Last Month

	Rabbi
	Amy R. Bernstein
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A few days ago, I was getting ready to put my daughter Eliana in the car, when I noticed a tiny caterpillar in the driveway. I realized that Eliana had never seen a caterpillar and at 20 months old she gets very excited by new things. So rather than rush to the car, I stopped and showed her the little insect. She squealed with delight when we touched it gently and it moved! After playing with the caterpillar for a while, I told Ellie that it was time to go. We put the caterpillar down and Eliana squatted very close to it in order to wave "bye" at it. As I became more insistent that we really needed to get going, Eliana crept alongside the caterpillar, waved and repeated "bye", "bye", "bye".... As we drove away, I was reminded of the central tenet of Jewish faith - "Listen, Israel; Adonai our God is One." This line from the book of Deuteronomy is written in a special way in every Torah scroll. Two letters of this sacred line of text are enlarged and together they spell the Hebrew word ed, "witness".

I was reminded by Eliana that we are the way Creation witnesses itself. We, created in the image of God, are the only parts of Creation able to consciously appreciate it. Judaism teaches that we are partners with God in creating the world every day. I was reminded by my toddler that we are God’s only witnesses to the miracle of the caterpillar, the grass, the rain and the stars it all unfolds under. We are the only ones able to recognize that it is all a reflection of the One - that the little girl and the little creature on the ground were two manifestations of the One greeting each other.

Eliana’s joy was a sacred reminder of the lesson taught by my esteemed teacher, Rabbi Arthur Green in his book Ehyeh, A Kabbalah For Tomorrow. In it he writes that "the One delights in each of the infinite forms in which it is manifest...The One loves the many. The coat-of-many-colors in which Being comes to be garbed is a garment of delight. We, as the self-conscious expression of Being, are called upon to love as well, to partake in and give human expression to the delightfulness of existence." Summer in the Northland is the perfect time to engage in the spiritual practice of delighting in existence! It is the perfect setting in which to honor, celebrate, and witness the wonder of the One as manifest in each unique one of the billions of rocks lining the majestic Lake Superior, in the blindingly beautiful purple of a perfect lupine petal, in the astonishing cerulean blue of a summer Northland sky. In all of them we are given an invitation to apprehend the One.

To really apprehend that God is one, is, in the words of Rabbi Green,"also to say that humanity is one, that life is one, that joys and sufferings are all one - for God is the force that binds them all together". When we live fully into this realization we know that we are inextricably bound to the planet, to its creatures and to each other. For Rabbi Green, "to assert that all is one in God is our supreme act of faith." May the summer months and its every day miracles, bring us all closer to the truth and the challenge of that assertion.

Updated October 9, 2006