B”H

Empirical Proofs, Astronomy and Astrology - The Scrolls Are "Light Years" Beyond Them All

Someone posed the following challenge to me:

It is of utmost importance that I subject any new idea to the same rigorous standards of intellectual scrutiny and self-honesty as I would in any other area of Torah learning, as well as philosophy or science, through the analysis of evidential proofs of reference sources, and not to be drawn in to ideas that may give me a sense of superficial intuitive satisfaction based to a large degree upon emotion.


B"H

I answered:


You would submit the Scrolls to the same exacting standards of logic and scientific proofs that you would what you have learned in yeshivot? SEFER HAYETZIRAH and GINAT EGOZ, two pillars of Rabbinic pseudo-Kabbalah, speak about seven heavenly bodies in our solar system, excluding the earth while including our sun and the earth’s moon. With the discovery of Neptune, Uranus, Pluto (which is considered a double planet because its one known moon is more than half the size of the planet) and the respective attending moons that orbit other planets in the solar system, those books are defunct except among all those who cherish them because their sense of identity would come apart if they were to admit the truth to themselves. The only remaining value in the astronomical “data” in Gikatilia’s GINAT EGOZ is the quaintness of ignorance past. For instance, Mars simply is not two-and-a-half times bigger than earth. A work that is truly holy cannot be refuted by empirical data based on a more advanced technology than that which existed at the time it was written. SEFER HAYETZIRAH and GINAT EGOZ however entertaining they may be to read, are not holy books.

You will find no such nonsense in the Scrolls. In fact, there is nothing that I have found in the Scrolls that can be refuted by empirical data based on advanced technology.

An important חלוף to consider is this: ספר = 340 = שמ. Therefore, שמים will equal ספרים. The word ספרים can easily be seen to be comprised of ספר + ים. ים is a חלוף for האדם. Therefore:
שמים = ספרים = ספר האדם. That which we see in the sky is our own understanding of our own Book.

Let us take a look at the word כוכב. Its gematria is 48, i.e, מח. The word הכוכב, then, would be חמה and המח. To the best of our knowledge today stars are suns (whatever those are), thus חמה. Returning to the fact that כוכב = מח we understand that there is a connection between stars and intelligence, but we do not know exactly what. The use of the word מח in the sense of ‘brain’ is post-Biblical. In ספר איוב כא:כד the word מח is used in the sense of ‘bone marrow’. Therefore, there is some connection between that which occurs within our bones and the astronomical phenomena. We are not yet in a position to attempt one-to-one correspondences between the astronomical phenomena we observe and other data.

We use much the same terminology when referring to astronomical phenomena as we do to intelligence. An intelligent person is “bright”, while a person of extreme intelligence is “brilliant”. Ideas are said to be “nebulous” until they eventually become clear point by point. The nubulae that are the stellar nurseries are described in similar ways. We talk about both consciousness and the universe “expanding”. The examples of analogous terminology and description go on.

When we observe the sky, and the astronomical phenomena it appears to us to “contain”, we are actually observing a physical representation of the processes of our own intelligence and internal processes. As we learn more, more astronomical phenomena are revealed to us and we rethink those phenomena that we thought we were already familiar with, perceiving them differently. Thus, what we perceive when we consider space is wholly dependent upon our own level of consciousness. We think we are looking outward, but actually we are gazing within.

We are now in a position to understand why astrology is עבודה זרה. We can only perceive astronomical phenomena in accordance with our own level of conscious evolution. We are not looking at astronomical phenomena as they are, in fact we do not even know if they exist in and of themselves. We are looking at physical representations of our own thought and physical processes, which are continuously evolving. We are fashioning the astronomical phenomena with our minds. The person who attributes power to predict his or her future to the stars is doing the very same thing as the person who fashions a statue with his or her own hands and expects it to be an oracle. To attribute the power to help us foresee the future to that which we fashion with our minds is actually a worse form of עבודה זרה than if we were to believe in a statue to do the same.

In מסכת עבודה זרה ס"ד עמ' ב we are taught that if we buy a statue from a Gentile, the substance of which we intend to use to make use of, for instance we intend to smelt the metal that a statue is made from and make something else with it, we are to demand that the Gentile break the statue somehow. This is done in order to make the Gentile prove that s/he attributes no powers to the statue nor holds it in any veneration. We are unable to do this with the images we fashion with our minds – the astronomical phenomena and the constellations being the example par excellence of this. Thus, astrology is a worse form of עבודה זרה than making statues and attributing powers to them. When we gaze at the stars are making תמונות with our minds. If we attribute anything to the images we fashion with our minds, and this includes “science” as well as pseudo-science, other than being very temporary, and ever-changing, representations of our own thought processes whatsoever we have crossed over into the worst kind of עבודה זרה.

Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat