The Sukkot Super-moon eclipse of 2015

The first night of Sukkot (Feast of Booths) always falls on the full moon of the Hebrew month of Tishri.  This year it was not only a full moon, it was a super-moon, because the moon's orbit brought it closer to Earth than usual.  But even more special, it was also a total eclipse where I live.  All of which made this a Sukkot night to remember.

My wife Caryl and I began eating in the Sukkah around 7:30, when the eclipse was just beginning.  We could see the moon through the natural branches on the Sukkah roof, but after the meal we decided to move our chairs outside for a better view.  The sky was not perfectly clear.  There were clouds moving across the sky, which sometimes obscured the moon.  Each time it appeared through a hole in the clouds, it looked a bit different as the eclipse progressed.  This added to the mystique, I think.

The night itself was perfect.  Not too cold, yet cool enough to be comfortable.  One interesting thing we noticed was that during totality, there were no mosquitoes.  Do they become less active in total darkness?  Normally the bugs are most active at dawn and dusk in the twilight.  As the eclipse came out of totality, there were again a few mosquitoes buzzing around us.  An interesting phenomenon.

 Sitting there together under the eclipse light was a romantic experience for Caryl and me, and we began talking about how long it had been since we had simply sat together in quiet sharing.  Watching the eclipse became a calm, gentle meditation for both of us.

We stayed outside the whole 3.5+ hours it lasted here in Sandstone, MN.  We could not take any photos because that is forbidden on a Jewish holy day, but the beautiful images of the experience are forever saved in our hearts.

Orion launch: One small step toward Mars, one big nostalgic moment for me

This morning I woke up at 5:50 AM, just in time to tune in and watch the launch of the Orion spacecraft at 6:05 (Central time).  This was both a big moment for NASA and a nostagic one for me.  The newscaster said this was the farthest out in space that the USA had sent a spacecraft since the last Apollo mission in 1973.  The thing is, I'm old enough to remember those Apollo flights, as well as the earlier Mercury and Gemini programs.

I grew up in the space era.  The sound barrier was broken by Chuck Jaeger on October 17, 1947, just 13 days before I was born.  (That was also the year of the supposed alien landing at Roswell in July.  It has always been a family joke that I'm weird because I got zapped by an alien mind beam.  I was in my mother's womb in California at the time, so who knows?)

Ten years later, Sputnik orbited the earth.  I can still remember the day that my father showed me the story in the morning paper.  The same paper had times listed for when you could see the tiny satellite cross the sky.  That was a big deal back then, as we went into the backyard to look for that pinpoint of light.

Then the space race was on, and every kid I knew (and a lot of adults, too) were tuned in to the space program.  Like everyone else, I went through a phase of wanting to be an astronaut.  That never happened, but I still fulfill my love of outer space with Star Trek and movies like The Right Stuff and Apollo 13.  (I've lost track of how many times I've watched that movie, but I will say that Gene Kranz's line, "Failure is not an option!" has become a watchword around our house.  It's my favorite movie for how a group of people working together can achieve the seemingly impossible.)

"Earthrise" by Frank Borman

One of the interesting things about space flight back then was that the famous picture of Earth rising over the moon wasn't even on the original agenda.  Until the Apollo 8 astronauts actually saw that from the lunar orbit, nobody had thought to include it in the list of photographic goals because nobody could picture it.  But Frank Borman knew a good picture when he saw one, so he pointed the camera and clicked.  That photo -- as well as many others of the "blue marble" -- has become a universal symbol of the unity we might one day have on our planet.  It was no accident that the first Earth Day happened in April 1970, less than a year after the Apollo moon landing.

I was 22 and living in South Dakota when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969.  People today who claim the moon landing was faked don't know what they are talking about.  Sure, the pix are fuzzy, but that's because the cameras and transmissions back then weren't a good as today.  But for those of us glued to our TV sets during the live transmission, there was no doubt it was real.  Cynics ask who was taking the photos of that first step, but the answer is simple:  The Eagle lander took them, the same as there was a camera on board Orion that took pix of the earth receding as the craft rose into the sky, etc.  No, my conspiracy theory friends, the Apollo moon walk was very real.

Photo of Mars showing a thin atmosphere.
What else will we discover there?

Today's Orion mission was a test flight for new equipment -- including a heat shield and a re-design of the Mercury-type capsule -- that may eventually be used for a trip to Mars.  A lot of people will ask, why go there?  It's so expensive, what do we get from it?

