The Power of Ritual with Rabbi Geoff Mitelman

Rituals and the cosmos

0:00Welcome to Wonder Cabinet. I'm Anne Strangehamps. And I'm Steve Paulson. There are certain times of the year when it feels so good, so nourishing, to lean into old rituals. Like carving pumpkins and lighting candles to celebrate Halloween and the Day of the Dead, or bringing the whole family together at Thanksgiving. This past week marked the end of the Jewish High Holy Days, so it's a good time to reflect on the value of religious rituals, like Shabbat. So thank you, Marcel, for inviting us here for your Shabbat dinner.

0:32This is wonderful. Shabbat is, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel talks about Shabbat, that it's a day when we don't try to engage in commerce, and we don't try to use technology to conquer things. And it's turning from the results of creation to the mystery of creation.

Judaism, science, and poetry

0:50And that's what Shabbat aims to be able to do each week that comes in. So, Marcel, I don't know if you want to light the Shabbat candles. This is Rabbi Jeff Middleman, leading an informal Shabbat observance at the Island of Knowledge in Tuscany. Yeah, so we'll light, and then if people are willing, I want to try doing a couple of, in Hebrew, a nigun, which is a prayer that has no words. We'll put some words in there, but I'll teach this, and you can pick up as we go. Ya-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i

1:49We've been recording conversations here for the past couple of years, and this time, the organizing question for the meeting, is there purpose in the cosmos? Most of the people here are scientists, cosmologists, physicists, neuroscientists. There are also a couple of philosophers of science. And Jeff Middleman, he's a reformed rabbi and the founding director of a group called Sinai and Synapses. It's nice to be with you all. I feel a little bit intimidated by how many PhDs are here, and I'm approaching this from a little bit of a different perspective,

2:22obviously from a Jewish perspective, and looking at the work that I do with Sinai and Synapses of bridging the worlds of religion and science and how do we think about Judaism and science as a whole and form and content is how I want to frame these questions of how do we read texts not as a scientific argument but as poetry. A lot of reading Torah is not just what is said but the ritual element of it and my cousin actually, Matthew Zapruder, who by the way, yes, is the grandson of Abraham Zapruder if you know of the famous Zapruder film

2:56from the Kennedy assassination. His grandson Matthew is my cousin. He was also a poetry editor at the New York Times. He wrote a wonderful book called Why Poetry? And he says, to read poetry is to look for the transcendence poetry can give, the way it can bring us out of our ordinary experiences into different levels of understanding or more exciting, even magical realms. So how do you find transcendence in a sacred text like the Torah? And how do you read the creation story in the book of Genesis if you believe in the Big Bang?

3:27For Jeff Middleman, these are urgent questions and they're part of a larger project to reconcile two very different ways of understanding our place in the universe. A subject you've also spent a lot of time thinking and writing about. Yeah, but he comes at these questions from a very different perspective. I mean, the debates about science and religion that I tend to follow are really about the nature of consciousness and whether there's a dimension of the mind that goes beyond our individual brains and opens up into some sort of cosmic consciousness. But Jeff's questions are not actually metaphysical.

3:58He's not searching for ultimate reality. He approaches religion as poetry, as ritual, which he thinks matters just as much, if not more, than any kind of personal transcendent experience. Let's listen.

Reading Genesis after the Big Bang

4:12So Jeff, most debates that we hear about science and religion, you know, the question of whether they are compatible or not, are really questions about Christianity. You started an organization called Sinai and Synapses, so kind of talking about Judaism and science. How do the questions change when we're talking about Judaism? Judaism as a religion is actually not biblical. It's rabbinic. So Judaism as it's practiced today is based on a collection of texts called the Talmud that also got expanded on over hundreds of years.

