Hundreds of years ago before electricity and smart phones, a rabbi asked his students: “How do you know when the night has ended and the day has begun…before the sun comes up on the horizon?”
One student said, “Rabbi, when I can see the fence between our field and the field of our neighbor.” Another student replied, “When I can look into the distance and tell if it is a horse or a cow.” A third student offered an answer: “Rabbi, when I see the colors of a flower and I see the red, the yellow and the blue. That’s when I know the night has ended and the day has begun.”
The rabbi had a frown on his face as he said: “Don’t you see that you are only dividing and separating, a fence to divide your field from your neighbor’s, a horse from a cow, and one color from another. Is that all we can do? Separate, divide, and split the world into pieces? Isn’t the world split and broken enough?
“What then is the answer,” they all asked. In a gentle voice the rabbi replied, “When you look into the face of the person who is next to you and you can recognize that the person is your brother….that the person is your sister.
Then the night has ended and the day has begun.”
