Our Rabbi's Message
October 23rd 2009
By Rabbi Aaron KriegelThe Tower of Babel was perhaps three stories high, yet those who built it thought that they had reached heaven itself with their skyscraper. Millennia later men built buildings that were perhaps ten stories high and they thought that they had gone as high into the heavens as man could go. In the Civil War men built balloons to touch the heavens and spy on the Confederate troops and they thought that they had gone as high as man could ever reach. Only about forty years from then the Wright Brothers led the way to conquering all of the heavens and within sixty years men were beginning to orbit the earth in satellites. Less than a score of years Americans walked on the moon, and one of those astronauts said, "One small step for man, one great leap for mankind."
Our forefathers believed that they could build a tower reaching heaven and challenge the authority of God from that tower. Years of scientific progress brought some men to an opposite conclusion. They began to recognize the enormity of the Universe and they expressed a sense of great wonder. (The Russians had an opposite view. From one of their satellites they said that they could not find God.)
There is a prejudice that holds that scientific exploration will destroy any concept of God and exchange that idea for the randomness what we call creation. Those who hold such a prejudice see God only in the gaps of knowledge, science has not yet explored and explained. However, the opposite has occurred. Space travel allows us to feel at sense of the ineffable which is holy. It gives us pause to wonder and ultimately to feel a Presence that we cannot define precisely because we are mortal, finite created beings.
The ancients had false beliefs in gods and in a God Who they thought could be toppled from His throne. We moderns have false beliefs of a godless universe devoid of reason and wonder. For many, space exploration has changed all that and has given us a more profound understanding of creation itself.
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