Berachot 29b ~ “Why are Sunsets Red?” asked the Rabbi and the Scientist

Photo by the Talmudology. Sunset from Clearwater Florida, Jan 29, 2020.

ברכות כט, ב

דְּאָמַר רַבִּי חִיָּיא בַּר אַבָּא אָמַר רַבִּי יוֹחָנָן: מִצְוָה לְהִתְפַּלֵּל עִם דִּמְדּוּמֵי חַמָּה. וְאָמַר רַבִּי זֵירָא: מַאי קְרָאָה — ״יִירָאוּךָ עִם שָׁמֶשׁ וְלִפְנֵי יָרֵחַ דּוֹר דּוֹרִים״

Rabbi Chiyya bar Abba said that Rabbi Yochanan said: It is a mitzva to pray with the reddening of the sun. And Rabbi Zeira said: What is the verse that alludes to this? “Let them fear You with the sun and before the moon, generation after generation” (Psalms 72:5)…

According to Rabbi Chiyya, the best time to pray is at sunrise and sunset. But why is the sun red around the time that it rises and sets? Elsewhere, the Talmud has an answer for that.

בבא בתרא פד,א

בצפרא דחלפא אבי וורדי דגן עדן בפניא דחלפא אפתחא דגיהנם – ואיכא דאמרי איפכא

In the morning it becomes red as it passes over the site of the roses of the Garden of Eden, [whose reflections give the light a red hue]. In the evening the sun turns red because it passes over the entrance of Gehenna, whose fires redden the light. And there are those who say the opposite [in explaining why the sun is red in the morning and the evening, i.e., in the morning it passes over the entrance of Gehenna, while in the evening it passes over the site of the roses of the Garden of Eden.]

The sequence above shows the setting Sun dipping toward the western horizon. As the Sun sinks lower, its color becomes more reddened. From here.

Why sunrise & sunset are red - the science

Here is the scientific explanation. At sunrise and sunset the light from the sun is not directly overhead, but from its position on the horizon it must pass through more of the atmosphere to reach our eyes, as you can see here.

From here.

You may recall that ever since Newton and his prism we have known that white light is made up of many different wavelengths, or colors of light (Figure 1 below). As the sun’s white light passes through our atmosphere, the shorter wavelengths of light are scattered (Figure 2). And the longer the path through our atmosphere, the more the shorter wavelengths of light are scattered away from the original white sun beam. All of that scattered light (Figure 3) is from the shorter, blue end of the spectrum, which is what colors the sky blue. The remaining unscattered light is at the red end of the spectrum, and that’s why the sun appears red at sunrise and sunset, and why the clouds that reflect it are colored red.

From here.

The Poet and the Scientist

Science is not the only way of understanding the world. Artists, poets, philosophers and religions all add different kinds of knowledge about the very same physical world that science explains. Science explains that a red sunrise is a result of physics. Rabbi Chiyya explained that it is because the sun reflects the red roses of the Garden of Eden. Which explanation most satisfies your mind. And which most satisfies your heart?

“In philosophy [i.e.science] one must proceed from wonder to no wonder, that is, one should continue one’s investigation until that which we thought strange no longer seems strange to us; but in theology, one must proceed from no wonder to wonder, that is…[until] that which does not seem strange to us does seem strange, and that all is wonderful.”

— Isaac Beekman. Journal tenu par Isaac Beekman de 1604 a 1634. Ed C de Waard. The Hague: M Nijhoff, 1939-53. vol 2, p375.

Middot 34a ~ The Temple as a Model of the Solar System

The Second Temple in Jerusalem. On the right are the three northern gates into the courtyard. From front to back they are The Women’s Gate (שער הנשים), The Gate of the Offering (שער הקרבן), and The Gate of the Ray (שער הניצוץ).

In tomorrow’s page of Talmud, we read the following Mishnah that describes the architecture of the Temple in Jerusalem.

מדות לד, א

שִׁבְעָה שְׁעָרִים הָיוּ בָעֲזָרָה, שְׁלשָׁה בַצָּפוֹן וּשְׁלשָׁה בַדָּרוֹם וְאֶחָד בַּמִּזְרָח. שֶׁבַּדָּרוֹם, שַׁעַר הַדֶּלֶק. שֵׁנִי לוֹ, שַׁעַר הַבְּכוֹרוֹת. שְׁלִישִׁי לוֹ, שַׁעַר הַמָּיִם. שֶׁבַּמִּזְרָח, שַׁעַר נִקָּנוֹר, וּשְׁתֵּי לְשָׁכוֹת הָיוּ לוֹ, אַחַת מִימִינוֹ וְאַחַת מִשְּׂמֹאלוֹ, אַחַת לִשְׁכַּת פִּנְחָס הַמַּלְבִּישׁ, וְאַחַת לִשְׁכַּת עוֹשֵׂי חֲבִתִּין

There were seven gates in the courtyard [of the Temple the stood in Jerusalem]: three in the north and three in the south and one in the east. In the south: the Gate of Kindling, and next to it the Gate of the First-borns, and then the Water Gate. In the east: the Gate of Nicanor. It had two chambers, one on its right and one on its left. One was the chamber of Pinchas the dresser and one the other the chamber of the griddle cake makers.

