Yitro
Exodus 18:1-20:23
Isaiah 6:1-7:6; 9:5-6
I’ve always been a science fiction fan. When I was a kid I loved the classics: “The Martian Chronicles,” the Foundation Trilogy, “Stranger in a Strange Land,” the giant sand worms of “Dune.” I even liked cheesy science fiction: old Japanese movies about monstrous insects from another planet crunching apartment buildings in their massive jaws; and all the gang from “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” — Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, R2D2 and Yoda, the wise little gnome.
What I never sensed, in all these encounters with aliens and robots and cute talking androids, was the terror and grandeur of outer space. More often than not, science fiction stories were structured like old-fashioned Westerns, with the good guy in the white hat facing off against the villain in the black. Movies like “Star Wars,” for all their razzle-dazzle special effects, made “the final frontier” familiar and homey, reduced to a human scale.
The real thing, of course, is something else entirely. In 1999 scientists extrapolating Hubble Space Telescope images estimated that there are 125 billion galaxies in the universe, each of them containing anywhere from 10 million to 1 trillion stars. How big is a trillion? One trillion seconds of clock time equals 31,546 years.
The dimensions of the universe are similarly staggering. Our own galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter; the Andromeda Galaxy, visible from the Northern Hemisphere, is more than 2 million light years from earth; and the oldest objects in the universe are nearly 14 billion light years away. Keep in mind that just one light year is 6 trillion miles.
Here we are, at the other end of the Hubble telescope: human beings contemplating the vast universe where we live. Like charged particles of chutzpah, we buzz around in our tiny orbits, wondering about our place in the grand scheme of things.
The real star war, in a sense, is the war we fight with our own logical minds: How can we possibly matter to anyone, anywhere, when we are infinitesimal specks lost in the stars?
To say a prayer, to lift up our voice and speak into the void, to foist our concerns on the universe, seems like the ultimate “science fiction.” It seems almost comical. Who could be listening out there? Who would care what we say? How many light years away is the Holy One?
In this week’s Torah portion, Exodus 19:1 says, “On the third new moon after the Israelites had gone forth from the land of Egypt, on that very day, they entered the wilderness of Sinai.”
Picture this: They came into a new place. It was vast, empty, untouched. They felt dwarfed by the mountains, swallowed up by the sky, flattened by the horizon that stretched away forever.
Something happened in that place — something we don’t understand to this day. Something happened that convinced the Israelites they were not alone in a vast, cold universe. Someone met them there, in the wilderness.
That is the primal fact of our history. We encountered God. We received something. We promised something. The moment ended, and we were still in the wilderness, in an empty and frightening place.
But the reverberations from that moment still spiral down the centuries. Someone told us that we mattered, and would always matter, even if darkness surrounded us, even if we walked through fire, even if we called out and our voices echoed in the silence.
And when we look through our telescopes and see billions and billions of stars stretching out over trillions of miles, and when we contemplate the audacity of lifting up our voice to say a prayer, we have that memory to sustain us. Once, long ago, we found God in a place that seemed empty and barren, but was not.
And so we cherish hope, small and fragile, radiant as a faraway star — hope that the story we have been telling for millennia is true. And here, on this speck of a planet, we dare to lift up our prayers.
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:
“A billion stars go spinning through the night blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that will be, when all the stars are dead.”
Rabbi Janet Marder is the spiritual leader at Reform Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills.