Lost In Space: From Renegades to Tardigrades
“Take this down,” said God: “Bereisheet barah elokim et hashamyim ve’et haaretz…
In the beginning, I created the concept of a Heavenly domain separate from an Earthly domain…”
Taking dictation from God was both intimidating and awe inspiring.
Writing the planet’s first Torah was the task at hand, and Moses, God’s loyal servant, appreciated that God had difficulty speaking the language of humans.
The responsibility of getting it right in order to properly pass the Torah down from one generation to the next set Moses on edge.
“Excuse me, did I hear right: did you say bareisheet or bereisheet?” asked the punctilious scribe, favoring the former, a more grammatically correct version.
God cleared his throat, held back his frustration over not getting past the first vowel of his Torah, and exclaimed: “Let me send you on an adventure through time, to the study of a man known as Rashi, and he will explain it to you.”
Not dressed appropriately for a 2300 year leap in time to France, Moses arrived at Rashi’s villa somewhat chilled.
A comforting blanket by the fireplace was offered, together with a glass or two of private stock wine to warm the blood, and Rashi dazzled Moses with insights into the only officially authorized verse of the Torah that existed in Moses’ mind.
After a short, but mutually illuminating visit, Moses bid his host adieu and was whisked back to his secretarial work, with a deeper understanding of the nuances of God’s writing style.
Maybe it was the wine, but for some reason, Moses felt emboldened to act as God’s editor, and, challenging the quality of the writing, asked:“ Why start with this verse?”
God explained.
“The words of the Torah that we are writing together will have a way of finding their way into the world, for better or for worse. In the future, this verse will be recited from the heavens by humans, and its universal message will resonate with their fellow Earthlings, connecting them to each other and to their past and future, even if for just one soul enriching moment. This is part of my plan for ongoing revelation, an eytz chaim, if you will.
Let me tell you about the time when the verse I just dictated to you will be recited on a Shabbat from a Torah scroll like the one you are writing, by a man floating hundreds of thousands of cubits over Jerusalem.
Moses tried to imagine a man floating so high, reciting Torah, but all he could envision was an angel. God reassured Moses that the Torah reader was indeed made of flesh and blood, and further explained that the Torah reading occurred while the man was the circling the Earth on a ship.
Jerusalem? Flying ships? A round Earth?
He couldn’t comprehend any of it.
Moses’ imagination was on fire, burning like a bush, its flames dancing, consuming and expanding his curiosity simultaneously.
Sensing a need to contain Moses’ confusion, God whisked Moses into the future and landed him on board the Space Shuttle Columbia, just as astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman was about to recite the verse that Moses had heard from God’s lips.
God grinned as He watched the expression on Moses’ face as he heard the first word of the verse pronounced the exact same way that God had dictated it to him.
Moments later, Moses found himself back on Earth, his head buzzing in a dizzying state of tohu vavohu.
Struggling to regain stability, he remembered that God had said that there was at least one other human who would read the same verse from above. Perhaps, he thought, there might be a clue in that story to pull his thoughts together and make sense of it all.
Moses asked God to tell him about that other man, but was not prepared for what he he was about to hear.
“Over a generation before its reading over Jerusalem, that same verse was recited by a man floating in a ship around the moon,” explained the Creator of All. “In fact, there were three men on board the first ship to sail to the moon, and together they recited the first ten verses of the Torah, and despite the distance, over a quarter of the people on Earth heard it live as it happened, as if they were there. ”
Moses tried to fathom the concept of so many people experiencing the words of God simultaneously. It was as if the miracle of revelation at Sinai was repeating itself thousands of years later.
Ongoing revelation indeed.
“What inspired the crew to read from the Torah while circling the moon?” asked Moses.
God paused and collected his thoughts.
“Sometimes in life, there are times when one is overwhelmed by emotions, and words fail. At those times, the options are either silence, the awkward mumbling and stumbling of a word salad , or a quote linking the present to the past while moving into the future. When faced with contemplating the challenge of what to say to their fellow Earthlings upon reaching the moon, words failed the three crew members, so they turned to someone with expertise in crafting words, and he was just as blocked as they were. At three in the morning, as the deadline for his task approached, he turned to his wife for inspiration, who turned to the book that we are about to write, and she advised him to have the crew recite its first ten verses.