The Temple was not only the physical resting place of God on earth. It was also a model of the universe itself, and built into it was the very structure of our solar system. Here’s how.

Rabbi Moses Isserles: Halachist and Astronomer

For Ashkenazi Jews who practice their faith, perhaps the most important figure is Rabbi Moses Isserles (d. 1572). R. Isserles, better known by his acronym as the Rema, earned this accolade because of his gloss on the Shulhan Arukh, the code of Jewish law, which had been written by a Sephardic Jew, Joseph Caro (d. 1575). Caro’s magnum opus was the defining code of Jewish law, but it had a serious deficiency in that it lacked the customs and rulings of the Ashkenazi Jews of Germany and Poland. Moses Isserles redressed this defect by writing a commentary and supplement for the Ashkenazi Jews, and as a result the Shulhan Arukh with Isserles’ gloss became the authoritative code and guide for all Polish-German Jews. The Shulhan Arukh was first published in Venice in 1565 and went through six editions in Caro’s lifetime alone, with Isserles’ gloss becoming the authoritative reference work for Ashkenazi Jews. 

But the Rema’s scholarship was not limited to the vast field of Jewish law, and he was deeply interested in astronomy. He wrote a commentary on the Hebrew translation of Georg Peuerbach’s Theoricae Novae Planetarum (New Theories of Planets), which had been published in 1473. He also wrote a more esoteric work of astronomy entitled Torat Ha’olah (The Laws of the Burned Sacrifice), in which he demonstrated how the Temple in Jerusalem symbolized a wide range of astronomical phenomena. The Rema claimed that there was a direct numerical relationship between the Temple and these phenomena, and he wove together a wide range of earlier rabbinic sources and non-Jewish astronomers to prove his thesis. For example, he wrote that the altar of the Temple corresponded to the layout of the heavens, and that the seven gates leading into the temple corresponded to the seven planets.

The Azarah [the large courtyard in the Temple] was a reflection of the World of the Spheres as we have explained, which is why they stated that it had seven gates, which represented the seven planets, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon. For each of these planets has its own gate in its own particular path, and the path of one is not like the path of another. Three of the gates in the Temple are on the left and three on the right, representing the three planets to the right of the sun which are the major ones. These are hinted to in the gates on the east, as I will explain. And the three gates to the left represent the three planets to the left of the Sun which stands in the middle, like a king in the middle of his soldiers. And in truth this fact has persuaded the astronomers to believe that the sun is at the center of all the stars [Torat Ha’olah 12b].

Philo: The Menorah was also a Model of the Solar System

The Rema was following a long tradition of ascribing allegorical meaning to the Temple and its various contents. Perhaps the earliest to do so was Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish biblical commentator who lived in the first century. He wrote of the allegorical meaning of the menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum that was placed in the Tabernacle and later in the Temple in Jerusalem:

[F]rom this candlestick there proceeded six branches, three on each side, projecting from the candlestick in the center, so as altogether to complete the number of seven; and in all the seven there were seven candles and seven lights, being symbols of those seven stars which are called planets by those men who are versed in natural philosophy; for the sun, like the candlestick, being placed in the middle of the other six, in the fourth rank, gives light to the three planets which are above it, and to those of equal number which are below it, adapting to circumstances the musical and truly divine instrument.

The menorah as symbol of the order of the planets from the Earth. From here. Don’t be confused - this is not a model of the heliocentric solar system. Rather, the sun is the fourth of seven ‘planets’ from Earth, so it is in the middle.

The famous Spanish commentator Isaac ben Moses Arama (c. 1420–1494) also described the Menorah as a model of the solar system, in his commentary on the Torah called Akedat Yitzhak (The Binding of Isaac). It is fascinating to read see how Arama weaved the Ptolemaic geocentric system into his allegorical interpretation of the menorah, echoing Philo’s commentary:

The Sun is the central branch, for it is that which is required to lead all the others. [The three branches on each side represent] the three planets, three on one side and three on the other, which serve to help and support the perfection of one’s intentions. . . .

