Ekev Reflections

This week's Torah portion is Ekev (Deuteronomy 7:12-11:25). Most of this last Book of the Torah involves Moses ripping into the Children of Israel in one last ditch effort to make sure they cross the Jordan an intact nation. So it is that Moses reminds them of their accomplishments as well as their failures. He reviews and cautions with the full knowledge that their crossing cannot be his. In Chapter 9 Verse 10 Moses reminds the Children that after spending forty days and forty nights on the Mountain he brought down '...the two tablets of stone written with the finger of God ..' Of course by the time Moses was ready to descend the mountain and deliver the tablets we (the Children of Israel) were already head long into our own descent which so angered Moses that he threw those written by the hand of God tablets so hard they shattered. Sure we eventually got another set of tablets but written by the hand of Moses with the assumption that we never got anything in God's own handwriting again.
While it may be true that God hasn't written to us in stone much since then His hand writing is all over the place. Our tasks are to take the time to look beyond ourselves and notice.
May we begin this very moment to notice that we are surrounded by Holy handwriting and may we then in those moments of noticing stop our descents into life's frequent distractions to become instead transformative ascents to Holiness.