News from Kol Ami

on Friday, 02 October 2015.

BY ALEX SCHOIJETT

NOTE: This D'var Torah was written and delivered by Kol Ami member Alex Schoijett on the second day of Rosh Hashanah 5776.

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Every Saturday, we read from the Siddur a verse that always resonated in me. It says:
 

In every land and in every age
Your children imagined you in separate ways,
And yet, O God, you are One, unifier of humanity.  

Today is not Saturday but Rosh Hashana, our Jewish New Year, which marks the beginning of the Aseret Yemei Tshuva (the 10 days of introspection leading to Yom Kippur) and the Creation of the World.  

In this RH, I want to explore some of the stories that different people used to explain how their known world came to be, because those stories largely represent how they imagined the divine. These creation stories are also called "Cosmogonies" and there are literally hundreds of them. They have been mostly transmitted orally from generation to generation and have been nurturing the creeds and behaviours of all civilizations. The narrative of Bereshit in our Torah is probably the one we are most familiar with, and its importance to Western civilization and obviously monotheism cannot be denied. And there is also the scientific Cosmogony which, for the last few centuries, seems to be dead set on replacing all the others.

Today, we will listen to a few of those narratives but we won’t dive into their possible deeper meanings; otherwise we’ll have to deal with the anger of the ducks from the pond on Centre St., who are eagerly awaiting our Tashlich breadcrumbs.    

 We will listen to those stories as they were told in the past: around a fire.   If we pay attention, we’ll hear certain themes repeating, like Water, Chaos, Heroes, Dualism and creation Out of Nothing. Try to listen for those themes as we go by – and also, ask yourself the following questions:

• How many deities are involved the creation? One? Many?
• Was the creation done by “The” Supreme Being of the cosmogony or by a helper?  
• What behaviours did the creators exhibit?
• Was the creation about specifically named individuals or about groups of nameless people?
• Are women mentioned? If so, in which context?

To allow you to do all that, let me set the stage first.

Imagine we are sitting in a circle around a fire among the dwellers of a village surrounded by a jungle. The musicians are drumming up a slow rhythm. It is the new moon and the oldest man of the village will speak to us tonight. A woman throws a log into the fire and its flames climb up to the dark sky, like if it were trying to illuminate it. Our eyes follow the flames and we marvel at the way the Milky Way shines tonight.   It is the new moon and that makes this night wonderful indeed.   The old man sits there, with his eyes closed.

The drums stop. The old man opens his eyes and starts talking.

Speaking with long pauses and with a grave voice that shows at once authority and knowledge, he tells us of the time when he was young and strong, the time when he received these truths from the oldest person in his village. Then, he tells us the story that explains how everything that we see around us came to be. The story that will explains the old rivers, the mountains, the animals, and finally, ourselves.

He is teaching us the Cosmogony of the Maya.

Sorry, I forgot to tell you...Our village is in Central America, somewhere in an area that stretches through Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. The year is 803 CE and we are sitting with people from one of the most sophisticated civilizations in the world. The astronomers who created the extremely accurate calendar came from a city not far from here, and the engineers who erected the massive palaces and pyramids you can see nearby are also neighbours.

The old man says that in the beginning all was stillness, silence, and water. There was no light, no land, no plants, no animals, and no people. Six deities, covered in green and blue feathers, rested in the waters. These deities helped the god Hurakán create the Earth. To separate the Sky from the Earth they planted a tall ceiba tree, making space for all life. The roots of the tree penetrated deep into the Underworld, the trunk was on the surface of the land, and the branches reached up to the Upper-world.

The plants were created next to live on the Earth. And then the animals. But the animals did not speak and could not worship the gods so they decided to create human beings from mud.

These first mud humans had no souls and thus could not worship, so the gods destroyed them in a great flood. The gods tried again and created humans from wood. But the wooden people could not worship either, and the gods destroyed them. Those that survived became the monkeys we see in the trees.

The sky and Earth now existed, but there was no Sun and no Moon. Hun Hunahpu, the father of the hero twins had been killed by the Lords of Xibalbá, the Underworld. The hero twins became great ball players, and to bring their Father back to life, challenged the Lords of the Underworld to a game in Xibalbá. Using great skill and cunning, the twins won the ball game, and this allowed their slain father to come back to life as the Maize God.