It is easy to mistakenly read Arama’s allegorical interpretation as placing the Sun at the center of the solar system, but this is not what he described. Rather, Arama outlined the order of the planets of the Ptolemaic system. These were the seven planets in the order in which they orbited the Earth, with the Moon closest and Saturn furthest away, as shown in the figure above.

Allegory is re-interpreted…allegorically

Although Isaac Arama’s interpretation would have been understood in the early-fifteenth-century pre-Copernican world, this allegory made no sense if the Sun was not the fourth planet of seven presumed to be orbiting the Earth. Hayyim Yosef Pollak, a nineteenth-century rabbi who wrote a commentary onAkedat Yitzhak, noted this problem. Pollak paraphrased Arama’s explanation in a post-Copernican way:

The six branches that come out from the sides hint at the six types of partial wisdom [contained in the Torah] that help to complete the main type of wisdom [represented by the central branch]. . . . You can also imagine the Sun is the largest and most central of the planets, and around it orbit the other six planets. . . .

Although both Arama and Pollak interpreted the central branch of the menorah as allegorically representing the Sun, their cosmology was completely different. Pollak’s interpretation is not in fact what Arama had originally written, leading to the curious, if not entirely unexpected, situation of an allegorical explanation itself being interpreted allegorically. 

The Menorah and the Catholic Church

A similar exegesis was made by a Carmelite priest from Calabria in southern Italy, Paolo Antonio Foscarini, in a letter that he wrote in 1615. Foscarini’s goal was to demonstrate how the Bible could be reconciled with the new Copernican model. In the letter Foscarini suggested that the six branches of the Menorah found in the Temple corresponded to the six “heavens,” or planets, that orbit the Sun.

And could it not be that, in the marvelous structure of the candlestick placed in the Tabernacle of God, our most loving God wished to represent secretly to us the system of the universe and in particular of the planets?…it could be that these branches signify the six heavens which rotate around the sun as follows. Saturn, which is the slowest and furthest away, completes its path around the sun through all twelve signs of the zodiac in thirty years; Jupiter, which is closer, in twelve years; Mars, which is closer still, in two years. The earth, which is closer than that, moves through its path together with the orb of the moon in one year, i.e twelve months. Venus, which is still closer than all of these, in nine months. Finally Mercury, which is closest of all to the sun, in less than three months…

Having described the six branches, the Sacred Text goes on to discuss the cups, the small globes and the flowers [that adorned the branches of the Menorah]…Could it be that these three cups…are intended to signify globes (like our own earth)…? More precisely, could it be that they signify those globes [i.e moons] discovered by the telescope which are associated with Saturn, Jupiter Venus and perhaps other planets…

Alas, the letter (“Concerning the Opinion of the Pythagoreans and Copernicus About the Mobility of the Earth and the Stability of the Sun”) didn’t get a wide readership. It was was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in March 1616 as “completely prohibited and condemned.”

The Second Temple in Jerusalem was a spectacular building, and its loss is still mourned in our daily prayers. So the next time you gaze up at the starry night, pause for moment to reflect on the grandeur of what once was.

Vincent van Gogh painted Starry Night in 1889 during his stay at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole. From the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

[Much of this post is based on New Heavens and a New Earth: The Jewish reception of Copernican Thought.]

Tamid 32a ~ How High is the Sky? (And How to Measure It)

Tomorrow we will read a wondrous page of Talmud, that includes a discussion of astronomical distances.

תמיד לא, ב

:עשרה דברים שאל אלכסנדרוס מוקדון את זקני הנגב אמר להן

[תמיד לב, א]

מן השמים לארץ רחוק או ממזרח למערב אמרו לו ממזרח למערב תדע שהרי חמה במזרח הכל מסתכלין בה חמה במערב הכל מסתכלין בה חמה באמצע רקיע אין הכל מסתכלין בה

וחכמים אומרים זה וזה כאחד שוין שנאמר (תהלים קג, יא) כגבוה שמים על הארץ [וגו'] כרחוק מזרח ממערב ואי חד מינייהו נפיש נכתוב תרווייהו כי ההוא דנפיש ואלא חמה באמצע רקיע מ"ט אין הכל מסתכלין בה משום דקאי להדיא ולא כסי ליה מידי

Alexander of Macedon asked the Elders of the Negev about ten matters.

He said to them: Is the distance from the heavens to the earth further, or is the distance from east to west further? They said to him: From east to west is a greater distance. Know that this is so, as when the sun is in the east, everyone looks at it without hurting their eyes, and when the sun is in the west, everyone looks at it without hurting their eyes. By contrast, when the sun is inthe middle ofthe sky, no one looks at it, as it would hurt their eyes. [This shows that the sun’s place in the middle of the sky is not as far from the earth as its remote positions in the extreme east and west].

