God is in many places, He is everywhere you want Him to be. First and foremost He is in your body, beneath and on the surface of your skin, on your fingertips as you type an email or text, upon your lips when you speak, in your footsteps as you change a slovenly walk into a dancing step, playing hopscotch as you step into the dance and feel goodness in each foot.
God is in front of us, in back of us, and within us. He circulates in our bloodstream going inside and pumping out of the heart, into all veins and arteries and capillaries, around one leg into the other, a leg torso leg arm, head brain, eyes, nostrils, mouth lips. Blinking an eye, twinkling that same eye, two eyes that see one God, two becoming one, a man and a woman creating children, generations after generations, more and more populace, the choice instead to remain single, to worship only God as you feel Him inside and outside, He is the delicious taste on our lips, the feeling we have inside our hearts as we appreciate Him and include Him, the weight of our life's endeavors as we feel Him on our back/neck between our shoulders, as strong as the shoulders of an ox.
Now you know where God is, He is you, He is all about you, He is separate from us when we want separateness or together with us when we want togetherness.
He is all we need, Psalm 23: "The Lord is our Shepherd, we shall lack nothing."
What words did you associate with the Shofar blowing on this new year Rosh Hashanah? Tishrei 5778. A call from a ram, an animal of grace and goodness, a Kosher animal that chews its cud and has cloven feet. The ram is not a predatory animal, does not eat meat, a vegan animal, fed the best of the greenest of good Godly grass.
Gardens still blooming, hot temperatures, flowers not withering, green vegetarian Mother Earth of soil, compost heaps in our backyards, jarring the veggies to save for the deep cold winter months.
Our hands in this soil, to nurture our plants, soil from the greenness of Mother Earth in between our fingernails, molding the soil around like clay pots, like an artist potter, forming a collar of goodness around the stem of a newly formed plant, keeping the plants firmly united with the dirt, dirt not being dirty dirt, instead being the nourishment from our Earth, Mother Earth.
Hands that become clean again after being soiled, hands even cleaner than they started out to be, clean hands clean hearts. Hands of generosity as your green produce is food, food for you, food for your family, 10% as charity for the poor.
The miracle of bread becoming cake! For one's meal eating Challah, the miracle yellow holy bread of the Jewish religion. Also with this bread being served cake, so to eat a holy bread and a delicious cake. If not cake, to eat a Kosher New York cheesecake. A cheesecake drizzled with chocolate syrup. A graham cracker moist chewy crust. Not a fasting holy day upcoming, instead a Rosh Hashanah when we celebrate and live it up, we have happiness and happiness is cultivated for us and our loves ones through Kosher sweet as honey foods galore.
Cakes of every flavor, buttercream, whipped cream, you name it, it is there for us to eat. A sweet table, real honey, bee's honey, a table filled with every cookie or/and chocolate candy you can imagine, our imaginations transforming into reality, wonderfully coming true. Needing an imagination to feel the existence of God.
To imagine God feeding us as when we were babes, softly coaxing us like a mother who uses a silver spoon to feed her children. One's mother who sings a song as she places the Kosher food sweet bread or cake upon our tongue.
Pleading for more sweetness, as Moses sweetened the River Nile with just a piece of wood. An entire river becoming as sweet as Kosher wine upon a touch of the staff of Moses, a staff (or walking cane) becoming a pen, a writing tool, the wood in the Nile becoming the Torah, the Torah of our lives to be recorded in "The Book of Life". In writing we read with a "yad", the Jewish Torah pointer. Bread becoming cake with the touch of a magic wand. The wand used by an orchestra conductor. A wand of Moses becoming a snake to chase away evil, the Hebrew slaves freed upon the death of the Pharaoh's son, never again to be enslaved.
As a birdie, a hungry baby birdie with opened beak or an adult mother bird to feed our youngsters with our Torah teachings our writings: To be followed by God and to be led by God.
To remember always, to "Keep the Faith of Judaism", our journey is never alone, God is always with us.
Angels. Do they exist? In the Torah, there are four angels mentioned. Yes, four. Not thousands, and the angels are not babies, not cherubs, not children but also not sure of what gender. When one leaves the Synagogue after worshipping on a holy day, after Kol Nidre or Rosh Hashanah, the Rabbi tells us, we are all angels, to look for an angel in one's mirror.
To feel your arm or/and hand and its smoothness, with or without lotion applications, your arms and hands are gentle, as gentle as an angel's. Can we feel like Michael and Raphael, or to be the angel who saves the mule from a lickin'. Or to be the angels who save the life of Isaac? To come directly from the heavens blowing Shofars of warning for Abraham not to kill his son, but instead to sacrifice a ram. To be the angel who fought Jacob, and Jacob became then of the honorable name Israel.
