Today at sundown begins day three of the eight day Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. In what has become a Hanukkah tradition, I hope (later this month) to post pictures taken at Hanukkah House, a museum in Binghamton, New York.
In the meantime, I wanted to let a fellow blogger, Judy Yaron, do the heavy work for me today as she asks: What is your miracle?
Do you believe in miracles? And, what is a miracle, anyway?
This is a Jewish viewpoint: all of life is one big miracle. For those who do not believe in the deity of the Biblical tradition, many still believe in a Spirit, or Nature, or some other supernatural force that we can not fully understand.
And if you do, you just might believe in miracles. Everything from what happens as a baby grows inside of us throughout our lives, to the germination of a seed and how it grows into an adult plant, to a beautiful sunrise or sunset, to the song of a bird or the smell of sauteing garlic or onions, is a miracle, in my opinion. These events are all explainable by science but science, after all, is just something that enables us to understand the workings of our world.
And the more I understand, the more I see the miracles in everyday life. Even today, as our nation navigates waters churned with terror and with hate, and we don't know what direction to turn in, there are still enough examples of the goodness of humanity.
I want to believe in that, anyway, as the United States enters new, even scarier waters.
The human race has known hours of uncertainty before. We need our faith in the goodness of humanity more than ever, and the everyday miracles around us.
So...is there a miracle in your life?