But the Sages say: This distance and that distance are equal, as it is stated: “For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is His kindness toward them that fear Him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us” (Psalms 103:11–12). [The verses compare the extent of God’s kindness and His removal of transgressions to vast expanses.] And if one of the distances is greater than the other, let the verse write that both of God’s enumerated attributes are like the measure that is greater. But if so, with regard to the sun in the middle of the sky, what is the reason that no one looks at it? It is because it stands exposed and nothing covers it, [whereas it is partially screened when it is in the east or the west.]

Method for measuring the distance from the Earth to the Moon. From Joseph Delmedigo’s 1629 masterpiece, Sefer Elim, p152.

Alexander on tour…

The path of the sun, based on the famous passage in Peaschim 94b.

Historians know that Alexander the Great waged a famous campaign against Gaza and Egypt in 332 BCE. That would have placed him in or near the area in southern Israel known as the Negev, and it is while he was there that he asked the local sages whether the distance to the heavens is greater than the distance from east to west. To moderns, this is a silly question, but not to Alexander and his contemporaries. They believed that the world was a flat saucer, covered with water on which the earth floated in the middle. They also believed above us lay a solid vault that contained the stars, and which the rabbis referred to as the rakia. So which was greater, the distance up to the heavenly vault that held the sun and the stars, or the distance from one side of the earth to the other? It’s a fair question.

November 11 2019 - The Transit of Mercury

November 11, 2019: Mercury transits the sun from east to west. The horizontal yellow line represents the ecliptic, and the top is North. Make sure you are using a sun-filter on your telescope, and don’t try this with hand-held binoculars (too wobbly to see). From here.

And here is how it looks in real life through a telescope. Mercury is the black dot in the lower part of the image. At top is a more blurry sunspot. From here.

On November 11, the tiny planet of Mercury will transit (that’s astronomy-speak for “passing in front of”) across the sun. These events get astronomers very excited. You may recall that back in June of 2012 Venus was in transit across the face of the sun, leading many to spend a sunny day peering into a telescope for a glimpse. (I did. It was amazing.)

Back in the nineteenth century, the transit of Venus was of huge scientific importance because by observing it from various locations and using some clever trigonometry, astronomers could calculate the distance from the Earth. Knowing this would allow the distance of other planets from the Earth to be calculated, which would then give the answer to one of the most important astronomical questions of the time: Just how big is the solar system?

Using the transit of Venus to determine the distance from the earth to the Sun. For a deep dive into how the math works see this delightful article in the December 2003 edition of Mathematics Magazine.

The transit of Venus always occurs twice in eight years, followed by a gap of 105.5 or 121.5 years. The first time it could be viewed was in 1639, but that transit was witnessed by only two observers. By the time of the paired transits of 1761 and 1769, scientific instruments were accurate enough to provide the data needed for the all-important calculations. So in 1760 and again in 1768 the major European nations including Britain, France, Spain and Russia sent teams across the globe to measure the transit times of Venus. Perhaps the most famous expedition was that led by Captain James Cook who sailed from London to Tahiti and made a series of accurate measurements that allowed the all-important calculations to be made.

Anyway, in a couple of weeks the tiny planet of Mercury will also transit the sun. In the past, this event too could have been used to calculate the size of the solar system. But it wasn’t. The planet is just too small and too far away, and the telescopes of the time were too inaccurate for any scientifically valid measurements to be taken. Instead, astronomers waited for the larger and more visible planet Venus to transit, which also caught the attention of some important Jewish authors.

Three Jewish responses to measuring the size of the universe

1. Sefer Haberit 1797

The first Hebrew book to discuss the transit of Venus was Sefer Haberit, The Book of the Covenant, first published in 1797 in Brno. That also makes it the first Hebrew book to discuss the measurement of astronomical distances.

The author was Pinhas Hurwitz, a self-educated Jew from Vilna. Sefer Haberit was divided in two parts; the first, consisting of some two hundred and fifty pages is a scientific encyclopedia, addressing what Hurwitz called human wisdom (hokhmat adam) and focuses on the material world. The second part, shorter than the first at only one hundred and thirty pages, is an analysis of divine wisdom (hokhmat elohim), and focuses on spiritual matters. Sefer Haberit was an encyclopedia, and contained information on astronomy, geography, physics, and embryology. It described all manner of scientific discoveries, from the barometer to the lightening rod, and gave its readers up to date information on the recent discovery of the planet Uranus, and the (not so recent) discovery of America. Sefer Haberit was also incredibly popular; it has been reprinted some thirty times, was translated into Yiddish and Ladino, and remains available today.

