I like to think of myself as a pretty on the ball person but as I trotted around the Rain forest of Peru a couple of weeks ago, rushing after our guide and hanging on his every word I felt like I was always missing something.  Our guide would suddenly get very animated, very excited as he would be pointing at the top of a very high tree saying to us, “look look, up there, can you see this time, it’s a macaw, parrot, monkey….”  As I squinted off up into the tree I was invariably looking at the wrong branch or at the wrong tree.  Or many times I realised I was looking right at it but it wasn’t until it flew away that I could make it out.  To my untrained eye there was simply so much to always be taking in that a camouflaged bird high up in the tree would be missed time and time again.  There were other examples when I simply couldn’t see the animals because I didn’t understand the environment well enough.  We would walk past a tree and the guide would tell us to look closely at the bark.  Could we see anything? No.  Then he would begin taping lightly on the bark.  Suddenly hundreds upon thousands of tiny red ants emerged from the bark and were crawling all over the tree.  The tree began to change colour as it was cloaked in a blanket of ants crawling all over it.  There is so much more to the world than we see on first glance, so much more to be understood by a situation than is first apparent to us.  May the summer and the month of Elul give us that opportunity to try and find the detail in the big picture, may it allow us to re-evaluate our priorities and find the beauty so often camouflaged.

Rabbi Miriam Berger