Midnight in Tennessee – The untold story of the first Jewish lynching in America
Samuel Bierfield screamed and begged for his life. He swore he would leave town straight away and never return, if they would only let him go. But the men had not come to bargain. They had come for a lynching.
By The Forward and Paul Berger | Dec. 20, 2014 | 4:05 AM

Crime Scene: The city corner where Bierfield’s body was found. Photo by Courtesy of Heritage Foundation of Franklin and Williamson County

FRANKLIN, TENNESSEE — Late one summer’s night in Tennessee, in 1868, Samuel Bierfield sat in the back of a dry goods store with his black clerk Lawrence Bowman and another black man, Henry Morton. Fists pounded on the back door. A voice demanded that Bierfield open up. Bierfield shouted for the visitors to go around the front, unless they wanted to be shot. Moments later, the back door crashed open and a handful of masked men burst into the store.

Bierfield tried to make a run for it. He dashed out of his front door onto Main Street, where about a dozen men were waiting for him. He ran past the mob and into a stable. But the men quickly found him and dragged him into the street. Bierfield screamed and begged for his life. He offered the men money. He swore he would leave town straight away and never return, if they would only let him go. But the men had not come to bargain. They had come for a lynching.

The big tent at Robinson’s Circus had not long since closed down for the evening that Saturday night. Although it was almost midnight, many of Franklin’s residents were still awake. The commotion drew people to their windows and into the street. John L. Burch, a magistrate, tried to intervene. But the mob fired pistols into the air. They ordered everyone back indoors and warned them to keep away from their windows.

Bureau Chief: William Carlin ordered a lynching investigation

Moments later, five shots rang out. One bullet pierced Bierfield’s hip. The other four entered through the front of his head. The pistols were fired from such close range that gunpowder burned Bierfield’s clothes and skin. After the mob rode off, the people of Franklin came out of their homes. They found Bierfield’s body lying on the corner of Indigo and Main streets. Bowman, who had been shot once, was found nearby, mortally wounded.

On August 16, 1868, an inquest jury of eight men recorded that the gunshots that killed Bierfield were fired by “a person or persons to the jury unknown.” Incredibly, the jury added that “from the evidence the jury are unable to say whether the deed was done maliciously or feloniously.” Someone must have thought better of that last statement because those lines were later crossed through.

                                  The gravestones of Jeremiah and Nathaniel Ezell.Photo by Paul Berger

No one took evidence from Bowman before he died. Some newspapers claimed that he was shot by accident. Dr. Daniel Cliffe later recalled that Bowman said he was shot on purpose. Morton, who escaped through a neighboring house, was the only one of the three who lived to tell the tale.

           This letter, of October 1867, is one of several Samuel Bierfield wrote to his family about his life in                 Franklin.Photo by The Forward

Several newspapers blamed the murders on a new, rapidly growing organization of disaffected, white Southerners that called itself the Ku Klux Klan. “Lynch Law in Williamson County,” thundered the Nashville Press and Times. “Murderous outrage at Franklin,” reported the New York Times. The Jewish Messenger noted that “living in Tennessee can hardly be recommended.” Even Democratic newspapers admitted grudgingly that though Bierfield was “an earnest Union man, he was quite an inoffensive Gentleman.”

Although we think of lynching today as a person being hung from a tree, a lynching is any extrajudicial murder by a mob. Thousands of blacks were lynched across the South following the Civil War. The lynching of whites was rare and the lynching of Jews rarer still. Partly because of its rarity, the lynching of Leo Frank, in 1915 in Georgia, is famed as an example of the American Jewish dream turned sour. Which is why it is so strange that the lynching of Samuel Bierfield almost 50 years earlier is barely a footnote in American Jewish history. The American Jewish Archives at the Jacob Rader Marcus Center contains no references to Bierfield in its catalog or in its collection. The Institute of Southern Jewish Life refers to Bierfield only briefly in its encyclopedia entry on Nashville. The lengthiest treatment Bierfield has received to date is the three pages historian Morris Schappes devoted to him 60 years ago in his “Documentary History of the Jews in the United States” under the heading “Double-Lynching of a Jew and a Negro.”

The inquest into Bierfield’s death originally stated that there was no sign of malicious intent.Photo by The Forward

If Schappes had wanted to piece together Bierfield’s life when he researched his book in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he would have struggled. In those days, Williamson County’s clerk held some of the county records while other documents were kept separately at the county courthouse. Williamson County’s first archivist, a volunteer, didn’t begin publishing and transcribing county records until the 1970s. The Williamson County Archives, which contains many of the clues to understanding Bierfield’s life and death, wasn’t founded until about 20 years ago.

Up to now, the few who have researched Bierfield’s murder have relied mainly upon newspaper accounts, which portrayed Bierfield as a two-dimensional character, a carpetbagger and a Radical Republican. Absent from these portraits of Bierfield are key details, such as where Bierfield was from and what he was doing in Franklin during the mid to late 1860s. They are the kind of details that are passed down through family histories and hidden away among family papers. The kind you might stumble upon if, say, you were to track down Bierfield’s distant relatives.

