My friend sent me this story, which is a strange blend of science fiction and Judaism. I hope you enjoy. I can’t endorse the explicit or implicit theological messages in this story, but I’m not sure there’s anything definitely problematic, and it’s just fiction. This it the first part, IYH there will be a continuation.
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Rabbi Yoḥanan said: Wherever you find a reference in the Bible to the might of the Holy One, Blessed be He, you also find a reference to His humility adjacent to it. This is written in the Torah, repeated in the Prophets, and stated a third time in the Writings. It is written in the Torah: “For the Lord your G-d is the G-d of gods and the Lord of lords” (Deuteronomy 10:17), and it is written immediately afterward: “He executes the judgment of the fatherless and widow” (Deuteronomy 10:18), displaying his humility in caring for even the weakest parts of society. It is repeated in the Prophets: “For thus says the High and Lofty One that inhabits eternity, Whose name is sacred” (Isaiah 57:15), and it is written immediately afterward: “In the high and holy place I dwell with him that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones” (Isaiah 57:15). It is stated a third time in the Writings, as it is written: “Extol Him Who rides upon the clouds, Whose name is the Lord” (Psalms 68:5), and it is written immediately afterward: “A father of the fatherless, and a judge of widows” (Psalms 68:6).
-Megillah 31a
Friends and fellows, how can you believe that this man of flesh and blood communicates with the Infinite G-d? This charlatan has been fooling you all these years, and will never bring you to the land of Canaan! If you continue to follow him, you will die in the desert just like your fathers, uncles, and brothers! Come with me, and I will lead you to lands rich in bread and wine!
-Shalom ben Tzadok of the Tribe of Simeon
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10 years following the Exodus, somewhere in the Paran desert
It was nine years after the episode with the spies, and Shalom ben Tzadok had amassed a following of about five thousand people. The people were starting to turn on Moses. They were tired of dying in the desert. They were tired of wandering around aimlessly. They were tired of the Manna. They didn’t trust Moses any more. Shalom ben Tzadok of the tribe of Simeon was a self-styled philosopher. He was one of the best educated men in the encampment, having had matriculated at the University of Tanis, Egypt, with a dual degree in rhetoric and circle mathematics, and Moses had taken him under his wing and taught him the secrets of the Torah. But like so many other people, he was dissatisfied with their lifestyle. Shalom also felt that Moses was not worthy of the intellectual pedestal that he was placed on. In many discussions, Shalom had covertly tested Moses in many sciences and found his knowledge lacking. While Moses was undoubtedly very wise and sharp, and was university educated himself, he didn’t approach Shalom’s knowledge in many areas. And this planted the seeds of doubt in Shalom’s heart, which eventually led to his rebellion. How could a man who claims to speak to G-d “face-to-face” not know everything there is to know? Does G-d lack knowledge also? Does it even make sense that the Infinite G-d of all Powers would be personally concerned with creatures of flesh and blood? Wouldn’t he delegate that to minor officers, the many gods that Egypt and the other pagan nations worshipped? And the episode with the spies only served to reinforce this. Why did Moses need to send spies in the first place? And then why did he need to kill them when they told the truth, and sentence the entire population to 40 years of endlessly wandering the desert? Shalom decided it was all a ruse. Moses was just power-hungry megalomaniac, with some magical abilities he had picked up from living the Midianites. It took him over five years to convince a significant number of people that Moses, despite the miracles he had wrought, was not a messenger of G-d and was taking them nowhere.
Eventually, Shalom decided it was time to make his move. He gathered his followers together and delivered a rousing speech, summarizing the reasons to doubt Moses’s leadership, competence, and morality, and exhorting them to strike out on their own, under his leadership. His followers gathered up their tents, livestock, and possessions, and prepared to exit the encampment. The onlookers were petrified, expecting these rebels to suffer a sudden and violent retribution from G-d. But it never happened. They left in peace, whereabouts unknown. A few people sent out to track them eventually reported that they had joined some Arab tribes on the edge of the desert. This was the last that anybody heard of them for a long time… (note: the Torah doesn’t record this episode, just like it doesn’t record the vast majority of things that happened during the 40 year sojourn).
