"Torah from Tech"
Jun. 5th, 2011 09:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuEach month, MIT Hillel (on whose board I serve) publishes an electronic newsletter. One regular feature, "Torah from Tech", is a brief dvar Torah (essay) looking at Judaism from the unique perspective of MIT. The "Torah from Tech" in the June issue is by yours truly, and ties together the counting of the Omer and MIT's sesquicentennial.
For those who don't want to follow the link (frankly, the PDF isn't formatted very well), here's what I wrote:
We are approaching the end of the period of counting the Omer. During this time, we have a mitzvah that once each day we recite a beracha thanking God for this mitzvah, and then... we count. "Today is one day." "Today is two days." "Today is seven days, which makes one week." And so on for seven complete weeks; on the fiftieth day we celebrate Shavuot.
It is a mitzvah of awareness. Performing this mitzvah does not change the world in any physical way, and it does not change our religious position. What it does is highten our perception of the passage of time.
In Psalm 90, attributed to Moses, we read, "Teach us to number our days, that our seat of intelligence may gain wisdom." The peshat, the obvious meaning of this verse, is that knowing that we have a finite time in this world will lead us to knowledge of the true priorities in life.
Time, of course, is essential to the Jewish understanding of the world. As Rav Soloveitchik writes, Judaism "is extremely time conscious, finding the present moment so important. For instance, we are permitted to do work on a Friday afternoon until one minute before sunset, but are injoined from doing work one minute later. Why does one minute make such a difference, distinguishing between the permitted and the sinful?" Heschel's philosophy is that "Judaism constructs the Sabbath as an architecture of Time."
Some Jewish times are imposed from without, such as the moment of sunset that ushers in Shabbat. The determination of other times has been granted to us by God. The first mitzvah given in preparation for the Exodus was calendrical: "This month [Nisan] shall be for you the first of months." Not only were we given the authority to intercalate months to keep the lunar and solar calendars lined up, the Sanhedrin established on which date each month began. For although the Jewish calendar is based on the phases of the moon, it is more specifically determined by the proclamation of the high court that the new moon has, indeed, been seen. Our time is governed not by *astronomy* but by *astronomical observation*, giving a quite literal meaning to the verse in Deuteronomy: "Lo ba-shamayim hi," the law is not in the heavens.
Returning to our verse from Psalms, I would suggest another reading, perhaps more apt for MIT: "Teach us to measure the passage of time, so that we may increase knowledge." This is at the heart of MIT's mission --- teaching people how to use science and technology to measure the universe, and thereby discover new things.
But just as the Jewish measurement of time contains a combination of extrinsic and intrinsic elements, the scientific measurement of time is subject to differences between measurements that come from without and determinations that arise from within.
Einstein, perhaps the most famous yiddische kopf, demonstrated by a thought experiment the fallacy of treating scientific time as being absolutely measurable. The more precisely we try to grasp for time, the more we need to account for our own position (vis-a-vis an external gravitational field) and our motion (vis-a-vis acceleration disturbing our inertial reference frame). And these are not merely theoretical or inconsequentially trivial: the atomic clocks on GPS satellites must compensate for both of these effects. Einstein demolished the idea of absolute extrinsic time.
Both as Jews and as Techies, we strive to balance time as we define it and time as it defines us. We count the days from Pesach to Shavuot, and watch each one slide from future to past. We count the years from 1861 to 2011, and wonder what MIT will accomplish next. We run a program on our smartphones and find out what time Shabbat will begin. We callibrate atomic clocks to count 9,192,631,770 periods of hyperfine oscillation of an atom of cesium-133, and call that a second. We mourn someone whose days have reached their final number, and we count seven days, and thirty days, and eleven months, and a year.
We number our days, our picoseconds, our sesquicentenials, and we pray that the awareness of time passing gives us wisdom, both to master the world and to appreciate being mastered by it.
For those who don't want to follow the link (frankly, the PDF isn't formatted very well), here's what I wrote:
We are approaching the end of the period of counting the Omer. During this time, we have a mitzvah that once each day we recite a beracha thanking God for this mitzvah, and then... we count. "Today is one day." "Today is two days." "Today is seven days, which makes one week." And so on for seven complete weeks; on the fiftieth day we celebrate Shavuot.
It is a mitzvah of awareness. Performing this mitzvah does not change the world in any physical way, and it does not change our religious position. What it does is highten our perception of the passage of time.
In Psalm 90, attributed to Moses, we read, "Teach us to number our days, that our seat of intelligence may gain wisdom." The peshat, the obvious meaning of this verse, is that knowing that we have a finite time in this world will lead us to knowledge of the true priorities in life.
Time, of course, is essential to the Jewish understanding of the world. As Rav Soloveitchik writes, Judaism "is extremely time conscious, finding the present moment so important. For instance, we are permitted to do work on a Friday afternoon until one minute before sunset, but are injoined from doing work one minute later. Why does one minute make such a difference, distinguishing between the permitted and the sinful?" Heschel's philosophy is that "Judaism constructs the Sabbath as an architecture of Time."
Some Jewish times are imposed from without, such as the moment of sunset that ushers in Shabbat. The determination of other times has been granted to us by God. The first mitzvah given in preparation for the Exodus was calendrical: "This month [Nisan] shall be for you the first of months." Not only were we given the authority to intercalate months to keep the lunar and solar calendars lined up, the Sanhedrin established on which date each month began. For although the Jewish calendar is based on the phases of the moon, it is more specifically determined by the proclamation of the high court that the new moon has, indeed, been seen. Our time is governed not by *astronomy* but by *astronomical observation*, giving a quite literal meaning to the verse in Deuteronomy: "Lo ba-shamayim hi," the law is not in the heavens.
Returning to our verse from Psalms, I would suggest another reading, perhaps more apt for MIT: "Teach us to measure the passage of time, so that we may increase knowledge." This is at the heart of MIT's mission --- teaching people how to use science and technology to measure the universe, and thereby discover new things.
But just as the Jewish measurement of time contains a combination of extrinsic and intrinsic elements, the scientific measurement of time is subject to differences between measurements that come from without and determinations that arise from within.
Einstein, perhaps the most famous yiddische kopf, demonstrated by a thought experiment the fallacy of treating scientific time as being absolutely measurable. The more precisely we try to grasp for time, the more we need to account for our own position (vis-a-vis an external gravitational field) and our motion (vis-a-vis acceleration disturbing our inertial reference frame). And these are not merely theoretical or inconsequentially trivial: the atomic clocks on GPS satellites must compensate for both of these effects. Einstein demolished the idea of absolute extrinsic time.
Both as Jews and as Techies, we strive to balance time as we define it and time as it defines us. We count the days from Pesach to Shavuot, and watch each one slide from future to past. We count the years from 1861 to 2011, and wonder what MIT will accomplish next. We run a program on our smartphones and find out what time Shabbat will begin. We callibrate atomic clocks to count 9,192,631,770 periods of hyperfine oscillation of an atom of cesium-133, and call that a second. We mourn someone whose days have reached their final number, and we count seven days, and thirty days, and eleven months, and a year.
We number our days, our picoseconds, our sesquicentenials, and we pray that the awareness of time passing gives us wisdom, both to master the world and to appreciate being mastered by it.