In a section on solar and lunar eclipses, Hurwitz recalled the transit of Venus in 1769. He described how Cook’s expedition had almost been in vain when some of their scientific instruments were stolen the night before the transit, and how, thanks to the team’s valiant efforts, the stolen instruments were returned. Here is the original text:

And I have twice witnessed a solar eclipse caused by the moon. The first was in the Hague in Holland, and the second in Vilna in Lita, the city of my birth. During my life there was also a transit of across the sun by the planet Venus, which passed in front of it as a tiny round black dot…

This transit [of 1769] became famous across the world before it had even occurred. In British universities they examined and calculated the orbits of the planets and discovered that at a specific time Venus will pass across the face of the sun. Several years prior, they published that this event would be visible at a specific time in one location and at another time in another location…So one year prior a number of wealthy adventurers left England and sailed for more than a year to reach distant shores. They reached the island of Tahiti in the Americas, together with their telescopes and equipment to see the transit under the best conditions…

On the day before the event they set up their equipment at a specific location to be ready for the transit. But overnight the locals stole all the equipment, and then denied having done so, making the entire trip almost fruitless. But after intense negotiations they returned it all, and the transit of Venus occurred at the exact time that had been predicted…

Cook eventually returned to England with his measurements, which together with those from several other observations from Lapland to California eventually allowed the Sun-Earth distance to be calculated. (Oh, and that bit about the equipment being stolen. It is mostly true. A quadrant went missing. Here is how Cook described what happened next in his journal: “… it was not long before we got information that one of the natives had taken it away and carried it to the Eastward...I met Mr Banks and Mr Green about 4 miles from the Fort returning with the Quadrant, this was about Sunset and we all got back to the Fort about 8 oClock.”)

What is of interest here is that Hurwitz did not inform his readers of the real reason that the transit was to be observed.  There is no mention of the way in which the transit of Venus could be used to determine the size of the solar system or the distance from the sun to the Earth, which were of course the real reasons for all the time and effort being spent in observing it.  Why did Hurwitz leave all this out, and suggest instead that the reason for sending Captain Cook all the way from London to Tahiti was to see if the predictions for the time of the transit were accurate?

The answer lies in the fact that Hurwitz was somewhat conflicted about his belief in the model suggested by Copernicus in which the Earth and all the planets revolve around a stationary sun.  Although in some places in Sefer Haberit he spoke highly of the Copernican model, Hurwitz ultimately sided with the Tychonic universe in which all the planets except the Earth revolve around the Sun, while the Sun orbits a stationary Earth, dragging the planets along with it. He did this for a number of scientific and theological reasons, including a belief that the Earth was the crowning glory of creation. “All of the planets were only created for the sake of this Earth, and everything was created for the sake of mankind on the Earth...even if the purpose of these other heavenly creations is not always clear to us.”Since the Earth was the reason for creation, it was only fitting that it lay at the center of the universe.

Hurwitz described the goal of Cook’s expedition to Tahiti as testing the predictions of the timing of the transit, when in fact its mission was far more important than that. But since Hurwitz ultimately rejected the Copernican model, he chose not to discuss the real reason for Cook’s expedition, namely to provide data that would allow the size of the Copernican solar system to be calculated.  Instead, Hurwitz described the mission as one to verify the times of the predicted transit, as a sort of test of the ability of astronomers to predict these kinds of events.  Although he did not reveal the real goals of the expedition, he noted that is was a great success, and that transit of Venus occurred precisely the times predicted. Which it did.

“The range of solar parallax values derived from the 1769 transit, and thus the length of the astronomical unit, drew ever closer other values accepted today. ...a modern radar-based value for the astronomical unit is 92,955,000 miles.
And based on his analysis of the 1769 transit of Venus, Thomas Horsby wrote in 1771 that “... the mean distance of the Earth from the Sun will be 93,726,900 English miles.”
Eight-tenths of a percent difference. Absolutely remarkable.”

— Teets, D. Transits of Venus and the Astronomical Unit. Mathematic Magazine 2003; 75 (5); 347.

2. Kochava Deshavit 1835

We have previously discussed the Jewish scientist extraordinaire Chaim Zelig Slonimski, For our new readers here is a recap.

Chaim Zelig Slonimski. Kochava DeShavit 1835.