4:46So the Bible is the start, but it is definitely not the end of the discussion. The rabbis often say, here's this interpretation, and here's this interpretation, here's this interpretation, and this interpretation. And then I read it as a modern person thinking about it as a, predominantly a poetic text. So there's a lot of wrestling with the text based on, for instance, what modern science says. Right. So Genesis is not a science textbook. And I mean that in different ways. Genesis is a cosmology.

5:18The Torah is a cosmology. It is an explanation of who we are as a universe, as a world, as a people. There is an origin story that comes in. But the authors of the Torah didn't have the James Webb Telescope. They didn't have an understanding of quantum mechanics. They were trying to understand who we were and how we relate to the universe here as well. So Genesis is not meant to be read as a peer-reviewed scientific journal. And on the flip side, if you read a peer-reviewed scientific journal,

5:51it is not going to make your soul sing in the way you hear Genesis is read. Whether that's actually read in English, and if you read it, it reads very poetically. We're actually recording this in the weekly Torah portion of the Torah portion when you read Genesis. It is a year to the Hebrew date of when my daughter is going to become bat mitzvah. She's going to be reading that. So it's incredibly meaningful. And I'm going to hear her sing those words from the bimah.

6:24And I'm going to be, the Yiddish word is, I'm going to be kvelling. I'm going to be so proud. Because there's a tradition of however many thousands of years of people reading and chanting those words over and over and over and over again and finding new interpretations, new ways of looking at these texts. So that's sort of everything for you, right? I mean, that tradition. Yeah. I mean, going back like a couple thousand years, I mean, to read these, and that you and your daughter will be following in the tradition.

6:54You're reinterpreting. I mean, that's all part of what makes this so wonderful for you. And one of the wonderful things about Torah study for me is you find something new each time you read it, there's something that comes across. Or, boy, this speaks to what's going on in my life right now or world right now. I've been talking about the Talmud. You can talk about it as the Torah as you want, where someone says, I want to become a rabbi. I've gone through the Talmud three times. And the rabbi says, that's great.

7:25How many times has it gone through you? So, the text doesn't change year to year. We do. And I think that's an important element. And when we're studying Torah, I lead Torah study at a synagogue once a month. And one of the things that we do is we start by going around, and everyone reads about a verse or two out loud. Because one of the things that happens is when you hear something, it comes across. You're not actually trying to read it to get all the content there, but you're thinking about, well, that's an interesting word choice.

8:02That makes me think of this other verse that I thought about here. And Talmud study, for example, Talmud study, if you go to a yeshiva, if you go to a place where there is a tremendous amount of text study, it is going to be cacophony. Because everyone is arguing, and Steve, you're probably saying, I'm using my hands left and right. You gesture a lot with your hands. Right. I'm very animated because that's how we talk about these questions. So when we're thinking about science, science is a human endeavor, but it's often very intellectual.

8:38And so trying to think of something that is very intellectual, which needs to be a lived experience, how does this impact who I am? The key words of the opening verses of Genesis, for example, and God saw it was good. But that's not a scientific statement of is the world good or not. That's not a provable statement. That's a value statement. And that then impacts how I treat this planet, how I treat the other people around me, how I treat the people who are not around me.

9:11If everything is good, that entails a level of responsibility. That's how I read that text. So I'm going to ask you how you read the book of Genesis because you gave a talk the other day. I mean, I should say that we're at a science and philosophy conference right now in Italy, in Tuscany, and we are at this very moment sitting above this old, I think it's 16th century, Christian chapel. And you walked us through the first few verses of the book of Genesis, the creation story. And we're also sitting here with a bunch of physicists who have their own version of the creation story in physics.

9:46So how do you approach the story of creation from your perspective? So first, by taking the words seriously. And again, using the word poetry, not necessarily as fiction, but as poetry as the words on the page matter. How you say it is as important as what is said. If you read poetry, you wonder, well, why did the author choose that word and not this word? Because they want evocations of other emotional elements or referencing other texts.