The Hero Twins climbed back up from the Underworld into the sky, becoming the Sun and the Moon. Now that the Sun and Moon were in the sky and illuminated the Earth, the deities created the final form of human beings using white and yellow corn. Corn is the precious substance that ultimately succeeds in producing true and enduring humans. 

And so it was.

The fire is dim now and everyone around it is silent.   Those who heard the story for the first time look fascinated. Those who heard it before look thoughtful, as if trying to extract new meanings from it.

A woman throws a log into the fire and its flames climb up to the dark sky, like trying to illuminate it.

We are now half way around the planet, sitting in an arid part of ancient China. The date is 147 BCE and when the old man speaks, he tells us that when Heaven and Earth were yet unformed, all was ascending and flying, diving and delving. And then, the Grand Inception produced the Nebulous Void.

The Nebulous Void produced space and time which in turn produced the original qi. The qi was split in two. The part of the qi that was pure and bright spread out to form Heaven; the other part was heavy and turbid and congealed to form Earth. Heaven was completed first; Earth was fixed afterward. The conjoined essences of Heaven and Earth produced yin and yang.

The essences of yin and yang caused the four seasons. The scattered essences of the four seasons created the myriad things. The hot qi of accumulated yang produced fire; the essence of fiery qi became the sun. The cold qi of accumulated yin produced water; the essence of watery qi became the moon.

The overflowing qi of the essences of the sun and the moon made the stars and planets. To Heaven belong the sun, moon, stars, and planets; to Earth belong waters and floods, dust and soil.

And so it was.

The fire is dim now and everyone around it is silent.   Those who heard the story for the first time look fascinated. Those who heard it before look thoughtful, as if trying to extract new meanings from it.

A woman throws a log into the fire and its flames climb up to the dark sky, like trying to illuminate it.

We are now sitting around a camp fire near the old city of Babylon. The year is 851 BCE and the old man is telling us a story about the two primeval gods: Apsû, the male fresh waters and Tiamat, the female salt waters.

From their union come Ea and his brothers, and they all reside in Tiamat's vast body. They make too much noise and Apsû wants to kill them all – but Tiamat warns her son Ea, who is the most powerful of the younger gods. Ea uses his magic to put Apsû into a deep sleep and then kills him.

Thus, Ea becomes the chief god. With his consort Damkina, he has a son, Marduk, who is even greater than Ea himself.

Marduk is given wind to play with and he uses the wind to make dust storms and tornadoes. This disrupts Tiamat's body and causes the gods still residing inside her to be unable to sleep.

The gods persuade Tiamat to take revenge for the death of her husband, Apsû. Her power grows, and some of the gods join her. So Tiamat creates 11 monsters to help her win the battle and elevates Kingu, her new husband, to Supreme Dominion. A great battle is about to start.

Marduk offers to save the other gods if he is appointed their permanent leader. When the gods agree to his conditions, Marduk challenges Tiamat to a combat.

They fight, and Marduk kills Tiamat. He then rips her corpse into two halves, and fashions with them the earth and the skies. Marduk then creates the calendar, organizes the planets and stars, and gives the laws to the moon, the sun, and the weather.

The gods who had pledged their allegiance to Tiamat are initially forced into labor to service the gods who sided with Marduk. But they are freed from these labors when Marduk destroys Kingu, Tiamat's husband, and uses his blood to create humankind to do the work for the gods.

And so it was.  

The fire is dim now and everyone around it is silent.   Those who heard the story for the first time look fascinated. Those who heard it before look thoughtful, as if trying to extract new meanings from it.

A woman throws a log into the fire and its flames climb up to the dark sky, like trying to illuminate it.

We are now in a small town close to Athens in Greece.   The year is 413 BCE.   The old man starts his story telling us that an amorphous being called Kaos, engendered Uranos (the Sky) and Gaia (the Earth).  

Uranos and Gaia give birth to the first 12 Titans, 6 male and 6 female. The youngest of them, Cronos waits until his father comes to lay with his mother, and then cuts his manhood with a sickle. He then mates with his sister Rhea and has many children.   But he is afraid that his children will try to kill him, as he did with his father, so he eats them alive as soon as they are born.

Rhea hides her last child, Zeus, from Cronos. When Zeus grows up, he gives Cronos a powerful drink that causes his father to vomit all his brothers and sisters back into the world.  

