I love bananas, especially the real big ones. A banana is an amazing powerhouse of energy. However, we sometimes overlook an amazing part of the banana, the peel. The peel, besides being a very efficient wrapper to keep the banana fresh and dry, also has another very important function: to announce when it is the best time to eat the great fruit inside. You see, when the peel is green we know that the banana isn’t ready yet, but when it turns yellow we know that the time has come to peel it and eat it.

This is an absolute miracle that deserves studying! All fruits are green when they are still "cooking" on the tree. During this time, they hide by blending in with the green leaves of the tree.

They are hiding because they know that their purpose is to be eaten by creatures which possess color eyesight.

However, when they are ready, they stick out like a sore thumb!

Oranges turn orange; grapefruits turn yellow, and so on. They are screaming "we are now ready to fulfill our purpose! Come eat me!

So this week I had some weird bananas. They were still greenish and didn’t look ripe yet. I was hungry, so I went and peeled one. To my surprise, the banana was already overripe and soft. The ripeness and peel color were really out of sync. Then it dawned on me that this wasn’t an accident. It made me realize how often we take for granted the great miracle that the peel and ripeness are in sync! We stupid humans don’t appreciate things until we lose them, or they go wrong. So now I felt great gratitude to Hashem for this great miracle that shows when we should and when we shouldn’t eat fruit.

We can turn every meal we eat into a lesson of Hashem’s kindliness to us if we just open our eyes to see it.

“And ELOKIM saw all that He had made and behold it was very good…”

Hashem obviously knew it was very good before He created it. And it follows that He knew it was all very good after it was created. So what does is this passage coming to teach us? Reb Avigdor Miller ZTZAL explains that this teaches us the we must emulate Hashem and look at all He has done and realize that it is all very good. This explanation has very far reaching ramifications. However, at least when Hashem gives us the great gift of rain we shouldn’t call it “bad weather” like the idiots do. Rain is life to this world, so why is a rainy day a term for a gloomy one. Rain is beautiful and wonderful.

Rain has another purpose which I understood this Shabbos, as Baruch Hashem it was pouring most of the Holy Day here in Jerusalem. Rain keeps the bums (as well as “bumeses”) off the streets. Usually, the Geulah area is packed with low personalities during Shabbos, making a Shabbos stroll in these areas very disconcerting. However, thanks to the rain, they were nowhere to be seen. Gadol Yom HaGshamim!