10:18So there are a couple of different ways in which reading the opening verses of Genesis through the lens of poetry speak very deeply to me. I don't know if you have memorized those opening words, but can you walk us through some of this? Yeah, so I mean, so the opening words in Hebrew are bereshit barai Elohim, et ha-shamayim, et ha-aretz. So it's a question of, is it in the beginning? Is it at the beginning of God's creating the heavens and the earth? The Torah starts with the letter bet, which is the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

10:52Aleph is the first. Aleph bet sounds very similar to alphabet because they both came from the Phoenician alphabet. But there's a discussion that the rabbis talk about, which is why does the Torah start with a letter bet? Right, why doesn't it start with the first letter? Right, we start with an aleph. You would start that, you know, you can start with it. Why does it start with a bet? And the rabbis give all sorts of different explanations. One of them is the letter bet means that there's something before what you can know. There's always something that we're never going to be able to know.

11:23That bet starts with, okay, I'm starting here. The aleph is the unknown and maybe even the unknowable. And in fact, Big Bang cosmology, I think a lot of people are asking, how did the universe begin? But from what I understand, and if they're astrophysicists, they can tell me if I'm wrong on this, they always look at immediately after the Big Bang. Right, right. All we can know is what happened after the Big Bang. Right, because no one can even get to that fraction of a second of the first bit of the Big Bang.

11:53I mean, it's a total mystery. Right, all we can know is what has existed in this world. So you're saying that this lines up with the Jewish interpretation. Yes, or I would say it is a reading of Genesis that is consistent with Big Bang cosmology. Again, I don't think the authors of the Torah knew necessarily how old the universe was or how we were going to discover that. But to me, again, that's a meaningful way to read the text. There's always more that we will never be able to know.

12:26The rabbis also talk about that if you look at the six days of creation, days two through six always say, Yom Sheini, Yom Shlishi, Yom Revi'i, Yom Hamishi, Yom Shishi, which are the second day, the third day, the fourth day, the fifth day, the sixth day. And so you would assume that the first day would be Yom Rishon of the first day. But it's not. It's Yom Echad. It's day one or one day. There is a conception that maybe you could conceive that there were other worlds before this one.

13:01Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah. Right? And if I'm going back to cosmology, I mean, there is sort of this theory among astrophysicists that, you know, there might have been an earlier universe. Right. This universe might have popped out of an earlier universe. I mean, no one knows. There's no experimental proof of that. But it is a theory. And you can't say, you can't necessarily say this is the first day. You can say this is the day one that we know of this world from coming forward. So that's a way in which I at least reconcile Genesis and Big Bang cosmology.

13:33And the other way that I also think about, and again, this is all based on sort of the poetry of the language. It's playing on words a little bit. But in Judaism, you can play with the words the rabbis will often say, like, don't read this Hebrew word. Read this other word that's very similar. So there's a lot of debate about how to, you know, which translation you're going to use, which words you're going to use, and obviously how you interpret those words. Exactly. Exactly. And again, coming like the end of each day ends in Hebrew, there was evening, there was morning.

14:06Again, if you want to talk about it as like why these words are not those words, there are a couple of different questions that you can ask. Like, well, first of all, starting with evening and morning, that's a little bit the opposite as to how we live our lives. Normally, we start with the morning and then the evening. Why is it so with an evening and then a morning? That's one question. By the way, that's also why all Jewish holidays start in the evening, because it says there was evening, there was morning. So another question is, why doesn't it say there was night, there was day? It's evening, there was morning. So the words, Hebrew words, Erev and Boker are meaningful.

14:42There's evocation there. So tell me, why does that matter for you, evening, morning versus day and night? So because the word Erev is also used in another text in Exodus of an Erev, a mixed multitude came up, Erev Rav. Erev could potentially mean or links to or evokes a word of chaos. And Boker maybe could be, at least again, could be evoke of a word of levakir, meaning to distinguish. So you could read the text to say at the end of the six days of creation, there was chaos, there was order.

