Torah

Pocket Theology

BEFORE WE BEGIN, LET’S HAVE an agreed-upon definition or two (c. OED, mostly):

mystic 1. one who believes that union with or absorption into the Deity or the Absolute, or the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect, may be attained through contemplation and self-surrender. 2. one possessed by self-delusion or dreamy confusion of thought, especially when based on the assumption of occult qualities or mysterious agencies.

Strange words? Confusing? Off-putting, even? Granted. However:

skeptic an ancient or modern philosopher who denies the possibility of knowledge, or even rational belief, in some sphere.

Ethnically and religiously, I consider myself a Jew through and through (for some values of the word “Jew”). And as one who self-describes as mystic #1, it seems to me that “religion” is to “mysticism” as “cheering a team” is to “playing the sport.” Not content with worshipping the Divine, what I really want is to thoroughly and joyfully wallow around in It.

At the same time, experience has taught me to be leery of those self-proclaimed “mystics” who fit definition #2. That’s where skepticism can be handy; as noted elsewhere, I am wordlessly convinced of an indefinable, infinite, yet universal sentience laced through and underlying all existence. But human knowledge is only finite, and human certitude – even or especially the gut-level, immediate, intuitive variety – can be illusory and deceptive. So I also embrace the possibility that I could be completely wrong.

And I’m okay with that.

Given the universe’s detailed complexity, comfort with ambiguity is an important, even essential quality of any spiritual discipline. (As my friend Sputnik liked to interject during enthusiastic theological explanations, “Sounds about as good as any other damn thing.”) We cannot become so convinced of our own Inner Truth that we become dogmatic about it, especially at the expense of others. That way lies fanaticism, cultishness, and the darkest sort of militant, lock-brained fundamentalism.

To paraphrase Ivan Stang, another favorite philosopher: “‘God’ is not a fan club.” So join me on that field – and let’s play our hearts out.

Crit, Writ

First Graf: Sidereus Nuncio

PERHAPS THE GREATEST THING ABOUT Galileo Galilei’s first publication, translated from the Latin as The Sidereal Messenger, is his sense of adventure at being the first known human to telescopically observe and painstakingly chronicle the night sky.

Galileo recorded his unprecedented experience in 1610 CE, a time of adventurous European discoveries in general. His detailed and methodical observations will be thrilling to anyone also observing the same celestial sights for the first time through a simple 20x (read: low-power) backyard telescope. Science historian Albert Van Helden’s superb 1989 translation reveals Galileo’s excitement and wonder on every page, and adds valuable context via explanatory bookending and notes.

That era being one of grand aspirations and flowery speech, Galileo’s grateful bow to his patron, Duke Cosimo II de Medici, is fully titled, “SIDEREAL MESSENGER, unfolding great and very wonderful sights and displaying to the gaze of everyone, but especially philosophers and astronomers, the things that were observed by GALILEO GALILEI, Florentine patrician and public mathematician of the University of Padua, with the help of a spyglass lately devised by him, about the face of the Moon, countless fixed stars, the Milky Way, nebulous stars, but especially about four planets flying around the star of Jupiter at unequal intervals and periods with wonderful swiftness; which, unknown by anyone until this day, the first author detected recently and decided to name MEDICIAN STARS.” (That honorific didn’t stick; instead, the “four planets” are now called by astronomers the “Galilean moons.”)

Let us skip Galileo’s five-page introductory paean to the Duke de Medici and dive right into the first paragraph of the work itself:

In this short treatise I propose great things for inspection and contemplation by every explorer of Nature. Great, I say, because of the excellence of the things themselves, because of their newness, unheard of through the ages, and also because of the instrument with the benefit of which they make themselves manifest to our sight.

Life

“You Can’t Avoid the Void!”

IT DOESN’T REALLY MATTER WHERE or when I was, beyond that it was a high place from which I felt an overwhelming urge to jump.

I felt neither depressed nor sad nor suicidal. But I did feel scared, though mostly of the compulsion. In fact, I retained an echo of those feelings, not to mention utter perplexity, until happening across a healthline.com article which told me that such compulsions are very, very common. Normal, even.

It’s known as the “Call of the Void.” (In the original French, because the French have words for everything experientially interesting, “l’appel du vide.”) In clinical terms, it’s referred to as “High-Place Phenomenon,” and can also involve other aspects of self-harm: leaping in front of a train, steering one’s car into oncoming traffic, or sticking one’s hand into a garbage disposal. Naturally, these urges are quickly suppressed. And no one quite knows why we have such episodes – they may simply be an artifact of our neurological wiring – but it seems related to anxiety: the more anxious one is, the louder the Void calls.

We humans seem to be repelled by, yet attracted to, vast emptiness: the gulfs between stars and galaxies; abyssal ocean depths; wide-open deserts; untenanted warehouses; the view from a mountaintop. (BTW, the worst vertigo I ever experienced was while [very briefly!] standing on my head atop Northern California’s Mount Diablo – I literally felt as though I was dropping into the sky. Brrr.) Perhaps such things remind us of our insignificance. Perhaps we just don’t know what to do with (or in) them. Getting lost in immensity carries a deep discomfort; it blurs the lines we draw between Is and Is-Not. And that can be downright scary.

The most important thing to do when the Void calls? Don’t answer.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
– Philip K. Dick

Life, Writ

Points of Honor, Literary and Otherwise

– STUFFING SENTENCES TO CARRYING CAPACITY.
– Never starting a blog post (or sermon) with “I.”
– Punctuality.
– Creative segues.
– Repeating verbatim whatever someone wants said to another.
– That only what I actually heard appears inside quotation marks.
– One-sentence ledes.
– Snappy ledes. (“If you can do that, you’ll never be out of a job,” quoth a mentor.)
– Keeping an open mind, especially when it’s difficult.
– Never speaking in absolutes. (Present list excluded.)
– Crediting my sources.
– Communicating as accurately as I can. (Challenging, but aspirational.)
– Pushing through my shyness. (Also aspirationally challenging.)
– Being kind to cashiers, sales clerks, waiters, and tradesfolk.
– Saying “Take your time” whenever necessary.
– Waving at passing cars.
– Not speculating.
– “Killing my darlings” (per Wm. Faulkner, via Stephen King).
– Making an effort to pet stray cats.
– Greeting passersby with (at least) a smile.
– Concisifying.

(And yours?)

Crit

A Short Course in Flabbergastery

IN HIS EPIC, THREE-VOLUME Burnham’s Celestial Handbook, the astronomer Robert Burnham, Jr., proposes the following metric:

Let one astronomical unit (the mean Earth-Sun distance) equal one inch. On that same scale, one light-year, or 63,360 astronomical units, equals one mile; in our model, that puts Alpha Centauri, our closest stellar neighbor, just over four miles away.

See how big space is? But let’s go further.

Fig. 1.

In October 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope peered 13.1 billion light-years into one tiny slice of our all-surrounding nothingness (see Fig. 1). On Burnham’s scale, that’s 78,067,190,880,000,000,000,000 miles — or roughly the distance from Earth to just beyond the boundary of interstellar space.

And if your mind is still insufficiently blown, think on this: Except for a handful of relatively close six-rayed stars, the smudges of light you see in Fig. 1 are all galaxies.

GALAXIES. Each containing hundreds of billions of stars, a good many of which are just like our Sun.

Wow. Right?

Contemplating such vasty depths may challenge our sanity. But I also think such a meditation is good for the perspective.

Because in all that unending emptiness, there is only one of each of us: unique, ephemeral, irreplaceable. Enjoy yourself if and while you can — and don’t forget to floss.

I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
— Thos. Jefferson