Friday, April 10, 2009

Fruit Flies

A Prayer for Birkat HaChammah


God: Eternal, Infinite, Awesome, and Vast Unknowable!
Is/Was/Will Be
That which is before everything I think of as real was here.
That which is now whether I understand it or not.
And that which is left after all that I think will last forever is gone.

The fruit fly lives a lifetime in a day and says its Shabbat prayers every half hour.
We get our three score and ten and we say our Shabbat prayers once a week.
The sun lives billions of years and we say a prayer on its behalf once every twenty-eight years.

So Eternal….how often do you say your prayers?

Speaking of which, God, if I haven’t mentioned it before? I'm really scared. I need something to hold on to, something really big and solid
But also small enough for me to comprehend.
So this morning I gratefully pray with the sun, precisely because, like me, it is not eternal.

It just looks that way to us fruit flies. Amen.