Post by Rabbi Neil on Apr 25, 2019 16:35:47 GMT
It is impossible to conceptualize nothing. Our human experience is always something. If we close our eyes and try to imagine nothing, we still imagine something – usually a black expanse. It may look like nothing in particular, but it’s never nothing. We cannot conceive of nothing. Our thinking, our entire being, is predicated on something. Human beings do not do nothing. We can abstractly represent nothing, of course. Mathematically, we can represent nothing and that does certainly evoke an emotion in us. Similarly, contemplation of death evokes an emotion based on the absence of life. Despite these emotional responses, though, we can never really conceive of nothing, or of the absence of being.
Because we are very limited beings, because the mind is only capable of a limited number of feats, we find ourselves struggling when contemplating anything outside bounded, limited existence. The concept of infinity, for example, is totally inaccessible to us other than through mathematics. We cannot mentally picture infinity because anything we picture is necessarily finite. As soon as we imagine infinity, that mean we can imagine Infinity+1, which means we didn’t imagine infinity. So, there are two clear limits to human understanding – the concept of nothing and the concept of infinity.
This week, for the first time in human existence, we were given a visual experience of nothing and of infinity. Thanks to an extraordinary combined human effort, we were able to “see” a black hole. Except, of course, we couldn’t see a black hole because it’s not actually possible to see. A black hole is the absence of seeing. It is nothing, and yet it is clearly something. A black hole has mass – this black hole has more mass than any of us could possibly conceive, in fact. It is detectable by the gravitational pull it exerts on other objects around it, since the more massive an object is, the larger its gravitational attraction with other objects. A black hole is formed, in fact, when the gravitational pull is so strong that even light, which acts as both a wave and as a particle, cannot escape from it. So, we can never see a black hole. However, we can observe the effects of black holes readily not only by what is around them but also by observing gravitational waves, first postulated by Einstein in 1916 and confirmed exactly one hundred years later. We do not know what is inside a black hole. In fact, we can never know. The whole point of a black hole is that no information of any sort could ever come out from it.
According to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, time breaks down inside a black hole. Time doesn’t stop, because it’s not possible for time to stop. However, because time and space are intimately connected, and space as we know it breaks down inside a black hole so, too, does time. A black hole is nothing like our universe. It is of our universe but it is not of our universe. It is of our universe because we can observe its effect, but it is not of our universe because we cannot actually see it and because we can never know anything about it. Moreover, anything from our universe that crosses the event horizon of a black hole is lost to our universe forever. It literally ceases to be for us. It turns from being something into being nothing.
Now, thanks to the work of Dr. Katie Bouman and her global team, humanity has for the first time visually witnessed the effects of a black hole. While many in the Jewish community have responded with jokes about illuminated cosmic bagels, I actually think we should be forming a theological response. Some have turned to the opening chapters of Genesis, which describes darkness being on the face of the deep, and say that this could be used as a description that includes black holes. Of course, Torah has no concept of black holes, but the description initially doesn’t seem so bad. The Hebrew – “v’ha’aretz hayta tohu vavohu v’choshesh al p’nei t’hom” – is really difficult to translate. Usually, it’s translated as “the Earth was unformed and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” But the Rabbis struggled with the concept of tohu vavohu – unformed and void. Rashi says that the word tohu signifies astonishment and amazement because a person would have been astonished and amazed at its emptiness. He says the word vohu signifies emptiness and empty space. That’s not a black hole (which isn’t empty) but by not being able to in any way describe something, we are astonished and wordless. In the Middle Ages, the idea of tohu and bohu as time and form came to prominence. With that in mind, one might be tempted to suggest time and space as a translation of tohu vavohu. However, Isaiah (34:11) also uses the phrase tohu vavohu but changes it, saying of Edom “God shall stretch over it a line of tohu and stones of bohu.” If both of those are physical concepts – a line or stones - time and space really wouldn’t work as a translation. In Mishnah Chagigah (2:1), in fact, we learn that these are slimy stones. So, while a superficial reading of “darkness on the face of the deep” may connect slightly to black holes, a more in-depth analysis shows that such a reading doesn’t bear up, and certainly isn’t in accordance with the traditional understanding.
