Celestial Wonders and God’s Dirt
Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Kol Nidrei Eve 5783
You have seen the astonishing photos that sent back the past couple of months from the James Webb telescope, launched by NASA last December and now a million miles and more out in space. The Webb telescope is 100 times more powerful than the old Hubble telescope, launched 32 years ago and still in operation, and for the low, low price of $10 billion we are getting a glimpse towards the beginning of time that was never possible before. In a sense, we are peering into the intricacies of Creation.
What photos that telescope shared with us! Amazing images of fantastic celestial colors, stars upon stars upon stars, nebulae exploding into existence in star nurseries, beautiful and wonderful. And also, just slightly intimidating: there are so many galaxies out there, such a profusion of light energy radiating everywhere, far more even than we had previously imagined. There are galaxies and nebulae and an incredibly richly immenseness of stars of every size and description, and the photos demonstrate this in vivid color. We may feel a little like the first users of telescopes must have way back in the 1500s when they used their brand-new tool to look out at the night sky and saw just how much more was there in the heavens than any naked eye could ever discern.
As we grow as a species and develop the abilities to peer deeper and deeper into the nature of existence, our eyes can see things our imaginations never could. It is amazing just how much of creation is out there to discover.
And it's also a reminder that we are all, in essence, made out of stars: the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen that make up most of our own bodies were generated the moment the first stars began burning. We truly are made out of starlight forged at the beginning of everything. What is it Shakespeare wrote? “There was a star danced and under that was I born.” Or, to be more accurate, out of that star was I born.
I don’t know how you could be anything but stunned by the vision of the distant views of our enormous universe, not an empty, black void but one filled with blazing, colorful light. We saw stars and galaxies that date back to the very beginning of time.
Most astronomers and astrophysicists believe that the initial moment of creation, the Big Bang, took place around 13.7 billion years ago, when the first stars began to burn, shining forth with primordial light and creating the elements that compose everything in the universe. The 21-foot Webb Telescope, covered in golden mirrors, can see light from 13.6 billion years ago, shockingly close to the beginning of everything, light that has been traveling towards us for all that extraordinary length of time, from the moment of what Judaism calls Breisheet, the inception of creation.
I started thinking about that song from a Disney movie, the one which begins with Jiminy Cricket singing, “When you wish upon a star.” And then, looking at these amazing photographs of the beginning of time, I got to thinking: “You know, when you wish upon a star, you are actually a few billion years late…”
A classic story: a Jewish astrophysicist is addressing a Hadassah group and he says, “In truth, if current trends continue, our world will simply cease to exist in about 8 billion years.”
From the back of the room a woman’s voice cries out loudly, “Oy Vey! Oy Gevald! Oy Vey iz Mir!”
The astrophysicist is nonplussed. He says, “Madam, calm yourself, please. I assure you, you won’t be around when this happens in 8 billion years.”
“Oh,” she gasps with relief, “I thought you said 8 million years!”
In any case, it is both amazing and humbling to see just how spectacular this universe of ours really is, and to marvel at the incredible creation of it all.
Which calls to mind a salient story about human arrogance. One day a group of scientists got together and decided humanity had come a long way and no longer needed God. So, they picked one scientist to go and tell God that they were done with the Lord. The scientist walked up to God and said, “God, we've decided that we no longer need you. We’re to the point where we can clone people, manipulate atoms, build molecules, fly through space, and do many other miraculous things. So why don’t you just go away and mind your own business from now on?”
God listened very patiently and kindly to the man. After the scientist was done talking, God said, “Very well. How about this? Before I go, let’s say we have a human-making contest.” To which the scientist replied, “Okay, we can handle that!”
“But,” God added, “we’re going to do this just like I did back in the old days with Adam.”
The scientist nodded, “Sure, no problem,” and bent down and picked up a handful of dirt. God wagged a finger at him and said, “Uh, uh, uh. Put that down. Go find your own dirt.”
