Question: I have a question which I was hoping you may be able to help my husband and me with. This morning my daughter asked me the following:
"Mommy, how does G-d make the world work?"
I was unable to answer. I was hoping you could provide me with a way to answer the question in words that an almost 4-year-old will understand!
Response: What a sweet question. I hope you are proud that your nearly 4-year-old ponders such issues.
Maybe try asking her this:
How does your body work? As you sit there, you are breathing and blinking and digesting food. How do you do all that? Your hair grows, your fingernails grow, you get taller all the time. Even in your sleep. How do you do it?
The answer: you just live, and by being alive your body grows and develops. You have a soul, a neshoma, that gives your body life. Just by having a neshoma, you are alive, and your body works. You don't need to do anything.
So too G-d is the life behind the universe. It is like the world is a big body, and G-d is the soul behind it. Just by Him being, He enlivens everything.
But it isn't enough to have a soul. There is something you need to do to stay alive. You need to eat. Food keeps your neshoma in your body. If you don't eat you get weak, and the neshoma starts to leave. Then when you eat you get strong again.
So too we have to do something to keep G-d in the world. We have to do mitzvos - good deeds. Every mitzvah brings G-d into the world, like food brings the soul into the body. When you say the Shema prayer, or give tzedaka (charity), or light Shabbos candles or listen to your parents, you are giving G-d strength and you are keeping the world going.
It is a deep concept, but try it, you may be surprised how easily a child can grasp spiritual ideas. She may have a little body, but she has a huge soul.