15:20Day one, there was chaos, there was order, which also is a little bit ridiculous because the world's natural tendency, the universe's natural tendency is to go from order to chaos. But each of the six days goes from chaos to order. Well, how does that happen? How do we do that? Well, ask scientists on this, ask astrophysicists. The only way that you can take chaos and make it order is to invest time and energy into the system, increase a level of complexity that's there.

15:53And so maybe the idea of what the text says, God's role is taking a world that is chaotic and making it a little bit more orderly. And I take that to mean, well, that's part of my human responsibility. Our world is chaotic. The natural world is to move to chaos. Our political system is designed. It's moving to chaos. How do we put the energy that's required to make the world good, to make it more orderly?

16:29Again, that's a way in which I can still accept the universe's 13.8 billion years. Humans evolved by natural selection, right? That's how I think the world happened. What I'm claiming are not scientific statements about Genesis. They're religious statements. They're about how I lead my life and how I look at the world and how I need to treat people. And, you know, what does this mean about how to live? Right. Right. And because we are people who need community, I think we need levels of ritual.

17:00I think we need structure. And the goal of religion is not to be religious. The goal of religion is to help us become better human beings. You know, an analogy that I tend to like is religion is kind of like language. Everyone needs language. But the purpose of language is not to develop language. The purpose of language is to communicate. But different languages have different ways in which they speak about that.

17:33And they may be contradictory. They may be mutually incomprehensible. But they're all trying to achieve the same thing. So how do we translate from one language to another in the same way that religion is the way in which we look at, or at least for me, how to look at and live in this world? Everyone's trying to make the world better. At least I think they are. Everyone's trying to find meaning. Everyone's trying to go about their day-to-day lives. What's going to be the orientation through which that's going to be the most meaningful?

18:06I mean, the other thing that I would say, though, is that, I mean, just hearing you talk about this, you take such delight. I mean, you do. You really do. I mean, you're sort of gesturing and you're like, I mean, it's getting off on this incredible piece of poetry. Yeah. And when you actually go back and read the first few verses of Genesis, there aren't that many words there. Exactly. And again, like, how do you keep coming back to it? I've taught an entire class on just the first 30 or so verses of Genesis. And then, boy, we can do a whole conversation about Genesis 2, which is an entirely different creation story.

18:42And how do we reconcile those? And what is the cosmic story versus the human story? It's not only my favorite Torah portion, favorite thing to talk about, because it thinks about all these questions of Judaism and science. But my wife became bat mitzvah on parashat barashit. I'm looking at this text. My daughter, as I said, in about a year. And then my son a couple years from now. And so there's this connection of not just these wonderful, heady ideas, but, like, it makes me emotional thinking about that.

19:13Okay. Hold that thought for a moment. And when we come back, we'll talk about God, ritual, and why Jeff says Judaism is really about being religious but not spiritual. Hi, it's Anne.

Autobiography and theological language

19:33I am so glad you're joining us. We have some amazing guests lined up for the weeks ahead, and I'm really excited about them. And here's a tip. Maybe you know this already, but if you follow Wonder Cabinet on Apple Podcasts, those new episodes will show up automatically, like a little weekly gift in your podcast feed. And I hope you like it.

19:57This is Wonder Cabinet. I'm Steve Paulson. My guest is Rabbi Jeff Middleman, the founding director of Sinai and Synapses. You know, the other thing that really strikes me is we've barely mentioned God. Right. Don't we have to talk about God if we're talking about the creation story and, you know, who is God and what's God's role in all of this? Yeah. And I think, again, drawing the distinction between God versus religion, I'll quote, again, I've seen all these in names of other people.

20:28But Rabbi Laura Geller is the one who I first ever read this, who said, all theology is really autobiography. What we say about God has much more to say about ourselves than it says about God. At least my theology, and this, again, comes up in the text in a variety of different ways, which is that I think asking the question, do you believe in God? Who is God? What is God? Those are not great questions because those are, again, binary answers. Aren't those kind of important questions? So they are important questions. But if I were to say to you, like, do you believe in God?

