A burst of light interrupts the rigorous monotony of the priestly manual as Numbers chapter six draws to a close.
The Lord instructs Moses to train Aaron and unseen generations of Aaronide sons to bless Israel by speaking good things to them in the presence of YHWH.
The language of blessing is among the richest of dialects in the biblical material. Its echo lives on in our reference to ‘material blessings’. Even if entire lines of religious kitsch have taken up the word in promotion of trinketry, the notion itself is pervaded by a strenuous application of will to the shaping of human experience.
To bless someone is to wish for him only the best that can befall him and then to make oneself available for the realization of the wished thing. To bless is more concrete than abstract and so usually involves the speaking of one’s good will. Eyes meet, sometimes a speaker’s breath warms the listener’s cheek, often hand touches shoulder if indeed there is no embrace.
Biblical narrative enriches the context by posing an attentive YHWH within hearing of the speaker’s declaration, Guarantor and Effector of the good thing that is willed.
To bless is audacious, for what fragile speaker can rearrange or reconstruct a friend’s life and environs. It is impossible or at least improbable, and so the person who blesses offers himself to stand actively in the breach that separates the present poverty from the provision that is wished, sought, pursued.
To bless is also to adventure the spiritually violent notion that one’s own wishes align with YHWH who can shape lives, future, and environs or—yet more inconvenient for idolatries that serve the status quo—that one’s blessing spoken aloud might move the heart and hand of the deity to act for weal and not for woe when previously he was inert, absent, or adversarial.
This is to bless.
It is to talk about other people, asserting by words in the first instance a future that exists only in the dimly lit mind of the one who would lock eyes with another and will good things out loud.
Canter Bridge 
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