I Remembered in the Night Your Name
By Varda Branfman

“I was feeling grateful for the amazing transformation…The great wave of gratitude that settled around my heart pulsed bigger and bigger. But who was I thanking?”

When the heart overflows with gratitude, then song is the natural response. Varda's essays and poems are essentially songs that celebrate her wonder and thankfulness at finding the answer to her question in the eyes of her children, in the air of Jerusalem, in an unused silver spice box, in the silence of her Old World grandmother.

If there is any darkness in these stories or memories, it is only as a pathway to experience the light of our higher selves. It is all one tapestry of light whether she is swimming in a glacial lake, saying Psalms in an old Jerusalem synagogue under threat of war, or witnessing the breathtaking dance of a 70 year-old grandmother at a Jewish wedding. She holds out the possibility of an exhilarating wakefulness – “Make yourself a shore/Hold nothing back” – and she shares a vision of the peace and wholeness to be found in returning to our higher selves.

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"I read your book a second time and it was just as good as the first. Even Shmuel, my husband, read it and and said it spoke to him "from the grassroots up" as he found it caused him to think anew, in a fresh way, about so much of life that we do not stop to reflect on normally. (Actually he could not put it down and just read right through it--I don't think I ever saw him do that before!)"
Rivka Sharvit

"Opening Varda Branfman's book is like entering a warm, richly populated home filled with many rooms. Generous rooms that interconnect in prose and poetry.
Weaving between meditation and experience, she makes visible the spiritual journey for others to see in all its complexity, grandeur, and joy. Always joy. In these pages, she invites us to experience transformation and partake of the miracle that is our lives.
Fortunate reader who enters this door, this home."
Dr. Judy Belsky
Author of Thread of Blue

"How can I describe that sensation we all share at some time or other, of being able to fly?
Varda Branfman captures it."
Rebbetzin Sheindel Weinbach
Associate Editor, Yated Ne’eman

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