This is the week of the Torah’s most beautiful blessing, loved by Jews and Christians alike:

May God bless and keep you; May God’s presence shine upon you and give you grace; May God’s presence be turned towards you and bring you peace.

I remember most poignantly going to see my father for his blessing on the Eve of Yom Kippur in the final years of his life. It meant far, far more than any mere formula; it was a kind of alignment of his love, the love and spirit of the generations of the family, and the hope for God’s grace and guidance, touching my head through his hands, and my heart and conscience through the ancient words. I have carried that blessing with me, most often as encouragement, but sometimes also as chastisement, in all the years since. I hope it reaches and touches the souls of the children.

But what exactly is a blessing? It’s easy to speak about when we say them and what precise words we’re supposed to employ. But what does ‘blessing’ itself actually mean? It was to this subject that we devoted the many discussions of our retreat just two weeks ago.

Berachah, berech, bereichah, ‘blessing’, ‘knees’, ‘pool of water’: seemingly unlikely partners in English, in Hebrew the three words derive from the same root. They are evidently inter-related, but how? Based on a lecture she had heard, one of the participants demonstrated a literal connection, acting out the sequence of finding a pool of cool water in a desert, falling down on one’s knees and prostrating oneself to drink, before thanking God for this life-giving moment.

Or perhaps the bereichah, the pool, does not refer to not a physical gathering of waters, but rather to the flow of vitality from the invisible reservoir of spirit by which all life is nourished. ‘My soul thirsts for You’, says the Psalmist: ‘Like a deer longing for streams of water, so my whole being longs, God, for You’. I sometimes think it’s the closest we know to the presence of God, when a new alertness, a deeper awareness, quickens us as if from the inside of our own mind.

It’s similar with the artist’s prayer when feeling helpless and useless in an arid zone of zero creativity, like T S Eliot on Margate Sands where he ‘can connect Nothing with Nothing’. Then, as if all at once and from nowhere, the words, the music flow again.

But blessings are not only from above to below. They also flow between us, and sometimes from below to above. We pondered God’s words to Abraham, ‘Be a blessing’. How is he, how are we supposed to do that? What does ‘be a blessing’ mean? Rachel Remen addresses exactly this question in her beautiful book My grandfather’s Blessings:

When we recognise the spark of God in others, we blow on it with our attention and strengthen it, no matter how deeply it has been buried or for how long. When we bless someone, we touch the unborn goodness in them and wish it well…A blessing is a moment of meeting, a certain kind of relationship in which both people involved remember and acknowledge their true nature and worth, and strengthen what is whole in one another. (p. 5, p. 6).

The final word of the priestly blessing is indeed ‘Shalom’, peace, from a root which means ‘whole’: ‘May God make you whole’.

But what is wholeness, when life so often grinds us down or breaks us apart? ‘Nothing is more whole than the heart which is broken’ said the hasidic master Rebbe Nachman of Breslav, known to have suffered from depressions. It’s what opens us out which makes us most deeply human. Sometimes it’s what seems to break us, which makes the deepest inner wellspring of blessing flow out towards others in recognition and compassion.

Yet that must not make us forget the simple blessings of sights and scents and actions, – for tree blossom, fruits, mountains, and lightning; for being able to open our eyes, get out of bed, put on clothes, – gifts so ordinary we’re in danger of appreciating them only when we no longer have them.

Perhaps the deepest blessing is to be the kind of people who notice our blessings.