To coincide with the appearance of Halley's Comet in 1835, a Hebrew book called Kokhava Deshavit (The Comet) was published in Vilna. It described where and when the comet would be visible with precise coordinates for the inhabitants of Bialystok, as well as an explanation of the nature of comets and their orbits. The author was the remarkable Hayyim Zelig Slonimski, (1810-1904), the founding editor of Hazefirah (The Dawn), a weekly Hebrew-language newspaper first published in Warsaw in 1862. He also wrote Mosdei Hokhmah (The Foundation of Wisdom), a work on algebra, and struck up a friendship with the famed German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Not content with all this, Slonimski invented a method to send two telegraphs simultaneously over one wire (which was a very big deal at the time,) and developed a calculating machine that he later presented to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. It was so successful that in 1845 the Russian minister of education made Slonimski an honorary citizen, a remarkable honor given the general oppression faced by the Jews at the time. So yes, Jewish scientist extraordinaire.

Writing in Kokhava Deshavit Slonimski explained why the transit was so important: “if [Venus] happens to pass in front of the sun and we can see it, that would be the time for astronomers to measure the angle it subtends in front of the sun (solar parallax), which is a fundamental and valuable [measure] for astronomy, as those who know these things understand. This is the reason that astronomers went to such lengths at that time to measure the moment of its [Venus’] conjunctions at various locations across the Earth. In 1769, when astronomers calculated that the transit would occur, they all prepared for this time in order to provide the most precise measurements…” [Small print: Slonimski here is absolutely correct. Solar parallax is an angular measurement that is one-half of the angular size of the Earth as seen from the sun. The reason the measurement is so important is that the distance to the sun is the radius of the Earth divided by the solar parallax.]

…Germany sent three astronomers to Domingo in the Americas and to East India, and England sent them to North America, Madras, and Tahiti. The Russian Empress Catherine sent people to follow astronomers from Germany and Sweden. They brought lots of equipment from London and Paris which they sent to the four corners of her empire…

They calculated the angle of parallax with great precision, but it was not quite accurate enough. They will get a better measurement at the next opportunity. This will occur in the Jewish year 5634 [1874] on the ninth of December, when Venus will again transit the sun at 2.18pm. The transit will last 4 hours and 9 minutes.

The reader can almost see the smile on Slonimski’s face as he shared the start time of the transit. In fact Slonimski viewed these kinds of calculations as one of the great triumphs of astronomy. When in 1846 astronomers discovered the planet Neptune, they did so on the basis of a series of calculations that suggested the existence of a planet to account for irregularities in the orbit of Uranus. And Slonimski was overjoyed, imbuing the moment with a religious patina:

The findings of this amazing discovery have struck every wise person with awe. Nothing like this in the history of humanity has ever occurred since God created man on the Earth. For can a person sit at home and use his human mind to calculate and then find a completely hidden celestial object thirty-six times as far away as the Sun is from the Earth? Yet indeed he can point to the sky and say “look, aim your telescopes there. That is where you will find another planet that orbits the Sun”…

3. Nivreshet Lenez Hahamah 1898

The third Hebrew book to discuss the measurement of astronomic distance is Nivreshet Lenez Hachama (The Chandelier of the Sunrise), published in Jerusalem in 1898. Its author was the geocentric Hayah David Spitzer. He rejected Copernicus and his heliocentric model, believing instead that the entire universe revolved around the Earth, because “everything, including the Sun, was created for the Earth and for Israel who dwell on it and keep the Torah.” Spitzer’s main interest was in determining the precise times of sunrise and sunset in halakhah, and he spent hours carefully measuring these times in and around Jerusalem.

Spitzer rejected all the calculations about the size of the solar system and the distance to the nearest stars that had been calculated using the observations of the transit of Venus, as well as estimates of the speed of light that had been made in the nineteenth century. He did so on both ‘scientific’ and religious grounds. For example, if as astronomers claimed, some stars were 24,000 light years away from Earth, their light could not have reached the Earth that had only existed for some 6,000 years. In addition, what purpose would there have been in creating such remote stars, whose light served no purpose for those on Earth? Finally, since the speed of light is not mentioned in the Talmud, the notion that light has a finite speed cannot be correct. Here is the original text.

Hayah David Spitzer, Nivreshet Lenez Hahamah(Jerusalem: Blumenthal, 1898). 35a.

