The Tiny Creature That Refuses to Die

[snorts] >> There is a tiny creature on earth smaller than a grain of sand called a water bear and it is capable [music] of doing the impossible. When its environment becomes deadly, complete dryness or a temperature of minus 270 degrees, it does not die. It enters a state called cryptobiosis, hidden life. The term was coined in 1959 by David Keilin from Cambridge. The water bear squeezes out more than 95% of the water from its body, retracts its head and legs, and slows [music] its metabolism to almost zero, turning into a dry, shriveled ball that appears [music] completely dead. It can remain like this for decades. In the museum, they found water bears that had been dry for 120 years. They looked dead. They were dust. But the moment a single drop of water touched them, they came back to life. Within minutes, as if no time had passed. Listen closely. What seemed like death was not death. This was the most ingenious survival strategy in nature. The contraction, the so-called death, was exactly what made coming back to life possible. We all go through periods of spiritual [music] cryptobiosis, times when everything contracts. The fire has gone out, the enthusiasm has disappeared. We wake up in the morning feeling dry, shriveled, distant from ourselves, without vitality, without taste. And we are convinced that this is the end, that the lively, enthusiastic, believing [music] person we once were is dead, that we will never come back to life again, that something in us has been extinguished forever. But thousands of years before Keilin, the sages discovered the law of cryptobiosis of the soul. In Tractate Berakhot, they said something striking. Sleep is 1/60 [music] of death. Every night when we sleep, we taste a small taste of death. The soul, as it were, is entrusted to the creator, [music] and therefore the sages instituted that the very first words a Jew says [music] in the morning, even before getting out of bed, should be, "I thank you, living and eternal king, for you have [music] mercifully restored my soul within me. Great is your faithfulness." The Midrash teaches that the return of the soul each [music] morning is like a small resurrection of the dead. Every day we prove to ourselves that what seems [music] extinguished can rise again. Our dead periods are not death, they are cryptobiosis leave. And every morning when we say Modeh Ani, we are practicing the truth. The dryness is not final. The soul is always there, shriveled, waiting, and the moment the right drop falls, it will come back to life. So, the next time we feel dry, extinguished, dead inside, we won't be afraid. We'll remember the water bear, we'll remember that sleep is 1/60 of death in bed, and that every morning we rise anew. We won't despair from the dryness, we'll wait for the drop, because what seems dead is only waiting [music] to rise.