Here then, for the first time, is a much fuller picture of Bierfield’s story than has ever been told. It is based upon archival research, interviews with scholars, historians, and family members, on-the-ground reporting, and never before seen documents, including letters written by Bierfield in the last years of his life.

Today, the few Jews who know Bierfield’s name remember him as the first Jew to be lynched by the KKK — a categorization that implies that it was specifically Bierfield’s Jewishness that marked him out for death. But the historical record suggests something much more complex.

Bierfield was murdered during the opening phase of Reconstruction, when the social, political and economic lines of the South were being radically redrawn. The Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination were still fresh in people’s minds. So too was the fact that while blacks could vote for the first time, many former Confederates were banned from voting. Bierfield was lynched one year after Republicans swept to victory in statewide elections in Tennessee on a tide of black votes and as the Republican Ulysses S. Grant looked poised to win the presidential election of 1868.

Yes, Bierfield was a carpetbagger and a Jew. Yes, he treated blacks with more empathy and respect than most whites in Williamson County. But that was not sufficient for the Klan to want Bierfield dead. It would take something more for the people of Franklin to turn on their Jewish neighbor. In the summer of 1868, the South was a racial and a political tinderbox. All that was needed was a spark.

Captain George Judd and Brevet Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Gelray must have made quite a sight when they arrived in Franklin on August 18, 1868. The two Union Army veterans each lost an arm during the Civil War. Judd, 30, lost his left arm in 1862 at the Battle of Fair Oaks, Virginia. Gelray, 31, lost his right arm the following year at Gettysburg.

The two men were dispatched to Franklin by Major General William Carlin, head of the Nashville headquarters of the Freedmen’s Bureau, to investigate the murder of Bierfield. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands was established in 1865 to negotiate labor contracts between freedmen and farmers, as well as to ensure former slaves had access to education and healthcare. The Bureau was almost universally reviled by former Confederates who saw its agents as meddlers who usurped the authority planters once enjoyed over slaves. In Tennessee, the Bureau had the added difficulty of maintaining order across the land that gave birth to the Ku Klux Klan.

The Klan was established in Pulaski, Tennessee, about 60 miles south of Franklin, in 1866. The Klan’s reputation today as a virulently anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic organization is a holdover from the second iteration of the Klan, which began in Georgia in 1915. The first Klan, which died out in the 1870s, focused almost exclusively on intimidating and killing blacks as well as whites who supported and helped former slaves.

Klan violence did not begin until the end of 1867. But when it did, it spread rapidly across the South. In June 1868, a Freedmen’s bureau agent in Columbia, 30 miles south of Franklin, warned about the “reign of terror” sweeping Middle and West Tennessee. In an official report, the agent, A. H. Eastman, recounted tales of black residents roused from their homes, being beaten, whipped and lynched. He told of schoolhouses burned to the ground and of white teachers beaten and driven from town. Black and white Union sympathizers lived in perpetual fear. “I have been sleeping for months with a revolver under my pillow, and a double-barreled shot-gun, heavily charged with buck shot at one hand, and a hatchet at the other,” Eastman wrote.

In Franklin, Judd and Gelray focused their investigation on one piece of evidence — a widely publicized letter between two black men that appeared to show that Bierfield was complicit in the earlier fatal shooting of a white Williamson County farmer, Jeremiah Ezell. In the letter, Israel Brown wrote to John Nolan that Bierfield had promised to pay Brown and others for the killing of Ezell. Somehow, the letter found its way into the hands of the Nashville Union and Dispatch, a Democratic newspaper, where it was published on August 17.

As Judd and Gelray began their investigation, the Dispatch published an article declaring that the Brown letter provided ample evidence of Bierfield’s guilt. The newspaper declared that Bierfield’s murder was retaliation for Ezell’s murder and not, as some began to fear, the result of anti-Semitism. “The Radicals in our midst are trying in every manner to prejudice the Israelites in the State to believe it is a war waged against them,” the Dispatch reported. “When they come to consider the facts and the circumstances surrounding the deceased, we think they will readily number him among the very few criminals of their nation.”

But Judd and Gelray concluded that the letter was a forgery. Nolan denied knowing anyone by the name of Israel Brown. And O.J. Kennedy, a white Franklin resident and the last person to see the letter, told Judd that he had lost it. “I told him that it was curious he should lose it, and still it should come out in the [newspaper] on the next day,” Judd wrote in his official report of the investigation.

“[Kennedy] said he could not help it, that he lost valuable private papers at the same time.”

On the second day of their investigation, at 10 a.m., Judd and Gelray strode past the 30-foot-tall columns at the entrance to Franklin’s courthouse. Inside, Williamson County’s sheriff had gathered Franklin’s most prominent citizens at Judd and Gelray’s request. In Judd’s official report of his investigation, published in the Nashville Republican on August 21, he wrote of the townspeople: “Most of them were former rebels to my certain knowledge, and I think more than one concerned in the killing of Bierfield and Bowman, were there.”

