On Monday morning of this week, I had a real panic attack.

Like, really.

I had an appointment to meet with someone I was very nervous about meeting.

We were matched up to work on a project together: me as the rabbi and he as the artist.

Me writing a drash, or sermon, on the weekly parsha—like I do here every week.

Him making a painting based on my drash.

But we were from completely opposite backgrounds.

A fierce Zionist, he moved to Israel at the age of 15 and has been in counterterrorism his entire life.

One of his children had been at the music festival in Israel when Hamas had attacked.

He had escaped, but the trauma was real.

Me? I grew up in a communist, antizionist household.

What a time, in the midst of such high tensions, for us to meet!

Why had we been matched? What if we couldn’t find common ground to work together?

On my way downtown on the subway, a man came walking down the aisle with his cane leading the way.

“I have a wife and children, and I’m almost blind. If anyone could spare a quarter, a nickel, a dime, some food, anything…”

Across the aisle from me was a young man I had noticed.

He seemed to be a new African immigrant in New York.

As the blind man approached the pole that separated me from this young man across the aisle, he reached out to pull him over so he wouldn’t hurt himself.

He didn’t worry about how dirty the blind man was; he wasn’t afraid to touch him at all.

I wasn’t the only one surprised by the gesture; the blind man seemed taken aback as well.

He didn’t give him money, but treated him with dignity: a human being in need of assistance.

It struck that he did it like it was the most natural thing in the world, reaching out with his whole body in a caring way to grasp the man’s arm.

In this week’s parsha full of “mishpatim,” or laws, there’s a very curious little paragraph.

All the elders of the community ascend the mountain, and they see God.

“Under God’s feet,” it says, “there was the likeness of a pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for purity…they beheld God, and they ate and drank.”

These men see God, and instead of trembling at the sight, they just go about their business, eating and drinking.

There has been much commentary on this strange verse.

The one that seemed the most probable when I read it was that God is in the ordinary, if we only stop to notice it.

Or not; maybe God is in the ordinary even when we don’t notice.

When I got downtown and met the artist, I realized how all my worries had been for naught.

I could not have been more surprised by our encounter.

We had so much more in common than I could have ever imagined!

Our conversation was as natural as could be.

We ate pizza and drank Snapple, and then went to see his artwork, and it was exciting learning about each other, our families, our children, our lives, our paths.

We could have talked for hours.

Like the man on the subway, he was just another human being, not the extreme person I had expected after all.

Like when the men beheld God and went to their eating and drinking, maybe I also beheld God on Monday.

Maybe I do every day, and fail to realize it.