The Grass is Greener
And therefore today the world is being held responsible more than in previous generations. And us surely; especially if you heard this lecture tonight so Hakadosh Baruch Hu holds us responsible – you should feel it's an obligation. We’re expected to use our minds, to look around and say “Yes, we recognize You Ribono shel Olam. We see You so clearly that we actually feel close to You.”
If you walk by a plot of grass today, a lawn, you shouldn’t waste such an opportunity. Besides thinking how beautiful the color is, how green is so soft on the eyes, and how it’s such a nice thing to roll yourself in the grass if you're a child; but you’re also thinking how the grass refreshes the atmosphere and how it holds the soil together so the top soil shouldn't blow away. So you’re already seeing the yad Hashem in the grass.
Now, if you want to do it right you won’t stop there. You’re thinking now about how Hakadosh Baruch Hu planted grass all over the world as food for grazing animals, for sheep and cows. And the cow uses that grass to produce milk. Milk from grass? Yes from grass and water a cow produces milk and cream and butter and cheese. That’s what milk is, grass and water. Can you make cream and cheese or even milk from grass and water? If you did, you'd get a patent and you’d become a millionaire overnight. But the cow has it - he has that patent of taking grass and making it into all these ingredients that we eat and enjoy.
Appreciating the Miracles
Now look at your wool suit. You're dressed in grass. What is wool? A sheep eats grass and turns it into wool. That's a tremendous procedure, to take grass, to chop it up until it's shiny and change the chemicals around and the molecules around in such a way that now it comes out in the form of wool on the sheep's back instead of grass. Grass should grow on the sheep's back. If he eats grass, grass should grow on the back, not wool. A tremendous thing! You have to realize it's a miracle.
You heard this before? You know all about it? You have to hear it a thousand more times to appreciate the tremendous nes. And hearing is not enough. You have to do something about it. You have to study creation and see the Creator all the time.
You look at a man and he has two eyes over here, by his head. But they’re not just eyes, just two holes in your head so that your brain can see out. It’s a marvelous contraption, the eye. Two perfect color cameras that can focus for distant scenes and for close scenes. Immediately, they can change focus from far off to close by. And they’re taking pictures every second. And how would they take pictures? It’s a real camera. Inside there’s a dark chamber and inside there’s a negative in which the picture registers. And these nerves in the retina bring the picture to the brain.
Two such perfect cameras that are unmatched! Nobody in the world has manufactured cameras that work as efficiently as these two! So it means that every time you look at someone’s eyes you’re reminded of the Creator. You’re walking on the street and you see your neighbor coming towards you. Look at his eyes! They are demonstrating there’s a plan and purpose in the world. They are demonstrating that Hakadosh Baruch Hu is right here! It’s His handiwork after all. As open as can be, we see the yad Hashem in the world!
Microscopic Factories
And it’s with no end. It’s crowding in on you from all sides! You walk outside and you see the leaves on the trees. If you know something, a little bit about science, you know how complicated a leaf is. It’s amazing how complicated a leaf is. A leaf is a whole block of factories. It breathes in carbon dioxide from the air. It breathes in moisture from the air and it takes in sunshine too. And it takes together all these things and it kneads it together and it makes out of it materials.
Yes, the leaf is making materials; there’s machinery, microscopic machinery, in ever leaf that’s producing material and then it sends the juicy materials through tiny little channels to the stem of the leaf and into the branch of the tree. It goes into the trunk. It becomes wood. It becomes root. It becomes leaves again. And eventually it makes blossoms with nectar to attract the bees in order to pollinate the plants; and then a fruit grows. And that's the work of the leaf.
Now, the leaf is spread out. The leaves of one tree are thin, very thin, but they want to cover as much space as possible. If you take all the leaves of one tree, it will cover an entire city block. Imagine you have a breathing space in contact with the air, a whole city block.
You see the tree is doing tremendous work. And every leaf is like that. Every leaf is in contact with the air. That's why some leaves have irregular circumferences. They're not round and smooth but irregular; an irregular shape, in and out. Why is it in and out? Because the end of the leaf has holes in it where it breathes in and out. It's like a bay. When the land goes in and out there's more shore. And therefore when you have irregular shapes of the leaf, the more opportunity for the leaf to function, to breathe.