Gelray addressed the courtroom, his piercing eyes framed by a sweeping mane of dark hair and a bushy goatee: “Does anyone know of Bierfield’s advising the negroes to organize and fight the whites, Ku Klux Klan, or anything of that description?”

No one answered.

“Does anyone know of Bierfield’s offering to furnish powder and balls to such an organization?”

No one answered.

“Does any man know of Bierfield’s saying that the negroes done right when they killed Ezell?”

No one answered.

“Is there any man here who can say anything against the character of Mr. Bierfield in any way, shape, manner of form?”

No one answered.

Carlin repeated the questions. Still no one answered.

Judd wrote in his report: “All looked like a set of whipped curs, as they are.”
He concluded by noting that Bierfield ran a very successful dry goods store and that business was improving. The motive for the murder, as far as Judd could see, was jealousy on the part of a business rival, or rivals, who were “vexed at his success.”

Toronto, May 1865

Dear Parents, … There is little day to day news from Canada, but in the United States is much confusion. The war is just about over. The Northern President was shot two weeks ago in a theater. The Southern President was captured, and with this, comes the end of the greatest revolution in the world. Canada is not involved in this struggle. Til now, there has not been a way to enter the Southern States since they tried to attack the Northern States via Canada. This was prevented by the cautious Canadian Government. This, also, stopped deportations from Canada. As far as our health is concerned, thank God, we are well. In the papers, we read about illness in the surrounding areas of Riga (pest and typhoid). Sam is well and sends his greetings.

Benjamin Bierfield

During the second half of the 19th century, tens of thousands of Jews sailed from Central and Eastern Europe to North America, lured by the promise of economic opportunity and religious freedom. After spending time in crowded northern cities, many of these immigrants soon headed south. They started out as itinerant peddlers with the hope of eventually establishing themselves as merchants. In Nashville, in 1860, one-quarter of the city’s 100 Jewish families listed their profession as “peddler.” After the Civil War, even more Jews headed south searching for opportunity. Between 1860 and 1880, the Jewish population of Tennessee roughly doubled from about 2,000 people to about 3,800.

Peddlers were soft targets for robbers. They often traveled alone and carried money and valuables with them. Jewish merchants, ensconced in their stores and homes, were only marginally safer. The 50 years after the end of the Civil War were littered with cases of Jewish peddlers and merchants who were attacked, robbed and in some cases killed. Jacob Simon was robbed and murdered in his store in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, in 1887. Peddler Gustav Loeb and his wife Julia were robbed and murdered in 1895 in Kentucky. Abram Surasky, another peddler, was robbed and killed in 1903 in South Carolina.

Many peddlers and merchants operated on credit and some of the violence, borne of jealousy, debt and frustration, took on a distinctly anti-Semitic tone. In Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana, on a Sunday night in March 1887, a masked mob opened fire on the storehouses of two successful Jewish businesses, H. & A. Kahn and Felix Bauer. The mob put up signs telling Jews to leave the county by April 1 or face death. Horrified by the mob’s actions, parishioners denounced the act and Louisiana’s governor offered a reward for the attackers’ arrest.

But money was not the only motive for harassment and murder of Jews. As newcomers to towns and cities, Jews were often seen as outsiders. Because many Jews in the South were willing to trade with blacks, they were also seen as social and political rebels. That was what probably led to the murders in Florida of Samuel Fleishman, in 1869, and of M. H. Lucy, in 1871.

Samuel Bierfield appears to have arrived in Toronto, Canada, in the late 1850s. From his letters, it seems likely that he grew up in or around Riga, which is today the capital of Latvia, but was then a major port city in the Russian empire. In a short letter written to his parents in March 1859, when Bierfield was about 18 years old, he says that he has moved out of his uncle’s home in Toronto and that he goes to school regularly. “I can wright [sic], read and speak English,” he tells them. By 1865, Samuel is listed in Toronto’s city directory as a “salesman” living at 422 Queen West St., a five-minute walk from his brother Benjamin, a grocer, who lives at 254 Queen West St.

The following year, Benjamin Bierfield is still listed at the same address, but Samuel has disappeared. Some time in 1866, Samuel Bierfield moved 750 miles south to Franklin, Tennessee. In a June 12, 1867 letter to his parents, Bierfield says that he is working for a local merchant and earning about $1,000 per year, more than twice what his uncle Morell paid him in Toronto. Still, life is hard. He has lost almost all of his money on two speculative ventures — a billiard room and a cotton deal — that went sour. “My dear kind mother do not I pray scold me so much for I have only made a start in the world since I left my Uncle,” Bierfield writes. He is particularly apologetic because his sister is due to get married soon in the Old Country and he is expected to supply the dowry:

I am very sorry that in your uncivilized and godforsaken land the Young men marry for money. I am sure no man can love his wife if she has to buy him with a few dollars. I am mad to think of it. Pray tell him I will guarantee to pay him in three months from date if God spares me providing that my dear Sister loves him. My dear Kind Mother though I am sitting with my back to you now yet I love you none the less; and what is quite as strange I can see you just as plainly as if I stood peeping in upon you. I did not expect to hear from you so soon or else I would have been prepared but as I was sitting in the counting house my employer brought in your welcome letter and I was happily surprised — You ask me if I want a pretty girl! I can tell you I am overrun with that question weekly. But I will have none but one that I can love and she must have plenty of money to coax me with for I like money better than Matrimony. If there is such a Young Lady in your town tell her I am coming some day.

