On July 11, NASA released the first images taken from the James Webb Space Telescope.
A “dawn of a new era in astronomy,” according to the agency, the images provide the most detailed and clearest infrared images of space, including of the most distant galaxies and oldest star clusters detected, according to NASA’s press release.
For scientists, the images from the Webb Telescope are representative of the new opportunities for seeing the universe, as well as a reflection of the culminating efforts to achieve scientific advancement. For spiritual leaders, the reaction is similar.
Though religion and science are sometimes pitted against each other and treated as contradicting ideologies, the reactions to the Webb Telescope images from Jewish astrophysicists and rabbis suggest a harmony between religion and science.
“The two biggest sellers probably for [the James Webb Space Telescope] are its ability to study these extrasolar planets systems, but also its ability to see galaxies and their very early youth by looking very far away and very far into the past,” said University of Pennsylvania Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics Gary Bernstein, who was raised Jewish. “So we’re going to learn an awful lot about how the Milky Way and things like it came to be.”
Though in awe of the new findings about space, Bernstein doesn’t feel the need to attribute the vastness of the universe to a deity, though he says some members of the scientific community do.
“For me, and maybe — probably — a majority of the people working, we don’t feel the need for an agent in nature,” Bernstein said. “I can be awed by what I see there because it’s just what the universe produces.”
“Even on a more basic level, it’s just realizing that the human scale of things is so limited,” he added. “Our experiences are very limited compared to what’s in the whole universe.”
Though Bernstein does not have a strong belief in God, his overall sentiment about outer space aligns with rabbinic thought.
Rhawnhurst Congregation Bais Medrash Harav B’nai Jacob Rabbi Yitzchok Leizerowski shared a similar belief about the significance of the Webb images: “Jewish tradition is replete with references to the vastness, incomprehensibility of the cosmos.”
Greater evidence of the vastness of space serves as a lesson in humility, Leizerowski said. It’s a way to teach modestly and about an individual’s limitations.
Rabbi Abi Weber of Temple Beth Zion-Beth Israel cited a midrash about a Chasidic rebbe who believes an individual should keep two slips of paper in either of their pockets.
In one pocket, the slip of paper says, “I am but dust and ashes;” the other, “The universe was created just for me.”
“We are teeny tiny specks. We are nothing,” Weber said. “And we have to hold within us this great truth that for each of us, the world was created because each of us has a universe in and of ourselves.”
Leizerowski, strong in his belief in a deity, offers flexibility in the language one can use to describe scientific phenomena. He uses the phrase “first cause” to describe the genesis of the universe, opting against using “God,” which can, for some people, conjure up images of a man with a long, white beard and crown.
“Whatever name you’re going to give it … We cannot grasp this purposeful first creation,” Liezerowski said.
One purpose of religion is to prescribe meaning to unexplainable happenings in the universe — to find order in chaos.
“If you want to try to make some sort of sense, some type of order, out of reality, religion provides a certain answer,” he said.
Judaism and astronomy have gone hand-in-hand for centuries, asserts NASA astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman, who studies black holes and gravitational waves.
“In the ancient world, astronomy had a very practical application,” Schnittman said. “And then we see the Jewish liturgy — and also all forms of classic literature and legends, mythologies — that people would just be really fascinated with the sky.”
Astronomy was used for navigation, using the stars to determine directionality, and agriculture, determining what crops to plant by using the cycles of constellations in the sky. Moon cycles have allowed Jews to track the beginnings of new months.
A religious Jew and scientist, Schnittman holds onto the idea that science and religion are not mutually exclusive. He believes that the love of God is so strong, that not only did God create the universe, but also allow humans the tools to begin to comprehend it.
“Why should equations math, multiplication and division somehow explain the actual mechanics of the entire universe?” Schnittman said. “This idea that God made a world that is — it’s really a window into his own life as it were — It’s just, to me, it’s an incredible gift.”
