Writing the Waves

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What if we lived our lives guided by a prime directive—peppering in a little Star Trek as we begin a new year—that takes seriously what the mystics teach: that everything, always and everywhere, in every person and every encounter, exists only because the Divine flow continues to move through it? And that were that flow to stop, even for a moment, everything would simply vanish?

It’s not unlike those all-too-familiar moments in Houston when, without warning or explanation, the power grid drops. Lights go out. Systems fail. Life as we know it halts. Or like the days before automatic backups, when a computer froze and the document you were working on simply disappeared into the ether—never to be recovered in quite the way it had been. Gone, not gradually, but instantly.

For the mystics—Jewish and otherwise—the idea that all is God is both exhilarating and unsettling. The Kabbalists insist we take the words of the morning Kedushah literally: m’lo kol ha’aretz kvodo—“God’s presence fills the entire earth.” Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Literally. All of it. Mamash. Really.

Prayer, then, and the discipline of sustained spiritual practice, emerge from the recognition that it could all disappear. One day, for each of us, it will. That awareness can leave us feeling profoundly vulnerable. But it is also deeply empowering. Because it means that the world—as we experience it and understand it—depends on us. On each of us. To make it matter.

Yes, this perspective underscores our fragility. But it also affirms our purpose. We are not passive recipients of creation; we are its partners. If God is truly God—beyond nature, beyond physics, beyond even our capacity to imagine—then God had choices in
how to bring the world into being. We could have been automatons. But that would have required staying in the Garden. Instead, we were sent into the world.

What God seems to want from us is not perfection, but presence: to engage the world as it is, to assess our capacities, to notice opportunities, and to manifest the Divine through our
choices. To bring light where there is darkness.

This is the call placed before us each day—and all the more so at the turning of a year. Welcome to 2026, fully twenty-five years beyond the future imagined by 2001: A Space Odyssey. It turns out that no matter how advanced our technology becomes, we are still being asked the same ancient question: What will we do with the dash between the year of our birth and the day we are gone?

It’s time to begin filling it again—with meaning, with passion, with courage, with hope, and with love.