Jews Don’t Belong in Space
“Jews Don’t belong in space.” My Rabbi said with a smile. He always wore that smile when he knew he was blowing our tiny 15-year-old minds. His reasoning seemed bulletproof to us; Ilan Ramon, the first Jewish Astronaut (He wasn’t but I will get to that), died in the fatal Columbia mission. Using typical under-researched, faulty thinking, (which we ate up like the oily yeshivah cafeteria food) he demonstrated that God simply does not want Yidden (Jews) to go to space. He may have created an infinite cosmos, full of unseen wonders, but it was clear to my Rabbi that we were not to think too deeply about exploring God’s pretty planetarium.
There are so many Halachic issues with going to space, he argued. Most of our commandments are only relevant or logical for people living on earth, he pointed out. We use the location of the sun, moon, and stars to determine when God wants us to say which prayers, and to eat which foods, which are two very important activities for Yeshivish Jews. Going to space throws a giant monkey wrench in a very fine-tuned machine that consumes huge amounts of cholent and emits many many important prayers and recites many many important teachings, which is the entire purpose of creation in the first place. The explosion of the Space Shuttle Columbia was a message, he said, pausing for effect. “Jews don’t belong in space.”
A few things have changed since then. For starters, I now know that everything is in space. I have used this collection of words before, and I will use it again because it is a ticket for a train of thought whose last stop is infinity. It hits me with an immediate expansion of perspective, which is something I treasure deeply. We are on a rock ball, hurtling through infinite inky black nothingness, and it doesn’t come up nearly as often as it should! The universe wasn’t designed for us, we were designed, mistakenly, intricately, awkwardly, and amazingly, by the universe. As a fictional wise boy once said: “Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s gonna die”. Some might find this proposition depressing, but upon further reflection, it reveals itself to be deeply liberating.
Some have accepted that we do not exist on purpose, that there is no single location where we belong more than any other- no center or eye or of the universe to huddle around. We belong nowhere and everywhere, and that our time here is limited. An admirable few- including several Jews (my rebbe apparently never googled ‘Jewish Astronauts’ — he would have been horrified to find that there have been, in fact, many more went to space — most of whom returned to earth successfully)- took this info in stride and proceeded to step, or rather rocket, into that infinite inky blackness for the sake of exploration, education and just as importantly, play (if you haven’t seen video footage of spacemen hopping around in the moon’s relatively weak gravity you should go and do that now).
I’m not surprised that Jews have gone to space. Jews are an amazing collection of humans, constituting 20% of Nobel laureates, for example, despite being less than .20% of the population. We have a long-standing tradition of obsession with education (its a very specific way of learning very specific things, but it can be applied more generally if one is so inclined) but I’d be surprised if Orthodox Jews like my Rebbe went to space. He taught me to be afraid of the world beyond the four corners of the study hall, and that the only books worth studying were written in ancient Aramaic and Hebrew. I left that world, and in some ways, I am still leaving it. It's been unbelievably (pun intended) liberating.
A significant part of the process of leaving entails externalizing my thoughts into words, and this blog is a part of that. Hopefully, it is a project that will add some momentum to a machine that is fueled not by fear and chulent, but by curiosity and wonder- and spurts out knowledge and lightheartedness, instead of prayer and supplication.