Offered live on April 5, 2019, with beautiful piano accompaniment by Joyce Rosenzweig.

The text is adapted from liturgy, in a multi-part prayer that most commonly appears in Shabbat and festival mornings, at the end of a section called P'sukei D'zimrah (literally, "Verses of Song"). The words draw upon a wide variety of imagery to express profound, immeasurable gratitude. For the refrain, those familiar with the liturgy will note that I removed the gendered language for God, rendering the arrival moment in the prayer as "...we can never stop giving thanks and blessing..." or "...we cannot adequately thank or bless...", and then descends, or perhaps ascends, into wordlessness.

Translation:
Even if our mouths were full of song like the sea,
and our tongues like countless waves,
and our lips with praise as boundless as the sky,
and our eyes shining like the sun and the moon,
and our arms spread like eagles’ wings,
and our legs as fleet as gazelles,
we could never stop expressing our thanks and blessing.

Ilu Finu

Cantor Jacob Niemi