Parashat Terumah 5781 — 02/20/2021
Beginning with Bereishit 5781 (17 October 2020) we embarked on a new format. We will be considering Rambam’s (Maimonides’) great philosophical work Moreh Nevukim (Guide for the Perplexed) in the light of the knowledge of Vedic Science as expounded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The individual essays will therefore not necessarily have anything to do with the weekly Torah portion, although certainly there will be plenty of references to the Torah, the rest of the Bible, and to the Rabbinic literature. For Bereishit we described the project. The next four parshiyyot, Noach through Chayei Sarah, laid out a foundational understanding of Vedic Science, to the degree I am capable of doing so. Beginning with Toledot we started examining Moreh Nevukim.
Shemot 25:1-27:19
This week I want to turn to the actual descriptions of time and cosmology as they have evolved as our understanding of the physical world has evolved. That evolution has proceeded as technology has allowed us to peer more and more deeply into the fundamental processes of nature, from the smallest subatomic scale to the largest astronomical phenomena.
In the mid-1600’s Sir Isaac Newton wrote:
Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without regard to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent and common time, is some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time. (Principia Mathematica, published 1687)
This conception of time asserts that there is a kind of ideal, mathematical form of time that stretches from an infinite past to an infinite future. It is different from the time we measure. We measure time from the motion of objects – the pendulum on a grandfather clock, for example, or the motion of the earth around the sun (1 year) or the vibration of a certain atom (“atomic clock”). Perhaps we can say that “absolute time” is the Platonic form that underlies all the manifestations of time that we measure.
By the same token, absolute space (in three dimensions rather than one) was held to be the arena in which movement takes place. Space, like time, was held to be flat, extending infinitely to the left and to the right, to the front and the back, up and down. Furthermore, space and time were not held to be connected to one another. Space is the arena in which dynamics plays itself out, while time simply flowed behind the scenes, so to speak.
All this was upended by Einstein’s Special Relativity (1905). Building on the fact that the speed of light is the same no matter what one’s state of motion is with respect to the source of the light (as long as one is moving in a straight line at a constant speed), Einstein showed that space and time are actually two aspects of one underlying reality, called space-time. (Incidentally, the experiment that proved the constancy of the speed of light was the Michelson-Morley experiment, for which Albert Michelson won the 1907 Nobel Prize in Physics. Michelson, who was Jewish, was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in the sciences. Teddy Roosevelt had won the Peace Prize a few years earlier for helping negotiate an end to the Russo-Japanese war.)
Stepping back a bit, consider ordinary space for a minute. Suppose you are sitting on a swivel chair in front of your computer and someone enters the room at your right. That person is to your right. Now you swivel around in your chair to face him. The person is in front of you! What has changed? Certainly not the relative position of your friend. The only thing that has changed is your point of view. Whether the person is to your right or in front depends not on the underlying, “objective” reality, but rather on the way you evaluate that reality. If your frame of reference changes, your description of reality changes, but the reality itself does not. A similar example is found with a person riding a train along flat, straight track. Is he stationary and everything is moving past him, or is the landscape stationary and he’s moving past it? It depends on your frame of reference. In the train’s frame of reference, the person is static. In the earth’s frame of reference, the landscape is static. There is no a priori reason to favor one or the other, and indeed, the laws of physics are exactly the same (we say they are “invariant”) in either frame of reference. That is, the description of the position and motion of each object may change, but the dynamic relationships between them are invariant when the frame of reference changes.
Now returning to space-time, it turns out that the laws of physics are invariant under a change of frame of reference, but the actual description of the space-time coordinates may change. Two events that are simultaneous in one frame of reference may not be simultaneous in another. “Absolute, true and mathematical time” does not exist. Time itself is relative to the frame of reference of the observer. Nonetheless, the underlying space-time is flat and unbounded, stretching to infinity, now in 8 dimensions: forward and back, left and right, up and down, past and future.
Now we move on to General Relativity, which is an extension of Special Relativity. General Relativity explains gravity as a curvature of space-time. In the vicinity of a massive object, space-time is bent. The “shortest distance between two points” is no longer a straight line; it is instead a curved path; the curve of the path being determined by the curvature of the underlying space-time geometry. A common example of this phenomenon can be found on the curves surface of the earth (we know that the earth is not flat, because if it were, cats would have already pushed everything off the edge). The shortest distance between two points is a “great circle” – the circular path that runs through the two points and whose center is at the center of the earth. In the words of one of Einstein’s foremost students, John Archibald Wheeler, “matter tells space-time how to curve; space-time tells matter how to move.”
Now time is not only not absolute, but it has become a dynamic player in the activity of the universe. In fact, this dynamic, curved nature of spacetime gives us a very different picture of the universe than the old view of an eternal, static entity, and this of course has great bearing on our consideration of the argument between Aristotle and Rambam. We will, Gd willing, address this next week.
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Commentary by Steve Sufian
Parashat Terumah
“Terumah” means “gift” or “offering.” In this parshah, Gd asks our ancestors to give a gift of an offering from their heart. Then He gives the Great Gift of detailed instructions for building a Sanctuary so that our ancestors will see Him dwelling within the Sanctuary, so that He “may dwell in their midst.” The detailed instructions make it clear that the Sanctuary is an expression of the same pattern that is present in the universe and in the human body. In the human body, for example, Gd created 248 limbs which correspond to the 248 positive commandments of the Bible – in the Sanctuary, there were 48 beams, 100 hooks and 100 loops.
Obviously, Gd is Everywhere, Omnipresent – He dwells everywhere. So this statement “may dwell in their midst” means that the harmony between their open hearts and the Sanctuary created in part by their offerings will be so great it will resonate with the personalities and physiologies of all who enter; even our ancestors who just a few days before were terrified by the sound of the Lord’s voice.
Neither modern synagogues – for example, Beth Shalom – nor modern homes seem to be built according to the plan of the Sanctuary so what can we do in order to be aware of Gd’s dwelling within our synagogues, our homes, our minds, feelings, egos, bodies?
The key seems to be in Gd’s command to Moses:
“Speak to the children of Israel, and have them take for Me an offering; from every person whose heart inspires him to generosity, you shall take My offering.”
By behaving with generosity to all, we make offerings to Gd because “love thy neighbor as thyself – Self — is inextricably intertwined with “love the Lrd, thy Gd, with all thy heart, with all thy soul and with all thy might.”
Another way to make offerings to Gd and to be aware of Gd’s Presence is through the daily prayers of our religion: waking, morning, afternoon, evening and bedtime. These have the value of opening our hearts even though we may be fatigued or stressed. The Joy of Gd’s Presence enters into the words and to our awareness.
A third way is to come to our synagogue: personally or through Zoom – I feel magnetically drawn to our synagogue, especially to the Torah Scrolls and so I came regularly before Covid. During Covid, I join the Zoom service and for a short time while Rabbi Alan is taking a hiatus, I’ll tune into some service that fits my time schedule.
Each of us is an individual expression of Gd, finely crafted to play a particular role in the Cosmic Story, the Divine Plan and so each of us may intuit a particular way at a particular moment or routinely that we can offer to Gd: Whatever way we can offer to Gd, let us offer and let us be fully aware of Gd’s Presence dwelling within us and around us.
Baruch HaShem