21:01In many ways, that's kind of a leading question, right? If I come to you, do you believe in God? I'm asking that question with an expectation that you're going to answer in a certain way. And if you answer wrong, I'm going to be upset, whether you're a religious person or an atheist. And it also answers a question like yes or no. But if I were to ask you a question of what do you believe about God? How do you think God works in this world? Or tell me about a moment when you felt connected with the divine.

21:34That opens up that conversation, right? That's a question where I can learn a little bit more about you. You can learn a little bit more about me. We are finite human beings who use limited language to talk about God. My theology is very much that God is in process. I think, look, I think all language that we talk about God is metaphor. And it's worth pointing out that in the Jewish tradition, I mean, there's this whole question of what's God's name, which is hugely sort of complicated.

22:09Right, and in fact, the text says, I will tell you what God's name. Moses says, tell me your name. And God says what God's name is. And God says God's name is, in Hebrew, Eya Asher Eya, which is really hard to translate. But people say, I am what I am. But it's maybe more accurately of, I will be what I will be. I am what I will be. I will be what I am. It's a process. It's a dynamic conversation. So God is not an entity here. Right, there's a relationship that comes in.

22:41When we pray, there's a prayer that's said, traditionally three times a day, but it's often said of our God, God of our ancestors, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob. At least modern rabbis talk about this. There's two different, there's actually four different elements of this, or maybe even talk about five. But there's our God. By the way, not my God, our God. So there is an element of it's not just about me. But that it's not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.

23:11That God has a different relationship with Abraham than God has with Isaac, than God has with Jacob. In the same way that my relationship with God is different than your relationship with God. As I actually don't know what your relationship with God is, and I'd be interested to hear about that as well. But that doesn't mean that it's a different God. In the same way that who I am, or who you are, you're Steve, right? You are a person. But you're a different person when you are watching the Milwaukee Brewers, versus when you're with your family, versus when you're on a hike, versus when you're doing an interview.

23:53You are still the same person, but your relationship changes. That's kind of how I view God. That God is the same God, but relates to each person, each entity, in different kinds of ways. So in your talk the other day, you said something that I found really fascinating. You said, you don't really think about God philosophically. I mean, like these questions of the existence of God, who God is, that doesn't really do much for you, which is really interesting, I have to say.

24:24Why don't you think about God philosophically? Because I think it's much more about the lived experience.

Religion over personal spirituality

24:33It's much more important to me as to how I lead my life. What kind of example am I showing to others? Am I doing the right thing? As a Jew, I have a lot of anxiety about that in a lot of ways. And so that's how I strive to bring more of God's presence into the world. But thinking about who or what God is is less important to me than who I am and how I act either brings more or less of God into this world.

25:10Now, the other thing that's really interesting is you're not really talking about the spiritual experience of God. And, of course, there is this whole sort of mystical tradition within Judaism, the people who really study the Kabbalah. You don't really go there, do you? No. And it's interesting of what spirituality looks like and very much in favor of when people find spiritual experiences. I think those are wonderful elements. And there's a lot of people who are spiritual but not religious. Right. And on some level, Judaism is about being religious and not spiritual.

25:47Or at least it's more important to be religious than it is to be spiritual. Let me explain what I mean by that. Because religion, at least the Latin root, is religio, like to bind somebody that's there. So, I go to Shabbat services almost every week with our family and I find it kind of boring. I go and I love it and I'm bored. And it's all like – and that's – Wait, why do you love it if it's boring? That's a good question, right? Like that's – because sort of that is – because that's my obligation.

26:20Like I need to be there. And there's something that is really powerful of after services. We have what's called the Kiddush, which is a – there's some – depends on what's there. But there's some egg salad and sometimes there's French toast and there's bagels. And we're at services for maybe an hour, hour and a half. And then we're at Kiddush for another hour, hour and a half or so. And that's where so much of the conversation happens.

