More on Chaos and Judaism
Last week I touched upon the Jewish religious concept of order from chaos. Here are thoughts on a related subject…
During my graduate student years at Cornell, I became involved with work on behalf of Ethiopian Jews. One snowy winter evening I went to the Ithaca airport to pick up a speaker whom our group had arranged to tell us about the American Association for Ethiopian Jews’ efforts to rescue that persecuted minority. While waiting in the airport lobby, I struck up a conversation with another man.
It turned out that he was a world-renowned mathematician, Mitchell Feigenbaum (now of blessed memory). A friendly, candid person, he was curious to know what I was doing there. I explained. He told me the subject did not hold any interest for him. My Jewdar was on; this fellow was obviously Jewish himself. I gathered that he, the same as most other Jews in my experience, did not prioritize Jewish cultural and religious concerns. (Speaking of which, please remember Shavuot, which begins this – Sunday – evening!)
I asked him what his interests were. He told me he was studying something called “Chaos Theory.” My first guess was that this was a very technical and arcane topic, limited to scientists and their researches. He quickly disabused me of that assumption, saying that, on the contrary, Chaos Theory could be helpful in any discipline or field of inquiry – from the most arcane to the most ordinary. He was claiming it had infinite and varied applications. (Could this subject have some relevance to Judaism, I wondered.)
To my fascinated ears, he explained the basic premise: Supposedly erratic occurrences can be shown to fit, after all, into a coherent pattern. Here’s a technical definition of Chaos Theory: “in mechanics and mathematics, the study of apparently random or unpredictable behaviour in systems governed by deterministic laws” (https://www.britannica.com/science/chaos-theory).
To illustrate, people often cite the “butterfly effect,” defined as the “idea in chaos theory that describes how small changes to a complex system’s initial conditions can produce dramatically different outcomes” (https://www.britannica.com/science/butterfly-effect) – the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in one place having a momentous meteorological impact elsewhere. Simple enough, right?
I ran into Feigenbaum again one time when I was walking across campus. He seemed to remember me and told me what he was spending his time doing: sitting in front of a computer, operating a program that threw millions of numbers at rapid pace through an operating system. Around that time, I saw in the New York Times Magazine an article about Chaos Theory.
On the magazine’s cover was a picture of Feigenbaum, a diminutive, smiling, pixie-like figure with long hair – just as I remembered him – standing posing, in Ithaca’s Taughannock Falls State Park, right in front of the waterfall itself, the tallest one east of the Mississippi.
That image was teasing readers with the question of how myriad drops of water tumbling down, wind-tossed and spraying unpredictably from a great height, might, as seen through a larger analytical lens, trace a pattern of motion and fluctuation that forms some sort of intelligible configuration.
Yes, intriguing.
In those days I was still learning some of the most basic elements of Judaism. I had not yet studied much about Lurianic Kabbalah. Now I’m wondering if it might have some relevance to the subject of Chaos Theory.
According to Rabbi Yitzchak Luria (of blessed memory), sparks of holiness are trapped in kelipot, “shells” of impurity in which the world is mired, our task as Jews being to separate and rescue those holy sparks from the surrounding corruption and return them to their Divine Source. The sparks descended into impurity, Luria explains, when a cosmic catastrophe thwarted God’s attempt to create our world by transmitting some of that sacred energy into hermetically sealed vessels.
Too fragile to contain God’s infinitely powerful presence, they shattered, and from the ensuing catastrophe chaos ensued as sparks spilled out, intermingling with the surrounding filth – the sacred now tainted by the profane and in need of purification. In light of this story, could Feigenbaum possibly have been right that his mathematical studies do apply to any field of inquiry – including ones in which he himself showed no interest, such the pursuit of spiritual truth? Or the rescue of endangered Ethiopian Jews?
Haphazard fallout from happenings over which we have no control produce the impression of disorder. But, just as chaos theorists such as Feigenbaum run numbers through their computers in search of patterns underlying apparent randomness; Jews, like archeologists in search of treasures amid ruins, continue to patiently plod through the wreckage of a world gone bad in order to salvage the Good, to sift out hope from despair.
(https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2014/06/18/08/23/butterfly-370937_1280.jpg)
(https://tse3.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.tqBvMPFyOlBQcjpzgyqDZgHaFE&pid=Api&P=0&h=220)