One Among the Stars: The Evolution of Jewish Cosmology

The stories we tell about our place in the World lay the foundation for how we comprehend our roots, our identity, and our purpose. The dynamic history of Jewish cosmology illuminates a path forward.

“Cosmologies are deep-rooted, symbolically expressed understandings of “humanness.” They predate all other human structured expressions, including religion and social and political orders.”
- Gregory Cajete, Native Science, 1999

For as long as humans have wondered about our place in the universe, we have gazed up at the night sky in awe, searching for symbols and meaning. Across the world, various cultures have developed different stories to explain the happenings of the heavens – and their relationship to the Earth below. Judaism is no exception. Similar to other cultural cosmologies, the Jewish struggle to comprehend the human place and purpose in the World has roots in the foundational stories we use to perceive the history of the Cosmos. In this essay, I will explore the evolving role of cosmology in human, and particularly Jewish, Life. We will examine the unfolding relationships of understanding that have long interwoven story, perception, and interdependence into the heart of our knowledge of our place in the World. By considering the development of our ideas about both the heavens above, and their role in shaping the World we’ve come to know, and people, I hope to start a discussion on the role that cosmological stories — stories about the creation of the Universe — play in structuring the ways we live and comprehend our purpose in the World.

In the modern day, it can be hard to imagine the significance of the night sky to our ancestors. Today, with an ever larger proportion of humankind living in cities, fewer and fewer of us can see the infinite stars and majestic swirling clouds of the endless sky above our homes. With this tragic loss, fewer kids spend their childhoods wondering about what exists out there; less and less do we lift our eyes to the heavens and wonder about the wandering movements of the planets above; only rarely do we notice the nightly turning of the stars above. Do you ever wonder what your ancestors thought about the nature of the Cosmos? What we see when we look out into the night sky is shaped by the stories and people who inform us of what we are seeing. By taking the time to apprehend the Cosmos as it was conceptualized by ancient and medieval Jewish thinkers, we will gain new insight regarding the role that astronomy, cosmology, and the heavens play in constructing not only our understanding of our place in the Universe, but also our understanding of the Vastness enmeshed within and beyond the limits of our comprehension.

The Roots of Jewish Cosmology

In the minds of our pre-modern ancestors, the daily, monthly and annual turning of the night sky were seen as having a profound influence on human life. From an ecological standpoint, this is reasonable intuition – agricultural cycles are tied to the seasonal rhythms of rainfall and warmth. A culture which built its knowledge of the stars in relation to this cycle would naturally understand the stars as “influencing” their ecosystems – as the stars really did come to drive agricultural lifeways across the world, informing people on when to sow their seeds,and when to harvest. We could imagine that all over the Earth, hunter-gatherers would have come to build systems of ecological knowledge regarding what plants, animals, and other needs would be available at which times of the year through stories written in the stars. In this way, the human perception of the seasons, and thus the heavens, has perhaps always been of fundamental importance to human survival. And people have always wondered why this was.  

The contemporary understanding about what the Sun, moon, and night sky are is not something we can intuitively apprehend unless we are taught stories or other frameworks to perceive both the Nature of matter and energy, and the Vastness of  space and time. Without modern science, it would only be intuitive to assume that the time of year when a child was born — the positions of constellations and planets overhead — could directly influence that child’s personality, virtues, and destiny. As an ancient mantra states: As above, so below. Changes in heaven influenced changes on Earth. And thus Astrology emerged on the landscape of the Ancient Near East and beyond. 

Astrology takes many forms, and numerous animistic and polytheistic traditions built upon astrological interpretation to better comprehend the connections between our World and the motions of the heavenly bodies above. Various archetypal deities were imagined to live in the heavens — not as a part of the fixed stars, which form constellations and rotate in perfect harmony with the turning of the Earth — but as the planets. The Greek word from which planet arises means wanderer. From the perspective of the Earth, there are 7 planets that might be understood as wanderers – unbound to the turnings of the Vastness beyond. These classical planets were the  Sun and Moon, Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn. Each of these heavenly bodies can be seen wandering alone across the night sky, and time and time again these “planets” have come to be understood as the manifestation or physical embodiments of gods. By telling stories about these gods — and by increasingly describing them as almost-human beings, symbolic archetypes who behave in remarkably human ways — the Cosmos became full of heroic icons, ideals towards which humans could dedicate their lives and aspirations. This polytheistic approach created a view of the Cosmos divided and transformed into the dominions of this or that god; a universe full of competing forces, distinct kinds of peoples, powers vying against one another and whose destiny became forever at odds with the destiny of other peoples and deities. People became driven by cosmic forces. Forces whose source was so far removed from this World  as to make human knowledge a nigh impossibility. These gods were knowable through the guidance and interpretation of shamans, priests, and charlatans.