We find various discussions in out Talmud about the size of the universe, and the distance to and the size of the stars. But we there is no mention at all about the idea that sunlight or light from the stars takes a finite time to reach us. If there was even the remote possibility that this was so our sages would certainly have discussed it in detail…

Spitzer claimed that anyone could perform a simple experiment that would refute the notion that light took a finite time to travel vast distances. If, during the day, the door to a house was suddenly closed, it should still be possible to see an image of the sun for some time since the light would take time to travel from the site of the now closed door across the room and into the eye of the observer. Similarly, 

if we open a closed door or window…we should not be able to see sunlight for some time, and we should be forced to sit in darkness as if the doors had not been opened. What can be said of this idiocy and stupidity, at which any person would laugh? Rather, as soon as a person opens his eyes he stops seeing nothing and when he opens his eyes at night he immediately sees all the stars, both those nearby that need sixteen years for their light to travel, and those far away whose light takes one hundred and twenty years to reach us.

Sptizer 34b.

Oy. Even when judged by the scientific standards of his own time, Spitzer’s work was astonishingly naive. To explain why he adopted this extreme (and extremely uninformed) position, you need to understand that Spitzer believed that the entire scientific process had but one goal in mind - to destroy the fundamentals of Jewish belief: “Their entire aim is to deny God’s Torah, to destroy religion, to confuse those who would disagree with them and to embarrass and belittle the sages of Israel.”

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These three rabbinic authors had three quite different ways of approaching both the history of the transit of Venus and the measurement of distances that was deduced from it. Hurwitz was certainly inquisitive about all things scientific, but did not reveal the real goals of the expeditions to observe the transit, because they would raise further questions about the model of the solar system in which he believed- a model in which the Earth was the unmoving center. Slonimski informed his readers of the real goals of the observations and had no issues – religious or scientific - with accepting a universe in which the Earth was not the center. But for Spitzer, the enterprise of astronomy was a vast conspiracy to undermine Torah values. He therefore stretched to reject any science that the transit of Venus bequeathed to future generations.

“Alexander was not just another conqueror in the ancient world. He severed that world from its past. He hellenized it, and at the same time he delivered a lethal blow to its traditions.”

— G. W. Bowersock. The Invention of Time. The New York Review of Books. Nov 7, 2019, 29.

Humanity has been intrigued by the heavens for as long as recorded history. The answer Alexander the Great received from the Elders of the Negev was not based any mathematical principles or measurements of the planets or stars. It was based on a more important and more trustworthy source: the word of God. Over a millennia later, the Temple in Jerusalem was interpreted as a model of the solar system, with its gates representing the planets. That’s next time, on Talmudology.

[Partial repost from a here.]

Bechorot 16a ~ A Flat Earth, The Eye, and the Sky

“Map of the Square and Stationary Earth. By Prof. Orlando Ferguson, Hot Springs, South Dakota.
Four Hundred Passages in the Bible that Condemns the Globe Theory, or the Flying Earth, and None Sustain It.
This Map is the Bible Map of the World. Copyright by Orlando Ferguson, 1893.”

בכורות טז, א

A film over the eye - בדוקין שבעין

An animal brought to the Temple in Jerusalem as a sacrifice must be free of physical deformities or blemishes. One of these is a film over the cornea or, according to some, over the eyelid. The word duk (דק), which in modern Hebrew means thin, is translated as either a cataract (Soncino and Schottenstein) or “a veiled or withered spot” (Jastrow).

Rashi and the Meaning of דֹּק

To better understand the etymology of the word, Rashi draws our attention to the verse in Isaiah (40:22 ) הַנּוֹטֶה כַדֹּק שָׁמַיִם וַיִּמְתָּחֵם כָּאֹהֶל לָשָׁבֶת “Who spread out the skies like a film [כַדֹּק], stretched them out like a tent to dwell in.” He notes that in the French of his day the the word for דֹּק is “teile” or toile, (טייל׳א or טולא) meaning a canvas or fabric. So the Talmud is describing a film over the eye, and this is certainly a reasonable way to describe a cataract, which is a cloudiness of the lens in the eye. In a cow it would look like this:

A cow with a cataract.

Rashi’s second explanation and a map of the world

Rashi then gives an alternative meaning for the word: a blemish on the eyelids. He continues

ל"א דוקין שיש לו מום בעפעפים ולהכי קרי לעפעפים דוק על העין כרקיע דהכי אמרינן בספרי אגודות העין דומה לעולם קטן העפעפים כנגד הרקיע והתחתון כנגד הארץ והלבן שמקיף את העין כנגד ים אוקיינוס שסובב את העולם והשחור שבו שהוא עגול דומה לגלגל חמה

We read about this in homiletic stories: The eye is a mini representation of the world. The upper eyelid represent the rakia (the vault over the sky that contains the stars) and the lower lid represents the earth. The white of the eye [the conjunctiva] represents the ocean that encircles the world, and the dark part which is circular [the pupil] represents the orbit of the sun.

