| Innovative ideas: God's Mailbox 03/24/2001 "Dear God," the letter started. "If you put a piece of you into everyone, how come you don't run out? Love, Your Wondering Creation."
Every month, a dozen or so kids – and a few adults – drop queries into God's Mailbox at Temple Beth-El's school in Somerville, N.J. Answers are delivered at the Reform synagogue's monthly shabbat dinner. "We're careful to make it clear that we're not talking for God, but from our own sense of God's presence in our lives," Rabbi Arnold Gluck says of the adults and teens who ghostwrite for God.
The mailbox – inspired by Rabbi Marc Gellman's book of the same name – gives kids a way to ask uncomfortable questions and helps parents struggling for answers. Some kids sign their names; some don't. They ask about death, school and "Why do you create people who don't believe in you?"
"It's really been everything we hoped it would be," Rabbi Gluck says. "It stimulated an atmostphere where people are not afraid to ask questions and for children to see that ... religion is not necessarily about a clear set of answers, but living creatively and affirmatively with the questions."
"Your Wondering Creation" received this response: "I love your question because it creates an opportunity for me to explain how sharing myself is different from a subtraction problem and different from how it can seem when you give a favorite possession away. When I put a piece of me into each person I am actually growing. Have you ever noticed that the more you give the more you have? Or the more you love yourself, the more you can love others? So it is with me, putting myself inside of you and everyone else. I actually become more than I already was. In this way you can trust that I will never run out of me to share."
Diane Connolly
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