“Isn’t God Amazing?”

“Isn’t God Amazing?”

This is a sentence that was mentioned by a Jewish lady whom I work in her house every Wednesday. This work is one of my blue collar casual jobs I have during my holiday time. I could say this is my first encounter with a Jewish in person, aside of my colleague student here in the university. I have never met any Jewish in my life in Indonesia, where even the word Jewish or Yahudi have negative connotation, the same meaning with ‘kafir’ or infidel, and the mock ‘dasar Yahudi’ will have the same negative tone as ‘dasar Cina’ during Orde Baru era, a form of racism that was promoted by the authoritarian state and religion public figures, and was followed blatantly by the followers. I remember my late father once mentioned that there was a synagogue in Surabaya when he was there, near the current Delta Plaza. I supposed it was around end 1960’s . I forget the exact street name, but the old building is there, change function I supposed. I don’t really knowledgeable about when was the last time they lived in Indonesia, -Surabaya especially, but I guess it was about the same period when the Chinese were forced to return to the mainland during the early New Order regime. I’m not sure though.

Back to the title of this article, this Jewish lady mentioned the sentence when we talked about how every human being is designed differently: the way they speak, their gestures, the way they walk, smile, get angry, they cry and so on. It started when I said it took me 50 minutes or almost an hour to travel to her house from my place. I recall about 60 tram stops I have to pass through to reach her house, in which most of the time I spent for sleeping, listening to the radio, reading a novel or just simply watching people: the passengers. I was thinking about taking train, which is a shorter route there, but I said to her that it’s too much hassles, getting up and down the train, walk in and out of railway stations, plus taking tram again. At 8.00 AM in the morning, I think it’s just too much. I would prefer one get up and down, and a long sitting on the tram, watching people. Apparently she said that she also loves to watch people around, how each person could behave differently, even different faces, by design. She believes that it is God who designs each person differently, which makes us human so interesting: none of the individual can exactly resemble anyone else even since the first time human being was created. I agree with her.

I remembered that I once read about The Human Genome Project several years ago. All of a sudden that project came into my mind. I personally think it is brilliant that human being eventually found a way to map living organisms, which including human being themselves. Some people (the conservatives or the atheists or the pantheists?) said that it is one way to get closer to God’s mind. An effort to get to know what was/is in His mind when He created/s a human. A black, a yellow, or a white skin? A blonde, a black, a brunette or a brown haired? A curly, a straight, or a wave haired? A tall or a short person? A male or a female? A melancholic or a sanguinis personality? Which percentage of this and that component in order to make a man/woman becomes the way he/she is now? Which blend is ‘ideal’? There are a way too many variables that can be thought of. It exceeds my brain’s capacity. Maybe a super computer with super chips and nano-particles processors whatsoever, someday will find it out (oh yeah, with some obsessed scientists as the programmer and designer who try to “playing God”). Maybe not. Who knows. Maybe I still can witness when the project does success. Maybe I cannot witness it, because it will happen hundreds of years from now. I don’t know. It’s just almost 2009 years (within 2 days literally) more or less after Christ, who knows what will happen next year..or the next year..or the next year… (is it a hearsay or a fact that human’s brain capacity has just being used under 20% of the total capacity?). I will Google it :).