Parashat Lech Lecha: You're a Super Star!

 

Date:	4th September 1973
Class:	Reception
Age:	5 Years, 8 Months

 

 

“…he is eager to read and knows most of his letters…Claude is very imaginative in thought and expression and is very candid in views…he must learn to overcome the restless side of his nature and settle down in class.”

I guess some things haven’t changed although now I’m the one complaining about my students not settling down! Leafing through my primary school report (which at times made me cringe), the common theme that pervades throughout was my love of reading. The stories fed my imagination and caused my mind to stray at times when I should have been paying attention to important subjects like science and maths.

I was never that much into fiction and if you peruse my library, often, you’ll come across someone’s biography, for that is probably my favourite genre of book. It combines my love of history with a fascination in discovering what makes people ‘tick’. Most importantly, biographies nearly always include pictures. Who doesn’t enjoy looking at photographs of people at various stages of their lives?

Which is why the book I just finished reading has been so unusual. It wasn’t a biography as such, and it flipped the text/photo ratio significantly in the opposite direction. It is called “Unknown Universe: Secrets of the Cosmos from the James Webb Telescope” by Tom Kerss and it was published just over a month ago. It is also one of the most extraordinary books I have read in a very long time (and I read a lot!)

The James Webb Space Telescope (hereafter referred to as JWST) was designed as a successor to the phenomenal Hubble Space Telescope. Its origins stretch back to the late 1990s and is a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. It was launched on Christmas Day 2021 and now resides 1.5 million kilometres (which is nearly 10 million miles) from earth. It started sending back images in July 2022 and this book contains over 220 pages of high definition and dazzling photographs of deep space. Each coruscating star cluster, nebula, planet, galaxy accompanied by an unobtrusive box providing a clear explanation to a non-astronomer such as yours truly. When I describe the book as ‘extraordinary’, I’m not joking.

The night sky has long captivated me and if I had time, I would love to study astronomy, which is perhaps the reason why I find a pasuk/verse in this week’s Parasha so interesting:

Let’s set the scene.

Avram (soon to be renamed Avraham) Avinu has just been served bread and wine from Malkitzedek, the King Priest of Shalem (whom I referred to last week as being non-other than Shem, son of Noach) following his defeat of the four kings and rescue of his nephew, lot.

He is sitting in his tent when Gd comes to him in a vision to let him know that he will one day father an heir, something that Avraham can’t believe. The Torah tells us that Hashem then took Avraham outside and said:

“Look at the heavens and count the stars – if indeed you can count them…that is how your descendants will be.”

Rashi comments on this verse stating that a simple/peshat understanding is that he literally took him outside the tent and showed him the night sky to impress upon him how numerous his descendants would be. In other words, he looked up at the stars.

He quotes the Midrash which takes an even different point of view. As someone who had come from an idolatrous background, Avraham was well-versed in astrology and believed that the stars foretold that he was not destined to have a child. Gd was therefore telling him to set aside his heathen ways and believe in the power of the Almighty to give him an heir. The stars were therefore a visual astronomical (as opposed to astrological) metaphor.

However, there is third interpretation that I wish to highlight here. Rashi says that Gd took Avraham out into space to the point where he was looking down over the stars and what he would have no-doubt seen in this position was infinitely more spectacular than a ground-based view.

The number of stars that we can see with our naked eyes (if we ignore the effects of light pollution) are limited by the panorama above us. As we know, the images that we view are echoes of light that have travelled through space for millennia. Since the world was much younger in Avraham’s era and the universe was smaller than it is now, there would have been fewer stars in the Biblical sky than we could theoretically see in the 21^st century.

In 1929, Edwin Hubble, the famed astronomer observed that the ‘red shift of galaxies was directly proportional to the distance of the galaxy from earth. That meant that things farther from the earth were moving away faster. In other words, the universe must be expanding.’ (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dp29hu.html#:~:text=Hubble's%20brilliant%20observation%20was%20that,announced%20his%20finding%20in%201929.)

The JWST has, in its first two years of operation already opened our eyes to the expanse of the universe. Each dot in a single image represents a galaxy, each of which holds an untold number of stars – far more than we can count. In other words, our forefather, according to Rashi’s explanation was a human JWST! Each direction he faced to look at the stars was equivalent to a page of the book and perhaps, now you can appreciate why I was so bowled over by what I was looking at.

All of this is all well and good, but Chazal ask a very good question. If we, Avraham’s descendants are compared to stars, to the extent that we can’t be counted as we are so numerous….why are there so few of us in proportion to the rest of the world?

They provide a beautiful answer. To Avraham Avinu, the idea of a single star, in the form of his heir was unimaginable. Could he have countered the idea that one day, his descendants would number in the millions? Would he believe that Jews figure amongst the brightest stars on this planet in virtually every sphere of life. From Nobel Prize Winning Scientists to media personalities, Supreme Court Justices to Astronauts.

We are Avraham’s Super Stars. We, by simply existing today, are G-d’s testament to the covenant He established with the very first Jew. Can one honestly count how many famous Jewish people positively impact the global society in which we reside? That is the vision that Avraham saw in the skies above Israel over three thousand years ago.

The JWST will no doubt provide us with many more incredible photographs over the next few decades. It will provide a galaxy of surprises and remind the rest of humanity of how little they know and how much they still have to learn about the solar system – and how little they know and have yet to learn about the Jewish stars that live amongst them on this tiny blue dot in the universe.

Shavuah Tov.

