Recently I was sitting in the park and there was a father and three children. One of them was severely disabled and he sat there feeding her and making sure her headphones were playing as she moved and “sang” along to the music in her head.

There was an older brother who went to throw ball with his younger sister. The boy told his sister to stand farther back, but the father immediately called out, “You gotta stand closer to her; she’s a girl!”

Neither child challenged his statement.

I was upset; “Still putting each other, and ourselves, in little boxes,” I thought. What can this man imagine for his children and what boxes is he keeping them in? Will they be able to break out of them?

True to boxes, this week the Torah clearly states that both Miriam and Aaron make racist comments about their brother Moses’ wife, but then God only punishes Miriam—with a really bad skin affliction—to the point where they fear for her life and Moses prays for her (the famous prayer: el na refana la; please, God, heal her).

God also clarifies that Moses has been singled out as the only prophet who gets to talk to God face to face and that Moses is the most humble of all men on earth (Great example: two men are accused of acting like prophets and Moses defends them: “Are you really that upset on my account? Don’t worry about me! I don’t need to be the only one. In fact, everyone should have the spirit of God upon them.” Nice, Moses! Breaking out of those boxes God has made!)

Yes, it’s great to have a leader who knows how to ask for help (as he does this week again) and doesn’t need to be special (in other words, not a narcissist like so many), but it seems obvious that Moses is chosen for his special role at least partly because he’s a man, like God in the Bible, and that Aaron goes unpunished because he’s also a man.

Historically, we earthlings have also put God in a little box, not being able to imagine that “He” might not be male at all, or what non-gendered would even mean—for God or anyone else.

Back to God, though, who lacks imagination in other ways; though often described as all-compassionate, unending in forgiveness, how often does he have to be talked down by Moses? It happens again here when the people begin to complain about the limited variety of food available to them in the dessert (only manna), as they reminisce about the meat and fish, yes fish! and melons and all kinds of goodies they supposedly enjoyed in Egypt as slaves (I guess their imaginations were not limited here!).

God becomes incensed a couple of times in this particular story and says, “You want meat!? I’ll give you meat! I’ll give you so much meat, it’ll be coming out of your ears and you’ll be sick from it. (And to think that God predicted that some people in the world would have access to so much food one day, it would make them sick! This, indeed, was not lacking in imagination.)

Now it’s Moses’ turn to be limited in imagination. Here he panics and says to God, “There are 600,000 people to feed! There’s no way we can have enough for everybody by tomorrow!” To which God responds, “Are you kidding me? Nothing is too big for me. Do you forget that I am the all-powerful, unlimited in capacity?” (And God delivers. No problem.)

Scene change: The Pentagon finally, sort of, acknowledged this week that UFO’s might be a real thing. This is part of the same problem: it’s so hard for our earthling brains to imagine that there might be other intelligent life on planets that don’t look like ours or have the same biologic make-up.

I heard Jill Tarter, a female space scientist who went to Cornell at a time when the female students were literally locked in their own little boxes (their dorms) every evening because it was believed the university should be their parent (in loco parentis). Tarter was interviewed by Krista Tippett for the On Being Project.

Her words and the title of the interview: “It Takes a Cosmos to Make a Human,” by which she means, every single cell in our bodies and everything on earth contains the same exact material—of the cosmos!

Translation: there’s no such thing as Me and You/Us and Them. In fact, Tarter wants us to call ourselves Earthlings as opposed to humans because that would help us realize that we have so much more that links us than separates us.

But I hated it when she said, “Oh, organized religion is not my thing.” (Tippett always asks about an interviewee’s spiritual or religious upbringing).

It’s become so popular to reject religion. But I say, Tarter, like others, was putting “religion” in the boxes she herself wants us to reject.

I mean, I get it. “Organized Religion” has done a lot of harm in the world. A lot of people have been slaughtered in the name of it. And so much of the story of earthlings as told in the Bible is what she/we reject, right? The Torah seems to be all about separation: between God and God’s creations, between Moses and his people, the Israelites and Other people, even between the different tribes. There’s us, the special ones, over here; those inferior people over there, us driving them out, them driving us out.

It seems to give license to separation, hierarchy and slaughter.

Yet, there’s that message of awe that Tarter is talking about, and that Einstein and other scientists have talked about, that we’ve lost touch with. And there is a constant reminder in the Torah that we must live with awe.

Towards the end of her interview, Tippett asks Tarter if she ever gets frustrated at not finding intelligent life out in the universe. To this Tarter responds, “Absolutely not. We’re just at the very beginning of our space exploration and our use of computers to aid us in that.”

She adds: “It would be like scooping water with a bucket to see if there are any fish in the ocean, and seeing it come up empty, we assume there are no fish.”

Maybe the problem is not religion vs. spirituality/you vs. me/us vs. them (and, yes, I'm thinking of present-day Israel as well). Maybe it’s our little earthling brains that divide us from each other because of lack of imagination and the little boxes we live in, even inside our brains.

The weather has been swinging back and forth over the past week in many places, including in New York: 90 degrees for several days (and it’s not even June!) and then dropping to 60 for a couple of days, then 90 again. It’s frustrating and scary. What’s our future? I’m having a hard time imagining the healing of the earth.

And yet I know I must expand my little earthling brain because, well, there’s the awe factor.

Should we be frustrated? Maybe not.

Maybe we should try our best to remember that we are just at the very beginning of our earthling civilization becoming civilized, stretch our imaginations out of the little boxes we’ve been living in for so, so long, and try our best to live with awe and in awe, every day, as much as possible.

That’s what Organized Religion does for me. Because I don’t get to look through a microscope or a telescope very often.

But when I address or bow to “God,” I am placing imagination in a place far up in the sky, remembering how very vast the universe is, and how very endless the possibilities, even if I can’t imagine them right now.

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