Zeus then fights Cronos and the other Titans and throws them all into Tartarus. Zeus keeps the reign of Heavens for himself, and gives his brother Poseidon the seas and his other brother Hades the underworld.

Men are created so they can praise the gods but Zeus destroys humanity several times. One of those creations is done by Prometheus, a Titan who did not side with Cronos in the battle against Zeus.

Prometheus steals from the gods the knowledge of fire and agriculture and gives them to men. In revenge, Zeus asks the god Hephaistos to forge the first woman, Pandora and gives her as a present to Prometheus’ brother, along with a famous jar that came to be known as Pandora's Box. When Pandora opens the jar, all the evil that Zeus had put inside is spread throughout humanity. But not all is lost, because the last thing to come out of the jar is hope.

Zeus and other the gods then mate with the humans and from those unions came the demi-gods who lived among them. From these humans came poets like Hesiod and Homer who put all these stories on paper for men to read. And 23 centuries later, another human called Rick Riordan created the Percy Jackson books that made these stories even more accessible to humanity.

And so it was.

The fire is dim now and everyone around it is silent.   Those who heard the story for the first time look fascinated. Those who heard it before look thoughtful, as if trying to extract new meanings from it.

A woman throws a log into the fire and its flames climb up to the dark sky, like trying to illuminate it.

We are now listening to a different story. A story in which there is only one God. This God has no origin and no end, is totally ascetic, and is the one who creates the Universe and all that it contains, and though acting tough many times, always shows love and compassion for its creatures. This is the way the Jewish children have seen God. This is our narrative of creation, the one that we are going to read today. It is deceptively short: in just 31 verses, the Bible tells us the story of the first six days of the Universe, when God created light, planets, stars, animals and finally the first humans, male and female.

From my point of view, the characteristics of this story make it stand above the others.   However, I do not intent to judge the Bible’s story against the other stories of Creation but rather focus on a more complex problem: its conflicts with Science. A conflict that starts in those very first 31 verses: According to Science, it took the world more than 15-billion years to reach the state that the Torah says was reached in 6 days.

I would not be surprised if someone said: “Hey, I don't care about the Greek Cronos eating his children for breakfast or if the hero twins playing ball with the lords of the underworld are actually a cosmic representation of the motion of the planets in the Maya calendar. Those stories have zero impact on how I live my life. I want to live my life based on values – like peace and justice and compassion and love and sanctity of life. I’ve been taught that those values are core to Judaism and that all can be derived from the words of the Torah.   I’m Jewish and I am sitting here today, in this RH service, because I do care about my Jewish roots. But I want my beliefs to be built on solid grounds. And if I find such big contradictions right at the very first words of the Torah, I have to ask what else could be wrong and whether ultimately, I can base my life on its teachings...”

Not surprisingly, two extreme positions have emerged over the years.

On the one hand we have those who claim that science may be good but that it destroy faith in the Divine and thus over time it will create a society devoid of values where youth and old wander aimlessly – without the moral compass needed to guide them.  

On the other hand we have the group that claims that religion blinds the mind and dulls the intellect, has been responsible over the centuries for countless deaths and has slowed down the progress of humanity in general.

And both camps have been stiff-necked.   Science ignoring the possibility of a larger force at play and Religion burning the books that contradicted it and sometimes even the writers of those books too.

The reality is that this is not as simple as A is right and B is wrong. We are indeed sitting around a fire in the middle of the night, where two old men are talking at once and telling us two seemingly different stories. Our challenge is to try to listen to both and find from them the truths that can guide our lives.

Maimonides, who lived in the 12th century CE put it in rather simple terms: when Torah and Science seem to contradict each other, it is not because one is right and the other is wrong. It is because we do not understand either of them in full. And he went further, saying that if you really want to understand God, you should study the way the Nature works.   That, by the way, is the purview of Science!

Science is based on a sequence of observation, theory formulation and experimental verification. The method works and there is no doubt about its results. It has shown a Universe of majestic beauty.   But what about Religion’s methods? Can they be used to support science in its quest for truth? I’ll let you answer that question after you hear this story:  

Approximately 800 years ago, a famous Kabbalist called Nachmanides, lived in Barcelona, Spain. Through a painstaking analysis of the first 31 verses of Genesis he reached amazing conclusions.