Parashat Noach: The Boat People

If you were to take a survey amongst Jewish people to gauge how they earned a living, I would guess that in a statistical sample of thirty individuals, you would expect to see the following categories included (in no specific order):

Medicine, Accountancy, Law, Teaching, Sales, IT, Driving a Cab, Engineering, Surveying, Banking/Finance and Media. 

I don’t imagine that being a Sea Captain would feature in the list (the Israeli Navy notwithstanding). 

Which reminds me of the following joke:

Harry Cohen is showing his elderly parents around his new yacht.  He dons a captain’s hat and pronounces:

“Look Mum, I’m a ship’s captain!”

His mother looks at him and replies tersely, “Harry, to me, you’re a ship’s captain.  To your father, you’re a ship’s captain but to a ship’s captain, you’re no ship’s captain!”

As you may be aware, although the Tanach is not exactly replete with examples of Jews and boats, a few notable exceptions stand out.  A few weeks ago, on Yom Kippur, we read about Jonah’s (ultimately futile) attempts to flee Gd by boarding a ship to Tarshish.

The second, possibly even more famous example, occurs in this week’s Parasha of Noach.  Noach was not Jewish but one of his sons, Shem was the progenitor of the Semitic nations and according to Chazal, he and Malkitzedek, the High Priest of Shalem – later Jerusalem, were one and the same. 

Gd tells Noach that he will destroy the earth which is filled with violence (which is a translation of the Hebrew word ‘Hamas’ – interpret this as you wish) and that he, Noach, is to build an ark of gopher wood.  The world’s first ship’s captain has a crew of eight, along with a cargo of animals, and they are escaping a world that is hell-bent on perpetrating evil.  Hence, the watery divine punishment.

This theme is echoed a few hundred years later when a different sort of passenger becomes the sole occupant of his own miniscule boat.  Escaping a murderous decree by Pharaoh to kill the Hebrew baby boys, Moshe’s basket floats amongst the bull rushes until he is rescued by none other than the evil king’s own daughter.  Both Shem and Moshe are saved by a ‘Tevah’ (the Torah uses the same word).  If you read the Hebrew carefully, you can see striking similarities in the descriptions of both arks.  In essence, each boat provided refuge to its occupants.  The vessels quite literally saved their lives.

A few weeks ago, a five-hundred-year-old mystery linking Jews to boats seems to have been solved.  Along with Shem and Moshe, the identity of a third sea-faring Semite (and not a few of his crew members) might have been revealed.

For as long as I can recall, my mother (of Blessed Memory) believed that Christopher Columbus was a member of our tribe.  She wasn’t the only one to do so and it appears that a forensic medical expert, at the University of Grenada, José Antonio Lorente, spent twenty-two years trying to discover the ethnic origins of the renowned explorer.  He extracted DNA from the remains of Columbus’s son Hernando Colón along with that of a distant cousin, Diego Colón and compared these with Columbus’s remains at the Cathedral of Seville.  His findings suggest (and this remains to be proven) that my mother and many others were correct in their assumption that one of history’s most famous captains, was a Sephardic Jew.  It is evident that amongst his crew of ninety sailing on the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria were several Conversos (Jews who had been converted to Catholicism but practised their Judaism secretly) including his translator, Luis de Torres.  It was again a case of Jews using naval means to flee for their lives against the antisemitic Inquisition instituted by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.

Notwithstanding the current evidence regarding Columbus’s Jewish ancestry, I can’t help but consider the thematic links which connect Noach and Shem, Moshe and the crew of the three Spanish ships sailing away from Spain in that catastrophic year of 1492. 

In all three cases, albeit in differing circumstances, the evil machinations of human beings led to vulnerable people having to escape to save their lives using a particularly dangerous method of transport.  I know very little about sailing, but I have experienced what it feels like to be travelling on a surface that is anything but stable or predictable.  In a car, you can rely on a (usually smooth) road underneath.  An aeroplane is statistically one of the safest methods of transport and trains run on rails that run in continuous lines, even when they turn a corner.

Water, as we know, is very different.  On a boat, you are at the mercy of the environment and how it impacts the sea on which you are travelling.  It sometimes feels as though the water itself is your enemy, especially when it becomes ‘rough’.  You may feel that although the boat is providing protection from external threats, it can become as dangerous as the human elements you are trying to escape.

So, although we may not consider sailing as being a ‘Jewish thing’, it turns out that without boats, we may not be here today. 

At our Sederim, in ‘Vehi She’amda we talk about how ‘in every generation, there rose those who wished to destroy us, but Gd saved us from their hands’. 

How many of you are descendants of those who fled the Russian and Polish Pogroms and landed on these shores a few centuries ago?

During World War Two, the Danish Resistance Movement saved 7,220 of the country’s 7,800 Jews by ferrying them to neighbouring Sweden.  The Exodus 1947 brought Jews to Palestine (eventually) and the fact that I am here today is because my father and his parents were able to escape Belgium on ‘the Westernland’ in April 1940.  His life was saved through boarding a ship and arriving safely in New York.

We may not have captained those ships but without them, we could not have ended up being doctors, accountants, solicitors, teacher, salespeople, IT experts, cab drivers, engineers, surveyors, bankers or media stars. 

I know it’s hard to admit that we are not good at everything and perhaps, we will never be ship’s captains but I don’t think we’d be wrong admitting that, looking at our history, we are definitely ‘The Boat People’. 

Shavuah Tov.