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"With one good thought, you can change your life, even save the world." - The Rebbe |
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Home  Soul of Science
Soul of Science
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Faith.
Science.
Two solitudes.
Or are they? One G-d made them both,
So why don't they mesh?
Or do they? They work together pretty well in the summertime, out in "G-d's country." You watch a sunset - heavenly. You study a bug on a leaf or watch a waterfall - miraculous. Listen to the birds singing in the woods in the morning - divinely awesome. |
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They say that America is a meritocracy. There is nothing to stop you from working your way up from rags to riches or from ignoble origins to the presidency itself. Even after you've earned your way up, staying there is no given, due to various checks and balances to fiscal and political clout. But once you have legitimately climbed the ranks and now rule the roost, your authority is great.
Judaism has something similar. For millennia, the best scholar became the Rabbi, and the most scholarly of those became renowned authorities and their rulings were obeyed. Yes, one could always question the basis of a rabbinic ruling, but generally speaking once rendered appropriately, the ruling of a Torah authority is binding. |
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Very late one Thursday night, Reid, a relative newcomer to town, slipped in through the side door of a certain residential dwelling, took the narrow stairs down into the basement, turned the handle gently and pushed.
He found what he was looking for. Seated at the head of a long, well-laden table of half-consumed refreshments and a dozen men listening, a bearded man in a dark suit and black fedora was talking. |
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The Danish Poet, Piet Hein, wrote "Love is like a pineapple, sweet and undefinable." As elusive as love may be, we can still talk about different kinds of it. Let's take the love of food for instance. Is it fish that you fancy? Then maybe the best way to express that would be to let them swim rather than fry and eat them. And what about money? It's also a materialistic attraction (and how!) but a little more abstract, especially nowadays when physical currency is not so current, and cash today is neither cold nor hard, but just a transient blip in cyberspace. |
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We live in an age of uncertainty. Geopolitics, the economy, the environment. However much we know, things are still increasingly unpredictable. And then there is science. At the heart of atomic theory, for example, is the "uncertainty principle," that pillar of quantum wisdom that informs us that the most fundamental building blocks of matter and energy are ultimately unknowable. The laws of nature, once thought to be completely deterministic, are now viewed as probabilities. In other words, more uncertainty. Another case in point is the environment, which is modeled by chaos theory or the butterfly effect, the idea that tiny unpredictable changes can quickly reverberate into massive system change. |
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Who doesn't mess up?
Obviously we all do. And when we do, the thought of someone (or Someone) constantly watching and keeping score can be very intimidating. Think about the kid who covers his eyes and says "You can't see me!" Our inner child wants to wish away those critical eyes, too.
But then there are new beginnings. It may not be easy but we can all get there. The process is, basically, deal with it: Reflect, regret, restore, and poof... we are good to go with a nice clean slate. Then we retry, but oops. Error! And the cycle starts again. Refail, reflect. Regret, restore. Renew, retry. Then oops - Error! R-r-r-r-r-r... Error! R-r-r-r-r-r... Error! It can get pretty discouraging but fortunately there is another ingredient - Forgiveness. |
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Paul Bach-y-Rita did not learn about the brain's ability to rewire itself from science and medicine. True, he was a famous doctor and biomedical engineer, but his extraordinary insights and innovative cures had no basis in the neuroscience of the 60's when his work first started to shake up the old mechanistic model of the brain. Nor did he learn about it from kabbala or chassidic philosophy, although theoretically he could have because those sources had long been teaching principles of neuroeducation by then, as we discussed in last week's newsletter. |
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Ahh. Summer. No more pencils, no more books... The kids are free! ...but not too free. They need structured activities to keep them safe, happy and well, so the prevalent custom is to send them to camp. They make new friends, learn skills, have fun, and go on trips. They may even do some book learning, especially if they go to a Chabad camp where learning is a fun yet integral part of the experience. The integration of spirit, mind and body is a popular theme in wellness circles these days. My first exposure to the concept was on a school trip to Eastern Canada. I was gazing out the bus window while passing through the campus of Mt. Allison University when an odd inscription caught my eye on a very big building with classic looking pillars. |
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Asian trappers have a neat trick for catching monkeys. They hollow out a coconut through a small hole, fill it with chick peas, and wedge it firmly between rocks or fasten it to a tree. Smelling the chick peas, the monkey gingerly sidles over to the treasure trove, surreptitiously slips his hand into the hole, grasps a fistful of goodies, and... oops... he's stuck - stuck between two options - drop the peas and slip his hand out, our hang onto them and get caught himself. The monkeys are smart but the peas win out.
We've all got our chick pea traps - obsessions big or small that cost us our freedom. Businesses that devour our families, inboxes that gobble up our days, diversions that distract us from our greater goals. The lesson is obvious. Sometimes you just have to let go. |
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Musicians manipulate it. Comedians play it up. Actors, politicians, kids and their parents all have some intuitive sense of how to convey deep and powerful messages using this one simple technique - Silence. Whether it's a pregnant pause, an upbeat syncopation, a raised eyebrow or a baby's silent scream, a well-placed silence speaks volumes. |
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