What you raise in your last letter is a complaint I have heard expressed many times.  Why do we need to go through that lengthy and boring reading of the genealogies of so-and-so begat so-and-so and so on. This seems like a pointless repetition of unimportant statements of no theological value.  So why is it there and even read in the liturgy?

There are several things we can comment on.  First, notice the symmetry of the generations.  Their numbers are specific and what they point to is the fact that the world is not chaotic but is governed by purpose towards a certain goal.  The facticity of these generations may be questioned but that is not the main point of their inclusion and repetition during worship. Another illustration of this is the actual date of Christ’s birth.  A lot of time has been spent on arguing whether Christ was born on December 25 or not. But the date is telling us something theologically important.  When do the days start to get longer?  It is around this time of the year.  When do the days start to get shorter?  It is around June 24.  And whom do we remember at that date?  John the Baptist.  Through these two dates, the faithful are being reminded of the statement made in the Gospels that Jesus must grow whereas John must diminish.  All the arguments about the correctness of the date of Jesus’ birth date are really irrelevant. What is important are the theological teachings that we can gather from the calendar.  Now this does not mean that all facts are unimportant and can be interpreted haphazardly.  But the actual date of Jesus’ birth carries no important message for us and neither does it impact any teachings of our faith and therefore, its factual relevance is of secondary importance.

So what else do the genealogies tell us?  Well. One of the most important things they tell us is that you are unique, there is no other like you and no other will be a copy of you.  Just step back and think about the long, long thread of ancestors that has led to you.  And even if one of those links were interrupted, you, with all your properties would not exist. How countless are the preparations, overseen and guided by God, that have finally resulted in your coming into being.  In fact, the roots of your being go all the way to the time of Adam, to the time of Abraham and the promises God made to him.  We rarely think about this but we are connected to countless of generations that preceded us. Next time you are at a church service, think of the following.  Look to your right and then look to the left.  If you were to go back far enough in time you would see that these people are in fact close relatives of yours. And this is another reason for the reading of the genealogies – to remind us that we are truly interconnected family members.

But there is another point that comes out of the genealogical readings in the services.  If you look at the amount of time covered in the genealogies you will see that at that time, they cover a huge amount of time in comparison to the perceived age of creation.  Today, they remind the believer, especially in light of what we now know about the universe, that the cosmos has an unimaginable length of time.  We seem to fade into oblivion when we look at our life spans in comparison to the age of the universe, When this is coupled to the huge immensity of creation, our existence pales in significance.  And yet, from what we know about how the universe functions, about its properties and the very fact that we study the universe and make sense of it, we see that we are not insignificant but in a sense, at the very center of meaning in the universe.

If we consider the material constituents of the universe we realize that they are quite restricted. There are ninety-two elements which are available for making up the physical components of the universe.  Of these approximately 30 are necessary for living systems.  The universe itself, presently consists of about 75% hydrogen and about 24% helium. So the question arises as to how the other elements are formed.  Hydrogen and helium are the raw material from which the other elements form in a process called fusion whereby small atoms are fused together to form atoms of larger elements.  Hydrogen has a weight of one and if you combine two hydrogen atoms, you will have a helium atom (this in fact is what happens in the hydrogen bomb). Now if you bring three helium atoms (weight of two for each) you should get carbon (weight of six).  But this is very tricky because the energy levels required to do this – referred to as resonance – is very, very narrow and difficult to achieve.  And yet, it comes about.  Another one of those strange co-incidences that seem to pepper the cosmos.  We could go on and on showing that the likelihood of any of this happening by chance to be so low that we would come to the conclusion that it is impossible. And yet, it happens.  It is curious that this resonance factor was predicted by Hoyle, a British astrophysicist who was also a militant (are there any other kinds) of atheist.  He was so opposed to the Big Bang theory, with its ramifications of suggesting a beginning for the universe, that he proposed an alternate theory for the origins of the universe, the Steady State theory, which was empirically discredited.  But the interesting thing was that when Hoyle proposed the resonance energy for the formation of carbon, he thought it so unlikely that he made a public statement that it appears as if the laws of the universe have been “monkeyed” with.  Hoyle, who was an atheist until he died, concluded that the universe is much more directed and designed than we sometimes think. But even this realization, did not bring him to accepting the presence of God behind the universe showing us that it is not intellectual arguments that are crucial for conversion. Intellectual arguments are important but, in philosophical parlance, they are insufficient to bring us to God.  They may enable us to know about God, but not God. As an aside, Hoyle’s work on the carbon resonance was so important that it resulted in the granting of  a Nobel prize to two American researchers who collaborated with Hoyle, but no Nobel prize went to Hoyle.  Truly, an injustice.

But I seem to have gone off track and let me return to what I started discussing.  The hydrogen bomb is really two bombs – an atomic fission bomb and the fusion bomb which we call the hydrogen bomb.  Why?  Because to fuse, or combine atoms, it takes a very high temperature and this is achieved by the atomic (or fission) bomb which explodes within the hydrogen bomb, and supplies the necessary temperature to allow atomic isotopes of hydrogen – deuterium and tritium – to fuse together and release immense amounts of energy. This, in fact is the process by which stars, such as our sun, generate energy. Similarly, in the universe, in order to fuse smaller atoms into larger atoms, we would need extremely high temperatures and this is achieved in the interior of stars.  This is where the elements are formed. You are literally formed from star dust which is released when the star explodes and spews out the elements that form you. But all of this takes time, a very long time because the original cosmic dust has to coalesce and form stars which go through a long life cycle before they are ready to explode and generate the elements that will enable carbon based life to come into existence. But time, is also connected to the size of the universe, because the universe is dynamic (something we discovered in the twentieth century) and in order for it to generate time and be dynamic, it must also be huge – it must expand with time.

What I am trying to point out to you, is that in fact the huge time span and the immensity of the universe do not speak about the insignificance of man.  On the contrary, they fit into a narrative that is coherent and points to the fact that there is sense in all of that we observe of the cosmos, a cosmos pregnant with the possibility of man.  The universe seems to be a machine for generating the elements crucial for the occurrence of carbon based life.

The lesson we can take away from all this is that even the most innocuous things such as genealogical lists can hold interesting treasures which can enrich our faith if only we dig deeply enough. The other thing is that it is interesting how various things come together to write the story of creation.  It is far too easy to write things off as if they are of no significance but we ignore these things to our own impoverishment.

Sincerely,

Bar-Abbas