“The initial creation produced an entity so thin that it had no substance to it. It was the only physical creation ever to occur and was all concentrated within the speck of space that was the entire universe just following its creation.   As the universe expanded from the size of that initial minuscule space, the primordial, substance-less substance changed into matter as we know it.   Biblical time, he continued, starts (grabs hold, in his words) with the appearance of matter.”

Almost word by word, his quote could have been taken from a modern text in quantum mechanics. Such text will tell you that a few instants after the Big Bang, energy coalesced into matter, which then made it possible for time to exist.   Nachmanides did not arrive at those conclusions through science: Forget about Einstein...Not even Newton or Galileo had been born in his day! He did it through a religious interpretation of the text. And he did that centuries before the Hubble telescope and the gigantic particle accelerators we have today could be used to test his theories.   It was his faith in the divine that brought him closer to the truth of Nature.

Religion can indeed assist Science in the search for those truths.

But…Can it work the other way around?   Professor Gerald Schroedder, who has a PhD in Physics from MIT, believes so. Using only published research data as well as the Talmud and the work of some kabbalists, he argued that the six days of Genesis that we are about to read are indeed 24-hour days, and that they truly represent the 15-billion years of cosmological evolution that scientists are observing. In essence, that there’s no contradiction, only lack of understanding.

The key, he explains, is that these are not planet Earth’s days but days in the context of the totality of the universe.   You need to account for the fact that because of the high gravitational pull of a concentrated universe the clock would tick slower, but then the chips seem to fall into place. How much slower would time go by? Well, if you follow his math, the slowdown is by a factor of 1012, i.e. a million-million, which is, surprisingly, the ratio of 15-billion years to 6 days.

It gets better. He explains that the Bible rushes through Creation because it wants to focus on the history of humanity, and to do that, it compresses the timeline of the story.   But the compression is not arbitrary. Using the laws of physics, quantum mechanics, and relativity, Prof. Schroeder shows a precise logarithmic scale for time, based on universal constants and tuned to the temperature of quantum congealment (i.e. at the time of the BB) and the temperature of its remnant, which we can measure today in the black of space. This scale aligns the timing of the events from theories of physics and the findings of paleontology to the events told in the 6 days of Genesis with a precision that can only produce awe.

His work does not provide us with absolute certainty on a scientific foundation for the story of Genesis. However, like Nachmanides’ story that showed us the possibility of Religion assisting Science in its search for truth, his work shows us the possibility of Science assisting Religion it the same endeavor.

In 1994, Prof. S. Weinberg wrote for Scientific American that “Life in the Universe would be impossible if any of several physical quantities had slightly different values.”   One of these quantities is the energy of the Universe at the time of the BB. If this energy had been different to what it was by just one part in 10120 (i.e. a one followed by 120 zeros) then there would be no life anywhere in the Universe.  

This leads to the contemplation of a Universe tuned for life from its inception, which talks about creation for a purpose. And here, Religion agrees with Physics. There is a purpose.   And there are many more areas of agreement.   As much as Cosmology has come to agree that there was a beginning, just like Gen 1:1 says, so has Biology discovered that life on Earth started shortly after the appearance of liquid water, just like verses 9-12 say; and that 3-billion years later, animal life exploded in a burst of aquatic organisms holding all the phyla that are alive today, just like verses 20-21 say.

So, to those who fear about building their moral values on shaky grounds, we can say, “Don’t worry. That is not the case. The ground is much more solid than we thought. Keep exploring, keep learning. You can indeed use the Torah to base your life.”

Judaism teaches us that life is precious and that it was given to us by a Creator through the laws of Nature enshrined in the first 31 verses of Genesis.  

Judaism also teaches us that our lives have a purpose and that God gave us the capacity to discover that purpose and the free will to act on it.  

The question to us is, how will we choose to act this coming year?

Will we be able to open our eyes to the marvels of Nature and to the way it is braided with the words of Torah?

Will we be able to act accordingly?

I truly wish so.

May this RH be one in which the proverbial woman of our stories once again throws a log into our fires so its flames raise up to illuminate our paths.  

May the light so created be used to dig deeper and thus increase our wisdom, our understanding, and our knowledge.  

May this 5776 be a year in which we increase our engagement with the study of our Torah and in performing the good deeds that can be elucidated from its words.  

May this be the year that bring us closer to the certainty that Nature and the Creator are One.

And may this be a year when we can and live our lives in Shalom, in peace and completeness.  

Shana tova umetuka.