It is not totally surprising that Kabbalah allows us to come close to an authentic Jewish approach to black holes. In Lurianic Kabbalah, God is described as Ein Sof, meaning Without End or perhaps Infinite. Of course, no-one is saying that black holes and God are synonymous but there is a definite focus in Kabbalah with yesh and ayin, with Being and Not-Being. A black hole is, as I mentioned before, both Something and Nothing. 14th century Kabbalist David ben Avraham Ha-Lavan wrote that “Ayin, nothingness, is more existent than all the being of the world. But since it is simple, and all simple things are complex compared with its simplicity it is called Ayin.” Kabbalist Ze’ev ben Shimon HaLevi said that “Ayin means No-Thing. Ayin is beyond existence, separate from any-thing. Ayin is Absolute Nothing. Ayin is not above or below. Neither is Ayin still or in motion. There is nowhere where Ayin is, for Ayin is not. Ayin is soundless, but neither is it silence. Nor is Ayin a void – and yet out of the zeroes of Ayins no-thingness comes to the one of Ein Sof.”
It would be very tempting to use these quotations are sources for a Jewish approach to black holes because of the wonderfully ambiguous terminology used that hints at the liminal existence between something and nothing. But while there are similarities in language, in Kabbalah, Ayin precedes Yesh in creation – Nothing precedes Something. With black holes, it is definitely the other way round in terms of our own experience – Something precedes Nothing. Something exists, it passes beyond the event horizon of the black hole, and then it no longer exists. Yesh and Ayin, then, are concepts mainly relating to creation. At the same time, Kabbalah’s experiential focus means that it does in some sense address the accessible and the inaccessible. For example, the Tree of Life, the chain of S’firot that forms the basis of most Kabbalistic thought, has ten s’firot, or Divine emanations of God, but not all of them are accessible to us. Indeed, the top three in the tree – Keter, Chochmah and Binah - are totally inaccessible to us. So, at least Kabbalistic thought recognizes the impossibility of total knowledge or of total revelation. It knows that we are limited in our understanding and that there are some things that are totally beyond our ken. We cannot reach beyond a certain level of understanding of God, just as we cannot see beyond the event horizon of a black hole.
And yet, I feel there is more that needs to be explored. I have already seen a number of Jews say that our tradition never mentions black holes simply because they are not relevant to our lives. I might disagree with that statement somewhat. Although in my day-to-day experience of work, shopping, eating and so on, the nearest black hole isn’t an important consideration, our observational experience is that at the centre of nearly every large spiral and elliptical galaxy lies a black hole. There is a black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A, and this week’s black hole photograph was not of that black hole at the center of our galaxy, which is inconveniently located for us to be able to see it. But the fact that black holes are to be expected in most galaxies means that they are very relevant. Where Torah and Rabbinic tradition thought that the centre of our existence was the Earth, which is Something, in fact the centre of our galaxy is a black hole, which is Nothing, or, at the very least, nothing that we can ever know. It’s not the centre of the universe for sure, because we can never know where that is, but at least the very centre of our galaxy, around which our entire galaxy which includes our solar system rotates, is a black hole. It’s inaccessible. It is unBeing. It is the opposite of what Torah and our tradition imagined.
And I think that poses an existential problem to Judaism. Sure, we could say it’s a metaphor for the fact that the unknowable God should be at the centre of our lives. That would be very cute and Rabbinic, but that would also avoid the issue. How do we address Nothing in our tradition? Is God in a black hole? Can a black hole at least attest to the presence of God? Our liturgy is replete with references to creation attesting to the existence of God. Kol Hanshema t’hallel Ya – all living things praise God. “The heavens declare your handiwork,” we read. Do they? Do black holes declare God’s handiwork? How? How can something which is of our universe and simultaneously not of our universe demonstrate that God created the universe? The theological challenge is that the idea of God creating just as an artist paints a picture or as a sculptor creates a statue (as in the prayer Ki hinei kachomer b’yad haYotzer) is way too simplistic to describe something like a black hole. Perhaps we need to return to the Kabbalistic concept of Ein Sof, as God who is limitless and thus even more than a black hole, which is limited at the event horizon. But that would take God totally outside the physical world, which is necessarily limited, and that might be very problematic for those who want to connect to God, for example, through prayer, which is a vocally limited expression of self. Perhaps we could turn to God’s statement of self-identity in Exodus – ehyeh asher ehyeh – “I shall be as I shall be,” as an expression not just of space but of time. In that statement, God is not described in space but in time. A God who is future potential is Something and also Nothing.
