Category Archives: Science

Noach – Get Your Own Dirt

It could have been a launch pad for a vehicle to reach the moon. Or a panopticon to monitor people over a large distance. Those are two of the suggested theories for why the people of Bavel sought to build an unprecedentedly tall tower. The first suggestion was put forth by Rav Yonasan Eibschutz; the second, by the Netziv.

Whatever the builders’ aim was, though, it was a development that, as the Torah recounts, merited divine interference. But the words introducing the endeavor are strange. The would-be builders said to one another:

“‘Come, let us mold bricks and bake them well.’ They then had the bricks to use as stone, and the clay for mortar” (Beraishis, 11:3).” What is the significance of their mode of construction?

In 1927, Tomáš Masaryk, then-president of then-Czechoslovakia and a leader friendly to Jews, visited the Yishuv in Eretz Yisrael and was received by its leader, Rav Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld. 

According to the book about Rav Sonnenfeld, Ha’ish al Hachomah, one of the things he discussed with the European leader was the danger posed by technological advances. And he pointed to the pasuk above as an example of how such progress is often born of a misguided attempt to deny the ultimate importance of Hashem. The Bavel builders, he explained, shunned the natural stone available to them, opting instead for their advanced “brick technology.” In so doing, they were declaring their “independence” from the divine.

I’m reminded of the story of the group of scientists who inform Hashem that His services are no longer needed, that their knowledge of the universe now allows them to run it just fine themselves, thank You.

“Can you create life like I did?” the Creator asks. “No problem,” they reply as they confidently gather some dirt and fiddle with the settings on their shiny biologocyclotron.

“Excuse Me,” interrupts the heavenly voice. “Get your own dirt.”

Or, as Carl Sagan said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

© 2024 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Beraishis – The The

Is there any reason why the Torah uses the definite article (“the”) in its first pasuk? Couldn’t it have said “In the beginning, Elokim created heavens and earth” –  minus the “the”s?

While we can never truly know what transpired at the dawn of creation – Mishlei 25:2 says “The honor of Elokim is hiding the thing,” which Rabi Levi in the name of Rabi Chama bar Chanina (Beraishis Rabbah 9:1) applies to the creation week – it’s reasonable to assume that “heavens” refers to space (Rav Hirsch sees the word shomayim as referring to all the “shom”s – the “theres” in all directions); and “earth,” to matter (and, perhaps, what we call energy). So what’s with the “the”s?

I raise the question not to answer it, rather only to ruminate on that Hebrew letter, the one that serves to mean “the” or “that” – the letter hei.

The universe Hashem created, to the best of our perception, has three spatial dimensions and one temporal one. To pinpoint an object, one has to identify its three axes in space and its “place” in time.

To get a fix on a hot air balloon, for instance, we must know its longitude, latitude and altitude; and when it is there.

Which leads to an interesting observation: After the first four letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which might correspond to our four-dimensional universe, we have its fifth, the letter that is used as a prefix to mean “the” or “that” – the words we use to point to a particular thing.

© 2024 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Nitzavim – How to Perform a Miracle

As is the case with any question about nature, when a child asks why the sky is blue, the answer you give (here, that blue light is scattered more than other colors) will elicit a subsequent why (because it travels as shorter, smaller waves); and then that answer will yield yet another question: Why is that? Eventually, the final answer is “That’s just the way it is!” In other words, it’s Hashem’s will.

Rav Dessler famously explained that all of nature, no less than a sea splitting, is ultimately a miracle, an act of G-d. What we call miraculous is just a divine-directed happening we’re not used to seeing.

The season of teshuvah, in our Torah-reading cycle, coincides with our parshah, in which we read: “And you will return to Hashem…” (Devarim 30:2).

The most fundamental element of nature, arguably, is time. The past is past, and time proceeds into the future relentlessly. But time itself, too, is a divine creation. Commenting on the Torah’s first words, which introduce Hashem’s creation, “In the beginning…,” Seforno writes: “[the beginning] of time, the first, indivisible, moment.”

And time, too, like the rest of nature, can be manipulated by Hashem’s will. Indeed, as it happens, by our own as well.

Because teshuvah, Chazal teach us, can change past intentional sins into unintended ones. Even, if the teshuvah is propelled by love of Hashem, into merits.

