“Who is like You, Master of powerful deeds,” the blessing continues. “Who compares to You, King who causes death and brings about life and causes salvation to grow.” I once heard Rabbi Noach Weinberg, the founder of Aish HaTorah, the Jewish outreach organization, tell an interesting story about a fellow who came to him and bragged that He had no need to follow the Torah, because even though he had never done so, God saved his life. He described how one day he was driving down a mountainous road on a motorcycle, when he lost control and flew over a cliff. As he told it: “I was falling to my death when I felt two hands catch me and guide me gently down to the ground. I came out of the accident without a bruise or a scratch. So I know that God saved me.” Rabbi Weinberg said, “I’m glad that you know who saved you, but did you ever think about who pushed you off?” Although in the Amidah we are praising God for reviving the dead, healing the sick, lifting up the fallen and freeing the enslaved, we really have to think about who causes us to die, fall, be sick or be bound. And why, then, should we praise God for lifting us up if He was the one who made us fall? Or for healing our sickness if He was the one who brought it upon us? Judaism teaches that we praise God because we recognize that He is a God of life, and life is a process. We praise Him not only for the saving part of life, but also for the whole adventure and journey of life, the ups and the downs. On the news I once saw a fellow who was arrested for allegedly killing someone. He was in jail for many months and finally stood trial. After anxiously awaiting the verdict, the man and his lawyers, friends and family jumped for joy, dancing wildly around the courtroom when he was declared innocent. I wondered if this fellow had ever been so alive and happy in his life. Perhaps it was worth being in jail for six months—with all the discomfort and the anxiety that he could get the death penalty—to suddenly feel the joy of being proven innocent. Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook explains that this is the reason we eat the sandwich of matzah and marror on Passover night—to taste both the sweetness of redemption and the bitterness of slavery at the same time. We praise God for both and celebrate. God orchestrates our lives with ups and down. When we thank God for taking us out of Egypt, we don’t just thank Him for the redemption from slavery but also for putting us in Egypt in the first place. For it is in the transition from exile to freedom that the drama of life unfolds and we grow spiritually. Here is how the Kabbalah explains this truth: In the beginning, all of existence was Divine endless light. When God wanted to create a being other than Himself, He withdrew His endless light creating a space in which to accommodate other beings (or vessels as the Kabbalah calls them). Then, when God poured His light into the vessels, He caused them to break—an act the Kabbalah calls death. The vessels could not contain the light and they exploded, or died. The rest of the story is called tikkun, “fixing,” which is also referred to in the Kabbalah as the revival of the dead. This breaking and fixing, death and revival, is what is hinted at in the second blessing of the Amidah. God intentionally causes death, just like He causes sickness and imprisonment, yet He does so to create the possibility for health and freedom. Before we ask anything of God in our prayers, we must recognize that God intended for life to be a gradual growing process, like a flower that grows over time. And we affirm this in the Amidah when we describe God as “the King who causes death and brings about life and causes salvation to grow.” In addition, we are acknowledging that God causes death and brings about life at the same time. In other words, at the very moment that God is causing death, He is actually bringing about life in the same way as the seed seems to be decaying while it is actually sprouting. What looks to us like death is actually the beginning of new life. What looks to us like sickness is the beginning of healing. What looks like imprisonment is the beginning of freedom. Every painful challenge we face is a gift from God, who is helping us in our spiritual growth. Imagine you are a seed in the ground. You’re thinking, “They buried me. How could they do this to me?” Here you lie in the dirt—it is dark and cold and depressing. Suddenly you see your whole life breaking down, as though it is disintegrating. You feel that you are surely dying. But are you? No, not really. You may be dying as a seed, but you will be reborn as a sprout. Then you will die as a sprout to come alive as a sapling. And finally, you will die as a sapling to come alive as a tree. At each stage you must die in order to inaugurate a new evolved stage of life. We must remember as we pray that what seems like death is actually growth. We must remember that God, while causing death, is bringing about life. No matter what the situation may be—whether we are facing business failure, or a break up of a personal relationship, or spiritual darkness—God is committed to reviving us. We should not despair if we don’t receive an immediate answer to our prayers because life is meant to be a gradual process. "