Samuel Bierfield

What drew Samuel Bierfield to this part of Tennessee? The Jewish community in Nashville was established during the 1840s. The community almost tripled during the 1860s as the city swelled with Union veterans and speculators from the North.

Like other Jews across the South, Nashville’s Jews supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. They raised money for wounded Confederate soldiers and, after Nashville’s capture by Union troops, Jacob Bloomstein, a merchant, was arrested and imprisoned for smuggling goods to the Confederacy. After the war, there was a high turnover of Jewish residents as business prospects rose and fell. There were also frequent arguments within and between the city’s congregations. Writing in the Jewish Messenger, in 1870, Mosche Schnurrer noted that “Nashville has four congregations with scarce sufficient numbers to sustain one.” Schnurrer guessed that the discord was caused by “business jealousy and diverse other reasons.” Even so, he said life in Nashville, “delightfully situated on the Cumberland River,” was good. Compared to places like New York City, there was little poverty and rent was cheap.

But Nashville did not appeal to Bierfield. He decided to try his luck 20 miles south in Franklin, a bustling farming town tucked into a bend in the Harpeth River. Williamson County has always been the richest county, per capita, in Tennessee. The rich loam of the countryside surrounding the county seat of Franklin was perfect for growing cotton, corn, wheat and tobacco. During the 1860s, Williamson County produced more wheat than any other county in the state. The railroad, which arrived in Franklin in 1858, allowed goods to be transported quickly and easily to Nashville and beyond. Williamson County was also known for its hog farmers and for its horse breeders who raised trotters for two-wheeled sulkies. The county was mostly dotted with good-sized farms, averaging a couple of hundred acres each. But sprinkled in among them were white subsistence farmers who grew small crops and raised a mule or two.

The Civil War had little physical effect on Franklin. Nashville and Williamson County were controlled by the Union from 1862. The worst fighting during the Battle of Franklin in 1864, which claimed more than 2,000 lives and injured more than 7,000 men, most of them Confederate soldiers, took place on the outskirts of the city. Even today, the antebellum homes and churches are untouched.

But the war did have a great impact on society. In 1860, Williamson County was home to 11,300 whites and 12,200 slaves. After Tennessee seceded from the Union, in 1861, many blacks fled to Nashville or were pressed into service by the Union Army. Almost all of the county’s whites joined the Confederate Army.

As peace settled over the South, Williamson County’s blacks and whites found themselves living in a new reality. Tennessee’s slaves were emancipated in February 1865. Now, in theory at least, blacks were able to negotiate their own labor contracts and work toward a bright, independent future. Meanwhile, many former Confederate soldiers chafed under the leadership of the Radical Republican Governor William Brownlow, who denied them the vote. Tensions between blacks and whites, Democrats and Republicans, boiled over in the summer of 1867, a few months before that year’s statewide elections.

On Saturday, July 6, a speech by Joe Williams a black member of the Conservative faction aligned with the Democratic Party, angered many of Franklin’s black Republicans. A group of blacks marched over to Williams and tried to stop him from speaking. John House, a white former colonel in the Confederate Army, strode into the street and accused a leading white Republican and former Union soldier, Jesse Bliss, of inciting the blacks. Bliss called House a liar, so House slapped Bliss across the face.

Black members of the Union League, an organization of former Union soldiers who were standing nearby, fired their guns into the air in protest. The League marched out of town to a grove where they were addressed by white Republicans who urged them to calm down, return to Franklin and go home peacefully. That evening, at dusk, the League marched into Franklin. When they entered the town square to disband, a pistol shot rang out from the corner, just in front of Colonel House’s dry goods store. A group of former Confederate soldiers and Conservative sympathizers, including some blacks, had hidden in the store waiting to ambush the League. Several volleys of gunfire followed. When the skirmish was over, 30 Union League veterans were wounded, most of them shot in the side and back. Eight Conservatives, including three blacks, were wounded and one white Conservative, Michael Cody, Jr., was killed.

Five days later, Bierfield wrote to his sister Sarah that America was a tough country to start a business in. “I am willing God knows to help you and my parents any way possible but you must pray for me to have better luck as I have lost about $500 in six months all that I was worth, in a riot that occurred here the other week between the Black men and the White men.”

