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A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg

Good Morning.

As I鈥檝e got older, I鈥檝e become more of an early morning person. I love the hour when the blackbirds herald the coming day, and the finches and bluetits first flock to the feeders. I always start my morning prayers while filling them. Or perhaps giving food to the birds is my worship, an act of homage to the God of all creatures.

There鈥檚 a special harmony between the dawn light and dusk light and the timbre of the birdsong, as if the birds too are praying. As Ed Yong wrote in his bestseller "An Immense World", 'animals inhabit sensory realms we humans cannot fathom and apprehend life in wavelengths we scarcely hear. So this a special hour, when weariness morphs into wonder'.

But for many, dawn is very different. Perhaps it鈥檚 the end of a hospital night shift, and you鈥檙e going home exhausted to catch some sleep, still carrying worries over the man whose oxygen levels just weren鈥檛 right.

Or maybe you鈥檝e already been up for hours, mopping the school corridors so that the teachers and children find them clean and tidy when they arrive. How easy it is for day people to take for granted the nightly work force they scarcely see and rarely acknowledge.

Or perhaps pain or worry has kept us awake all night in futile pursuit of elusive sleep, and first light brings us only further exhaustion.

Maybe that鈥檚 why the Jewish mystics saw dawn as an hour of potential mercy, when loving kindness hovers over the world waiting to be drawn down into life.

God, help us to bring that love down to earth, and make it real in the tasks that lie ahead of us today.

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