True, it is expensive.  But the technological  advances we got from previous space missions have long since paid for themselves.  One example being those thin, light, but very warm materials we now use for so many things.  (I've got a pair of winter boot liners made of the same stuff as astronaut space suits.)  Learning to put satellites in orbit has given us GPS, cell phones, global communications.  Etc.  And the quest for lighter payloads has given us smaller and smaller electronics.

So who knows what we will learn from the Mars mission?  I say, let's go!

Blood Moon was beautiful on the morning before Sukkot starts, 5775

Tonight the Festival of Sukkot (booths) begins.  Because the Jewish calendar is lunar, Sukkot always begins on a full moon.   So nothing unusual about that.  What was special this year was the beautiful "blood moon" eclipse this morning (October 8, 2014).  It reached totality at 5:55 AM here in Minnesota, and is currently trending all over the Net.  In some places, people gathered for "blood moon parties" to watch and enjoy it.  That would have been fun, but out here in rural Minnesota, it was a solitary experience for me.

Here on our little hobby farm, I was up at 4 AM cooking food for the Festival so that I could use the daylight hours to finish setting up my sukkah booth.   The local news stations were covering the eclipse, so every half hour or so there was a live update during the weather report.

Just before totality, I went outside to take a look.  The sky was clear but the trees were in the way, so I had to walk out to the road to get a good view.  (We have a much better view of the sky in the east, where I often take wonderful dawn photos.  But this time around, the eclipse was happening as the moon was setting in the west, where we have a windbreak of trees and bushes.)

We live out of town on a dirt road with zero traffic this time of night, so I could stand there moon gazing, but it was also pretty cold  -- in the mid 30s -- so I didn't stay out long.  In fact, it was so chilly that there were no crickets chirping.  Nor were there any other nature sounds.  The wind, which had been blowing hard the last few days, was now still.  No traffic sounds, either -- even the freeway, which I can sometimes faintly hear at night if a noisy truck goes by, was silent.

Then, for some reason known only to himself, one of my roosters crowed.

According to an old superstition, a rooster crowing at night is a bad omen.  So is a blood moon in some cultures.  So a blood moon and a rooster crowing at the same time -- oy vey, is that a double whammy?

Hardly.  I'm not superstitious.  I see these things as natural phenomena, period.   One of my favorite stories is the one about the Jewish archer in the Roman army who asked why they had stopped marching.  His commanding officer pointed to a certain bird in a tree and said that it was an omen telling them to stop.  Whereupon the archer shot the bird and said, "That bird could not even protect itself from my arrow, so how can it protect an army?"  (Sad that the bird had to die, but the point was made:  Looking for omens in natural events is not a Jewish practice.)

Returning to the eclipse, I did take time to make the brochah (blessing) osseh ma-asseh bereshit -- praising "The One (God) Who creates the works of Creation" -- that Jews are supposed to say upon seeing a wonder of nature.  It may not be an omen, but it is a wonderful thing to look at.

My wife, who has difficulty walking and some balance problems when walking in the dark, opted to stay inside.  So I downloaded this beautiful photo on space.com taken in Nebraska by John W. Johnson of the Virtual Telescope Project.  I set it up as the desktop wallpaper on the computer, where we can both enjoy it today, as we continue to prepare for the holiday tonight.

Peace and blessings! 

Free the Thanksgivukkah turkeys!

"Thanksgivukkah" is the term coined for a very rare event happening on November 28, 2013:  This year, the first day of Hanukkah falls on the American holiday of Thanksgiving.  It won't happen again for another 70,000 years, so enjoy it now while you can!  (Plus the date also converges with a spectacular comet -- more on that below.)

"American Gothukkah" poster
designed by ModernTribe.com,
a take-off on a famous painting.

The Jewish community is certainly having a good time with it.   Search the Internet and you will find all kinds of Thanksgivukkah shirts, mugs, postcards, and other chochkes, as well as announcements of community celebrations.  (To see a gallery of shirt designs, click here.)  The Times of Israel has a nice roundup page of links, including songs and the story of a boy who designed a "menurkey" -- that's a Hanukkah menorah in the shape of a turkey.

One of my favorite images is this shirt by ModernTribe.com, featuring a Woodstock-inspired theme with "8 Days of Light, Liberty, Latkes."  Pretty clever!

Hanukkah really is about freedom, when the Jews rose up against the Greeks and re-dedicated the Jerusalem Temple to God.  Hanukkah may well be the first recorded war fought for religious freedom.  But this freedom theme also raises the issue of how "free" the Thanksgivukkah turkeys really are.  Can we eat turkey at a freedom fest when the birds themselves are not really free?

