It's always hakhel!

One of the difficult things about being a kofer is that there are so many opinions out there in this religion of ours, it's almost impossible not to find one you can agree with and cherish. Take for example Birkas Hachamah, which is taking the blogosphere (and hence the world) by storm, affecting even this little corner of the universe, the Machon L'Horaah of Morristown, New Jersey. A large argument ensued about the sun, the moon, the stars, etc, and the Rebbe's opinion was brought up.

Rabbi Chaim Schapiro, our benevolent leader, mentioned a letter he has seen. Rabbi Klass wrote in the Jewish Press forty or fifty years ago that the earth goes around the sun. The Lubavitcher Rebbe ostensibly (we'll get to that later) wrote a letter protesting this assumption and explained that according to Mr. Einstein it was impossible to prove either way (two bodies circling one another, impossible to ever prove which one is circling which). Rabbi Klass wrote back (presumably in an article) asking if the Rebbe denied that the earth was rotating on its axis! The Rebbe (again ostensibly) wrote back that no, the earth certainly rotated around its axis, but what he held regarding the movement of the sun and the earth remained.

The reason this is all ostensible is because these letters were never sent, or were possibly never sent, or something like that. They're in the collection of R' Nissan Mangel, him of the infamous Ethiopian debacle (cf. Scott) so their validity could be questioned.

Be that as it may, Rabbi Schapiro said that he used to be a big kanoi when it came to this issue (earth rotation) but now he's not. Besides, as he explained, science proves that it's true.

The only difficulty with accepting earth rotation is that it appears to negate the Rabbis' concept of the galgal hatshi'i, which was what used to be the alternative to earth rotation. The simple answer to this issue is that in fact the galgal hatshi'i is the Rabbi's way of saying earth rotation! So now everyone's happy.

Why does this all matter? First of all, it's always a good thing to figure out what exactly we believe in. The Rabbis say some pretty wild things in the aggadata, but once you learn that most of them are allegorical, faith is easier to handle. So too here-I never understood how it was possible to say that the earth was not moving, but now I don't have to. Yes, this is bordering on apologetics, but that's why I'm not the one doing it. When the Lubavitcher Rebbe clarifies a matter of belief that's one thing; when TRS does it, well, that's another matter entirely.

I'll conclude with a famous story. A professor was once told by his Shliach that the Rebbe held that the sun rotated around the earth. The professor was so shocked out of his boxers that he wrote into the Rebbe, "I can't believe that a man as intelligent as you could possibly think that the sun goes around the earth. I'm so confident that you'll tell me that you don't believe such things that I told the Shliach (Zushe Weiner I believe) that if you do I'll put on tefillin for the rest of my life!" Boy was he surprised when he got the Rebbe's answer.

Postscript: I just watched next week's Living Torah, and there's a great story from Yisrael Gordon which ends, "Then we realized that our shul was special. Not only was Hashem there, but also great tzaddikim. We knew we had to behave differently."

Isn't that a great line? I know that some people have in recent days gotten very angry with me for writing things that might provoke our brothers of a snaggish persuasion to hate us-and Rabbi Gordon says it for all the world to see! I can just imagine a snag saying, "What! By you tzaddikim are more important than Hashem!?"

It's great, no?