As you read the stories in My Grandfather's Blessings, you will feel as if Rachel has made you a member of the family. Rachel Naomi Remen was born into a family of service, of highly skilled doctors and nurses, the sons and daughters of her rabbi grandfather. But the family she invites us to belong to is the human race itself.

Be prepared to laugh and to cry, to look at yourself and others in new ways, and in the end to discover that your life matters more than you knew and you are a better person than you ever dreamed.

Often, when he came to visit, my grandfather would bring me a present. These were never the sorts of things that other people brought, dolls and books and stuffed animals. My dolls and stuffed animals have been gone for more than half a century but many of my grandfather's gifts are with me still.

Once he brought me a little paper cup. I looked inside it expecting something special. It was full of dirt. I was not allowed to play with dirt. Disappointed, I told him this. He smiled at me fondly. Turning, he picked up the little teapot from my doll's tea set and took me to the kitchen where he filled it with water. Back in the nursery, he put the little cup on the window sill and handed me the teapot. "If you promise to put some water in the cup every day, something may happen," he told me.

At the time, I was four years old and my nursery was on the sixth floor of an apartment building in Manhattan. This whole thing made no sense to me at all. I looked at him dubiously. He nodded with encouragement. "Every day, Neshume-le," he told me.

And so I promised. At first, curious to see what would happen, I did not mind doing this. But as the days went by and nothing changed, it got harder and harder to remember to water the cup. After a week, I asked my grandfather if it was time to stop yet. Shaking his head no, he said "Every day, Neshume-le." The second week was even harder and I became resentful of my promise to water the cup. When my grandfather came again, I tried to give it back to him but he refused to take it, saying simply, "Every day, Neshume-le." By the third week, I began to forget to water the cup. Often I would remember only after I had been put to bed and would have to get out of bed and water it in the dark. But I did not miss a single day. And one morning, there were two little green leaves that had not been there the night before.

I was completely astonished. Day by day they got bigger. I could not wait to tell my grandfather, certain that he would be as surprised as I was. But of course he was not. Carefully he explained to me that life is everywhere, hidden in the most ordinary and unlikely places. I was delighted. "And all it needs is water, Grandpa?" I asked him. Gently he touched me on the top of my head. "No, Neshume-le," he said. "All it needs is your faithfulness."

This was perhaps my first lesson in the power of service but I did not understand it in this way then. My grandfather would not have used these words. He would have said that we need to remember to bless the life around us and the life within us. He would have said when we remember how to bless life, we repair the world.

My grandfather was a scholar of Kabbalah, the mystical teachings of Judaism. My parents and my aunts and uncles took a dim view of this study, some seeing it as an embarrassment, a paternal idiosyncrasy and others as something highly suspect, a sort of dabbling in Magic. When he died, the old handwritten leather covered books he had studied daily simply disappeared. I never discovered what had happened to them.

According to the Kabbalah, at some point in the history of things, the Holy was broken up into countless sparks which were scattered throughout the universe. There is a god spark in everyone and in everything, a sort of diaspora of goodness. God's immanent presence among us is encountered daily in the most simple, humble and ordinary ways. Kaballah teaches that the Holy may speak to you from it's many hidden places at any time. The world may whisper in your ear or the spark of God in you may whisper in your heart. My grandfather showed me how to listen.

One is encouraged to acknowledge such unexpected meetings with the Holy by saying a blessing. There are hundreds of such blessings, each one attesting to a moment of awakening in which one remembers the holy nature of the world. In such moments heaven and earth meet and greet and recognize one another.

There is a blessing that is said whenever one encounters something new and of significance in one's experience. My mother was present at the moment when I met my grandfather. Soon after I was born, she had taken him to the hospital to see me for the first time in my incubator. She told me that he had stood regarding me in silence through the viewing room window for a long time. I had been very premature. Concerned that he was anxious or even repelled that I was so small and frail, she was about to reassure him when he whispered something under his breath. She had not quite heard and she asked him to repeat it for her. He had turned to her with a smile and said in Hebrew, "Blessed are Thou, Oh Lord Our God, King of the Universe, who has kept us alive and sustained us, who has brought us whole to this moment." It is a blessing of gratitude for the gift of life and it was also the beginning of our relationship.

My grandfather was a man of many blessings. These blessings were prescribed generations ago by the great teaching Rabbis and each is considered to be a moment of mindfulness, an acknowledgment that holiness has been met in the midst of ordinary life. Not only are there blessings to be said over food, there are blessings to be said when you wash your hands, when you see the sun rise or set, when something is lost or when it is found, when something begins or ends. Even the humblest of bodily functions has its own blessing. My grandfather was an orthodox Rabbi and he said them all, tipping his black fedora to the Holy many times each day as he dealt with the smallest details of daily life.

I was the child of two dedicated socialists who viewed all religion as "the opiate of the masses." Although such blessings were never said in my own family, saying them with my grandfather felt quite natural to me. At one time I knew many of them by heart but I have long since forgotten them. What I have remembered is the importance of blessing life.

When I was young, I seemed to be caught between two very different views of life, my grandfather and his sense of the holy nature of the world and my highly academic, research oriented uncles, aunts and cousins. All of my grandfather's children were doctors and nurses and many of their children are as well. As I grew older and time created a greater distance between us, my grandfather seemed to become an island of mysticism in a vast sea of science. Desperate to be successful and make a contribution to society I gradually put him in the back of my memory with the other things of my childhood. He had died when I was seven. It would be many years before I would make the connection between his ways and the work of medicine. Sometimes if you stay the course long enough divergent paths reveal themselves to have the same destination. My grandfather blessed life and his children served life. But in the end it has turned out that these may be one in the same thing.

As a young doctor I thought that serving life was a thing of drama and action and split second judgment calls. A question of going sleepless and riding ambulances and outwitting the angel of death. A role open only to those who have prepared themselves for years. Service was larger than ordinary life and those who served were larger than life also. But I know now that this is only the least part of the nature of service. That service is small and quiet and everywhere. That far more often we serve by who we are and not what we know. And everyone serves whether they know it or not.