Rashi seems to suggest that since the upper eyelid is described as representing the skies, which are stretched out like a canvas, working backwards the word דֹּק could mean the eyelid. The aggadic (homiletic) parable to which Rashi is referring is from Derech Eretz Zuta, a minor tractate of the Talmud (and not part of the daily one-page a day cycle). Here it is, from the end of the ninth chapter:

אבא איסי בן יוחנן משום שמואל הקטן אומר: העולם הזה דומה לגלגל עינו של אדם. לבן שבו זה אוקיינוס שמקיף את כל העולם שחור שבו זה העולם קומט שבשחור זה ירושלים פרצוף שבקומט זה בית המקדש, שיבנה במהרה בימינו ובימי כל ישראל אמן

The world can be compared to the eyes of a person. The whites of the eyes are the ocean that encircles the entire world. The dark part (? the ring around the iris) is the world, the iris [lit. the folded part of the pupil] is Jerusalem, and the pupil [lit image in the iris] is the Temple, may it be rebuilt speedily and in our days and the days of all of Israel, Amen.

Two maps of the world

So we have two ways in which eye might echo a map of the world. And although it is not entirely clear what the terms קומט שבשחור and פרצוף שבקומט mean, the maps look something like this:

Rashi’s description of the Aggada

Description by Shmuel Hakatan as found in Derech Eretz Zuta

Both of these “eye maps” capture elements of talmudic geography. In the talmudic mind, the Earth was a flat disc covered by an opaque sky known as the rakia. Exactly how the sun moved was the topic of a famous dispute between the “wise men of Israel” and the “wise Gentiles.” Here it is:

פסחים צד,ב

חכמי ישראל אומרים ביום חמה מהלכת למטה מן הרקיע ובלילה למעלה מן הרקיע וחכמי אומות העולם אומרים ביום חמה מהלכת למטה מן הרקיע ובלילה למטה מן הקרקע אמר רבי ונראין דבריהן מדברינו שביום מעינות צוננין ובלילה רותחין

The wise men of Israel say that during the day the Sun travels under the rakia, and at night it travels above the rakia. And Gentile wise men say: during the day the Sun travels under the rakia and at night under the Earth. Rabbi [Yehudah Hanasi] said: their view is more logical than ours for during the day springs are cold and at night they are warm.

The two options are shown below. In both, the earth is a flat disc surrounded by water. They really do match nicely with the eyeballs image.

From Judah Landa. Torah and Science. Ktav. Hoboken NJ. 1991.p66

Earliest map of the world, from 6th century BCE. It shows the world as a disc, surrounded by a ring of water called the "Bitter River.”. From the Collection of the British Museum #92687.

We have discussed the sun’s orbit around the earth back in February 2017. There is no doubt that the rabbis of the Talmud actually believed the world was actually a disk surrounded by an ocean. It was not a metaphor, even though describing the world as being reflected in the anatomy of the eye certainly is. (To read more about talmudic astronomy and the path of the sun around the flat earth, see here.) The rabbis of the Talmud were following a long held belief that the world is flat, which we can trace all the way back to the earliest known map, found in Babylon and made in the 6th century BCE. It shows a flat, disk like earth surrounded by waters. And that is the picture most people had, because, well, that’s what it looks like to us. But that changed when the great Greek mathematician and astronomer Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth, a figure that was within about 10% of its true value.

Jerusalem-Centric Maps

Before Copernicus, the earth was thought to be the physical center of the universe. All the planets in our solar system and all the stars beyond it were thought to orbit in perfect circles around us. And at the very center of the geocentric universe, was Jerusalem. You can see this beautifully demonstrated in the famous clover leaf map of the world by Heinrich Bunting (1545-1606). The original map now happily rests in Bunting’s bull’s-eye; it is part of the Eran Laor Cartographic Collection at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem.

Writing in the 16th century, the Maharsha, R. Shmuel Eidels (1555 – 1631) suggested that since the Earth is a sphere, Israel and Jerusalem can be seen as if they were its center.

מהרש"א חידושי אגדות מסכת קידושין דף סט עמוד א

 שהעולם הוא כתפוח ומקום בהמ"ק הוא מרכז עולם וכן א"י ולכך אמרו בא"י כיון דהוא מקום הממוצע אוירו מזוג

The world is round like an apple, and the Temple is at its center. So too is the Land of Israel, which is why it has a moderate climate

In fact Bunting’s clover leaf map and the Maharsha’s suggestion can now be combined with Google-era technology. It’s just one more way to help keep Jerusalem in our hearts and prayers.

Orthographic T&O map with Jerusalem at the center of the Earth.