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
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