Titzaveh: the Origin of Science

 

This week’s parsha adds the human aspect to the sanctuary.  The Israelites are commanded to bring clear olive oil.   Aaron and his sons are to arrange it, to burn through the night.  Presumably, this was to illuminate the area so that humans could see. The lighting of the menorah begins the interaction between the priests, the specially designated humans, and the sanctuary, the access point to the never seen Gd.

The chapter goes on to describe the very special clothing of the high priest and his assistants, his sons,  and the ceremony of induction into the priesthood.  The daily sacrifice of a lamb in the morning and a lamb in the afternoon are described. This sacrificial rite, performed by the properly dressed priest, is a prerequisite to having Gd remain in the sanctuary. Finally, the incense offering on the golden, internal altar is described.  This is a description of the preparations needed for the confrontation with Gd.

This week, after President Trump’s harsh rejection of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president was criticized for his clothing.  He wore his t-shirt with the Ukrainian trident.  He did not wear a collared shirt, rayon tie and suit. He appeared before the king in the wrong garb. His sartorial choice became part of the basis for his rejection.

Many of the premises for his rejection involved errors in the formalism of approaching a greater power. He did not say thank you enough. He was not sufficiently appreciative of the largess the great power had shown him.  Would the priest enter the temple in a t- shirt and neglect to offer the lambs?

After all the priest did to prevent rejection: the seven garments, the diadem, the lambs and the incense…  what was the priest going to experience? What was the point?

I cannot imagine the world view of the ancients. There are too many quantum leaps of understanding between us.  I cannot imagine a world before DNA was understood to contain the instructions of heredity, with all its wonders of molecular literacy and manufacture. I cannot put my mind into a world before Newton’s laws and the mathematics it spawned.  I certainly cannot approach the pre-numeric world, the world of Roman numerals and impossible multiplication.  The gaps in viewpoint blind me to the experience of the priest and the people in the sanctuary. The Torah says that they experienced communication with Gd. My conception of that idea is probably far from theirs.

Nevertheless, there is a connection.  The foundational idea of the sacred experience is that the reality we experience in everyday life is not all there is -  it is not enough. There is something beyond the way we now see the world.  For us, there is something beyond DNA, physics and arithmetic; for them,there is something beyond spirits and sprites and the phases of the moon. Concepts outside of experienced reality are significant, perhaps guiding.

I believe that I live on a nearly spherical, rocky planet with a malleable, hot, central core, that orbits a sun that is a star contained within a galaxy. That  galaxy, with its millions of stars and planets, rotates around a black hole. And that galaxy is one of millions of galaxies. And they all originated from a very ancient explosion that continues to propel the galaxies away from each other.  That is a lot of beliefs, and it is only a small part of the huge belief system I accept. This is the Scientific Faith, which, I am told, is based on organizing observations with mathematical precision. It is all predicated on the belief that ordinary life is a convenient illusion that may preserve some fundamentals but is often misleading and wrong. They are certainly less valid than the spectrophotometer!

The entry of the priest into the sanctuary was also a search for the deeper, truer meaning.  That experience seems to have evolved. Moses had immediate contact with the source of all. By the time of Samuel, the pre-Davidic prophet, the oracular breast plate was subject to misinterpretation: the high priest read the vowel-less letters of proper (kosher) as drunken (shikur). Later, the ark of the second temple was empty. The sacrificial rite was all that was left, a relic of the previous encounters. The spectacle of the search unified the nation even if the source was now an empty box.  (The space program?). Now all we have are words that recall the rite.

The contents of the ark had never been the source of truth. The contents, the tablets, were always inaccessible. It was the knowledge of what was in the box, and then the knowledge of what had once been in the box, that was, and remains, the source.

The priest suited up for the sanctuary.  It was a clean room. No dust of ritual impurity could be tolerated. The priest wore a space suit. He was entering a rarified place.  I do not understand what wisdom came from the inner sanctum, I do not deny  its validity.