The Monotheistic turn — beginning like a trickle amongst various peoples in the first millennium BCE, and moving like a tidal wave across the Roman Empire in the first centuries of the common era — ushered in an entirely different perspective. Within the landscape of competing polytheistic worldviews, Judaism (extending back to its roots, with the idol-smashing Abraham) stood harshly opposed to this consensus of each planet being its own deity, divided in various offices in a pantheon. Judaism sought to crush the idolatrous ideas that the 7 classical planets were the physical embodiment of gods. One way it did that was through various stories and traditions around the number 7. From the number of “days” it took G-d to create the cosmos, to the importance of shabbat, Judaism created the sense that 7 symbolized wholeness, completion, and perfection. The interest in the number 7 preceded Jewish interest, with it notably being of tremendous interest to mestopotamian mathematicians, as it’s the first number in a base 60 system (like that of the Babylonians and elsewhere) which does not cleanly divide by 60, and thus transcended their ability to calculate in absolutely precise terms. Alongside observations in astronomy yielding 7 classical planets, and the rise of agriculturally-rooted urban centers, various traditions came to see the number 7 as being of divine significance. But only with Judaism did the 7 gods of these polytheistic pantheons (alongside the 7 planets) get transformed into a singular conception of G-d, alongside with unity of the Cosmos – the Universe.

As Jewish thinkers sought to rebuke various polytheistic theologies, the planets were stitched into a new picture of the cosmos. A picture in which the Oneness of G-d, a singular driving principle which brought the cosmos into being, made the Universe perceptible as a harmonious whole. In the transition from polytheism to monotheism, the distinct forces that came together to bring the Cosmos into being were reimagined as a single Divine principle. And while this principle maintained many names, titles, and symbolic meanings, the first creation story of the Hebrew Bible — the other notably being about the creation of humankind — elevates two interwoven facets of the Divine. The world began with the Word, and the Breath. 

Genesis 1 opens: the World began as a void, unformed; the Breath of G-d moved over the surface of the primordial deep. And then G-d speaks light into being. 

What follows is the creation of the World – its Land, its Ocean; and all the living beings that have shared the planet we call home. From this story, a new cosmology comes together. The entire world was created through the immediacy of the Divine: the Living Word, Breathing the whole World into Existence. While this story is merely a myth, like all myths, it transformed the spiritual life of those who truly listened. 

As Jewish thinkers engaged with scholars and philosophers of Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, and beyond, eventually a new philosophical consensus emerged – one based in the unity of the Unmoved Mover, the transcendence of the Absolute, and the interconnectedness of all that Existence. From the interrogation and integration of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies, which we can see in a nascent from within the works of Philo of Alexandria, and was further developed into Christian Orthodoxy by Thomas Aquinas among others, philosophy as a whole came to see reality as bound with the unity of G-d, the Absolute.

But as this new philosophical consensus emerged, Jewish scholars and scientists continued to scrutinize simplistic narratives, seeking to uncover the True creation of the Universe. As new ideas emerged from cross-cultural and inter communal dialogue, these were continuously considered – some ideas were rejected entirely, but others were integrated. This led to a slew of distinct images of the structure of the Cosmos, building upon the cosmological systems of other cultures and thinkers. The Sun, Moon, and other Planets were still seen to wander through the Universe, within a nested structure of harmonizing spheres – with the “sublunary” realm, the realm beneath the Moon, being the world in which we lived. Each of the 7 visible planets had their own sphere, each nested within the sphere above it, with an ultimate limit, the firmament, dividing this World from the heavens beyond. Still, G-d existed in the Word and the Breath renewing Creation each day, but this system could not hold. While the esteemed Rambam, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (1138-1204), recreated a system similar to those which came before, G-d remained utterly transcendent, only connected to this world through the Divine overflow descending from beyond the limits of our World. Soon though, new challenges would arise, seeking to break out of the snow-globe that was medieval cosmology

