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Everything Is A Relationship

August 19, 2013 by Patrick Beaulier

intimacy-online-relationships1

The universe is pretty boring. One look at the periodic table and you’ll know everything. These elements make up the whole show. You and I are a stew of those elements. So is a chair, an asteroid, the fossil of an extinct dinosaur and your breakfast cereal.

The reason we have something instead of nothing is a complex tale, but the bottom line is that the laws of nature began to form right after the Big Bang: a moment of intense pressure release where all the stuff in the periodic table, the stuff that makes you, me and everything in between, came bursting forth. What we see today is the result of that chaotic ballet.

Everything in the universe is the same, and yet, we have incredible diversity. Solids, liquids, gases, plasmas, life, inanimate objects, forces of nature, poets, artists, madmen and everything else comes from the same old boring junk that hangs on a chemistry teacher’s wall. What makes it all different is not what it’s made of, but what is done with it.

Why are things the way they are? It’s not the stuff, but it’s the forces behind the stuff that gives it substance. An apple appears harder than water because of the way gravity plays with the molecules which make up the juicy fruit. And a person is more complex than a butterfly because millions of years of evolution have taken that butterfly and that human in two different directions.

But all of this, in the end, is about relationships.

What we think of as an atom is held together by a relationship of forces to protons, electrons and neutrons. What holds all that together are subatomic particles called quarks. And what we think holds all that together is a bunch of strings, or perhaps multiverses. We don’t know the answer to that yet, but a lot of people smarter than me are working on it.

What we do know is that everything in the universe is held together by relationships of stuff to one another.

If everything is held together through relationships, and we as people are made of the same “everything”, then what about our relationships? What holds us together? We know what the laws of nature are. So what are the laws of human nature? And is it really all that different? Could the same stuff that binds the universe together bind us together as well? And what do we call that?

Let’s talk more about this Friday night, August 23rd at 5PM EDT at OneShul.org. For more info, check us out on Facebook.

Rabbi Patrick is the director of PunkTorah and OneShul. When he’s not waxing poetic here at PunkTorah, he can be found playing in rock bands, officiating weddings and searching for the best cappuccino on the planet.

Filed Under: Rants Tagged With: convert to judaism, convert to judaism online, darshan yeshiva, Judaism, online conversion, online synagogue, patrick "aleph" beaulier, patrick aleph, punktorah, rabbi beaulier, rabbi patrick aleph beaulier, relationships, science and religion, spirituality

Neil deGrasse Tyson Made Me A Better Theologian

April 13, 2012 by Patrick Beaulier

I know, I know. Neil deGrasse Tyson is agnostic. But that doesn’t mean that man isn’t a believer at the same time.

My final assignment for rabbinical school is a thesis where I have to discuss my personal theological understanding of Judaism in the context of the Jewish future, and to use text to defend it. I must also include in the paper any kind of texts that contradict my theology and find ways to deal with those “difficult passages”. While I have a while before I get to this (one must crawl before running), I have to admit that I am terrified by writing this. There are some incredibly thorny passages in the Torah. How does a progressive Jew defend slaying Amelekites, stoning gay men, divorcing the spouses of interfaith marriages, and all the other troubling texts? It’s easy if you believe in an unquestionable Torah mi’Sinai that gives you the ultimate “out” of, “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it”. Problem is, if you’re the type to wrestle with text, no matter what you believe about the origin of our holy texts, you still have to figure out how to deal with all the fundamentalist sounding stuff that your modern sensibilities can’t stand.

Really good Jewish thinkers are willing to ask tough questions, to deviate from conventional thinking when things just don’t add up, and to willingly throw away any of their ideas that don’t hold up. I think the same must be true for scientists, which is why I often watch science programs on Netflix when I find myself unable to deal with religion. Surprisingly, Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson and others don’t compel me away from the Divine, but rather, help me to more fully connect with the nature of the Universe, which I understand to be one of several projects that God has undertaken.

The video below really spells it out for me.

While Mr. Tyson and I probably disagree on the conclusion, what we can agree on is the spectacular nature of life: that we are made of all the same things that the universe is made up of, and that this is pretty cool. I know that “pretty cool” is an amateur, flippant way of describing the existence of reality, but you get my drift.

For me, this unity of all things is the seat of God. I find in the Shema the blessing of God’s oneness as a true-ism of all reality: that God is one, that the universe and everything in it is one, and that we are one with all of these elements at the same time. God, heaven, the past, present and future are all within us and at the same time, outside of us.

As a self-professed “serial monogamist”, I can speak with a certain level of authority that no relationship is perfect and that while we hope that everything we do is to the benefit of our partner, or is at least keeping them in mind, often times we just act on our own self-interest. In an interview, Tyson said that “every account of a higher power that I’ve seen described, of all religions that I’ve seen, include many statements with regard to the benevolence of that power. When I look at the universe and all the ways the universe wants to kill us, I find it hard to reconcile that with statements of beneficence.” 

When we look at the way a single change in the coming together of our universe could have completely prevented humanity from ever existing, it gives us an amazing pause to think: perhaps the world is made with love in mind. As Einstein said, “God doesn’t play dice with the world.” At the same time, I can see where Tyson is coming from. The world is amoral; children are born with genetic diseases that take their lives before they have the opportunity to live, earthquakes and other natural phenomena sweep people off to eternity regardless of how holy or evil they are, and by most trustworthy accounts, the Earth will be destroyed by the sun, no matter how much faith we put into God to prevent that from happening.

Perhaps though, we are trying to fit a square God into a round hole. Perhaps God is not benevolent or the destroyer: God just is. Just as our relationships with those we love are never simple, perhaps God, who I have always viewed as the ultimate in complicated, complex issues, cannot be made into a boiler plate one-liner.

Our faith tradition gives us two ways to take refuge under God’s shechinah in spite of the terrible amount of mental noise that the why-God-why type questions cause us. As I mentioned before, the Shema’s declaration of oneness of God is a no-brainer. God is one, and from Tyson we learn that everything in the universe is one. Oneness disguised as diversity and chaos seems to be God’s operating philosophy.

The second point comes from liturgy. When we pray the Amidah, we pray “blessed are you…God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob”. Martin Buber in The Ten Rungs, a collection of Chasidic philosophy, explained that the reason we say “God of” before each name, is that God was revealed to each of these individuals, and to all of the prophets, in different ways and at different times. God is not a singular experience, but rather, an experience that each generation is tasked with in its own way. Perhaps science is just another of God’s prophecies.

From that place, I am able to sit with my non-theistic friends and know that when we talk about the stars in the sky, the birth of a child, or any other life affirming moment, the “ooh, ahh” noises we make reflect a shared experience of the transcendental.

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