32. Who, Me? (cont'd.)

We live in a miraculous world.

Life is a miracle. Water is a miracle. Healing is a miracle. Paying the mortgage is a miracle. The fact that my wife still loves me is a miracle. We can all handle the little miracles that happen every day. In a good mood, we might even count our blessings and thank the One Above for them.

Where it gets tricky is when we get singled out. Jews never went around calling themselves the “Chosen People.” Instead they campaigned for equality. Jews did not invent their appellation as “People of the Book.” Instead, they prized literacy. They never said, “Yo guys! We’ve got the true religion. Follow us.” Instead they preached religious tolerance.

Of course, the observant Jews understood that, yes, we are indeed Chosen People, of the Book, and blessed with True Religion. For the observant Jew, equality, literacy, and tolerance are the order of the day because we are Chosen, and because of the Book and its Truth.

For the pre-observant majority of Jews, however, the promotion of those other values may have some compensatory psychological value, as well. As if to say to their fellow human, I am like you. I am not different. Our religions are no different, in truth. And that’s where the Sea comes in.

Believing in the Red Sea is a lot more loaded than just believing in miracles. It means believing in One G-d that gave One Torah to One People. It means that in some fundamental way, I am not like you, I am different, and so is my faith. It also means that deliverance is not a free lunch. After the sea, there was a mountain, and the Law we received.

Coming to terms with all this might not be so bad, if only we could relegate the tale to history and be done with it. But no chance of that. G-d has His way of sneaking out of the dusty pages and into our face, with both kisses and other things, all unmistakably imprinted with His signature.

When a Jew does something, he does it right. If he’s going to deny the Sea, he better deny modern miracles too[3], because one thing can lead to another and before you know it, the miracle train might lead him to a mitzvah train and for many that prospect is daunting.

But maybe that’s what it takes to get yourself a miracle – a firm march into your own Red Sea just because that’s what Moses prescribed.

And when we take an approach like that, says the Torah template, we may get wet, we may get scared, we may get in up to our nose, but at just the right time, that Sea will split. And when that happens, your personal exodus may pave the way for us all.

Moshiach Now!

* * * * *

[3] as cited on PBS, “There are those in every tradition who believe miracles still happen. While the NEWSWEEK poll found that American Jews are the least likely to believe in modern miracles, the tradition is still strong among Hassidic Jews. Members of [the] Chabad Lubavitch community believe their late Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, intercedes with God. People bring their petitions to his grave site in Queens. If they can't make it in person, they fax or call Rabbi Abba Refson, who takes down requests on his palm computer.”

Rabbi Refson said: People do believe that there are miracles. They believe that, they see that their Rebbe has interceded on their behalf. I hear of quite a few miracles every single day that happen to different people. So, I can tell you that miracles do happen daily.”

31. Who, Me?

Miracles are one thing. Believing is quite another.

Take the Splitting of the Red Sea that we read about in this week’s Torah portion for example. You can’t get a bigger miracle than that.

But what really happened over there? It was a long time ago, after all, so who really knows? Of course we could ask around.. ..Of the 6.5 billion people parading the planet today, we’ve got over half who believe in scriptures[1] that say the Jews walked through walls of water on dry land while their oppressors drowned in pursuit.

So there you have it. A bonafide miracle that way over 3 billion people believe really happened. It probably happened just like that. Case closed. Or is it?

It turns out that although other faiths tend to take the wondrous walls of water at face value, the “People of the Book” are a little more reticent. Despite their having the most detailed and only first- hand account, Jews are the most skeptical about it. To illustrate, while 64% of Americans take the story literally, most Jews think of it as a parable.[2]

Does this, “Who, me?” posture strike you as odd?

It’s reminiscent of a story. A polltaker goes to a mosque on Friday and asks a worshipper if he believes in G-d. “Of course, That’s why I came. To pray.” When he asks the same question outside a church on Sunday, he gets a similar response, “Obviously. Why else would I be here?”

But when he visits a synagogue on Yom Kippur, he gets a different reaction. “Do I believe in G-d? Do I believe in G-d? What do you think I am, a philosopher?”

“So what are you doing here?”

“What do you mean, what am I doing here. It’s Yom Kippur. Where else is a Jew supposed to be on Yom Kippur?”

* * * * *

[1] Wikipedia on Religion
[2] Rutgers - Eagleton Poll (Apr.12/06)

30. Solar Flares (cont'd.)

Lately, I started to wonder: Could it be that all that focused consciousness directed at the sun affected it in some way? After all, in recent decades, dozens of ivy-league experiments have verified that focused human consciousness can affect objects and people in remote locations, up to thousands of miles away. If so, why not the sun?

Plenty other science developments point to the same possibility:

Ø Quantum physics teaches that human observership lies at the heart of the mechanics of the universe and that the whole cosmos is connected through some holistic unity beyond space and time;
Ø Chaos theory shows how minute perturbations in one part of a system can quickly change the state of the whole;
Ø The widely espoused Anthropic Principle says that the universe was geared to produce human life before time began, so the cosmos somehow depends on us.

Add this all together with a dash of Talmudic tradition (i.e., each person should say “the universe was made for me.”), and as crazy as it seems, there really is no reason why the sun couldn’t respond to our prayers about it.