The Origins of Modern Cosmology

Beginning in mid 1500s, new ideas about the structure of the universe — from Copernicus’ heliocentric solar system to from Bruno’s infinite Cosmos, and from Galileo’s physical observations of the planets to Kepler’s laws of planetary motion —worked to effectively overturn the medieval orthodoxy on cosmology. Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, was also going through tremendous innovation. The most significant of these developments,  for the sake of charting the evolution of Jewish cosmology, comes out of the Kabbalah of the monumental thinker, Isaac Lauria. In his mystical system, G-d is the Ein Sof (That Without End), but only with divine contraction, that is, the creation of a space devoid of G-d, could the physical World come into being. This process, known as Tzimtzum, can be imagined akin to the modern “Big Bang” theory of the origin of the universe, in that the origin of the Cosmos began with the expansion of space, ultimately creating discrete forces, particles, bodies, and patterns as the Universe expanded.. Tzimtzum sought to resolve the paradox of the One and the Many, by reconciling G-d’s place in the Universe as an eternal resonance within and between the many discrete beings of the World. This new cosmology postulated a relationship between G-d and the Cosmos; G-d was no longer solely the Creator, but internally harmonizing with the multiplicity of physical existence

This traditional symbol for tzimtzum shows the space opened up within which our World has come into being. The Divine can be seen coming in from beyond, and resonating within the matter of the Cosmos.

“Prior to Creation, there was only the infinite Or Ein Sof filling all existence. When it arose in G-d's Will to create worlds and emanate the emanated...He contracted (in Hebrew "tzimtzum") Himself in the point at the center, in the very center of His light. He restricted that light, distancing it to the sides surrounding the central point, so that there remained a void, a hollow empty space, away from the central point... After this tzimtzum... He drew down from the Or Ein Sof a single straight line [of light] from His light surrounding [the void] from above to below [into the void], and it chained down descending into that void.... In the space of that void He emanated, created, formed and made all the worlds.” - Isaac Luria, Etz Chaim

In the place of previous ideas on theology, metaphysics, and cosmology, thinkers of various traditions and schools constructed the idea of the Infinite and Eternal Universe. Now every star was as a sun, just like our own, each orbited by planets just like those in our own solar system – this begged the question: what of those who dwell on these other planets? What of their creation? And what of their redemption? If G-d really was One, how could the sheer magnitude and majesty of the universe ever come into being? 

Enter Spinoza. Lens-crafter by trade, Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy — heretical within the Jewish community he was raised in — reimagined the meaning of G-d. What if the infinite Universe was itself the infinite Body of G-d? Spinoza’s G-d (or Nature), is not a deity we can anthropomorphize – Nature does not think or plan like we do, nor does G-d have freedom in the absolute sense traditionally attributed to him. In this new way of imagining G-d — as including the Universe, with its infinite heavenly space and planets, including the Earth — G-d is bound up with the trajectories of heavenly bodies, as well as that of our own selves.

From Leibniz and Newton (creators of calculus and physics) to Linaeus and Humboldt (creators of the modern biological taxonomic system and of modern biogeography/ecology), scientists continued to seek a place for G-d beyond Spinoza’s “monstrous” pantheism. To these pious scientists, G-d continuously moved from gap to gap, always relegated to the unknown. And so physics and astronomy, alongside the biological sciences, continued to debate the place of G-d within their mathematical formalisms and their rationalized observations, playing an ever shrinking role until what Nieztche dubbed “the Death of God” – G-d no longer had any place in the worldview of the modern person; cosmology became the study of the origin of the purely physical cosmos, and nothing more.

