Sunday, July 26, 2015

Interstellar Geulah


 אִם-יִהְיֶה נִדַּחֲךָ בִּקְצֵה הַשָּׁמָיִם--מִשָּׁם יְקַבֶּצְךָ יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ וּמִשָּׁם יִקָּחֶךָ

  Devarim 30:4 (end of Parshat Netzavim)

My translation is as follows:

[Even] If you will be scattered amongst the ends of the heavens - From there Hashem your God will gather you in, and from there he will take you [back to the Land].


 Elsewhere in Tanach, where similar phrases are recorded as spoken by the Neviim, they say:
 'מֵאַרְבַּע כַּנְפוֹת הָאָרֶץ' - from the four corners [i.e. furthest places] of the Earth.

 Why are Moshe Rabbeinu's words different? What are his words, of the clearest prophecy, telling us?

 I propose the following:

 These words are a promise the degree of which we can only now, with the words of those such as Isaac Asimov in our minds, truly understand and feel:

 Here we are promised that even if the exile, Heaven forbid, is so terribly long that we, Bnei Yisrael, are scattered among colonies across the solar system, even so unimaginably prolonged that we are Exiled to other worlds orbiting other suns* - even from there, He will gather us and bring return us to Him in our ancestral home - the Land of Israel.

 To us in this day and age - is the final part of the Geulah [redemption] as it is commonly thought of, so incomprehensible? Does it now require a direct and obvious act of God to ascend to the Land? We have merited to live in the time when we have come to understand the Universe that God has built for all life, and can at last truly exercise the Tzelem Elohim [image of God] in which we were created. In little more than half a day we can journey from any of those 4 corners to the Land. It is become mundane.

However, far from detracting from the glory of God, we rather gain even deeper insight into Him and His Universe from our endeavors.

May we, Am Yisrael rebuild the Beyt Hamikdash, the third and eternal, speedily, with our own hands, by the mechanism of the daily miracles we, all of humanity, have enacted by the chochma, binah, and da'at that we wield as ones who exist in the Image of God.


*This conjecture, if one also accepts as true that God's Nissim are always enacted through the mechanism of existing physical laws, this could plausibly imply that this universe was built with at least one workable FTL method...