Along similar lines, the popular astronomer Carl Sagan was quoted as saying, “To really make an apple pie from scratch, you must begin by inventing the universe.” That might complicate cookbooks, like our own excellent Beit Simcha cookbook, but in essence it’s correct. That’s really starting from scratch. We think we human beings create things from nothing, but in truth we have to start with what God has already given us.
So I was surprised to read a report in the journal New Scientist that it may be possible now to actually “invent” a universe in a laboratory. Physicists believe they can distort space-time around a tiny point in our universe in such a way that it will begin to form a new superfluid that would break off and become a separate universe.
The create-a-universe project’s success depends upon two assumptions: first, that the universe truly began in a Big Bang, and second, that it underwent rapid inflation shortly thereafter. We know about rapid inflation from our economy this year, but what they mean by that is a super-fast expansion of energy and matter right after the Big Bang.
Now the first assumption, the Big Bang theory—the science, not the sitcom—is based on the observation that all objects in the universe appear to be moving away from one another; the universe is expanding. Edwin Hubble, after whom that older Hubble Space Telescope was named, noted this nearly a century ago, back in 1929. The key implication of Hubble’s discovery was that the universe had to have a beginning point, when it was incredibly small, from which it then expanded. In 1915 Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity said the universe must be either expanding or contracting. But since that was at odds with the universally held theory that the universe was unchanging, Einstein added a fudge factor into his equations. He called it the “cosmological constant” to get rid of the universe’s ballooning.
So, when Hubble’s findings matched Einstein’s predictions (minus the fudge factor) exactly, his observations were criticized and resisted. In fact, the name “the Big Bang” was a derogatory put down of the theory by astronomer Fred Hoyle. It made scientists extremely uncomfortable to be faced with the fact that the universe had a beginning, an initial singularity, a moment of creation.
Why? Essentially, it was because the most effective way to refute the idea of the existence of an unprovable entity like God is to say, “Why don’t we assume that the universe has always existed? Why add the complication of some creator we call ‘God?’”
But the reality of an expanding universe and the Big Bang Theory blew that refutation away. It had obvious theological implications; you know, that God exists and created the universe. The Big Bang Theory was fiercely resisted for decades; but today, it is pretty widely accepted.
So back to that crazy idea: how do you create an entire universe in a lab? Well, after the Big Bang, the second assumption needed to make this possible is called “inflation theory.” The theory was developed in 1981 by a Jewish MIT physicist, Alan Guth. Guth noticed there was a period immediately following the Big Bang when the universe “inflated” rapidly, separating regions of space-time far enough apart that they functioned entirely independently of each other.
Given these two assumptions, the Big Bang and rapid inflation, the universe “creation” project is not theoretical physics. Instead, it is applied physics, something you can actually do in the real world, like building an MRI machine or creating an atomic bomb. Inflation theory provides the means to understand how to test this theory by making it happen in a lab.
As the journal article says, “Inflation theory…relies on the fact that the ‘vacuum’ of empty space-time is not a boring, static place. Instead, it is subject to quantum fluctuations that cause strange bubbles to appear at random times. These bubbles of ‘false vacuum’ contain space-time with different—and very curious— properties.”
In theory, these bubbles can expand through cosmic inflation just like what followed the Big Bang of our universe. In other words, by applying a version of their own Big Bang energy to one of these strange bubbles, and with the rapid expansion of physics inflation, researchers can create an actual universe, a new state of existence: an actual baby universe.
This is scientists creating not just a new world or planet, but an entirely new universe. Playing God, if you will.
Japanese physicist Nobuyuki Sakai says that the “baby universe has its own space-time and, as this inflates, the pressure from the true vacuum outside its walls continues to constrain it. As these forces compete, the growing baby universe is forced to bubble out from our space-time until its only connection to us is through a narrow space-time tunnel called a wormhole.”
This fragile wormhole between our space-time and the newly created universe would quickly snap. But the new universe would continue to grow and expand in ways we could neither predict nor affect. In fact, from our perspective, it would appear as a microscopic black hole that evaporated almost instantly. Which is the problem with the whole experiment: everything would happen so fast that it might be impossible to know if anything had actually happened at all.