But we are talking over thousands of years ago. Do angels still exist? If you feel rescued by a human, say at a store in a check out lane, the cashier not taking your gift card, lying and saying there is no balance on it, and then, as a miracle the person standing behind you in line is the person who gave you this gift card, and she then tells you that "The cards do not give cash, that you have to come back to the store to spend it on another day".
Angel? I definitely think so! The argument was solved, I knew I could trust her, I saw her angelic shine as she patiently kindly steered me into the right direction, to come back another day to the store to spend the remaining balance on the store gift card. Not led out of the store by security for a misinterpretation, but yet coming so close!
We all had a good laugh and my admitted ignorance was the funny bone!
Mouth-watering green leafy salad for lunch today, this addition to my Kosher lunch was added, the greenness jumped out from under a Ranch Salad Dressing and like a lucky green leprechaun or a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, this greenness in a good cholesterol abundance was added to my diet. How did this come about? I prayed to God and He answered my prayer. Do you mean it is as easy as that? For some but unfortunately not for everyone.
What can we add to the lettuce to make the salad even tastier. We can add purple or golden raisins, but how can a Nazirite eat these forbidden raisins? First, one must give raisins to a Jewish Kohen Priest as a gift for him to eat before you and then you as a Nazirite may eat them too. A Nazirite is a Jewish Priest who is forbidden to eat raisins, grapes or to drink alcohol. But a salad, yes, a salad s/he can eat and enjoy if it is there for him.
Adding orange shredded carrots, red juicy tomato quarters, sunflower seeds. Red, orange, yellow and green peppers, chopped into small squares and sprinkled on top of the lettuce. Eggs but not fertile eggs, fertile eggs are not Kosher eggs. How can we tell the difference between a fertile and non-fertile egg? A fertile egg contains a spot of blood on the yolk.
Cheeses sprinkled on top too. American cheese, Muenster cheese, Greek cheese, White cheeses, Parmesan cheese, Wisconsin cheeses, any cheese that waters your palette, but no meats added if there are cheeses, to keep Kosher not to mix dairy and meat.
All I did was pray, but I made sure I prayed to the ONE God, the God of Abraham and Sarah, and whallah! There was the salad on my plate. Feeling now like a satiated rabbit after eating bunny lettuce, greens that are as deep as greens can be.
To have a handful of old friends who never leave you, like God, they are always there, to keep in touch either by phone, email, postal letter or a person to person visit. To know all about these old friends, they opened up to you sincerely when you first met and keep opening up to you to ask of your advice or encouragement. People who have something in common with you, mentors they are to you and mentors you are to them.
To eat together, to read Reader's Theater together, to create poetry or visual artwork together, to want to know how each other's creative streak is going, to take pleasure in the pleasure they have when they create.
To know their creative works like books in your library, establishing a connection of the artists' lives as you see it in their works. Knowing their favorite colors, their politics, the same religion, and on and on.
An old friend who brings you love and caring, year after year after year. Him being a friend to God, as you are.
Listen! What can you hear? Listen is SHEMA as the Hebrew word. To seek and to find, to find a tune that makes you move, to feel a dance in your steps even while you are sitting down in a chair. How can you locate God? Where is He? Are you looking for Him? Listen to this music and find Him there.
Huge timpani drums, six or eight of them, pounding on them, getting bass, echoing bouncing against all the walls around you, sound-proof, only the best of sounds coming through, hitting the drumheads harder, leather animal skins, clanking the metal cymbals, one against the other, clinking clanking, the Psalms teach us that this is an appropriate way to call upon God. Making noise, can He hear us?? Make more noise! Say, "God, can you hear me now?"
A violin, a baby girl, sitting on one's shoulder, carefully cradled, a string bow, not to shoot an arrow but to caress the violin so it kisses the air making sounds delightful to the ear, a violin child all grown up after a bat mitzvah having become a cello, a large violin, a blast of a womanly sound, a cello as a large body in one's arms, to strum a harp, a harp for you and a cello for me. Finding a clarinet player, a flutist, all together, a combination of musicians to show us the music of God, to strum and to then hear God sing, He is singing to us as we play music for Him.
Clear your throat, let pure air come into your lungs, heave your chest and find oxygen, expel carbon dioxide, when you breathe in call Adonai with every breath, when breathing out give Yah your gift of breath, in Adonai, out Yah, breathe again and again, in unison with the one God, in unity with two of His names, searching and straining the air purifying it, pour white flour powder into a sieve and puffing it up, granules mixing together, as white as white can be.
White flour to become cakes and cookies, brown sugar integrated with white sugar, using a large wooden spoon to circulate it, as a wand of direction in an orchestra, a symphony, baking your bakery to sounds, playing Classical music, a cello and violinist as you are, strumming the strings to the sounds you hear and the sounds you create, playing exciting music, playing it as a praise and thanks to God.
