THE SEA IS DEEP AND THE WORLD IS WIDE!

The sea is deep and the world is wide! 

…And she gazed at the sky the sea and the land, 

The waves and the caves and the golden sand, 

She gazed and gazed, amazed by it all, 

And she said to the whale, “I feel so small.”

Some of the best few lines in one of our favourite kids books by Julia Donaldson, the Snail and the Whale. It captures an essential part of life which is feeling so small.

Natalie often laughs at me that I always write or speak about ‘the world’, everything is about the essence of life, the globe, I am often dealing in the terms of the entirety of the universe. So alluring to spend life in the essence of the great big world yet this is not my direction this Shabbat.

My Judaism is the Shabbat candles on the table, the two loaves of freshly baked Hallah on the table, a glass of wine for kiddush, great simplicity. At the end of the week, we bring it all home, focus on the smallest of family, relationships or units of friendship and community. This model of Shabbat is also a model for our lives, not to be weighed down by the goings on of all the activity of life on earth but to find love, passion and focus for the life that is going on right in front of us. The world beyond here will still be there tomorrow.

Rebbe Nachman (18th Century, modern day Ukraine), writes of the world being a very narrow bridge and to not be afraid, it is a teaching that sits with me often. ‘The sea is deep and the world is wide’ but for the vast majority of us we will see the same four walls over and over, the same people again and again, the same station or bus stop, or office in repetition so in that sense the world is a narrow bridge. Our place here is confined to some varying degree.

This week has been one of diversity, both funerals and today a wedding, in this sense too our worlds are enormous and often baffling but we too often kid ourselves of the length of our days. Our lives are confined to limited surrounds and our years are but a blink in the story of the universe. It is these moments of profound grief and celebration that we connect with that essence of the fleeting nature of our lives and choose life, to wring everything out of this precious time that we have, here, now.

SHABBAT SHALOM