Today’s words come from Professor Ivy Helman, PhD, I knew her first in Lowell, MA at Temple Emanuel of the Merrimack Valley. We have stayed in contact all these years. She is now teaching at Charles University in Prague. I am all the way in Elgin. We are still friends.
Connecting to the Divine in Nature
“So it was always, the cloud covered the Tent of Meeting [during the day] and there was an appearance of fire at night.” Numbers 9:16.
One of my favorite images of the divine is the one here: a pillar of cloud during the day and one of fire at night. This pillar guided the Israelites as they wandered through the desert on their way to the Promised Land. There are many connections that can be drawn from such a verse and I hope that the two ideas I am providing here for reflection might resonate with you as we prepare ourselves to reconnect with each other and the divine in the approaching High Holy Days.
In the pillar of cloud and fire, I am struck by how close the divine is to the people. They can see the divine presence and that presence guides them throughout the desert. Where is the divine guiding us?
More importantly, I think, the Israelites were able to recognize the divine within the cloud and fire, and they connected with the divine by following the presence through the desert. Where can we recognize the divine in our day-to-day lives and how do we connect with the presence?
I also find comfort in the use of nature imagery which connects the divine to the world around us. It is not that divinity and nature, in this image of cloud and fire, are distinct entities. Rather, they are one in the same. There is no difference here between divinity and nature. There is a lesson here I think in how we connect to the natural world around us. Do we honor nature’s profound connection to the divine? How?
Assistant Professor/ Odborná asistentka
Charles University/ Univerzita Karlova v Praze