Friday, July 15, 2022

Looking to the Stars & Finding Ourselves

 

Earlier this week, NASA released the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which will enable us to see light from the most distant stars and galaxies, in existence just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Launched into orbit last year and only now fully operational, the JWST is a vast upgrade over NASA’s earlier Hubble Space Telescope.

The pictures are breathtaking, fascinating, and awe-inspiring.

Take this image:

A science writer explained: “While there are a few interloper stars in the photo, nearly every dot in the image is a galaxy. For a sense of scale, if you could hold a grain of sand at arm’s length up to the sky, that spec is the size of the view. It is one minuscule sliver of our universe, filled with thousands of galaxies, each with billions or trillions of star systems in each of those with its own planets.”

Michael Kaplan, a former NASA engineer who worked on the JWST more than a quarter of a century ago, captured the religious nature of the project’s accomplishment. A synagogue member from Boulder, Colorado, he noted: “God created the universe and God created us. He blessed us with the intellect and the curiosity to want to explore the universe and he gave us the intellectual capacity to be able to design and build such amazing instruments as James Webb and as the Mars Rovers and all the other amazing tools that we have to explore the universe… Why wouldn’t we expect that the universe that God created be a beautiful universe, right? I mean, in a sense it’s just as I expected.”

We are a “starry” people.

וַיֹּאמֶר הַבֶּט־נָא הַשָּׁמַיְמָה וּסְפֹר הַכּוֹכָבִים אִם־תּוּכַל לִסְפֹּר אֹתָם וַיֹּאמֶר לוֹ כֹּה יִהְיֶה זַרְעֶךָ׃ 

God said to Abraham, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them”—continuing, “So shall your offspring be.” (Bereishit 15:5)

I don’t think only Avraham is meant to look towards the stars. Whenever we need a reminder of the Jewish mission or a burst of encouragement, “the stars declare the glory of God.” (Tehillim 19:2). If things seem overwhelming, the stars remind us of just how small we are compared to the rest of the universe. Such an awareness isn’t meant to make us feel small; rather, it provides us a sense of just how complex the universe is. 

Seeing the universe is meant to inspire religious feelings. As Rambam wrote:

“When a person contemplates God’s wondrous and great deeds and creations and appreciates His infinite wisdom that surpasses all comparison, he will immediately love, praise, and glorify God, yearning with tremendous desire to know God's great name, as David stated: ‘My soul thirsts for the Lord, for the living God’ (Psalms 42:3). We know God by way of the wondrousness of his creations. ‘When I see Your heavens, the work of Your fingers... [I wonder] what is man that You should recall Him’ (Psalms 8:4-5)”. (Foundations of the Torah 2:2)

Scientists sometimes feel this way. Nobel Physics Laureate Joseph Taylor, Jr. said: “A scientific discovery is also a religious discovery. There is no conflict between science and religion. Our knowledge of God is made larger with every discovery we make about the world.”

The synergy between our appreciation of the cosmos and religious feeling can be expressed in the laws of berachot. There are blessings recited on various astronomical phenomena. Shulchan Aruch teaches:

Upon a comet, which is a type of star that is seen like an arrow shooting across the sky from place to place, whose light stretches like a staff; and upon shaking of the earth, and upon lightning, and upon thunder, and upon winds that blow angrily: on each of these one says, "Blessed are you, God our Lord, king of the world, creator of the original creations (oseh ma’aseh bereishit)." And if you'd like, say, "Blessed are you, God our Lord, king of the world, whose strength and might fill the world (she-kocho u’gevurato malei olam)." (Orach Chaim 227:1)

The new JWST photos do not require us to make a blessing, but they are very real reminders of God’s glorious creation and the complexity of His universe. In a world that moves so quickly, how often do we feel a sense of wonder? Whether it’s a sunset, the ocean waves crashing against the shore, or our expanding view into the cosmos, we should look up for some inspiration in appreciating our role in God’s universe.

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