Baruch Atah Adonia Eloheinu Melech Ha-Olam

So here is a fun fact about Judaism for today: since Jews are called to be holy people, they are also called to make the world holy. Now you pretty quickly run up against the issue that only God (or as a Jew would say “G-d”) is the only one who can make things holy, right? Right. Or for the purposes of this conversation we will stipulate that, ok? Ok. So if only God can make things holy, then what is the Jews’ job?

Turns out, the Jews’ job is to say, “Hey! That’s holy!” Or a Jew might say “Holy Moeshe!” which is the Hebrew version of “Holy Moses!” But probably not because there is a specific blessing for just about everything. There are blessings for physical objects like this iPod Touch or that salt and pepper potato chip from Trader Joe’s. There are blessing for mitzvahs (aka good deeds) that have been done or are about to happen. There are even blessings for events like, I guess, baseball games or a rainbow. A person could spend their whole day doing nothing but blessing things.

Which is kind of the point, I reckon, to spend the whole day essentially in prayer. The other thing is that this seems to indicate that just about everything is holy. I could get down with this as well, although there are some things, like Vienna sausages, that you would have to really work on selling me as “holy.” But certainly there are a lot more things that are holy than I recognize on a daily basis. Not just fluffy bunnies and baby chicks either. Mostly it’s people I take for granted. But I’ve been prone to overlook baby chicks too. Never fluffy bunnies.