Daniel Geffen: It’s almost a fundamental human reality to wonder where it all began and where it’s all going. I can’t imagine a Judaism that exists without an origin story, and one that I think actually is decidedly understandable – again, even if it doesn’t make scientific sense.
Stephen Rosen: The sky is dark. Why is the night sky dark? The night sky is dark because the stars are far away from each other. Why are they far away from each other? Well, maybe they were closer to each other at some earlier time. When Einstein did General Relativity in 1915, he thought that the universe was static – neither expanding nor contracting. But later, Hubble discovered that the stars are moving away from each other. Then you have to say that they must have been close together. So you look at the speed that they’re moving apart, and you extrapolate – you run the camera backwards. And you come at: “Fourteen billion years ago, approximately, they were all in one point.”
Claire Max: You look up and you see stars. And the universe goes way back into the black parts of the sky in between the stars and just keeps going and going. Even if I don’t see something with my eyes, I’m looking out into the depths of the universe. I’m looking at things that happened long ago, when the light left the distant object and finally made it here.
It’s very hard to understand the size scales. You know, the universe is so big that light from a few hundred thousand years after the beginning of the universe took 13 billion years to reach us. That kind of thing – when I think millions, I can kind of get it. When I think billions, it’s just big. Very, very big.
Daniel Geffen: You know, speaking as a rabbi who – every single Rosh Hashanah, every single New Year holiday that we celebrate – I get up in front of this congregation and say that we are celebrating the year 5,700-and-something since the beginning of creation – I have to, in real time, suspend that rational part of my brain that says, “This is absurd.”
And yet at the same time, to throw that out – as part of the Rosh Hashanah experience, as part of celebrating New Year’s – wouldn’t make any sense either. There is something that needs to tie us to a past that we can all kind of wrap our head around, right? And the Torah that we have in our ark, the one that hasn’t changed, that every synagogue has the same core text.
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God speaks things into being. And there is something of a logical progression of this thing, before that thing, before that thing, and then it ends. And then there is this unique situation. You get what seems to be a second creation story of sorts, in which you get much more of a deep dive into the story of the creation of the first human beings.
Annie Tucker: The questions that it’s asking may be a little bit different than the questions that a science textbook would ask about how the world came into being. I see them not as sort of a history or a cosmology or a work of science, but really as sort of a work of philosophy, right? They’re sort of a meditation on how the world came into being, how we’re meant to live in relationship to it and to other human beings.
Robert Scheinberg: What I learned from this is that our wise ancestors, when they pictured how they felt the world came into being, they pictured the world as having come into being, as moving from chaos to order.
Daniel Geffen: And if you can’t identify “Where did the world come from, where did our existence come from? And how do we speak about it, how we think about it, how do we respect it? And “How do we consider the possibility that our deeply held beliefs may not be the kinds of beliefs that can be scientifically explained and vice versa?” How do you find the space in between – in which both sides are coming to the realization that there is, I think, a certain familiarity in not knowing?
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