Physicists these days speak of “the conscious universe,” so why not a conscious sun? Maimonides in his Book of Knowledge says that the sun has consciousness. A strange thought for those of us who are material realists, but scientists haven’t espoused material realism for nearly a century!

These ideas led me to an odd, but testable, hypothesis. Since the solar blessing event was not tied to solar activity, if the prayer did affect solar dynamics, it would probably show as a detectable elevation in solar flare activity – akin to how the Creator “calls to the sun and it shines,” to borrow a phrase from the Shabbat morning prayers.

To test the notion, I googled around and found the US Federal archives at the National Geophysical Data Center at Boulder Colorado. Just what I was looking for. Reams and reams of raw data all about the sun. The best data- set for this purpose was the monthly full-disk solar flare intensity values from 1966 through 2005, a total of 12 x 40 = 480 data points.

If my hypothesis was wrong, and the sun did not visibly respond, what kind of solar flare intensity would we expect to see for April 1981? Obviously somewhere in the middle, not very high and not very low. Statistically speaking somewhere in the lower 95% of the intensity values. Scientific convention says that anything in that range may be due to chance. Anything higher than that may be significant. Anything in the upper 1% of the intensity values could be highly significant.

What we do see is graphed above. Solar flare intensities over the last 40 years vary widely. Of the 480 months, April 1981 was the second most intense. Statistically speaking, this may be considered highly significant.

Divine Providence? Absolutely! Scientific proof of a prayer connection with solar flares? Not really! But it is support of my hypothesis, for whatever that’s worth.

Somebody may want to follow up on this, but it probably won’t be me. I already know that the whole universe hangs on our divine service. I know it from the Tanya and other holy texts of Jewish origin. I don’t need proof from science for that.

What we may want to consider is how all this relates to the Torah portion of this week, in order to “live with the time,” as the Alter Rebbe enjoined.

For one thing, our portion contains the very first command to the Jewish nation, to keep the Jewish calendar. That certainly is relevant to our discussion. For another thing, the blessing of creation is relevant this week as well, because according to one opinion discussed by Rashi on the first verse of Genesis, the Torah should have started with this week’s portion about keeping the Jewish calendar.

A third piece of providence here is that today, on a Wednesday, I happen to be writing about the creation of the sun on a Wednesday, while reading the Torah portion for Wednesday of “Parshas Bo” that establishes a calendar based on the sun and moon which were created on Wednesday.

And if all this is not enough, while wondering about this confluence, I glanced at the front page news of my Wednesday paper to see that President George W. Bush has proclaimed a renewable energy initiative to immunize America from oil politics.

“For too long our nation has been dependent of foreign oil. And this dependence leaves us more vulnerable to hostile regimes, and to terrorists.. ..It is in our vital interest to diversify America’s energy supply – and the way forward is through technology.”

President Bush’s State of the Union
address to Congress, Jan. 23, 2007.

The remarkable thing about the timing of this announcement was that it precisely echoed the same message in the words of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, also uttered on a Wednesday, a very special Wednesday 26 years ago.

“We see clearly that when this country needs oil it is forced to listen to others – even to concede matters that are the opposite of justice, fairness and goodness.. ..If the United States would invest in developing energy sources in its own land, they would have already long been freed of dependence on other nations.”

The Lubavitcher Rebbe’s public address
at the solar blessing, April 8, 1981.

Now if that’s not Divine Providence, what is?

(c) 2007 Arnie Gotfryd, Ph.D

29. Blueprints: Solar Flares

The sun.

What does it not do for us? It powers the global ecosystem, cycling water from seas to clouds to rain to rivers and back again. Through every green plant, it’s light gives life to animals and man. It drives the seasons, delivers us sight, signals us to awaken, makes the sky blue.

In an ever-changing world, the sun is our constant, always there, always shining, never changing. Or is it?

The face of the sun is a lot more dynamic than the man-in-the moon. That steady façade of blinding brilliance belies turmoil and tempest, bubbles and belches that blast proton storms millions of miles into space, jamming our frequencies, then collapsing to quiescence in a matter of minutes.

Even the solar cycle is not so cyclic. Eleven years on average, it actually ranges from 9 to 14, and is more unpredictable than earthly weather in terms of number, size, location and intensity of major events like sunspots and flares.

Contrasting these capricious dynamics, is the perfectly predictable and deterministic astronomical calculations that underlie Judaism’s calendar. While some cultures mark only solar dates and others track lunar cycles, the Jews have developed a unique system that does both: Solar and lunar cycles are reconciled to the minute using seven leap-months every nineteen years.

Among the myriad details of the Jewish calendar is this: Every 28 years, on the second Wednesday in April, the sun and earth are in about the same positions as they were at the moment they were created on the eve of the fourth day 5767 years ago. When that happens, the Jews make a blessing, the same one they make when they see natural wonders like lightning, oceans, and shooting stars. They bless G-d for “Doing the work of creation.”

On April 8, 1981, the last time this blessing was recited on the sun, I was in Jerusalem at the Western Wall with 200,000 other Jews all making the same blessing at the same time. That day, hundreds of thousands more the world over chimed in with the same prayer and the same intent.

What an impact that must have made in heaven.