Through the baby monitor, I heard these words from my two-year-old daughter:

“Up, up, down, down…
up, down, up down…”

I knew immediately what she was singing!  Uncle Moishy’s song about God [Hashem]:

Hashem is here, Hashem is there, Hashem is truly everywhere
Hashem is here, Hashem is there, Hashem is truly everywhere
Up, up, down, down
right, left, and all around
Here, there and everywhere 
That’s where He can be found…

Apparently, she had been learning this ditty in her little day camp around the corner from my house.  I found this to be overwhelmingly heartwarming, and repeated her genius to everyone I know (hence, here).

Why?

Because I adore the fact that my very young child, who can barely put together a sentence, is absorbing in her young and fragile psyche ideas that I hold so dear.

That God is omniscient.

That He is omnipresent.

That He’s personal.

I take God personally.   That means I believe He cares intensely about what I do, micromanages world details to accommodate and make possible the personal growth of me and others, employs a level of detail in the minutiae of my motivations and machinations, and it’s all because He loves me.

Were you told that God loves you?  If you ever opened a prayer book to the Shema, it was right there, in the paragraph preceding it. 

Tim Tebow opened this question to the world on a whole new level: does God live on a sports field?

Here, there and everywhere, that’s where He can be found…

While hearing my child sing this song gives me intense comfort and peace, I acknowledge that there are those for whom it brings a stiffening of the neck. Was the Tebow debate about the detail of God’s personal involvement? Was it the resistance of Jews to unabashed declarations of faith?

Is that discomfort dependent on WHICH God we’re talking about (well-nigh irrelevant: a Jew would never wear his God on his sleeve. Why?)?

How much longer can my little girl unabashedly sing “Hashem is here” without filtering?

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