San Diego (special) -- Rabbis have so many sources from which to draw inspiration: Talmudic commentaries. Life cycle events at which they officiate. The Torah. Thousands of years of recorded Jewish history.

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, who will lecture in San Diego next week under the aegis of the Agency for Jewish Education, taps these sources, of course. 

But he also finds inspiration through such activities as playing his children's computer game, watching television, going to the movies, serving on a jury, and wearing woolen pants. 

He has collected such flashes of inspiration in his latest book: Invisible Lines of Connection: Sacred Stories of the Ordinary -- a book which will provide the basis for his 7 p.m. lecture, Sunday, Aug. 24, at the UCSD Faculty Club.

The 146 pages of text are divided into bite-size anecdotes, with every reader likely to have his or her own favorite. 

One which I liked in particular concerned a Jewish woman who was riding on a bus in nazi Germany when SS troopers started pulling those with Jewish identity cards off. She began to cry in fright, and the man seated next to her asked why. When she said she was a Jew, he immediately began to yell at her how stupid she was.

Vas ist dis? inquired a stromtrooper.

"Damn her," the man shouted angrily. "My wife has forgotten her papers again! I'm so fed up. She always does this!"

The stormtrooper laughed and moved on. The woman's life had been saved by a man whom she never saw before nor again. 

Another Kushner story concerns a woman who spotted him in a discount clothing store. He didn't know her, but he recognized the look in her eye: she wanted to talk to a rabbi. Not wanting to have a consultation in a clothing store, with his kids underfoot, Kushner sought to avoid her glance, but she came up to him, determined.

She told him that she was pregnant and also had learned that she soon would die from an inoperable tumor. In their time of need, they wanted to join Kushner's congregation. And would he perform the funeral when the time came? Kushner then reported in staccato fashion what happened:

"They joined.

"She bore a daughter.

"She died.

"I did the funeral."

The story did not end there. He told of attending a pizza supper at his synagogue. "My glance settled on a short, vivacious, red haired girl of seventeen. ... Her face had a grin as irrepressible as the sunrise. Everyone laughed with her. She is popular. ...I love that girl. I am honored that she looks up to me. That girl's father never did remarry. 'Last week,' I whispered to another teacher, 'her dad told me that his daughter was thinking of becoming a rabbi.'"

Such are the stories from profound sources. But then there are those "of the ordinary." Kushner tells of an Atari computer game called Adventure which he and his children liked to play. The game had a surprise for people who liked to explore on their own, without following instructions.

"In a particular place inside the 'black castle,' the diligent serarcher could find a small white dot that was too small to be noticeable as a normal game object," Kushner wrote. But if one transported this secret dot back to the starting screen, "you could enter a hidden, otherwise inaccessible room...All you would find in the room was a rainbow and the name of the person who invented the game."

So? 

"What I want to know is: If the signature of the Creator is not just in some hidden room but in every created thing, why can't we see it?"

That is the essence of the book. An incident. An analogy. An inquiry into the sacred.

"Meaning is primarily a matter of relationship," Kushner explains "If something is connected to absolutely nothing--symbolically, linguistically, physically, psychologically--it is literally meaning-less. And in the same way, if something is connected to everyone and everything, it would be supremely meaning-full. I suppose it would be God: The "One: through whom everything is connected to everything else, the Source of all meaning."

Tickets for Kushner's speech may be obtained through the Agency for Jewish Education at 268-9200. They are $15 for those who pay in advance and $18 for those who pay at the door. UCSD has a $3 on-campus parking fee.