Unlike the colorful wild turkeys usually portrayed in Thanksgiving art, the turkeys you buy in the grocery store are factory-farmed white birds that have been bred to be so heavy they cannot even mate naturally, let alone fly up into trees or run through autumn fields like their wild ancestors.  Most of them probably never even see the outdoors at all, because they are raised in big, overcrowded barns.

As a vegetarian, I would urge you to consider not having a turkey for Thanksgivukkah.  In fact, it was at Thanksgiving time many years ago that my wife and I finally decided to go veg.  We had been eating very little meat anyway, and as the holiday rolled around, we asked ourselves:  Do we really want a turkey this year?  The answer was no, and has been no ever since.   The only turkey on our table will be this toy bird.

As for the holiday menu, there are plenty of delicious vegetarian foods you can serve -- and combining with Hanukkah this year makes for some creative recipes.  The Jewish Community Center of St. Paul, MN, sent out a recipe for squash latkes (instead of potatoes) along with their recent fundraiser.  I plan to try that one!

When you think about it, turkey was not the only traditional food that Native people brought to our tables.  Corn, squash, pumpkins, potatoes, tomatoes, beans, wild rice, maple sugar, cranberries, blueberries, and chili peppers are some of the foods that are native to North and South America.  So let's make this a real Festival of Freedom and let the turkeys live!

Now for the comet: November 28, 2013 is also the date that Comet Ison -- which could be the "Comet of the Century" -- will pass around the sun.  As of this writing, it is now visible to the naked eye in the dark sky, and is expected to grow brighter in the next few days.  In centuries past, such a convergence between two calendars and a comet would have been seen as an omen, for good or bad depending on the culture.  To me, it is just an interesting phenomenon.

There are 3 possibilities for what will happen to Ison in the next week or so:  1) it could burn up in the sun's corona and disappear; 2) it might break up into a bunch of glowing pieces; or 3) it may remain intact and come out from behind the sun glowing very brightly.  For more on Ison's perilous journey, visit this page on the NASA site.

Meteors and Memories

Last night I finally got to watch the Perseid meteor showers.  I say "finally" because the previous nights this year were cloudy, and last year it rained the whole time.  But last night was perfect.  A clear sky with no moon.

About half an hour after midnight I turned off all the house lights to avoid light pollution in the yard, then took a sleeping bag and a pillow outside and lay down on the front lawn.  (My wife originally wanted to go, too, but was too tired when the time came, so she wished me well and went back to sleep.)  I was soon joined by two of my cats, who came up from hunting rodents by the chicken coop to sit on me and purr.

I did not have to wait long to see a meteor.  I counted 23 in an hour, several of them big bright streaks, but none to compare with the fireball my wife and I saw several years ago.  But even with the excitement of seeing a meteor, it was still a slow, quiet activity, with a lot of waiting between sightings.  You can't push nature, you just have to go with her pace of things.  As I lay there waiting for the next one to streak across the sky, I was reminded of when we did this at summer camp many years ago. It was a pleasant time to reminisce.

I also saw what was probably a satellite moving across the sky -- or was it maybe the space station?  I remember back in the late 50s and early 60s, when satellites were a new thing, there used to be schedules in the paper about when they would pass over.  My father and I would go out in the yard to try and spot them.  It was a big deal back then to spot a passing satellite -- way before GPS and satellite TV, long before anybody felt a need to "unplug" because nobody was as plugged in and speeded-up like today.  What we watched were just little orbiting balls reflecting the sun, the very beginnings of space flight.

The night was chilly and getting downright cold -- unusual for mid-August here, but welcome, because there were no mosquitoes.  The ground was getting damp though, and my old bones were feeling the lumps in the ground.  so after another half hour, around 2am, I went inside and called it a night.

No end of the world today

According to an old Mayan prophecy, the world was supposed to end at 5:11 AM today.  (In my time zone at least.)  Well, it's 12:00 noon and I'm still here.   Not that I really expected the world to end.  But this does give me an opportunity to answer some common questions about Judaism and "the End Times."

First of all, we need to clarify that the word olam in Hebrew can mean either "world" in the sense of the physical planet, or "eternity." The best modern translation is probably something like "space-time continuum."   (I have always wondered if this fact had any influence on Einstein's ability to imagine a point at infinity where space and time converge.  He wasn't a religious Jew, but culturally he must have heard the word olam.  Did the Hebrew language help facilitate the "thought experiment" that led to the Theory of Relativity?  Interesting question...)

