the roof, staring up at the vast night sky, I turn my attention down to the activity of the valley. All over the horizontal rows of earth are little splotches of light. I try to imagine the specific source of each, and its purpose. One tiny house’s fire cooks the night’s spiced potatoes and chapati. Another illuminates a small room, while in a house down at the bottom of the valley, a little boy curls up by his fire to study his English textbook.

Four nights ago, if anyone across the valley were to be sitting, looking up at the stars, and happened to notice the far glow on Mr. Verma-ji’s roof, he would most certainly have been looking at my friends and me, our headlamps alight as we readied ourselves for our mini Rosh Hashanah celebration. For Joe, that meant reading as much as he could of Harry Potter (and the prisoner of Azkaban) before Andrew finished cutting open his sticks of honey. I’d already poured a small portion of maple syrup into a small metal bowl, and fresh Indian bananas (the best you’ve ever tasted) waited, soft and sweet, beside the bowl. Genevieve, Christina, Binit-ji, and Lizzie sat in the circle with us, quietly and patiently waiting while I explored my pocket prayer book.

I didn’t know what prayers were to be said for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. My book knew what to do on normal days, on Shabbat, on Hannukah, even what to say on Purim. It had served me well in Kausani: on Saturday morning, after I’d finished a super-abridged Shabbat service, and I noticed the Himalayas had come out, the book provided me with the blessing for “seeing the majesty of the heavens, high mountains, or other glorious phenomena of nature”.

I searched and searched, and could come up with nothing for Rosh Hashanah. My companions were understanding and flexible though, and in the end we decided to say the shehechianu. “Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech haolam,” I began, and Joe and Andrew joined in. “Shehechianu vikiyamanu vihigianu lazman hazeh.”

The prayer thanked God for “giving us life and sustenance, and bringing us to this happy season.” For me, the blessing was perfect.

In its short and succinct Hebrew way, its words encompassed all that I wanted to say and more. Thank you, God, for making sure that admissions officer had been in a good mood that day. Thank you, the prayer said, for catching our eyes on the short blurb about Princeton’s pilot Bridge Year program, and thank you for instilling in us the courage to explore beyond our country’s familiar borders. Thank you for giving us the strength to write yet more essays about why us. Thank you for keeping Skype functioning long enough to be asked what we would do with no toilet paper for a year. Thank you for getting us past surprisingly intrusive swine flu checkpoints in the airports. Thank you for holding our wheels to the ground as we flew through the crowded, noisy streets of Delhi, and down the impossibly bendy one-way roads of the mountains. Thank you for keeping intestinal craziness, while clearly inevitable, to a minimum. Thank you for ensuring that our instructors were more knowledgeable and experienced than we ever could have hoped for. Thank you for inspiring us each morning with lush green hills, unearthly flowing wisps of clouds, and high, piercing Himalayan peaks. Thank you for allowing us to see our potential to improve lives, even in the small way that we had, helping to reconstruct Sadu’s small house. Thank you for giving us life, sustenance, and bringing us to this happy season.


And thank you, in advance, for everything to come.