The Franklin Riot occurred just a few weeks after Bierfield applied for U.S. citizenship at the Williamson County Courthouse, renouncing his fealty to Tsar Alexander of Russia. Although Bierfield seems to have accepted North America as his new home, he was not tied to Franklin. In October 1867, Bierfield wrote to his parents that he intended to return to Toronto by January the following year. His uncle Morell had offered him a job at more than double the pay he used to earn. Plus, Morell said Bierfield could take over his business when his uncle “goes home.” Bierfield was optimistic:

I am at present keeping a brand store for the same man I used to manage for last year for you must know that I am considered quite a good merchant and invested with all the authority of the House. I am buyer for them and consequently must travel a great deal which I like. I would like to see Russia again and hope I will some day. Then we can talk over old times and all about America the land of Gold as you call it.

Bierfield wrote that he heard his parents had opened a restaurant or a saloon:

Be sure to put plenty of water in the liquor as it will pay and do not give credit ha, ha. I would like to call and see your Garden and see what kind of a host you make. Please remember me to all inquiring friends and acquaintances and tell them I will be home on a visit maybe in a year or two. Then look out you don’t lose some pretty girl in your town. Dear Parents I was quite shocked to find myself twenty-four years old. I thought I was only nineteen. I feel young as ever though and don’t care. I will try to make money now seeing that I am getting old. No news here.

Your affectionate Son,
Samuel Bierfield.
But instead of moving to Toronto, Bierfield was still in Franklin a few months later and still struggling financially. In a letter of January 12, 1868, to his now married sister, Bierfield says that he has been nominated for a Circuit Court Clerk’s position. If elected, the position paid a salary of $2,000 per year, the equivalent of about $35,000 today. Bierfield adds that he is planning a trip to the South that should pay off handsomely for his employer and for himself.

Soon after, Bierfield raised enough capital to open his own store. Judging by the inventory of goods taken after his death, he focused on clothing and accessories. The inventory included 38 men’s and boys’ hats, 35 pairs of assorted suspenders, 17 business coats, thousands of buttons, hundreds of pairs of boots and shoes, hundreds of yards of denim and muslin, and dozens of hickory and calico shirts. Bierfield also sold gents’ collars, cotton and gingham handkerchiefs, combs, needles, pocket knives, scissors, hair pins, pocket books, bottles of men’s cologne and Galaway’s Magic Oil, cakes of soap, spectacles, and two small mirrors.

His single copy of the Hebrew Bible was probably not for sale.

Despite his run of bad luck, Bierfield struck an upbeat note in his January letter to his sister. He apologized for still not having cobbled together a dowry. Soon though, he hoped his fortune would turn:

Last year I was very unfortunate having lost all I made. But that is the way they do here and I not discouraged. Having a stout heart and a willing hand that never yet forsook me I intend to battle with this life’s discomforts in plain open battle and if victory crowned my efforts which I hope it will, all of you will not then repent of my delay. Let this be your maxim — there is a good time coming wait a little longer.

Mary Ezell was no stranger to tragedy. Her father died before the age of 30, when she was still a little girl. Her brother Nathaniel Ezell was ambushed and killed at the age of 21 by guerilla fighters, known as bushwhackers, during the waning months of the Civil War. Mary later recalled that Nathaniel was buried in a “very common walnut coffin, unlined and roughly made” and that his “shroud was of second hand clothes badly worn.”

On the morning of July 16, 1868, Mary Ezell walked home from her brother-in-law’s house along the Carter’s Creek Turnpike, about five miles south of Franklin. Mary was about 18 at the time. When she was about 600 yards from home, she was attacked and raped by a black man. A group of local white farmers set out to find her attacker. In a nearby field, they found William Guthrie, a farm laborer, who fit the description.

Guthrie was arrested and indicted on July 17 on charges of rape. The indictment said that Guthrie did “ravish and carnally know” the young woman against her will. The Nashville Union and Dispatch reported the same day that this “negro devil” had committed “an infernal outrage on a beautiful young lady in Williamson County.” The newspaper’s editors celebrated Guthrie’s capture: “Let his blackened soul be launched into eternity!”

Mob justice was not uncommon in Williamson County during the late 1800s. In 1888, Amos Miller, a black man accused of raping a white woman, was dragged from court in Franklin and hung from the courthouse railings. Three years later, Jim Taylor, a black man accused of shooting a policeman, was seized by a mob from Williamson County’s sheriff and hung from the Murfreesboro Pike bridge.

Perhaps fearing for Guthrie’s safety, Judge William H. S. Hill ordered that Guthrie be transferred north from the Williamson County Jail to Davidson County “where he will be safely kept till the further order of this Court.” But before the order could be carried out, a group of men showed up at Williamson County’s jailhouse the night of July 17 and took Guthrie from his cell. His body was found the next morning on the Spring Hill Pike. He had been shot.

Before the Civil War, the violence might have ended there. But Williamson County’s blacks were now free men. On Saturday, July 18, Mary Ezell’s brother Jeremiah Ezell rode into Franklin with a handful of men to pick up supplies. As he rode home along the Carter’s Creek Turnpike, he was ambushed by what newspapers later described as a party of more than 50 men. The light was fading, but the Nashville Tri-Weekly Union and Dispatch reported that “a sprinkle of incendiary whites, who are known as the ringleaders of the worst negroes,” were spotted among the ambush party. Two of Ezell’s companions were wounded in the firefight. Ezell was also wounded; he died the following day.

