The Foundation Song

In 1945, a handful of French Jews returned to Strasbourg after liberation. Their grand synagogue on Rue Kageneck — once among the finest in Europe — had been gutted by the Nazis, its dome collapsed, its Torah scrolls burned. The survivors gathered in the wreckage on a Friday evening. There was no roof. There was no ark. There was barely a minyan. But an elderly cantor named Henri Bauer, who had survived Auschwitz, stood on the cracked foundation stones and began to chant the Shabbat prayers. His voice carried over the rubble. One by one, the others joined him — some singing, some weeping, some doing both at once. A neighbor later said the sound coming from those ruins was the most beautiful and terrible thing she had ever heard.

That is Ezra 3:11. The exiles had returned to Jerusalem after seventy years of Babylonian captivity. The temple of Solomon — with its cedar beams and gold overlay — was gone. What they had before them was bare foundation stone. And yet they sang: "He is good; His love toward Israel endures forever." The old men who remembered Solomon's temple wept aloud. The young ones shouted for joy. The sound of weeping and celebration merged into one thunderous noise heard from far away.

Worship does not wait for completion. It begins at the foundation. The Almighty does not ask for a finished building before He inhabits the praise of His people. He meets them in the rubble, on the bare stone, where faithfulness and grief and hope all rise together as a single offering.