Is that not a changing of the past, the temporal equivalent of splitting a sea?

And that ability to manipulate time may be why, on Rosh Hashanah, unlike on every other Jewish holiday, the moon, the “clock” by which we count the months of the year, is not visible. What’s being telegraphed may be the idea that time need not limit us, if we properly engage the charge of the season.

© 2024 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Ki Savo – Schrödinger’s Moon

Seizing on the fact that the Hebrew word for a granary – osem – shares two letters with the word for “obscured” – samui – Chazal make an intriguing assertion: Blessing [i.e. increase in volume] is common only in things that are “obscured from the eye” (Bava Metzia 42a).

The pasuk on which that truth is based is in our parsha: “Hashem will order the blessing to be with you in your granaries [ba’asamecha]…” (Devarim, 28:8).

Rav Dessler (first chelek of Michtav M’Eliyahu, pg. 178 in my ancient edition) explains that what we call cause and effect, the essence of physics, is really an illusion; only Hashem’s will is operative, even in what we call physical nature. And so, when something is out of sight, where cause and effect cannot be perceived, His will can cause bracha in the hidden. 

That idea of natural law’s suspension in the case of something beneath perception is vaguely, but tantalizingly, reminiscent of quantum physics’ “Schrödinger’s cat” thought experiment, where direct cause and effect is seemingly suspended – on the subatomic level, but with theoretical implications for the macroscopic world. The issue underlying Schrödinger’s paradox remains an unsolved problem in physics.

Be that as it may, though, something important will in fact be “obscured from the eye” in a few weeks: the moon, on Rosh Hashana. The moon is Klal Yisrael’s timekeeper, and time is the most fundamental element of nature. Klal Yisrael’s clock will not be visible on the first of the days of teshuva.

And time itself, in a sense, will be suspended then. Because we can interfere with its natural, relentless march forward – or, at least, with its unreachable past. Through the bracha of teshuva, which Chazal tell us can change the very nature of our pasts, traveling back, in a way, in time – turning past wrong actions done intentionally into actions done inadvertently; even, with the deepest teshuva, repentance born of pure love of Hashem, into meritorious acts. 

© 2023 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Chukas – Echoes of “The Snakey Thing”

It’s commonly, but erroneously, assumed that the symbol commonly used for the medical profession, a snake, or a pair of them, wrapped upon a pole, is meant as a depiction of the nachash hanechoshes that Moshe Rabbeinu fashioned, as per Hashem’s command. The Jewish people were to gaze upon it and be cured of the plague of poisonous snakes they were facing.

But the symbol used today comes to us from Greek mythology, associated with the imagined divinities, a depiction of the “Rod of Asclepius” (or, when there is a pair of reptiles, the caduceus). 

How a staff and snake (or snakes) came to be associated with those Hellenistic “gods” is anyone’s guess. But it is certainly possible that the Torah’s narrative about the nachash hanechoshes found its way into ancient cultures, which may have repurposed the image for inclusion in their own idolatrous belief systems.

But that the symbols have come to represent the power of medicine is fascinating. Because the original staff and snake, although it was intended to focus our ancestors’ attention on the dangers of the desert and how Hashem had been protecting them (see Rav Hirsch), was kept over generations by the Jews and eventually came to be an object of worship. The melech Chizkiya put an end to that by deriding it as nechushtan (“the snakey thing”) and grinding it to copper dust (Melachim Beis, 18:4). 

The medical profession itself has followed a similar trajectory.

It has enjoyed the public’s reverence since the time of Hippocrates and Galen. Even when the reigning medical theory revolved around the “four humors” or when lobotomies and trepanning were considered normative treatments for mental illness. 

Medicine has come a long way since then. But even today, it is considered legitimate medical practice to abort healthy fetuses for any (or no) reason and to help people end their lives.

Medical knowledge is a blessing. As are doctors who employ it without hubris. But medical professionals who see themselves as gods (tov shebirof’im…) are self-made idols. And those who revere them as such mistake the messenger for the true Rofei cholim.

No modern-day Chizkiya has yet appeared. But the contemporary snake and staff deserve the treatment the ancient one received.

© 2023 Rabbi Avi Shafran