Hypothesis: Can prayer affect solar weather? Method: Analyze objective data. Result: p=0.004. Conclusion: WOW!!
The sun. What does it not do for us? It powers the global ecosystem, cycling water from seas to clouds to rain to rivers and back again. Through every green plant, it’s light gives life to animals and man. It drives the seasons, delivers us sight, signals us to awaken, makes the sky blue. 
In an ever-changing world, the sun is our constant, always there, always shining, never changing. Or is it?
The face of the sun is a lot more dynamic than the man-in-the moon. That steady façade of blinding brilliance belies turmoil and tempest, bubbles and belches that blast proton storms millions of miles into space, jamming our frequencies, then collapsing to quiescence in a matter of minutes.
Even the solar cycle is not so cyclic. Eleven years on average, it actually ranges from 9 to 14, and is more unpredictable than earthly weather in terms of number, size, location and intensity of major events like sunspots and flares.
Contrasting these capricious dynamics, is the perfectly predictable and deterministic astronomical calculations that underlie Judaism’s calendar. While some cultures mark only solar dates and others track lunar cycles, the Jews have developed a unique system that does both: Solar and lunar cycles are reconciled to the minute using seven leap-months every nineteen years.
Among the myriad details of the Jewish calendar is this: Every 28 years, on the second Wednesday in April, the sun and earth are in about the same positions as they were at the moment they were created on the eve of the fourth day 5767 years ago. When that happens, the Jews make a blessing, the same one they make when they see natural wonders like lightning, oceans, and shooting stars. They bless G-d for “Doing the work of creation.”
On April 8, 1981, the last time this blessing was recited on the sun, I was in Jerusalem at the Western Wall with 200,000 other Jews all making the same blessing at the same time. That day, hundreds of thousands more the world over chimed in with the same prayer and the same intent.
What an impact that must have made in heaven.
Lately, I started to wonder: Could it be that all that focused consciousness directed at the sun affected it in some way? After all, in recent decades, dozens of ivy-league experiments have verified that focused human consciousness can affect objects and people in remote locations, up to thousands of miles away. If so, why not the sun? 
Plenty other science developments point to the same possibility:
- Quantum physics teaches that human observership lies at the heart of the mechanics of the universe and that the whole cosmos is connected through some holistic unity beyond space and time;
- Chaos theory shows how minute perturbations in one part of a system can quickly change the state of the whole;
- The widely espoused Anthropic Principle says that the universe was geared to produce human life before time began, so the cosmos somehow depends on us.
Add this all together with a dash of Talmudic tradition (i.e., each person should say “the universe was made for me.”), and as crazy as it seems, there really is no reason why the sun couldn’t respond to our prayers about it.
Physicists these days speak of “the conscious universe,” so why not a conscious sun? Maimonides in his Book of Knowledge says that the sun has consciousness. A strange thought for those of us who are material realists, but scientists haven’t espoused material realism for nearly a century!
These ideas led me to an odd, but testable, hypothesis. Since the solar blessing event was not tied to solar activity, if the prayer did affect solar dynamics, it would probably show as a detectable elevation in solar flare activity – akin to how the Creator “calls to the sun and it shines,” to borrow a phrase from the Shabbat morning prayers.
To test the notion, I googled around and found the US Federal archives at the National Geophysical Data Center at Boulder Colorado. Just what I was looking for. Reams and reams of raw data all about the sun. The best data- set for this purpose was the monthly full-disk solar flare intensity values from 1966 through 2005, a total of 12 x 40 = 480 data points.
If my hypothesis was wrong, and the sun did not visibly respond, what kind of solar flare intensity would we expect to see for April 1981? Obviously somewhere in the middle, not very high and not very low. Statistically speaking somewhere in the lower 95% of the intensity values. Scientific convention says that anything in that range may be due to chance. Anything higher than that may be significant. Anything in the upper 1% of the intensity values could be highly significant.
What we do see is graphed above. Solar flare intensities over the last 40 years vary widely. Of the 480 months, April 1981 was the second most intense. Statistically speaking, this may be considered highly significant.
Divine Providence? Absolutely! Scientific proof of a prayer connection with solar flares? Not really! But it is support of my hypothesis, for whatever that’s worth.
Somebody may want to follow up on this, but it probably won’t be me. I already know that the whole universe hangs on our divine service. I know it from the Tanya and other holy texts of Jewish origin. I don’t need proof from science for that.
What we may want to consider is how all this relates to the Torah portion of this week, in order to “live with the time,” as the Alter Rebbe enjoined.
For one thing, our portion contains the very first command to the Jewish nation, to keep the Jewish calendar. That certainly is relevant to our discussion. For another thing, the blessing of creation is relevant this week as well, because according to one opinion discussed by Rashi on the first verse of Genesis, the Torah should have started with this week’s portion about keeping the Jewish calendar.
A third piece of providence here is that today, on a Wednesday, I happen to be writing about the creation of the sun on a Wednesday, while reading the Torah portion for Wednesday of “Parshas Bo” that establishes a calendar based on the sun and moon which were created on Wednesday.
And if all this is not enough, while wondering about this confluence, I glanced at the front page news of my Wednesday paper to see that President George W. Bush has proclaimed a renewable energy initiative to immunize America from oil politics.
“For too long our nation has been dependent of foreign oil. And this dependence leaves us more vulnerable to hostile regimes, and to terrorists.. ..It is in our vital interest to diversify America’s energy supply – and the way forward is through technology.”
President Bush’s State of the Union
address to Congress, Jan. 23, 2007.
The remarkable thing about the timing of this announcement was that it precisely echoed the same message in the words of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, also uttered on a Wednesday, a very special Wednesday 26 years ago.
“We see clearly that when this country needs oil it is forced to listen to others – even to concede matters that are the opposite of justice, fairness and goodness.. ..If the United States would invest in developing energy sources in its own land, they would have already long been freed of dependence on other nations.”
The Lubavitcher Rebbe’s public address
at the solar blessing, April 8, 1981.
Now if that’s not Divine Providence, what is? |
