Summer in The City
July 16th, 2018 Posted by Rabbi Daniel Lapin Thought Tools 14 commentsIt was on a clear but cold winter afternoon that I landed at JFK Airport on my first visit to the United States. After clearing customs and immigration and being granted a three week tourist visa, I climbed into a taxi on my way to my Manhattan hotel. Half an hour later, as the sun was starting to set, the cab swept around a curve in the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and for the first time in my life my eyes fell upon a sight of which I have never tired. The towering skyscrapers of lower Manhattan silhouetted against the still blue sky took my breath away. I found myself silently mouthing these words, “How great are your works, Oh Lord!” (Psalms 92:5) as tears started up in my eyes. It was then, only a couple of hours after first setting foot upon the continent of North America while driving up the East River towards the Brooklyn Bridge that I resolved to stay. And, though no longer on a tourist visa, I’m still here.
Why did this sight move me so deeply? Because the Grand Canyon, Mount Rainier, and the giant redwood trees overlooking San Francisco Bay might all have conceivably come into being as the result of a lengthy process of random, unaided materialistic evolution. Primeval winds and wild rivers might have shaped canyons and mountains while undisturbed saplings grew and grew. But a colossal hub of millions of human beings all cooperating to build and maintain Manhattan with its buildings and bridges, its streets and subways and its unimaginably vast system of human enterprise could only have been built by creatures touched by the finger of God. I was immeasurably moved realizing that I was gazing upon the proof of God’s goodness.