The Nashville Tri-Weekly Union and Dispatch railed against the white instigators of the ambush:

There is an element in the State who are determined, if possible, to first incite the negro to lawlessness and crime of the most hideous character, and then to uphold and sustain them in it; that the innocence and virtue of the white woman may be violently assailed and outraged by the most evil disposed of negroes, and when justice overtakes the fiends, their blood is to be avenged by armed mobs ambushing the high roads and murdering the white men of the neighborhood.

Then, the newspaper’s editors appealed for whites in Williamson County to take action.

We say to the fathers and sons, and brothers of Williamson, protect and defend your wives and mothers and daughters at all hazards, and to the last extremity. The white people of Tennessee will sustain you.

To reach Jeremiah Ezell’s grave you drive south out of Franklin about five miles along the Carter’s Creek Pike, past gently rolling woodland and the occasional, modest two-story home. You make a left onto Mile End Road and then turn right onto a dirt track and ford a creek. From here, you must continue on foot into the woods, heading up a hillside and climbing carefully through a barbed wire fence until you reach a vantage point that looks out over the lowland. There, scattered among the trees, are several dozen gravestones. Some look as though they are about to topple over, others have snapped into pieces. Many of the stones are so worn down by the elements that it is impossible to make out who is buried there. But you can still make out some of the names: the Cottons, the Sweeneys, and Nathaniel and Jeremiah Ezell.

Samuel Bierfield may not have known the Ezells. But he certainly knew their relatives. In March 1867, Bierfield signed a $1,250 marriage bond for the wedding of Henry P. Sweeney to Elizabeth Cotton. A marriage bond was a guarantee that there was no legal impediment to a marriage. Often, though not always, marriage bonds were signed by relatives of the bride and groom. Elizabeth Sweeney, née Cotton, is buried about 20 feet from the Ezell brothers.

Elizabeth Cotton and Henry Sweeney were first cousins. They were also first cousins with Mary and Jeremiah Ezell. Their mothers were sisters, members of the Huggins family. The families were also tied to the Ku Klux Klan. Family lore passed down through the Sweeney side of the family has it that Henry Sweeney’s mother, Sarah Ann Huggins, used to leave bedsheets on the front porch in the evening for the Klan’s nighttime raids. The sheets were returned before dawn and left on the porch to be laundered and made ready for the next night’s activities.

Henry Sweeney’s father, Charles Sweeney, was particularly close with the Ezell family. He became Mary Ezell’s ward after her father died and he remained her guardian even after her mother remarried. Mary Ezell’s brother Nathaniel Ezell lived with his uncle Charles Sweeney from 1860 until his death, apart from stints serving in the Confederate Army and a season growing a crop for his mother.

After Nathaniel Ezell was killed by bushwhackers, his body was carried to Sweeney’s house and Nathaniel was buried in an old suit that belonged one of Sweeney’s sons.

No one picked up on this link between the Ezell family and Samuel Bierfield at the time of the murders or since. If Bierfield was in any way seen as complicit in the murder of Jeremiah Ezell, it is conceivable that the Cottons, the Sweeneys and the Ezells might have decided they had a right and a duty to take matters into their own hands.

The evidence for Bierfield’s complicity in Ezell’s murder seems thin. Historian Stanley F. Horn, in his book on the Ku Klux Klan, published in 1939, said that the white leader of the group that attacked Ezell was spotted riding a white horse and that Bierfield owned the only white horse in Franklin. But no documents from the period or eyewitness testimony support that assertion. Horn goes on to show his bias by describing Bierfield as a carpetbagger who “encouraged the negroes to loaf around his store.” The only other piece of evidence against Bierfield, the letter tying him to Ezell’s murder, was discounted by the Freedmen’s Bureau investigators as a forgery in 1868, and there is no reason to doubt that decision today.

But what if there was a grain of truth in the allegation that Bierfield was a Radical Republican? Nashville’s Jews, whose sympathies lay with the Conservatives, appear to have taken little interest in coming to Bierfield’s posthumous defense.

Franklin’s only other Jewish resident, Louis Kaufman, sprang to the defense of the people of Franklin. Kaufman wrote a letter to the Republican Banner, on August 22, 1868, in which he protested “efforts made in certain quarters to prejudice the Jewishkind against our town by asserting that S.A. Bierfield… was killed because he was a Jew.” Kaufman stated that since he moved to Franklin in 1865, he had suffered no “prejudice or malice” because he was a Jew. “Our town is as quiet and law-abiding as any in the Union and I am certain that every person, whether he is Jew or Gentile, black or white, who behaves himself will be treated kindly by the people,” Kaufman wrote. Was he insinuating that Bierfield did not behave himself and that is why he was killed?

Bierfield’s letters show no trace of Radical Republican activity and no interest in politics in general. The two subjects foremost in his mind seem to have been finding a wife and making money. His murder doesn’t make sense.

