Since our last meeting, O Lord, we members have driven across a portion of Your land.

We have seen the objects of Your creation; and green valleys and jagged-topped hills; the shapely trees and lush grasses. The vast blue ocean.

And we found them to be good.

We saw too, the creative ingenuity of Man. The outcropping of communities against Your hills; the roads and highways; the fields, and orchards and vineyards.

And we found them to be good.

We are assembled, O Lord, have also labored and built and given. We have, each in our own way, left our marks of creativity upon this earth and our fellowman.

Let it be, O Lord, that you find them to be good.

I don’t know if my grandmother wrote and delivered these invocations on Friday nights before the entire congregation or only when the synagogue’s senior group met. Knowing my grandmother was an introvert, I question whether she actually read them out loud. Most likely, my grandfather, an extreme extrovert, was recruiter to recite the invocations.

In their later years, my grandparents purchased a small camper, which fit on a small truck. It had a dinette that turned into a bed, a small kitchen, and a cupboard that opened to reveal a port-a-potty. The small bed over the cab comfortably fit my barely five-foot grandmother, and my grandfather who was just five inches taller.

Their camper was probably about the size of this Six-Pac, and the truck was probably a little smaller.

They drove across the country in their cozy camper, stopping along the way to snap pictures and send postcards from their travels. My grandfather, along with being able to play piano by ear, also drew cartoons. He’d bring a handful of colored pencils and blank postcards on which he’d draw their adventures… their small camper fighting gale-force winds and vising national landmarks. I still have many of these humorous postcards.

It makes sense for my grandmother to have written in this invocation about driving across the land, seeing its beauty, and hoping the ingenuity of man is seen in the same light.