At the end of the day, Jewish theology struggles with black holes because they are pure manifestations of Einsteinian Relativity theory, while almost all Jewish theology is Hellenic, Platonic, or pseudo-Newtonian at best. The biggest challenge to contemporary Jewish theology isn’t the Shoah and the existence of evil – that’s an ancient problem. No, the biggest challenge is the fact that most of us literally do not even understand the world around us. We cannot conceive of light simultaneously being a wave and a particle, or that time is different depending on the observer’s velocity. We imagine ourselves as being fully here, and yet we learn that we are the result of probability fields and that we are essentially vibrating subatomic particles that just happen to constantly align. The problem of contemporary Jewish theology is not that we don’t understand evil, but that we don’t understand existence! Even though we can demonstrate that within black holes time breaks down, we cannot possibly comprehend what that means. How can we talk of God’s connection to the universe when we cannot even make sense of the universe, other than to throw our hands up and say God is a mystery?
Perhaps instead of mystery, we can talk of God in contradiction. For example, many theologians talk of God as being immanent and transcendent, which is contradictory but that’s seemingly the point. As uncomfortable as theological contradictions make me, because they seem like deliberate intellectual cop-outs, every black hole is a contradiction. It’s a contradiction of everything that we know and understand. So, does our theology need to be contradictory to meet it meaningfully?
It would be tempting to merely abandon the theological gymnastics and say, “Ancient Judaism couldn’t conceive of black holes so traditional theology can’t possibly address them. Instead, let’s just get on with mitzvot, with tikkun olam, and leave the mental hurdles to the Rabbis.” The problem with that is our liturgy, which still speaks of God as creating and ordering the universe. Abandoning an attempt to resolve theology when confronted with black holes leaves us theologically adrift every time we pray. If liturgy is a written expression of our theology, then we cannot abandon theology without also abandoning liturgy. And our liturgy as currently written inevitably leads to the question, “Does a black hole speak of God as Creator in the same way that the rest of the universe does?” Because I really don’t think it does, unless we consider black holes in simplistic and inaccurate ways.
So, if we are to bring our theology into an Einsteinian understanding of the universe, with space-time and gravity waves and black holes, I believe that we are going to have to move away from the liturgical perspective of God as the Supreme Designer. Where we go from there, I don’t yet know. Maybe we will have to live in theological contradiction. Maybe our new theology will involve yesh and ayin – Something and Nothing. Maybe our new theology will include tohu vavohu. Maybe it will connect to infinity, like Ein Sof. Maybe it will talk not of certainty but of probability. Maybe it will be as revolutionary to previous theology as Einstein was to Newton.
Certainly, it is time for us to probe the theological depths of Nothing, in order to try to understand the ultimate Something. With that in mind, may we search the boundaries of mental, physical and temporal existence, and may we together expand our theological horizons in ways previously unimagined. May the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be bound only in their appeal to the Infinite, and let us say, Amen.
Because we are very limited beings, because the mind is only capable of a limited number of feats, we find ourselves struggling when contemplating anything outside bounded, limited existence. The concept of infinity, for example, is totally inaccessible to us other than through mathematics. We cannot mentally picture infinity because anything we picture is necessarily finite. As soon as we imagine infinity, that mean we can imagine Infinity+1, which means we didn’t imagine infinity. So, there are two clear limits to human understanding – the concept of nothing and the concept of infinity.
This week, for the first time in human existence, we were given a visual experience of nothing and of infinity. Thanks to an extraordinary combined human effort, we were able to “see” a black hole. Except, of course, we couldn’t see a black hole because it’s not actually possible to see. A black hole is the absence of seeing. It is nothing, and yet it is clearly something. A black hole has mass – this black hole has more mass than any of us could possibly conceive, in fact. It is detectable by the gravitational pull it exerts on other objects around it, since the more massive an object is, the larger its gravitational attraction with other objects. A black hole is formed, in fact, when the gravitational pull is so strong that even light, which acts as both a wave and as a particle, cannot escape from it. So, we can never see a black hole. However, we can observe the effects of black holes readily not only by what is around them but also by observing gravitational waves, first postulated by Einstein in 1916 and confirmed exactly one hundred years later. We do not know what is inside a black hole. In fact, we can never know. The whole point of a black hole is that no information of any sort could ever come out from it.
According to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, time breaks down inside a black hole. Time doesn’t stop, because it’s not possible for time to stop. However, because time and space are intimately connected, and space as we know it breaks down inside a black hole so, too, does time. A black hole is nothing like our universe. It is of our universe but it is not of our universe. It is of our universe because we can observe its effect, but it is not of our universe because we cannot actually see it and because we can never know anything about it. Moreover, anything from our universe that crosses the event horizon of a black hole is lost to our universe forever. It literally ceases to be for us. It turns from being something into being nothing.
