During an intermission of services, our rabbi told a story of a little boy talking to an angel, who complained that in our days God doesn’t make miracles like He did in biblical days–the parting of the Red Sea and so forth. The angel brought the boy back in time to the Exodus from Egypt, to the middle of the parted Red Sea when the Jews were fleeing from Pharaoh’s armies (angels can do that you know). One woman was screaming, “We are all going to die! Where are God’s miracles now?” At that point the boy screamed at her, “Don’t you see the walls of water on both sides of you?” She couldn’t hear him or see him, because he was there just as an observer.

At the blink of an eye the angel brought him back to a field near his home, and there was his little sister looking down at a flower. “Look how beautiful the colors are,” she said. That’s when he looked around and realized that everything that God made, which we take so for granted, is a miracle. He then understood that God’s miracles were all around us and beyond and they were so endless that they could never be counted.

I remember thinking about the existence of God’s miracles while looking up at our many-bulb chandelier hanging from the ceiling in our dining room. It was then a thought entered my mind…I can see the fine detail and the symmetry and the shine of the brass, curved arms holding everything together. I know it’s just a chandelier and there are more complex things in this world, but that simple chandelier somehow did it for me. You see, it wasn’t the beauty of it, or the light that it gave off, or the electricity we harness to power it that gave me the answer to that question; it was the way that it just hung there from the ceiling, absolutely perfectly still. We (this earth) are moving in an orbit at a tremendous speed, which is over 65,000 miles per hour, and also spinning at several hundred mph and all of this in perfect synchronization with the rest of the universe, which we know is so endless, and yet, that chandelier on the ceiling remains perfectly…still.

Yes! We have a word for it, gravity, and they have an understanding of how it all works. But after all their research, scientists say that further study still needs to be done.

Try touching a chandelier and see if it doesn’t move!

By David Weinstein