It’s possible that Bierfield was framed for Ezell’s murder by a business rival. Colonel House, for example, who owned the dry goods store from which the Union League was ambushed in the riot of 1867, may have felt threatened by Bierfield. Newspaper accounts of Bierfield’s murder all speak of Bierfield owning his own store by the summer of 1868. An account written 60 years later by a local Klan sympathizer, John F. Campbell, places Bierfield’s dry goods store on the same block on Main Street as House’s store. House was among six charter members sworn into the Ku Klux Klan of Williamson County in 1868. The ceremony took place in his store. If Bierfield was doing well, what better way to get rid of him than to fabricate evidence that Bierfield incited blacks to kill Ezell, and then use the Klan to put Bierfield out of business.

John Pogue Jr. was arrested for Bierfield’s murder in September 1868. An eyewitness, Ed Lyle, claimed that he saw Pogue shoot Bierfield. During the few days Pogue spent in the Davidson County Jail, seven people came forward to give Pogue an alibi. On September 28, Judge John Hugh Smith had no option but to release Pogue. The Republican Banner said that Lyle had perjured himself in order to collect a $500 reward offered by Governor Brownlow for information leading to Bierfield’s killers.

After September 1868, Bierfield’s murder became lost among the hundreds of lynchings that plagued the South through the decades that followed. At its peak, between 1880 and 1930, there was an average of one lynching per week. More than 200 people were lynched in Tennessee, most of them black. If anything, Bierfield’s lynching was remarkable because he was white and because he was a Jew. But the most remarkable aspect of all may be that it has been forgotten and ignored for so long.

Contact Paul Berger at berger@forward.com

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Appearance and reality (Mikketz, Covenant & Conversation 5775 on Ethics)

Finally after twenty-two years and many twists and turns, Joseph and his brothers meet. We sense the drama of the moment. The last time they had been together, the brothers planned to kill Joseph and eventually sold him as a slave. One of the reasons they did so is that they were angry at his reports about his dreams. He twice dreamed that his brothers would bow down to him. To them that sounded like hubris, excessive confidence and conceit.

Hubris is usually punished by nemesis and so it was in Joseph’s case. Far from being a ruler, his brothers turned him into a slave. That, however, turned out not to be the end of the story but only the beginning. Unexpectedly, now in this week’s parsha, the dream has just come true. The brothers do bow down to him, “their faces to the ground” (Gen. 42: 6). Now, we feel, the story has reached its end. Instead it turns out only to be the beginning of another story altogether, about sin, repentance and forgiveness. Biblical stories tend to defy narrative conventions.

The reason, though, that the story does not end with the brothers’ meeting is that only one person present at the scene, Joseph himself, knew that it was a meeting. “As soon as Joseph saw his brothers, he recognised them, but he pretended to be a stranger and spoke harshly to them …Joseph recognised his brothers, but they did not recognise him.”

There were many reasons they did not recognise him. They did not know he was in Egypt. They believed he was still a slave while the man before whom they bowed was a viceroy. Besides which, he looked like an Egyptian, spoke Egyptian and had an Egyptian name, Tsofenat Paneakh. Most importantly, though, he was wearing the uniform of an Egyptian of high rank. That had been the sign of Joseph’s elevation at the hand of Pharaoh when he interpreted his dreams:

So Pharaoh said to Joseph, ‘I hereby put you in charge of the whole land of Egypt.’ Then Pharaoh took his signet ring from his finger and put it on Joseph’s finger. He dressed him in robes of fine linen and put a gold chain round his neck.  He made him ride in a chariot as his second-in-command, and people shouted before him, ‘Make way.’ Thus he put him in charge of the whole land of Egypt. (Gen. 41: 41-43)

We know from Egyptian wall paintings and from archeological discoveries like Tutankhamen’s tomb, how stylised and elaborate were Egyptian robes of office. Different ranks wore different clothes. Early pharaohs had two headdresses, a white one to mark the fact that they were kings of upper Egypt, and a red one to signal that they were kings of lower Egypt. Like all uniforms, clothes told a story, or as we say nowadays, “made a statement.” They proclaimed a person’s status. Someone dressed like the Egyptian before whom the brothers had just bowed could not possibly be their long lost brother Joseph. Except that it was.

This seems like a minor matter. I want in this essay to argue the opposite. It turns out to be a very major matter indeed. The first thing we need to note is that the Torah as a whole, and Genesis in particular, has a way of focusing our attention on a major theme: it presents us with recurring episodes. Robert Alter calls them “type scenes.”[1] There is, for example, the theme of sibling rivalry that appears four times in Genesis: Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau and Joseph and his brothers. There is the theme that occurs three times of the patriarch forced to leave home because of famine, and then realising that he will have to ask his wife to pretend she is his sister for fear that he will be murdered so that she can be taken into the royal harem. And there is the theme of finding-future-wife-at-well, which also occurs three times: Rebecca, Rachel and Jethro’s daughter Zipporah.

