This newsletter was delayed by technical issues at the site. I am sending it regardless of the problems, which may make it hard to read, because of the coming Jewish holiday I am preparing for. The web hosting company has not responded to my calls and emails for 4 hours so they may have other issues.
Tonight is the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, celebrated for two days in the Diaspora where we live. There will be no more blogs this week. The holiday starts in the evening, as is standard for Jewish festivals, because of how the Bible defines the start of a day (see below).
According to tradition, this is also the birthday of the whole world, which was supposedly created in six days by a God Stephen Hawkings says does not exist. Actually, the Bible story is taken with a grain of salt also by the rabbis, if not by Bible-thumpers of the evangelical persuasion.
The reason: the Bible is written in Hebrew, which rabbis can read. Rather than starting off “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”, the standard English translation, the Bible actually begins with a more subtle verbal phrase. It reads more like “When in the beginning, God was creating the heavens and the earth.”
The end of the first day’s events is paradoxical too. Both in Hebrew and in English, the day ends after God has created light. The key phrase is: “It was evening, it was morning, of the first day.” The problem is that there was no way to know it was evening, morning, or a day, as the sun had not yet been created.
From this, astronomically savvy Jewish sages decided that maybe the first day was a few million years long, corresponding to Big Bang or whatever Hawkings and his fellows are positing now.
May you have a good, happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year. More for paid subscribers from Israel, Britain, Mexico, Australia, Croatio, Canada, Britain, Greece, Belgium, Chile, and Thailand.
