Connecting Creation to Rosh Hashanah

We translate Rosh Hashanah colloquially as “New Year’s Day” even though it occurs on what the Torah says is the first day of our seventh month, Tishrei. Of the several reasons given for why that day is designated as Rosh Hashanah, one in particular stands out: Rosh Hashanah is “the birthday of the world,” as the liturgy of that day insists no fewer than three times.

Rosh Hashanah is the anniversary of the day when everything that exists — the universe and this planet — came into being, as the Torah depicts Creation in Genesis 1. It behooves us, therefore, to examine that chapter as Rosh Hashanah approaches because, as everyone knows and as many scientists tell us, science makes a mockery of the Torah’s account of Creation.

Seriously, are we supposed to believe that God uttered two Hebrew words — “va-y’hi ohr,” “let there be light” — and, poof, everything came into existence, and that it did so 5,784 years ago in a mere six Earth days? How are we supposed to take this seriously when the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and Earth is 4.54 billion years old, and both evolved over time? Calling any day “the birthday of the world” is laughable.

Actually, it is not laughable, and we are supposed to take the Torah’s account seriously. That is because we need to take something else seriously, as well: The more science delves into the origins of the universe, the more it confirms the Torah’s account — an account that includes information that no one on Earth knew anything about until science revealed it over the last couple of centuries.

Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.

The Torah contains that information, but it does so using simple concepts that could be understood by people 3,500 years ago in their own way, whereas science allows us to understand those concepts in modern terms. Judaism, after all, has never been wedded to the literalness of every word in the Torah. We recognize that the Torah often resorts to metaphor in narrating otherwise inexplicable events (See the Babylonian Talmud tractate Sukkah 5a.)

The Torah’s concepts are science’s concepts. I do not say that. LUCA says it. I will return to LUCA further on.

No one back when Genesis 1 was written knew or would have understood that both the universe and this planet began in liquid states and that it took hundreds of millions of years for the planet to cool down enough to develop a solid crust (Days One and Two in the Torah’s account).

No one back then knew or would have understood that as the liquid evaporated, a single land mass appeared surrounded by water (Day Three), which then broke up into seven continents. It took space-age photography to turn the once highly ridiculed Continental Drift Theory into fact.

No one knew back then or would have understood that as the planet cooled, it created a cloud cover so thick that it prevented the Sun from playing a positive role on Earth until midway in its evolution (Day Four). Earth’s atmosphere until then was composed mostly of hydrogen and helium, neither of which would sustain anything but the simplest of lifeforms. When sunlight finally penetrated that cloud about 2.4 billion years ago, it led to the Great Oxygenation Event, which dramatically increased oxygen levels.

No one knew back then that this oxygenation allowed for the development of more complex life forms, which allowed life as we know it to begin in the ocean (Day Five) and later on dry land (Day Six).

Most relevant especially to Rosh Hashanah, few, if anyone, back then likely fully grasped the significance of the interconnectedness of these “days” and how that formed the basis for the Torah’s laws — an interconnectedness Genesis 1 was meant to underscore. What happened on Day Three required what happened on Day Two, and so on. And everything depended on what happened on Day One. The Torah’s moral and ethical code is based on that interconnectedness, and atoning for violating that code is what Rosh Hashanah is all about.

The late 13th-early 14th century biblical commentator, grammarian, and philosopher Joseph ben Abba Mari Ibn Caspi did understand that interconnectedness. In explaining the Torah’s concern for the welfare of all non-human life forms, for example, he wrote that all creatures — in the sea, in the air, on the ground, from the smallest to the largest — are “k’ilu avoteinu,” meaning “they are like our ancestors.” (See his comment to Deuteronomy 22:6-7.)

In other words, everything on Earth was formed from the same substance, including ha-adam, the human being, so named because it emerged from the adamah, from the ground — or more accurately, from the same creative substance that brought everything else into being.

Science has a name for that substance: LUCA.

LUCA is an acronym for Last Universal Common Ancestor. It is a single-celled organism that is the common genetic ancestor to all life forms on our planet today. Everything that exists is descended from LUCA.

LUCA was unknown before advances were made in the fields of genetics and molecular biology in the mid-20th century, especially the discovery of DNA. By the 1990s, LUCA was widely accepted in the scientific community.

According to a study published in July in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, LUCA came into being around 400 million years after the Earth began forming. On the “creation clock” (to be explained below), that means LUCA came into existence about 62 minutes after the Earth began to form.

All life forms are indeed “k’ilu avoteinu,” all “are like our ancestors.” All humans are related to each other and to everything else. As Ibn Caspi explained it, the Torah’s laws are designed for us to treat everyone and everything the way we should treat any member of our family.

Genesis 1 contains other statements that appear incredible, including:

1) God created the universe in a moment in time seemingly out of nothing, yet we all know that it is impossible to create something out of nothing.

In 1965, however, an accident of a sort began to turn the impossible into the most likely.

Two Bell Laboratories astronomers — Arno Penzias (he was Jewish, by the way) and Robert W. Wilson — had set up a 20-foot-long horn-shaped telescopic antenna that they hoped would pick up noise reflected off high-altitude balloons. Instead, they were getting a great deal of weird, steady, and constant static that seemed to be coming from all directions in space at the same time, with equal intensity from all directions.

Science today believes that what Penzias and Wilson heard that day was the residual noise of the “Big Bang” itself, an “explosion” scientists call the primeval fireball that they say brought the universe into being. God said, “Let there be light,” and science says the Big Bang appeared out of seeming nothingness.

That something can be created out of nothing was proven in 2011 using the principles of quantum mechanics, particularly the theory of vacuum fluctuations. That theory states that even in a perfect vacuum, particles can spontaneously appear and disappear. In 2011, a Swedish research team from Chalmers University of Technology turned that theory into fact when they created real photons (particles of light) — real photons, not virtual ones — from a vacuum.

2) God “separated” the light from the darkness. Talk about not making any sense, considering that “darkness” simply means the absence of light. Yet, science says that is exactly what happened. Immediately after the “explosion,” the light of the primeval fireball was “trapped” inside the dark plasma the Big Bang produced. Atoms and electrons suddenly appeared, as well. As the MIT-trained physicist Gerald Schroeder, a onetime member of the Atomic Energy Commission, explains it, “the ‘breaking free’ of light [occurred] as electrons bind to atomic nuclei…. This is described in Genesis 1:1-5 as the creation followed by light separating from the darkness.”

Schroeder also has much to say about Creation occurring in six 24-hour days. It did, he says, but they were 24-hour days as registered on a “creation clock.” Creation, he argues, has to be seen in its own timeframe, not ours, because time is relative. (See Schroeder’s article at www.geraldschroeder.com/AgeUniverse.aspx)

The moon is a perfect example because lunar time gains about 58.7 microseconds per day compared to Earth’s time. In April, NASA and other space agencies began a two-year project to establish a lunar time zone, Coordinated Lunar Time, that will be in synch with Coordinated Universal Time, which regulates all time zones here on Earth.

As Schroeder explains it, the first 24-hour day uses the time that existed immediately after the Big Bang. That works out to a 24-hour day that, in our concept of time, is 7.5 billion years long. Day two is half that, and day three is half of day two. By the time you get to the seventh day, we are down to 24 hours.

It really can be said that creation occurred in six 24-hour days based on the “creation clock.”

This column only touches the surface of the scientific proofs that exist in support of the Torah’s account of Creation, and the existence of such proofs is reason enough for choosing a day to celebrate the birthday of the world — and using that day to call our attention to our responsibilities to that world and everyone and everything in it.

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