Fast forward about 3400 years…
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Year 2028, University of California, Fresno
Jonah was a 22-year old physics student at the University of California, Fresno. He was one of the few students selected to work in physics lab, developing an anti-gravity drive. You might be wondering what an anti-gravity drive is. After all, don’t you need energy to escape the gravitational pull of the earth? And so, isn’t every airplane, helicopter, and rocket an “anti-gravity drive”? I will explain. Gravity is a force. To resist gravity, you need a different force that acts in the opposite direction of gravity. This is provided through the rotors of a helicopter pushing air downwards, or the thrust of a rocket. In fact, whenever you throw a ball upwards, that’s what’s happening- the force of your arm is delivering a counterbalancing force to gravity.
The idea of a hypothetical anti-gravity drive is to enable you to escape gravity without force, but by somehow “cancelling” the gravitational pull. This sounds like a complete fantasy, in contravnetion to Newton’s first law- An object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. If such a thing was possible, it should be possible to stop a bullet simply by “cancelling” the energy in it. It sounds like total quackery, unbefitting for proper physicists to even discuss, even contemplate, much less tinker with. But this is what they were attempting in the University of California, Fresno, Applied Physics lab. If they would have asked me, I would have said to cancel their funding. Why should our tax money go to indulging in such flights of fancy that would lead nowhere? It’s a good thing they didn’t ask me. If we tied technological progress to whatever is thought to be the laws of the Universe, we would have never advanced beyond the wheel, or even to the wheel.
Anyways, Jonah was very excited, because the team seemed to be making some progress. The anti-gravity drive had registered some degree of gravity resistance. It was tiny, completely invisible to the naked eye. But when placed upon a high-precision scientific scale, the anti-gravity drive registered .00000756th of a kilogram lighter when it was turned on, and .00000756th of a kilogram heavier when it was turned off. Consistently. Or at least consistently today. Yesterday, that didn’t happen. Some of the scientists were dismissive of this development, maintaining it must be a calibration error on the scale that was somehow affected by the magnetic field of the anti-gravity drive. But Jonah couldn’t contain his optimism. Who knew what the potential could be if the anti-gravity drive actually worked? Limitless! Flying cars! Flying houses! Flying people! And if we could break the laws of physics with this, who knows what other laws of physics we can break! We could even reach the stars.
But there was a small doubt niggling at Jonah. It was this: If an anti-gravity drive worked, it wouldn’t just cancel the earth’s gravity. It would cancel the sun’s gravity as well. The fact we are on a planet spinning around the sun is due to the sun’s gravity, which is much weaker than the earths gravity at the distance we are from the sun. In fact, the sun’s gravity is 0.0006 the strength of the earth’s. If the anti-gravity device was “powerful” enough to cancel the much stronger earth’s gravity, it would definitely be powerful enough to cancel the sun’s gravity. And the object, instead of just floating upwards, would fly away, because it would no longer be spinning around the sun at the same rate as the earth, and would leave the earth completely. It would probably do so at high velocity. But how fast, and where would it go? Jonah couldn’t perform the calculations on the spot because he wasn’t carrying a napkin. But he wondered if this would make the anti-gravity device less useful. What’s the point of a flying car if it just immediately and uncontrollably flies up to space? Jonah decided that tomorrow, he would suggest that instead of just measuring the effects of the anti-gravity drive on a scale, they should measure it on a pendulum, to see if/how it makes the pendulum swing.
Jonah was thinking in the right direction. He was quite right that the anti-gravity drive would not lead to flying cars, for those very reasons. But his fears were misplaced. The anti-gravity drive would lead to things that were much more monumental than flying cars, as we will see soon.
As Jonah was walking through the lush walking paths of the beautiful campus, deep in thought, a dark object flew right in front of his face, almost hitting his nose. He jumped back. What was that? For a second, Jonah had the extremely silly idea it was the anti-gravity device, going crazy and escaping from the lab. But it was just a squirrel, leaping from one bush to another. The squirrel had stopped and was looking at him, twitching his nose. Jonah stopped and laughed. He pondered what could possibly be going through the squirrel’s tiny brain. What do squirrels know of humans, who they live along side by side? Can this squirrel have any concept of what I am working on? Jonah puffed up with pride, contemplating how his work would change the course of history, while this poor, dumb squirrel couldn’t even appreciate the most minute detail of his life.
