After a nine month journey we're on Mars again looking for life. What might it mean for Judaism if the six-wheeled rover "Curiosity" were to discover traces of life there? Would our concept of God change? The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's recent spectacular landing on Mars of the robotic, car-sized nuclear-powered science lab, adds new life to a question that has long been contemplated by rabbis, Jewish scientists and writers: does life exist on other planets?
There is little likelihood that Curiosity will find signs of intelligent life on the red planet. Instead, the probe's array of scientific instruments will be seeking to resolve if Mars could have ever supported life. Using a robotic arm and a laser that can vaporize rock, it will search for biosignatures--elements, molecules, and other evidence of life.
Rabbis and academics -- "exo-theologians" -- have long contemplated how our views of God might change, in light of a discovery, and have even speculated how Jews might live on other planets speculatively asking: how we will celebrate Jewish holidays light years from home, and on Mars, when should we light the Shabbos candles?
Creating the backdrop for this ET discussion was Jewish physicist and aerospace engineer Theodore von Karman, one of JPL's founding scientists, as well as Jewish scientists, mathematicians and engineers working at the Pasadena space lab, who have helped to design the space probes, and calculate their flights.
It's not that anyone expects to find something like the Dead Sea Scrolls on this apparently dead world, but what if Curiosity captures with its seventeen cameras some other signs of past life as it rolls around the ancient and vast crater in which it landed?
How would Jews greet the news?
As early as 1971, Rabbi Norman Lamm, now chancellor of Yeshiva University, began to grapple with Jewish exo-theology in his essay "The Religious Implications of Extraterrestrial Life." If there is a "discovery of fellow intelligent creatures," he concludes, it will "broaden our appreciation of the mysteries of the Creator and His creations."
Aryeh Kaplan, an Orthodox rabbi with knowledge of both kabbalah and physics also wrote on the possibility of other-worldy life. "The basic premise of the existence of extraterrestrial life is strongly supported by the Zohar," he said.
"The Midrash teaches us that there are seven earths. Although the Ibn Ezra tries to argue that these refer to the seven continents, the Zohar clearly states that the seven are separated by a firmament and are inhabited. Although they are not inhabited by man, they are the domain of intelligent creatures."
As for the Talmud, it tells us that "God roams over 18,000 worlds," and commentators speculate that He roams because there is life out there.
According to Chabad.org, The Lubavitcher Rebbe, basing his discussion on Meroz, an inhabited place mentioned in the book of Judges that the Talmud identifies as a star, pointed out "that there is support in Torah for the notion that life exists on other planets."
Jewish writers too have added their own ET speculations. William Tenn's (Phil Glass) 1974 science fiction story "On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi!" asks the question: who is a Jew? In the story, a group of creatures with gray spots and short tentacles arrive from Rigel IV, and want to be included as Jews at the First Interstellar Neozionist Conference.
Even in our every day expressions, Jews seem to be open to the idea of the cosmos: When we say in Hebrew, "Mazel tov," literally we mean that an event is occurring under a "lucky star." Some of our customs, especially in light of the Curiosity landing, also invite speculation; perhaps even nudging us out of the center of our own existence. Each Saturday night to ensure it is the right time to end Shabbat, we look up and count the first three stars in the sky. Imagine: what if on some distant world, someone is looking up at Earth and counting it as such a star?
Edmon J. Rodman has written about making his own matzah for JTA, Jewish love music for the Jerusalem Post, yiddisheh legerdemain for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, a Bernie Madoff Halloween mask for the Forward, and what really gets stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits for the Los Angeles Times. He has edited several Jewish population studies, and is one of the founders of the Movable Minyan, an over twenty-year-old chavura-size, independent congregation. He once designed a pop-up seder plate.In 2011 Rodman received a First Place Simon Rockower Award for "Excellence in Feature Writing" from the American Jewish Press Association."
and have even speculated how Jews might live on other planets speculatively asking: how we will celebrate Jewish holidays light years from home, and on Mars, when should we light the Shabbos candles?