Now, thanks to the work of Dr. Katie Bouman and her global team, humanity has for the first time visually witnessed the effects of a black hole. While many in the Jewish community have responded with jokes about illuminated cosmic bagels, I actually think we should be forming a theological response. Some have turned to the opening chapters of Genesis, which describes darkness being on the face of the deep, and say that this could be used as a description that includes black holes. Of course, Torah has no concept of black holes, but the description initially doesn’t seem so bad. The Hebrew – “v’ha’aretz hayta tohu vavohu v’choshesh al p’nei t’hom” – is really difficult to translate. Usually, it’s translated as “the Earth was unformed and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” But the Rabbis struggled with the concept of tohu vavohu – unformed and void. Rashi says that the word tohu signifies astonishment and amazement because a person would have been astonished and amazed at its emptiness. He says the word vohu signifies emptiness and empty space. That’s not a black hole (which isn’t empty) but by not being able to in any way describe something, we are astonished and wordless. In the Middle Ages, the idea of tohu and bohu as time and form came to prominence. With that in mind, one might be tempted to suggest time and space as a translation of tohu vavohu. However, Isaiah (34:11) also uses the phrase tohu vavohu but changes it, saying of Edom “God shall stretch over it a line of tohu and stones of bohu.” If both of those are physical concepts – a line or stones - time and space really wouldn’t work as a translation. In Mishnah Chagigah (2:1), in fact, we learn that these are slimy stones. So, while a superficial reading of “darkness on the face of the deep” may connect slightly to black holes, a more in-depth analysis shows that such a reading doesn’t bear up, and certainly isn’t in accordance with the traditional understanding.
It is not totally surprising that Kabbalah allows us to come close to an authentic Jewish approach to black holes. In Lurianic Kabbalah, God is described as Ein Sof, meaning Without End or perhaps Infinite. Of course, no-one is saying that black holes and God are synonymous but there is a definite focus in Kabbalah with yesh and ayin, with Being and Not-Being. A black hole is, as I mentioned before, both Something and Nothing. 14th century Kabbalist David ben Avraham Ha-Lavan wrote that “Ayin, nothingness, is more existent than all the being of the world. But since it is simple, and all simple things are complex compared with its simplicity it is called Ayin.” Kabbalist Ze’ev ben Shimon HaLevi said that “Ayin means No-Thing. Ayin is beyond existence, separate from any-thing. Ayin is Absolute Nothing. Ayin is not above or below. Neither is Ayin still or in motion. There is nowhere where Ayin is, for Ayin is not. Ayin is soundless, but neither is it silence. Nor is Ayin a void – and yet out of the zeroes of Ayins no-thingness comes to the one of Ein Sof.”
It would be very tempting to use these quotations are sources for a Jewish approach to black holes because of the wonderfully ambiguous terminology used that hints at the liminal existence between something and nothing. But while there are similarities in language, in Kabbalah, Ayin precedes Yesh in creation – Nothing precedes Something. With black holes, it is definitely the other way round in terms of our own experience – Something precedes Nothing. Something exists, it passes beyond the event horizon of the black hole, and then it no longer exists. Yesh and Ayin, then, are concepts mainly relating to creation. At the same time, Kabbalah’s experiential focus means that it does in some sense address the accessible and the inaccessible. For example, the Tree of Life, the chain of S’firot that forms the basis of most Kabbalistic thought, has ten s’firot, or Divine emanations of God, but not all of them are accessible to us. Indeed, the top three in the tree – Keter, Chochmah and Binah - are totally inaccessible to us. So, at least Kabbalistic thought recognizes the impossibility of total knowledge or of total revelation. It knows that we are limited in our understanding and that there are some things that are totally beyond our ken. We cannot reach beyond a certain level of understanding of God, just as we cannot see beyond the event horizon of a black hole.
And yet, I feel there is more that needs to be explored. I have already seen a number of Jews say that our tradition never mentions black holes simply because they are not relevant to our lives. I might disagree with that statement somewhat. Although in my day-to-day experience of work, shopping, eating and so on, the nearest black hole isn’t an important consideration, our observational experience is that at the centre of nearly every large spiral and elliptical galaxy lies a black hole. There is a black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A, and this week’s black hole photograph was not of that black hole at the center of our galaxy, which is inconveniently located for us to be able to see it. But the fact that black holes are to be expected in most galaxies means that they are very relevant. Where Torah and Rabbinic tradition thought that the centre of our existence was the Earth, which is Something, in fact the centre of our galaxy is a black hole, which is Nothing, or, at the very least, nothing that we can ever know. It’s not the centre of the universe for sure, because we can never know where that is, but at least the very centre of our galaxy, around which our entire galaxy which includes our solar system rotates, is a black hole. It’s inaccessible. It is unBeing. It is the opposite of what Torah and our tradition imagined.
