“Thank you for our lives entrusted to your hand, our souls placed in your care, for your miracles that greet us every day, and for your wonders and good things that are with us every hour, evening, morning, and noon.” (from the amidah)
These days, I am drawn strongly to the phrases about our lives being entrusted to God’s hand, to the workings of a world over which I have little control and less to the second part about experiencing the miracles with me daily.
However…
Whenever I can, even in winter, I davven shacharit on my back deck facing the sunrise. I stand at an old plastic table given to us by a close friend when we first moved to Hornby Island. And, in the winter, I cover the table with a tarp to keep it clean. The tarp covers the umbrella hole in the middle of the table which also drains the water from the top. In that collecting water, last winter, I noticed a maple seed which had begun to sprout.
For fun, I planted that seed in a small pot. After a while, the seed put down roots and began to grow above the soil. First, it put out two long and narrow leaves which looked nothing like maple leaves. [All the while I kept singing part of an old Canadian song, “The maple leaf, our emblem dear, the maple leaf forever…”] Then I noticed the tiny beginning of another shoot which this time produced two familiar looking maple leaves which gradually grew larger while the two original leaves, having served their purpose, gradually wilted and dropped off. And then another small shoot with two tiny leaves, a kind of tan colour, began to show itself. At first I thought that maybe the leaves were sick and that the tree would stop growing. But, over the course of about two weeks, they gradually got larger and greener. And now I see the next shoot becoming visible and two more of those tan leaves have taken shape.
All of this I watched as I davvened each morning over several months. And now I’ve transplanted the little tree into a bigger pot to keep it safe until it is strong enough to be safe from the deer and I can put it in a space where there used to be a cedar that died, likely due to the increasing warmth and dryness of this once temperate and wetter climate.
Reb Zalman told this story (in a talk he gave in 2008):
There was a man who came to his rabbi asked him for a business advice. The rabbi said, “Go ahead, you will succeed.” On the way home he stopped at the house of the rabbi's disciple and he asked him about his business, and the rabbi’s disciple said, “You’ll lose your shirt.” So now he said, “To whom should I listen? Should I listen to a great rabbi or should I listen to his disciple?” He listened to the rabbi and in the end he lost his shirt. So he comes back to the disciple and says, “Could you explain this to me?” The disciple said, “Yes. My master only could see till the end of his life and by the end of his life you had done very well, but he couldn't see beyond. I could see beyond and I knew you would lose your shirt.”
I’m beginning to feel this limitation of vision. While I have known for decades that something like Covid-19 was coming (though I thought it would be in the form of a natural disaster intensified by climate change rather than a virus), I no longer have confidence in an ability to see past this new present and feel certain that the ultimate outcome will be positive. I try and I advise others to model living in uncertainty with acceptance and trust, while we all do whatever we can to facilitate a positive outcome, one which I will likely not live long enough to see for certain.
And so my little maple continues to grow in its larger pot, ever so slowly, giving me deep pleasure and hope that we all will find ways to grow even as the Coronavirus challenges us to acknowledge the unsustainability of the society we have created and the need to rethink our patterns of consumption and our hierarchy of values.
Blessings
Daniel
PS: I usually wait at least a week between drafting a blog and actually posting it. This one is no exception and, during the time I’ve reflected on it, my little maple added another set of leaves and is now adding two sets at the same time. “Wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles!”