So, after all that, this incredible effort to create a separate universe in a lab, what we end up doing is creating something that may or may not exist, and which we will immediately lose track of, forever.
In theory, we would be playing God, creating a universe. In practice? Not so much. Certainly not very effectively.
And in any case, this is hardly the creation from nothing that God did. After all, everything we would use to make this experiment possible already exists in our world. As remarkable as such an experiment of creating an entire universe is, we would be, like the joke, not actually starting from scratch. We’d still be using God’s dirt.
So, since we can’t really do anything valuable about creating a new universe—at least beyond this essentially invisible experiment—let’s move a little closer to something we can actually see, on this Kol Nidrei Eve.
There are two ways to look at the enormity of the universe that we know does exist, our own universe. One is to be overwhelmed by it, and to feel small and unimportant. How could our small lives matter in all this immensity of stars?
The other is to understand that this grand creation is a tribute to something much greater than ourselves, what we call God—but that we, each, have an important role to play in this remarkable creation, too. And that, while we can’t be God, or even successfully play God in an experiment, we can do something much more relevant, and more important.
There is a great teaching in Kabbalah, in the Zohar, which I teach weekly. It says that when God created the universe, beginning with that singularity, that Big Bang, and after expansion occurred and all was ordered, God’s Shechinah, the divine flow of energy could not come into the universe and be present until the first man turned to the first woman in love. It was that spark, between them, that completed the circuit and allowed the divine energy to flow into the world.
In other words, the Zohar teaches that God can only be present in our world if we connect to one another and bring God’s generative energy into our lives and so, into our world. It is our task—and only we can do it—to bring God here, now.
Since we started by talking about stars, I was thinking about a promise that God made to our very first official ancestor, Abraham. As the elderly, childless Avram wonders whether he will ever have any progeny, anyone to inherit his belief in one God and his dream of a homeland, God literally takes him outside and promises him, “הַבֶּט־נָ֣א הַשָּׁמַ֗יְמָה וּסְפֹר֙ הַכּ֣וֹכָבִ֔ים אִם־תּוּכַ֖ל לִסְפֹּ֣ר אֹתָ֑ם …כֹּ֥ה יִהְיֶ֖ה זַרְעֶֽךָ׃ “Look toward heaven and count the stars; if you can count them… So shall your offspring be.” And then again, in a passage we read on Rosh HaShanah morning, God promised, “I will bless you and make your descendants like the stars in heaven.”
My, what a lot of descendants those would be! Truly beyond number, from the images we have seen from the Webb telescope: stars and stars and stars. Uncountable numbers of people.
Now, we know the truth: there are only about 18,000,000 Jews in the world, maximum. That’s quite a lot to count, nonetheless. And with the different definitions bandied about regarding how we should count Jews—are they Jewish enough, who is really a Jew, and so on—it remains a fact that there are actually a lot of Jews, even if we perhaps can’t actually count all of them. So, in a way, God was right: you can’t stand there and count them all.
Only the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai disagrees in his poem, you can count them,
You can count them. They. Aren't like sand on the seashore. They’re not like stars without number. They're like separate people.
On the corner and in the street.
For who’s to judge and what is judgment
Unless it’s the full import of the night
And the full onus of mercy.
You can cont them. You can count us. Each of us counts. We each matter.
And in a universe of light and stars, it is the light we bring into our own lives that allows God to be present, and helps us connect to the divine spark, and bring that influence into our world. It is our work of return—to each other, to our best selves, to our people—that enables God to ignite holiness and blessing in our lives.
On this holiest night of the year, when we gaze at the infinite stars above, may we come to understand our own role in completing creation and bringing God here, now. Over this Yom HaKippurim, this day of atonements, as we contemplate the purpose and meaning of our own existence, may we come to understand the central role we play in bringing blessings into our own world.
May we turn in love to one another, and so allow God to be fully present down here, on earth.
My friends, may your teshuvah be sincere and complete. And may you be blessed with a gmar chatimah tovah, a new year of life and goodness.