Her name is Christine Laitin. She was a special woman, who, among other accomplishments, fought the Nazis and their ilk….”
Moses interrupted.
“What’s a Nazi?”
God tried to illustrate his explanation of Nazis by teaching Moses about the story of another Torah that went into space on board Columbia.
God launched Moses through time and landed him in the Bergen- Belsen concentration camp at the height of its horror.
“This is what Nazis do,” said God, as he led Moses on a tour of the camp.
“Are these humans?” wondered Moses, feeling like an alien explorer on a hostile planet as he wandered among the camp’s inmates and their inhumane tormentors.
Having lived through the slavery of Egypt, Moses assumed that the treatment the Hebrews endured at the hands of the most advanced civilization on Earth reflected the low point of human morality. He couldn’t even imagine that what he was witnessing was even a possibility.
“All that you see before you are creatures created in my image,” said God. “But look here, the image I want you to store in your mind is in this building.”
Moses witnessed a bar mitzvah ceremony occurring in the barracks, as a young man read from a Torah.
“That Torah was given to the bar mitzvah boy after the ceremony. He was entrusted with its care, and he watched over it while it watched over him most of his life. He eventually transferred the care of that Torah to an astronaut from Israel, Ilan Ramon, who carried it into space aboard the space shuttle Columbia, the very same space ship from which Dr. Hoffman read the first verse of the Torah.”
Moses’ head was spinning.
Moses assumed that God’s story carried within it a lesson.
Still reeling from his concentration camp experience, Moses grew impatient, and asked God for the condensed version of the remainder of the parable.
God presented Moses with a highlight reel from beginning to end of the final voyage of Columbia, from its ascent on a pillar of fire into space, to its disintegration over Texas on a cold and broken Shabbat morning.
A pillar of cloud composed of the twirling ashes of Holocaust victims and Columbia’s holy cargo took form in Moses’ mind, and, reaching tornado velocity, it flattened his capacity for understanding.
Tohu vavohu.
What made sense in the Heavenly domain failed to resonate with God’s humble servant in the Earthly domain.
In fact, it made Moses feel sick.
Choshech, the darkest of the dark, a melancholic energy, emanated from the depths of Moses’ soul in response to God’s attempted explanation of Nazis.
God’s love for faces and interfaces, and their infinite possibilities, was shaken to its core by the pain that He saw emanating from Moses’ face.
Finding it too much to bear, He had to turn away.
God hovered for a moment, and, suddenly inspired, decided to put the power of healing into the text.
And so, God explained to Moses that the second verse of the Torah would be dedicated to embodying Moses’ experience of the Shoah.
God ran the verse by Moses.
“Veha’aretz hayta tohu vavohu, vechoshech al pnei tahom.Veruach elokim merachepet al pnei hamayim.”
“And the Earthly domain was nothing but waves of emptiness, heaving to and fro. And its inner light could not find a crack to penetrate the interface of complexity, where chaos and order simultaneously dance. And God’s essence vibrated within every molecule of water, hovering within its potential to support life.”
Moses resonated with that verse, and he felt the stirrings of a healing force begin to emerge from within him.
He nodded his approval.
Transmission of the text could now proceed to verse three.
“Vayomer Elokim Yehi ohr.”
“And I sang the Universe into existence, exclaiming: Let there be light.”
“Vayehi ohr.”
“And the light was able to find a crack.”
A grin of understanding worked its way through the crevices of Moses’ face.
“There’s a crack in everything,” he thought to himself.
Illuminated by a beaming full moon, God and Moses resumed working together on the task of encrypting the healing properties of light into the empty spaces between the letters of the Torah.
In those spaces, a connection between the Heavenly and Earthly domains was created, for subsequent generations to repeatedly lose and find.
Written in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the recitation of the Torah from space by astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman, the 18th yartzeit of Ilan Ramon, and the 15th anniversary of the flight of the Fenichel “Atlantis Torah” taken into space by Canadian astronaut Steve MacLean on STS 115.
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