In Greek, however, there are two separate words for these two ideas:  kosmos for the physical world, and aeon for a period of time or age.   So already we have a major difference between Jewish thought and Greco-Roman thought when it comes to talking about "the end times."  During the period when Christianity split off from Judaism, it was common in both groups to try and calculate the End of the World.  But were the early Christians talking about the end of the physical kosmos, or the end of an age?

Jesus and his disciples were speaking Aramaic, a derivative of Hebrew, so most likely they were using olam.  But the Gospels are written in Greek, not Hebrew, and, as far as I know, Greek does not have a single word that includes both time and space.  So the Christian authors had to choose between kosmos and aeon.  I'm no expert in this, but I do know that Judaism has tended to lean toward the "end of an age" rather than a literal destruction of the planet.

In fact, there is a famous quote in Avot de Rabbi Nathan (a classical Jewish commentary) that says, "If you are planting a tree and you hear the messiah has come, first finish planting your tree, then go to meet him."  In other words, don't drop everything just because you hear rumors about the end of the world.

By and large, modern Judaism discourages calculating a specific date for "the end times."  Why?  Because setting a specific date tends to become a form of escapism.  If you think the world is ending soon, and that a deity is going to appear and miraculously solve all your problems, then why bother to do anything to improve the world?  Many, many times I have been told by Christians that there is no point in trying to make peace in the Middle East, because there will always be "wars and rumors of wars" until Jesus returns.  Somehow, this seems defeatist and, frankly, rather callous.  In contrast, Jews are commanded to actively "seek peace and pursue it " (Psalm 34:14).

Jesus appearing in the clouds
from the Macklin Bible 1798

In Greek drama, there is a concept called deus ex machina, literally "god from a machine."  At the end of a play, an actor playing a god would be lowered on a rope (the machine) to "descend" and straighten out everything in the story.  We also see a form of this in the Book of Job, where, after Job and his friends debate the question of "why bad things happen to good people," God speaks to Job and answers the question on a cosmic scale.  (In fact, some scholars believe that the author of Job might have been a Greek convert to Judaism.  The book certainly follows the format of a Greek play.)  In Christian imagery, Jesus will descend from heaven on a cloud when he returns and sets the world right.  And in modern New Age circles, the "gods" are extraterrestrials who will descend in UFOs.

The problem with deus ex machina is that it doesn't work very well in real life.  If we sit around waiting for a messiah to fix everything for us, then nothing ever gets fixed.  This is why Jews are not "waiting for" the messiah.  Rather, we are working to bring the messianic age, to beat swords into plowshares as promised by Isaiah.  Each mitzvah we do brings us one step closer.  Some Jews do believe there will be an actual person who is the messiah, others see "bringing messiah" as a process.  But most of us would agree that it is not enough to just sit around and wait for a deus ex machina to appear and solve all our problems.   We are each responsible to help make the world a better place to live in.

(If you are still worried about a literal end of the world, check out this page on the NASA website.  NASA received so many inquiries about this "event," they actually posted a Q and A!)

Life on Mars and Jewish theology

NASA scientists at mission control cheer
as Curiosity lands safely on Mars. 
(Photo courtesy of NASA)

With the successful landing of the rover Curiosity on Mars today (way to go, NASA!) I'm already being asked what effect it would have on me as a rabbi if the rover does find evidence of life there.  My answer?  I'd be delighted!  And really, there would be no conflict with Judaism.  As I wrote in my 2009 book, Jewish Themes in Star Trek:

"Classical Jewish prayers refer to God as 'chay ha-olamin' -- Giver of Life to the worlds -- plural.  So there is no theological conflict with the idea of life on other planets.  There is also no conflict with the concept of being made 'in the image of God' if alien beings look different from us humans, because, in Jewish theology, God's 'image' is not a physical one.  If God has no physical body, then how can our bodies be in God's image?

"The Hebrew word often translated as "image" -- tselem -- really means 'likeness' or 'resemblance' and does not refer to a physical from.  Rather, it refers to the attributes of God that we are to imitate, such as mercy, love, creativity, etc.  As God is merciful, so should we be merciful, etc.  These are qualities that any sentient being can have, whether humanoid or not." (p. 128)

Of course, NASA isn't really expecting to find Martians in the science fiction sense.  The scientists will be delighted if the rover finds some complex carbon compounds.  But whatever they do or do not find, landing Curiosity successfully on the Red Planet is a magnificent accomplishment -- Congrats!