This week’s parsha is parshas וארא and I wanted to talk to you about one of Hashem’s names that is mentioned in this parsha. So is says וארא אל אברהם אל יצחק ואל יעקב באל ש-י and the sages said that this name stood for מי שאמר לעולמו די or “He who said to his world enough”.
Rabbi Fohman on Aleph-Beta points out, it’s not like I can tell you exactly what the sages meant but I can tell you what it makes me think of. It reminds me of what scientists today think created the world (though the sages lived in a time when these theories didn’t exist)- the big bang theory. If you’re not familiar then let me put some light on it for you.
There was this explosion, something out of nothing (as in time itself literally didn’t exist), nothing was there or happened before the bang. So back to after the bang, there were subatomic particles speeding out of the center-not even atoms. The particles over time are forced by gravity to come near each other and form the simplest atom-hydrogen. So for a time there was only huge clouds of hydrogen in the universe. But gravity starts to slowly draw the hydrogen atoms closer together and friction forms between them and the hydrogen heats up and there’s this thermonuclear explosion where the hydrogen forms helium and you get a star. Now there are stars. Towards the end of a star’s life (when it has nearly used up all its hydrogen) gravity (it’s turning up everywhere) causes the star to implode on itself and explodes (always a explosion) which we call a supernova. In this supernova elements are formed (gold, zinc, copper, you get the idea) they get out in space and become the building blocks for planets. So we have a universe. Why have I been teaching you a science lesson you might ask? Because of the chances. The Big Bang was an explosion, explosion 101, they’re not very ordered, they’re random. A disaster really. But was the Big Bang random? Was it to a disaster? Rabbi Fohrman doesn’t think so. The universe wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been very exact.
There is something called subatomic particles. They were speeding into space and may I ask how fast they were going? If they had just so happened to he going a bit faster, gravity wouldn’t have been able to take hold of them and there would have just been subatomic particles for all eternity. If they were going a bit slower, gravity would have stopped them all together. So how likely was it that they would have ended up going the exact right speed? Was it a chance out of ten? Then you could have said we were lucky. What about one out of a hundred? So we were really lucky. It was estimated to be a one out of 1054 for the subatomic particles to have been going the right speed (to put some light on this number for you it means one out of ten with 54 zeros following-there aren’t names for numbers like that, so let’s say all the leaves on all trees in all of north america is about 1024 power. Ten times that number of leaves is 1025. So now you can see how small a chance we’re talking about.). This was only the beginning of chances though! Then you have the smoothness problem. If the subatomic particles came out too clumpy then we would not have had hydrogen clouds, they would have become so massive that they would have collapsed into black holes. If is was too smooth then the hydrogen atoms would never have formed clouds. So it had to be just clumpy enough to avoid nothing and not become black holes. Well this time that makes the chances one out of 1010123. This last math was done by british scientist Roger Penrose estimated it (one of the people who helped prove that black holes existed). There are also about 13 other areas that have similar problems we have to make perfect in order for the universe to turn out just right (force strengths that have to have perfect ratios and so on.).
Coming all the way back to this name of Hashem in parshas וארא, Hashem didn’t just make the universe, he made it perfectly (imagine making a custom color on a google drawing and going slowly, slowly, slowly and enough). A perfect explosion to make a perfect world. Where the sages referring to what we know now? We can’t really say. But maybe they were referring to hashem stopping a creation. Know we can see the detail he put into stopping creation, not too much, not too little and can realize how perfect the name ש-י is to explain this.
I have to give credit to Rabbi Fohrman on Alefbeta for this dvar torah.
Shabbat Shalom,
Malka Handwerker