The Stars Sang

Did you know that one of the most unnatural things for people to do in this modern age is to look up? Watch people, especially as they are walking, and you will see them looking ahead or down, depending on whether or not they are carrying a device, but rarely will you ever see people looking up.

Now I admit I am a little bit on the weird side. I tend to look up quite a bit. I am a weather watcher so I look to the sky and the clouds all the time to determine what is coming. Tell me that snow is coming and I will literally spend hours watching the clouds thicken up, observing the temperature dropping, anticipating the first of the snow fall. In fact I am so fascinated by weather change that I will quite literally sit outside ( on a covered deck or porch) and watch lighting storms. I love to look up and see the changes.

But there is another reason that I like to look up. On a cold clear night,especially here in the north east, you can see the stars in all their glorious fullness and it gives you a proper perspective on just where you stand in the grand scheme of things.

I remember as a child laying outside on my grandmothers lawn and watching the stars. They were so bright ( where I grew up in Maine there wasn't much for lights to obstruct the view) that I could imagine that each star had a musical twinkle with them. I was always just a bit disappointed when I didn't hear anything, yet I was convinced that I should.

Imagine my surprise when I read the book of Job and found this particular passage. Job 38:7 “When the morning stars sang together, And all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

This, of course, was G-d responding to Job and asking him a series of questions, that he essentially didn't have an answer for, but the fact that G-d says that “ the morning stars sang” gave me a small amount of vindication, knowing that G-d said it has happened. I suppose that we have just lost our ability to hear it.

One thing about looking at the stars ,especially if you spend any length of time at it, is that you get a much better perspective of just where you are ,and stand, in the grand scheme of the universe.

We all live on this planet. We can't escape it. None of us gets out of this alive. Yet we live our lives, thanks to the media and the world wide political class, in almost constant fear. We have threats of war and nuclear holocaust thrown at us on a daily basis, as world “leaders” play a constant game of deadly chicken with each other. Even at our own peon level we fight with each other over everything that those powers tell us we should be “outraged” over, yet nothing is ever resolved and everything remains in chaos. What is the point of all this outrage? Why should we waste our time?

Go find a quite place, preferably well away from lights, on a mountain top, lay down and look up at the stars. Just look. Don't speak, or think, just observe and consider where you are in the grand scheme of the universe. Consider that we are all minuscule dots, on a minuscule planet, in a very small region of space. It is not to say that we are not important to G-d, we are, or His plans, but the universe is so big that it defies imagination and after a while you come to realize that all these things that we are “outraged” over, actually don't mean anything in the grand design of the universe.

Now just imagine if you could get world “leaders” to do the same, to look up into the heavens and come to the realization, that all our differences are petty and that we would, as an entire planet, be better off if we would focus on what really matters, the things that unite us, rather then what, allegedly, divides us.

Perhaps then we would hear, once again, the morning stars singing, and all of the sons of G-d rejoicing as we come to appreciate the things that are truly important.

Someone one said that if we worried about the things that truly matter there would be an extreme shortage of fishing poles. I would amend that with a shortage of back backs and telescopes as well.