"A Single Thread in a Tapestry...":
Thinking About the Creation

My Parsha, the portion of the Torah that I will be reading, which is the very beginning of the Bible, is about the creation of the universe and the earth and all the living creatures on our planet.

This is a very difficult subject for me to understand and so I need to try to explain it in a personal way by talking about what my Bat Mitzvah means to me.

This is a ceremony that shows that I am growing up and taking responsibility for myself and others. But it is also a religious ceremony that's important to me because I wasn't born Jewish, I was brought into the religion by my father as a baby.

Every night since then, I've said a prayer thanking God for all he has done for me and also asking him to watch over me and give me support. I do this because I believe that God brought me into this world and guided me to the man who was meant to be my father so that I would have a life of loving care.

Just as I believe that God was my personal creator and guardian, I also believe that God was the creator of all things, from the endless universe to each human being in this world.

The important word here is - "believe". I can't prove my belief scientifically, but I can prove it to myself in another way. To me, the proof comes by looking back on my life, which I don't see as an accident, a complete coincidence.

When I was very small, my father told me this fairy tale about my adoption:

When he decided to adopt a baby girl, as a middle-aged, unmarried man, he was both scared and excited. He had lived alone for many years and knew nothing about children and needed time to get used to the idea of becoming a father. So when the adoption agency called him after just six months and said there was a baby waiting for him in China, he didn't know what to say or do. In the fairy tale God sent an angel who whispered in his ear, "That little baby is not for you!" and so he told the adoption agency, he wanted to wait another month.

But there was a Chinese government problem and so another seven months went by, he heard nothing more and started to worry that he wouldn't get another chance. Then one wonderful day, they called him to say that they had another baby for him, one who was only four weeks old. My father thought this was really terrific, even though he never even held a baby and all his friends thought he was out of his mind. He was already packed and ready to leave for China, when the angel showed up again and this time whispered to some government official in Beijing, "That baby is not for him!"

So my father got another call: He wouldn't be getting the newborn he expected. They would be choosing another orphan for him, who was 2 years old. Then for the last time, the angel appeared in China just as a woman was about to make that choice , guided her hand to a file with the name, "Fu Ping", and whispered,

"That's the one!"

As you probably can guess, I was the orphan called Fu Ping, and I could prove to a scientist that the story happened just that way - except for God's angel. But to me, without the guidance of God, it would be an accident that meant nothing. With the angel, the story explains to me how I became part of God's Grand Design.

And it's through this that I can understand the two different ways of thinking about the Creation - the scientific explanation, that between ten and twenty billion years ago, there was a mysterious "Big Bang" after which everything in the universe just appeared and started forming - and the Bible's story of the seven days of God's Creation.

A scientist would laugh at the word "day".  Everyone knows that the universe was not built in a day. But, a thousand years ago, the great Jewish scholar Rashi, pointed out that a day to us may be thousands, or millions, or billions of years to our creator.

It all depends on whether your looking through the eyes of man or trying to imagine looking through the eyes of the Almighty.

There was a song I heard once,that said that we are all like single threads in a gigantic tapestry and we can't see our purpose in the Great Pattern unless we try to look at our lives - "through Heaven's eyes".

When I try to look at my own life in this way, it helps me understand what really might have happened, B'reisheet - In The Beginning.