As we know, haughtiness is a terrible sin. G-d was unhappy with Jonah’s pride, and for this as well as other important reasons, sent an angel to implant the following dark notion into his mind, which seemed to follow quite naturally from the previous train of thought, but you would have to quite unhinged to think of yourself. The thought was this: What if there are other powers out there, and compared to them, I am just a squirrel? For example, extraterrestrial intelligences, better known as aliens? What if these supposed extraterrestrials are so much more vastly intelligent than us, that we are mere squirrels in comparison? What conception do squirrels have of us? Our language? Our cultures? Our technology? Our activities? Our literature? Our music? Our philosophy? Our capabilities? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Zero. They don’t have even the beginnings of a concept of these things. When they see people, sitting outside, texting on their phone, what do they think about the phone? About the texting? Absolutely nothing. They can’t even begin to comprehend what is happening. To squirrels, we are just these big threatening creatures that lurk in the background that they must avoid.
Now, suppose these vastly more intelligent extraterrestrials visited the earth. What could we understand of them? We might see them, or their ships- if they came in ships- and if the aliens are so much more advanced than us, there is no reason to believe they would require anything even approximating “ships”- but we would have no idea of what they are doing or what they want. They could have an entire panoply of concepts that we couldn’t possibly grasp, the same way a squirrel can't conceive of our music, or philosophy, or advanced mathematics, or chess. They may have technology that not only we couldn’t develop, we couldn’t even comprehend what it does, even if we saw it work in front of our eyes. We might not even be able to tell the difference between the aliens themselves and their technology. We would just see a blur of weird, incomprehensible moving objects that suddenly invaded our environment. As for their purpose here, they could be coming for reasons that we couldn’t even begin to fathom.
And if the extraterrestrials wanted, they wouldn’t have much difficulty catching us. Just like catching squirrels, it might take them a few tries to get it right, they might have difficulty in the beginning- you can imagine some clumsy giant metallic spider like thing falling out of the sky and chasing a terrified crowd, and failing to capture any- but eventually they would be able to trap us quite handily, with no way for us to avoid it. People might start disappearing in the thousands, without anybody figuring out where they went. They might open wormholes under people’s bed in the night and drag them off to their alien world. They might snatch up airplanes mid flight. They might be hiding underwater, dragging off unsuspecting swimmers. They might impersonate police officers and start arresting people for swearing in public. We would be completely at their mercy- if mercy was a concept that the aliens recognized. This may all sound like paranoia, but it’s an important consideration for anybody who contemplates the idea of extraterrestrial visitors.
This thought entered Jonah’s head and his pride immediately deflated, replaced by a gloom that haunted him the rest of the afternoon, through his classes and at dinner. It made him inexplicably nervous and pushed aside all thoughts of the anti-gravity drive. He couldn’t concentrate on anything that mattered. Jonah couldn’t understand how this strange, unhinged thought that basically came out of nowhere made him so nervous, but he didn’t know that it was G-d that sent it. It was Thursday.
Now there is something else I have to tell you about Jonah. Jonah was an unaffiliated Jew, who grew up to completely nonobservant parents, Paul and Lucy. But Jonah knew he was Jewish, and was starting to develop some interest in traditional Judaism. Near the campus, there was a Chabad house with many activities. One of them was a weekly lecture on Kabbalah by the presiding shliach (“messenger”, Chabad term for a rabbi that engages in outreach) of the Chabad house, Rabbi Mendel Sternkop. Jonah attended this lecture and enjoyed the cholent that was served along with it.
On those Thursday nights, one of the things Jonah wondered about was the incongruous mix of cholent and Kabbalah. Kabbalah is supposed to be about the Infinite G-d. It’s supposed to be about the Divine upper worlds. But somehow, we are talking about it in the most mundain setting possible, over a bowl of Eastern European meat broth. This struck Jonah as strange. Does this make sense? Is any of this real? Is G-d real? Is Kabbalah real? Is the cholent real? The cholent seemed real enough. But during the lecture, the Divine realms also seemed real. While Rabbi Sternkop explained things well, it was as if somehow that the cholent helped him reach the upper worlds. Maybe there was something to this ancient Jewish wisdom, something even more important than the physics Jonah was working on.
