Wednesday, July 27, 2011

The Heavens are the Lord's

Thoughts on Creation and the Creator...

Paintbrush Dasies
Paintbrush Dasies.

The Heavens are the Lord's [click to read] by Rabbi Avi Shafran in Jewish World Review

I was in high school when men landed on the Moon in July of 1969. I remember the wonder of seeing a world that had previously been visualized only in the minds of artists. I was amazed by the human accomplishment, to be sure, but Rabbi Shafran captures well the awe that I felt on another level.

"Others in 1969, though, while they were duly impressed by what human minds and hands had built and accomplished, felt an awe of a deeper sort. It was essentially the same astonishment born of looking — truly looking — at any part of what the world calls nature, of seeing — truly seeing — the night sky even from here on earth, or the sun, or clouds shifting shape. It was the awe of watching a baby explore his own new world, or begin to talk or walk; of leaves turning in the fall; of a spider spinning a web; of a wound, miraculously, healing. To be sure, the awe that summer day in 1969 was newly writ large, in images of an alien landscape, of bootprints in ancient dust, of a brilliant blue earthrise. But the shiver it inspired was, to sensitive people, the same yir'as harome'mus — awe before creation's Creator — accessible everywhere. To those observers, the space program's subsequent deceleration was but a reminder of the limits placed upon us mortal creations." -- Rabbi Avi Shafran

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