And I think that poses an existential problem to Judaism. Sure, we could say it’s a metaphor for the fact that the unknowable God should be at the centre of our lives. That would be very cute and Rabbinic, but that would also avoid the issue. How do we address Nothing in our tradition? Is God in a black hole? Can a black hole at least attest to the presence of God? Our liturgy is replete with references to creation attesting to the existence of God. Kol Hanshema t’hallel Ya – all living things praise God. “The heavens declare your handiwork,” we read. Do they? Do black holes declare God’s handiwork? How? How can something which is of our universe and simultaneously not of our universe demonstrate that God created the universe? The theological challenge is that the idea of God creating just as an artist paints a picture or as a sculptor creates a statue (as in the prayer Ki hinei kachomer b’yad haYotzer) is way too simplistic to describe something like a black hole. Perhaps we need to return to the Kabbalistic concept of Ein Sof, as God who is limitless and thus even more than a black hole, which is limited at the event horizon. But that would take God totally outside the physical world, which is necessarily limited, and that might be very problematic for those who want to connect to God, for example, through prayer, which is a vocally limited expression of self. Perhaps we could turn to God’s statement of self-identity in Exodus – ehyeh asher ehyeh – “I shall be as I shall be,” as an expression not just of space but of time. In that statement, God is not described in space but in time. A God who is future potential is Something and also Nothing.
At the end of the day, Jewish theology struggles with black holes because they are pure manifestations of Einsteinian Relativity theory, while almost all Jewish theology is Hellenic, Platonic, or pseudo-Newtonian at best. The biggest challenge to contemporary Jewish theology isn’t the Shoah and the existence of evil – that’s an ancient problem. No, the biggest challenge is the fact that most of us literally do not even understand the world around us. We cannot conceive of light simultaneously being a wave and a particle, or that time is different depending on the observer’s velocity. We imagine ourselves as being fully here, and yet we learn that we are the result of probability fields and that we are essentially vibrating subatomic particles that just happen to constantly align. The problem of contemporary Jewish theology is not that we don’t understand evil, but that we don’t understand existence! Even though we can demonstrate that within black holes time breaks down, we cannot possibly comprehend what that means. How can we talk of God’s connection to the universe when we cannot even make sense of the universe, other than to throw our hands up and say God is a mystery?
Perhaps instead of mystery, we can talk of God in contradiction. For example, many theologians talk of God as being immanent and transcendent, which is contradictory but that’s seemingly the point. As uncomfortable as theological contradictions make me, because they seem like deliberate intellectual cop-outs, every black hole is a contradiction. It’s a contradiction of everything that we know and understand. So, does our theology need to be contradictory to meet it meaningfully?
It would be tempting to merely abandon the theological gymnastics and say, “Ancient Judaism couldn’t conceive of black holes so traditional theology can’t possibly address them. Instead, let’s just get on with mitzvot, with tikkun olam, and leave the mental hurdles to the Rabbis.” The problem with that is our liturgy, which still speaks of God as creating and ordering the universe. Abandoning an attempt to resolve theology when confronted with black holes leaves us theologically adrift every time we pray. If liturgy is a written expression of our theology, then we cannot abandon theology without also abandoning liturgy. And our liturgy as currently written inevitably leads to the question, “Does a black hole speak of God as Creator in the same way that the rest of the universe does?” Because I really don’t think it does, unless we consider black holes in simplistic and inaccurate ways.
So, if we are to bring our theology into an Einsteinian understanding of the universe, with space-time and gravity waves and black holes, I believe that we are going to have to move away from the liturgical perspective of God as the Supreme Designer. Where we go from there, I don’t yet know. Maybe we will have to live in theological contradiction. Maybe our new theology will involve yesh and ayin – Something and Nothing. Maybe our new theology will include tohu vavohu. Maybe it will connect to infinity, like Ein Sof. Maybe it will talk not of certainty but of probability. Maybe it will be as revolutionary to previous theology as Einstein was to Newton.
Certainly, it is time for us to probe the theological depths of Nothing, in order to try to understand the ultimate Something. With that in mind, may we search the boundaries of mental, physical and temporal existence, and may we together expand our theological horizons in ways previously unimagined. May the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be bound only in their appeal to the Infinite, and let us say, Amen.