Celebrating God's WordSample

Always on His Mind  

This week, Jews around the world will start reading the Bible from the beginning as part of the Jewish tradition to read the Five Books of Moses every year — Genesis through Deuteronomy. We have just celebrated the completion of the yearlong Torah readings on Simchat Torah, and tomorrow in synagogues everywhere, we begin again with the story of Creation. 

However, this story is not just about something that occurred, according to the Jewish calendar, 5,779 years ago; it’s about something that is happening today. 

In fact, it’s happening right now. Every morning in the Jewish prayer service we say, “God renews the work of Creation every day, constantly.” Creation is happening always.

This means that when we wake up in the morning and look outside, what we see is brand new. That tree, no matter how many years old, was created again today. It’s not just there today because it was there yesterday. It’s there because God decided that it was an integral, important, and necessary element in the world right now. If it wasn’t, it would cease to exist.

If that goes for trees, how much more so for people and for our lives? If we are alive today, it’s not just because we were born many decades ago. If you woke up this morning, it’s because God thinks that you are exactly where you should be at this very moment. 

What’s more, all our life circumstances present today were created for right now. Our blessings are given to us all over again, and for that, we should be grateful. At the same time, God also permitted all the challenges that we will face today because He believes that they are for our very best.

One way Judaism describes the relationship between God and ourselves is that we are God’s thoughts. What does that mean? Try picturing a green alien for a second. When you think of it, the extra-terrestrial exists even if just in our imagination. If we would stop thinking about that little green guy, he wouldn’t exist at all. So, too, with us. 

When God is thinking about us, including our life circumstances, we exist and everything around us exists. If God forgot about us for even a moment, we would no longer exist. We are always on God’s mind. At every moment, He is creating and re-creating the fabric of our lives.

Sometimes people think that God may have forgotten about them or that He is too busy doing other things to take care of them. We might feel that God isn’t aware of our challenges or doesn’t knows how we feel. But we have to understand that God is present and entirely involved at every moment of our lives. We are on His mind, He cares, and He is constantly creating everything exactly as it should be — today, tomorrow, and always.

Discover more about the Jewish view of the Bible from Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein’s DVD Bible study on the Torah.