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.