26:51That's where what we've lost a lot of our society is able to see the people that we don't necessarily see all the time, interact with them, and then find out, oh, my God, your mother is not doing well. How is she doing? So, it's the community that matter. But the community is brought together through these rituals, which is through the tradition. Right, through the tradition and knowing it each time. And seeing my kids know these prayers. And there's something that is – there are certain prayers that are said each year and sometimes each week, sometimes each month.

27:27But there are some – there are a couple of prayers that I don't want to miss. Like, I will not leave the sanctuary because I don't want to miss that prayer. And that has a spiritual experience because I think so much of spirituality, we're searching for a high in a lot of ways in spirituality. And first of all, you can't live your life on the spiritual high all the time. Or, I mean, people would say, or you're looking for some direct experience of the divine. Right. But you can't necessarily plan for it.

27:59No. Right. Right. And so, some of it is giving yourself as many opportunities as possible to have that spiritual experience. Right. So, when I go to services, I'm there maybe 40 to 50 times a year, something like that, on services in some way. Let's say we have a spiritual experience. Let's be generous. It's like you have a spiritual experience, one out of every hundred times you're doing something. I'm giving myself an average of one every two years. But if I show up at something and, you know, how often are we able to go to the Tuscan Hills?

28:32How often do we go to the Grand Canyon? That's much less frequent. Right. It's about, you know, that's maybe one or two times in a lifetime. Being able to give myself the opportunity and, by the way, in the same way that knowledge allows you to be able to learn more, that you feel comfortable in that space. You know, for example, when people meditate or do something that's often viewed as, you know, as a spiritual experience, it feels really uncomfortable at first.

29:02Right. They have to kind of know what they're doing and they need to get used to doing it there before they actually feel it. And some of that is you need to be able to know the prayers. You need to be able to know the rhythm. You need to be able to know what's happening. And I'm willing to be, I'm willing to be bored a little bit because there's also something that's, on some level, it's deeply spiritual that I get to see my friends that I don't get to see every couple, you know, I get to see them once a week and we get to, we talk about baseball and we talk about trivia or we talk about what's going on in the world.

29:34And that's, like, that's a deeply spiritual experience. And one of the things that I think we've lost a lot in our society, particularly, like, during COVID, if you want to meet someone or talk to someone, how often is it that you say, all right, I'm going to schedule this for a week from now and we're going to meet from 1230 to 130 and here's the link. And you have to schedule the social conversations. Right. Which then usually doesn't happen. Right. Versus, like, you go at our synagogue, there's 200, 300 people who were there.

30:07There's kids running around. Our phones are either in our homes or in our pockets or in our cars or, like, we're fully present. And we can talk to that person. Then, oh, another person comes in and we get to have this, like, that doesn't happen so much in our society right now. That's what's deeply spiritual to me. And that's, I think, where religion can come in. So I say being religious but not spiritual, the religiosity, I think, can lead to a level of spirituality. You're able to find more spiritual moments when there is a structure.

30:38Now, when you were talking about this the other day, you were saying that you did have one, what we might call a classic spiritual experience in Jerusalem. Yeah. Yeah. So I was at a synagogue. It's a progressive synagogue. So you go to Jerusalem. You go to Israel. And there's not a lot of non-Orthodox religious people. In Jerusalem, you're either totally secular. In Israel, you're totally secular. If you're secular, you're going to Tel Aviv. You're going to the beach. Go to Jerusalem. It's going to be pretty Orthodox there.

31:09So there's not many Reformed Jews, although there are some. So there was one Reformed synagogue that I went there. And it got a huge number of people. And it ended with a song that's at the end of Psalm 150, which is the Psalm of Hallelujah. The prayer ends in Hebrew, usually translated as let everything that has breath praise God. But again, I love biblical grammar. In Hebrew, Kohan Neshama really might be translated as let the entirety of your breath praise God.

