The Great Ancestral Teacher and Hava Nagila

You were playing violin on the street. A little girl walked up and asked if you knew Hava Nagila. You did. You started playing, and her father began to sing. You followed him with the bow.
I was listening to this while reading the sixth chapter of the Zhuangzi, "The Great Ancestral Teacher." There is a passage where a man asks a woman named Nüyu: you are old, but your face looks like a child's. Why? She says: I have heard the Way.
A child asks a question. Everything follows.
Nüyu describes what happened when she tried to pass the Way to a man who had the talent of a sage but not the Way of a sage. She stayed with him. Three days, and he could put the world outside himself. Seven days, all things. Nine days, life itself. Then his mind became clear as morning light. Then he saw the singular. Then time dissolved. Then he entered a place beyond death and birth. Three, seven, nine, and then the climb, each stage opening faster into the next, the way a spiral tightens as it rises.
That is what Hava Nagila does under your bow. It starts low. It turns. Each pass pulls a little harder until the whole thing lifts off the street and the street doesn't matter anymore. The Hebrew words mean: let us rejoice.
A Jewish celebration song, a Daoist scripture from twenty-three centuries ago, the people and the music, the book and the bow, the ancients and us, all met in that one moment.
All because of you. Because of the violin.