Living With Unresolved Questions: Reflections on Math and Judaism

Larry Lesser: Every young kid wonders about the infinite. And we are all wondering about how to wrestle with the unknown.

The insights of math can help make some sense out of some of the very deep, profound, mysterious ideas of religion. And religion provides examples to apply mathematics. So there absolutely is a conversation there.

In fact, there’s something called a fractal where you can have a finite area enclosed by a boundary that’s actually infinite in length.

In Judaism, you have – there’s a passage in the book of Exodus, for example: “They built the tabernacle as a place for God to dwell.” And someone is like, “Well, how is God going to dwell here? God’s infinite.” And basically God says, “Hey, you know, if I want to, I can contract my presence to just, like, a square foot.”

How can something infinite fit within something finite? But if it can happen in math, maybe it’s not so strange that it can happen in faith as well.

Ben Zeidman: And that there’s gray – even in something like mathematics, which is not what most of us [learned],  that’s certainly not what I learned.

Larry Lesser: And it turns out that, using the tools of mathematics itself, a logician named Kurt Gödel actually proved that the attempt to say that you’ve built up this mathematical edifice that can account for all questions – you know, can answer any question – is inherently impossible.

Any system you build that’s rich enough to be able to do anything in arithmetic is going to be able to have questions you can pose within the system that can only be answered by going beyond the system. It never ends. There will always be mystery. There will always be unanswerable questions. And that’s kind of profound – that in the one place, in the one realm that everyone looks to for absolute black-and-white certainty – “Well, at least in math, 1 + 1 is always 2” – even in math, you never have that complete closure in an absolute sense. To me, that is just mind-blowing and fascinating.

Larry Lesser: Even the Talmud itself sometimes will wrestle for pages with something, and then at the end, just say teiku, right? Like, “the answer will just have to wait until some future era, because we can’t resolve this.” Math and Judaism have those recognizing of our limits – which doesn’t mean we still shouldn’t try to understand as much as we can, because there’s value in that, and we grow from that and we learn from that – but, to always be humble enough to know that it’s still not the whole thing.