Rabbi Jack Moline
This week’s Torah portion is Eikev: Deuteronomy 7:12 – 11:25
Among the casualties of modern times are analogies to nature. I think “grains of sand on the shore” is still a pretty big number to most, even when beach erosion and oceanfront construction has made that a smaller comparison. But “cedars of Lebanon,” “the moon to rule the night” and certainly “the mighty Jordan River” are figures of speech and not the experience of most readers. We have cut down the trees, turned on the lights and diverted the headwaters.
Worst of all is “as numerous as the stars of heaven.” (Deuteronomy 10:22) We live in a metro area where particle contaminants and light pollution mean the abundance of stars we witness is a fraction of what can be seen in more isolated locations. I was, well, starstruck the first time I looked up at dark in rural Wisconsin and saw the canvas on which the ancients imagined the constellations. And that was nothing compared to looking up from my sleeping bag in Sinai on a moonless night and recognizing both my insignificance and my privilege in viewing that tableau.
Ask me my favorite verse from the Bible and I will say Psalm 147:3-4, “the healer of broken hearts and binder of their wounds counts the number of stars and calls each one by name.” It appeals to me for many reasons, including that in another life I would have loved to have been an astronaut. Wow, to be a bit of protoplasm built of stardust, returning to the endless void that birthed us all! And then, floating untethered by any visible means to anything else, I might give off my own faintest of light that would, after billions of years, reach some distant destination to take my place among the uncountable stars beheld by others aspiring to the heavens.
Yeah, pretty over the top. But on a clear night at sea, on a mountaintop or in an isolated wilderness, you, too, would know what I mean.
A small number of people get to live some version of that dream, including those on the International Space Station, orbiting the planet and performing research that has already expanded the breadth and depth of human knowledge immeasurably. I imagine that the cramped quarters and isolation from most human contact gets old. But would I do it, even today? In a heartbeat.
Fortunately, the flight of my imagination is easier to visualize despite light pollution and hazy skies. I installed an app on my phone that tracks the ISS and tells me where to look in the night sky when it passes overhead. A point of light — neither twinkling like a little star nor blinking like a big old jet airliner — travels among the points of light making an arc from horizon to horizon. (You can find it at issdetector.com). On those nights that it passes over my house, I look up and watch it sail across the sky. Do I wave? Of course.
When the phrase “as numerous as the stars of heaven” was coined, nothing was known about them beyond conjecture. When the assertion was made that God could count their number and name each one, certainly those names did not include Alpha Centauri or Betelgeuse. The nighttime sky was a welcome mystery, an analogue for the slightly less mysterious process of being fruitful and multiplying.
Today I cannot fathom how the letters I type on a keyboard wind up on a screen and then, at the push of a button, are whisked around the world. Someone has figured out the number of ones and zeros and given each a name, creating constellations of information greater than the Biblical population. But as impressed as I am by that process, it pales next to the awe I feel looking out on a moonless night, hoping for a glimpse of the source of the stardust that bears my name.
Rabbi Jack Moline is the rabbi emeritus of Agudas Achim Congregation in Alexandria.