Towards a New Cosmology

It took a daring brilliant Jewish scholar to once again overturn the consensus cosmology. Albert Einstein understood that the various forces of the Cosmos, Space and Time, were not separate, but deeply interconnected with one another: that energy and matter are two forms of the same underlying principle, that space and time too were inseparable, shaped by the movement of matter and energy through the Cosmos. Once again, the unfolding of the Cosmos became a singular unifying process. And yet, Einstein wasn’t right about everything – for one, he was wrong, arguing that the Universe could not have a beginning. Einstein followed in Spinoza’s footsteps, seeing the Universe, G-d and Nature as perhaps one and the same – going so far as to mathematically demonstrate the infinite space-time of our Cosmos, even advocating the eternally unchangeable boundlessness of the whole physical Universe. But in a strange coincidence of history, the Jewish cosmological idea regarding Creation — which Einstein sought to refute through his cosmological constant — is now upheld by the vast majority of scientific cosmologists:  the Big Bang is seen as the moment creation for our Universe.  The science of cosmology allows us to see the creation of the Cosmos as a grand story through which the whole of existence — from physics and chemistry to the potential for biology and history — first came into being. From this perspective, two places for G-d remain within science. Both are in accordance with the empirical pursuit of knowledge of G-d, in which G-d exists in the fundamental inability of our own knowledge to comprehend the whole, and both are entirely agnostic, they hinge upon our inability to know the whole happening of the Cosmos. The first relies on G-d an easy explanation for that which is fundamentally unknowable about the Big Bang – what caused the Big Bang? G-d. The same can be used to describe abiogenesis – the scientific process by which non-living atoms and molecules came together to create a living thing. This perspective continues the trend of writing G-d off as entirely transcendent, absent from this World except as the Unmoved Mover – the fundamental and first cause of our World, of Life. 

The second way of finding G-d within science lies within the whole of natural history itself – with G-d being a guiding principle through which the interconnectedness of Life is made ever more manifest. By taking the idea of tzimtzum, and applying it to the modern universe, we glean a picture of the role of Life in driving its own evolution, with G-d becoming ever more manifest in the world throughout the course of evolution. Here, we can see G-d as constituting the whole of reality, including the whole of each person, each organism, each cell, all the way down to the very quantum fields in which all Reality (as far as we can perceive) is happening. From this perspective, G-d in the World is an emergent phenomenon, coming into being through the nigh infinite chain of reciprocal interactions between quantum fields and forces, atoms, molecules; organelles and cells, species and metabolic processes; organisms and communities, cultures, stars, and planets. And yet, due to the fundamental indeterminacy of quantum physics (found within the uncertainty principle), as well the irreducible unknowability of both our own unconscious truths, as well as those of all the other minds of our Cosmos, there will always be an essential unknowability within our Universe. Through retelling the story of the unfolding cosmos as it intertwines with the many stories of evolution, from increasing complexity and ecological diversification, to the integration of organisms and environments across space and time, we can rediscover our responsibility as humans in the modern age. Through a comprehensive cosmology, we can rediscover the potent force, the fundamental love, which brings all into being together. This is the path towards a new integrative cosmology.

Still , scientific cosmology remains incomplete. From my own cursory survey of various cosmologies across cultures, from the case of Judaism to far beyond, traditional cosmological stories aren’t composed of a single story, but of two: the origin of the Cosmos, and the origin of the People. While inter-disciplinary scientists continue to try to puzzle out the causes and consequences of the unique evolution of humankind, only rarely are they concerned with the bigger picture that intertwines our story with that of the whole Universe. 

Throughout history, the collective human endeavor to comprehend the cosmos, beginning with the mythological interpretations of celestial bodies and culminating in the precise scientific understandings of modern astronomy, reflects our need to understand our place and history in the Cosmos. The evolution of our cosmological views, from seeing planets as divine wanderers to recognizing them as worlds akin to our own, mirrors our own journey as seekers within the vast expanse of the universe. To me, being Jewish means struggling to find unity within the complexity of modern science – from the quantum to the cosmological scales. And yet, when we fail to incorporate Life, we write ourselves out of Nature. We need a living cosmology, a braided story that harmonizes science and spirit, Nature and G-d. Through a process of dialogue, reconciliation, and openness to the multitude of stories about our origins and places in the World and the Cosmos, we can translate ethical views on Nature back into scientific terms. We too are wanderers in the Cosmos, forever navigating the unknowns of existence, forever searching for our ethical purpose. Science and spirituality are but two ways of seeking this truth. By working to reconcile the empirical facts of science with the ecological and spiritual interconnectedness of all existence, we can build a new story – not a story which flattens our diversity, but one that finds Lived Unity within it. All of us, together. One Earth, One Cosmos; One G-d. Only through dialogue, respect, and love, can we find our true calling – a calling of responsibility, for the time, space, and relationships which brought us into being. A calling to seek ever greater knowledge of the Whole, to find truth-bearing resonance between Word and Breath, and to act with knowledge and care for the sake of the World.