Our Torah and our siddur try (one might say desperately) to instill in us a love and appreciation for the natural world. Unfortunately, though, the modern world we live in somewhat blocks those feelings.
Think, for example, of a time when you were listening to a flock of birds in the morning. If the flock were large enough, the sound would have been almost deafening. But consider this: just in the past fifty years, the bird population in the U.S. has declined by 3 billion, roughly a quarter of the overall bird population. Our ancestors were far more accustomed than we are to a rich environment of bird movements, sounds, and colors.
Perhaps an even more extreme example is the night sky. In a city, you can only see about five of the brightest stars. Meh. Big deal.
If you were out in the desert though, with no light pollution, you would see what our ancestors saw: a swirling extravaganza with five thousand glowing stars and somewhere between 20 and 50 meteors on an average night—not to mention meteor showers, lunar eclipses, comets with their glowing tails visible for months, purple moons, etc., etc.
It was this experience our ancestors were thinking of when in the first blessing before the Shm’a (Maariv aravim) they praised G-d “Who places the stars in the dome of heaven.” Angela Abraham offers a modern take on the same feeling. She writes: “The night sky is how I came to wish to fly. It is the most beautiful art, alive with raw energy, a song for the eyes. At times I felt as if I could feel it vibrating somehow, whispering in a way the ears cannot hear. I guess it felt friendly when the world of people felt so devoid of love. I wanted to see it right, in three dimensions, see the sculpture of divine hands.”
So, putting these ideas in the context of the maariv service, one could perhaps say that the first thing we should realize after we are called to prayer is that we are living in a world that is a “sculpture of divine hands,” and bless the One Who made it so.