31:44And so we sang it. And I happened to know the melody of it. And it was singing it. And it's very simple. It's only a couple of words. And it was in a round. And I closed my eyes. And I joined in the singing there and hearing it and singing it. And that was, I would say, the one time in my life where I kind of felt God's presence in a way that afterwards I was walking down. I had to like sort of stop and take a couple of breaths and sort of reflect on that.

32:16I don't think it necessarily changed my life in any kind of way. I don't think God spoke to me. But that was a moment that was awe-inspiring. And so I'm also kind of happy to know that I'm not actively looking for another one. If another one comes, fantastic and wonderful. And I will feel whatever I'm feeling there as well. But feeling that experience was a moment. That's one of the things that ritual can do is ritual allows us to truly feel a moment that we've lost, I think, in our society.

32:54Because so much of our time is homogenous. And so when a child is called to the Torah for the first time, is becoming barba mitzvah, when a couple gets married, there are ways of bringing that in and feeling that connection that's there. Yeah, that is beautiful. So I have one final question that is off in a different direction.

A wedding kiddush cup

33:19So we're just starting this new podcast called Wonder Cabinet. And one thing that we're sort of playing around with, this idea of a wonder cabinet for the modern age. You know, this is not like a 17th century wonder cabinet. So if we have an imaginary wonder cabinet, and you could put something in that cabinet of wonders, it could be an object, it could be an idea, a concept, it could be an experience. What would you want to put in our wonder cabinet? So at least my initial thought is the kiddush cup that my wife and I got for our wedding for a variety of reasons.

33:58One is that we got that from our family members. So it has a tradition in there. It's one that we've used basically every Shabbat since we've gotten married. It is absolutely gorgeous. Like I look at it and I'm honestly always terrified that when I wash it, that I'm going to break the glass. Like that is legitimately one of my biggest fears because this kiddush cup means so much. And because kiddush, it's the prayer over, not the wine, although the kiddush is off, it's actually the prayer over the day.

34:32It's both an evocation and it says it is a memory of the creation of the world and the exodus from Egypt. It is both the universal element that we are part of this incredible world that we live in. And it's also part of the Jewish people's history. And it's also an obligation of lifting people out from whatever slavery they are experiencing in.

35:04That we have – it is not about us. It is about others. It is all of those elements. And my kids are now able to lead kiddush and their own kiddush cups that are not quite as beautiful as this one. So it has so many different levels of meaning for me and it's also what has been said for hundreds, thousands of years, God willing will be said for hundreds or thousands of years, that it is so deeply personal and so universal.

35:35And the words that we say on Shabbat are actually from the opening verses of Genesis. And so it's a physical manifestation that I hold. Someone looks at it and goes, oh, that's a pretty kiddush cup. But for me, there's so many levels of meaning that that's what I would want to bring. That is a wonderful place to leave it. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, that was great. Thank you, Steve. This was great. Yay, nay, nay.

36:06Yay, nay, nay, nay, nay.

Credits and production notes

36:09Rabbi Jeff Middleman is the founding director of Sinai and Synapses, a group looking to find common ground between religion and science. This conversation was recorded at the Island of Knowledge think tank in Tuscany with support from Dartmouth College and the John Templeton Foundation. And we've got more lined up for future episodes. They'll be in our podcast feed as the Island of Knowledge sessions. Thanks, as always, to our audio engineer, Steve Gottscher, and to our digital producer, Mark Rickers.

36:43Wonder Cabinet is based in Madison, Wisconsin, and Fersher, Vermont. I'm Steve Pauls. And I'm Anne Strangeamps. If you have questions or comments, you can always reach us at wondercabinetproductions.com. And if you sign up for our newsletter, you'll get updates on everything we're thinking about and doing. Be well, and see you next time. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.