Everything I have described was the typical Thursday night activity for Jonah. But on this eventful Thursday night, Jonah was surprised to see there was a new guest in attendance from the university. His name was Gavriel Stochastic-Process, and he was a professor of Rhetoric in the Communications Department. How did Gavriel get this name? I don’t know. Usually hyphenated names means the person took on the last name of both his father and mother. But do you really expect me to believe that his father’s last name was “Stochastic” and his mother’s last name was “Process”? Anyways, Dr. Stochastic-Process had negative opinions about the Kabbalah in general and Chabad in particular, and would not have ordinarily been in attendance, but somehow, G-d arranged that he would be there. Midlecture, he spoke up:
“Rabbi, you’re mentioning all these spiritual upper worlds, but what other physical worlds?”
“What do you mean?”- asked the rabbi quizically “Like the “world” of film, or the underwater “world”?”.
“No. There are trillions of stars in the universe, and many of them have planets. Does Judaism have a position as to what is going on in these worlds? Is there life there? Is there intelligence there?”
“Well, it’s funny you mention that because I have thought about this. I don’t believe the Torah necessarily has specific position on other planets. The Torah doesn’t mention them, just like it doesn’t mention other continents. But I will tell you this. According to the atheists, our existence, the existence of intelligent life on earth, is only possible through a cosmic accident of extreme unlikelihood. In fact, they have even hypothesized countless other other universes, just to explain away the unlikelihood of our own world. The chances of the conditions for any life, and especially intelligent life, arising on any of the other billions of planets in the universe is next to nothing. But if there is a G-d who populated our planet with life and people, He could have done so on any of the other planets. And why not? If He created people here, why wouldn’t He do so elsewhere? It seems most reasonable that all those other planets don’t exist for no purpose, but are populated with life."
“But doesn’t the Torah tell us that the world was created primarily for the Jewish people? If so, what would be the point of people on other planets?”
“Yes, that’s true. But the Torah can be understood as referring to our world, which as far as we are concerned, is our whole universe. We can’t currently go anywhere else, and definitely our ancestors to whom the Torah was given couldn’t. So it doesn’t mean there can’t be other worlds and peoples that G-d created, with their own purposes. Furthermore, it’s actually a machlokes (dispute). Although the simple reading of Chazal and many verses would indicate that the world was created for the Jewish people, that is not the position taken by the Rambam, Ibn Ezra, and other authorities. They understand that G-d created the world for His own, inscrutable reasons, and we are not the focal point of it. The Rambam writes that the angels are on a much higher level than we are. He understands that the Sun, Moon, and other celestial bodies are themselves conscious angels. He argues that there is no way these luminous awesome beings can be of any less significance than we are, and are in fact vastly more significant in the grand scheme of things. If so, then the question doesn’t start. G-d created a vast universe, for His own purposes, and we are only a small part of it. It’s entirely reasonable that He created countless other peoples as well. Perhaps they are much greater than us, such that we are like animals in comparison, like the gulf in intelligence between us and squirrels.”
Jonah was floored. Somehow, the rabbi had anticipated his thoughts, and neatly tied them into Judaism. As soon as the lecture was over, he approached the rabbi and told him everything. The rabbi seemed amused. “There’s nothing to worry about. Hashem is in control of everything. Maybe it was a lesson for us to not be so haughty. But more than that, it doesn’t matter. The Rebbe taught us to keep our heads in the sky, but our feet firmly planted on the ground. The main thing is being good Jews and bringing the redemption. How was the cholent? Can I give you a pair of tefillin to wear? Can you try to put it on every day?” Etc, etc.
But the rabbi was wrong. It did actually matter very much, because the next day, Jonah was present at the first working prototype of the anti-gravity drive. Two days later, the aliens appeared in the sky.
To be continued…
I'm confused. Maybe part two will help clarify.
In the beginning, I thought that the name of the antagonist Shalom ben Tzadok refers to this person https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A9%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%9D_%D7%A6%D7%93%D7%99%D7%A7
but then the sory pivots to something else.