The encounter between Joseph and his brothers is the fifth in a series of stories in which clothes play a key role. The first is Jacob who dresses in Esau’s clothes while bringing his father a meal so that he can take his brother’s blessing. Second is Joseph’s finely embroidered robe or “coat of many colours,” which the brothers bring back to their father stained in blood, saying that a wild animal must have seized him.

Third is the story of Tamar taking off her widow’s dress, covering herself with a veil, and making herself look as if she were a prostitute. Fourth is the robe Joseph leaves in the hands of Potiphar’s wife while escaping her attempt to seduce him. The fifth is the one in today’s parsha in which Pharaoh dresses Joseph as a high-ranking Egyptian, with clothes of linen, a gold chain and the royal signet ring.

What all five cases have in common is that they facilitate deception. In each case, they bring about a situation in which things are not as they seem. Jacob wears Esau’s clothes because he is worried that his blind father will feel him and realise that the smooth skin does not belong to Esau but to his younger brother. In the end it is not only the texture but also the smell of the clothes that deceives Isaac: “Ah, the smell of my son is like the smell of a field the Lord has blessed” (Gen. 27: 27).

Joseph’s stained robe was produced by the brothers to disguise the fact that they were responsible for Joseph’s disappearance. Jacob “recognized it and said, “It is my son’s robe! A wild animal has devoured him. Joseph has surely been torn to pieces.” (Gen. 37: 33).

Tamar’s appearance dressed as a veiled prostitute was intended to deceive Judah into sleeping with her since she wanted to have a child to “raise up the name” of her dead husband Er. It seems that in the pre-mosaic law of levirate marriage, other close relatives like a father-in-law, not just a brother-in-law, could fulfil the duty. Judah was duly deceived, and only realised what had happened when, three months later, Tamar produced the cord and staff she had taken from him as a pledge.

Potiphar’s wife used the evidence of Joseph’s robe to substantiate her claim that he had tried to rape her, a crime of which he was wholly innocent.

Lastly, Joseph used the fact that his brothers did not recognise him to set in motion a series of staged events to test whether they were still capable of selling a brother as a slave or whether they had changed.

So the five stories about garments tell a single story: things are not necessarily as they seem. Appearances deceive. It is therefore with a frisson of discovery that we realise that the Hebrew word for garment,b-g-d, is also the Hebrew word for “betrayal,” as in the confession formula, Ashamnu, bagadnu, “We have been guilty, we have betrayed.”

Is this a mere literary conceit, a way of linking a series of otherwise unconnected stories? Or is there something more fundamental at stake?

It was the nineteenth century Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz who pointed out a fundamental difference between other ancient cultures and Judaism: “The pagan perceives the Divine in nature through the medium of the eye, and he becomes conscious of it as something to be looked at. On the other hand, to the Jew who conceives God as being outside of nature and prior to it, the Divine manifests itself through the will and through the medium of the ear . . . The pagan beholds his god, the Jew hears Him; that is, apprehends His will.”[2]

In the twentieth century, literary theorist Erich Auerbach contrasted the literary style of Homer with that of the Hebrew Bible.[3] In Homer’s prose we see the play of light on surfaces. The Odyssey and Iliad are full of visual descriptions. By contrast, biblical narrative has very few such descriptions. We do not know how tall Abraham was, the colour of Isaac’s hair, or what Moses looked like. Visual details are minimal, and are present only when necessary to understand what follows. We are told for example that Joseph was good-looking (Gen. 39: 6) only to explain why Potiphar’s wife conceived a desire for him.

The key to the five stories occurs later on in Tanakh, in the biblical account of Israel’s first two kings. Saul looked like royalty. He was “head and shoulders above” everyone else (1 Sam. 9: 2). He was tall. He had presence. He had the bearing of a king. But he lacked self confidence. He followed the people rather than leading them. Samuel had to rebuke him with the words, “You may be small in your own eyesbut you are head of the tribes of Israel.” Appearance and reality were opposites. Saul had physical but not moral stature.

The contrast with David was total. When God told Samuel to go to the family of Yishai to find Israel’s next king, no one even thought of David, the youngest of the family. Samuel’s first instinct was to choose Eliav who, like Saul, looked the part. But God told him, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance but the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16: 7).

Only when we have read all these stories are we able to return to the first story of all in which clothes play a part: the story of Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit, after eating which they see they are naked. They are ashamed and they make clothes for themselves. That is a story for another occasion but its theme should now be clear. It is about eyes and ears, seeing and listening. Adam and Eve’s sin had little to do with fruit, or sex, and everything to do with the fact that they let what they saw override what they had heard.

“Joseph recognised his brothers, but they did not recognise him.” The reason they did not recognise him is that, from the start, they allowed their feelings to be guided by what they saw, the “coat of many colours” that inflamed their envy of their younger brother. Judge by appearances and you will miss the deeper truth about situations and people. You will even miss God Himself, for God cannot be seen, only heard. That is why the primary imperative in Judaism is Shema Yisrael, “Listen, O Israel,” and why, when we say the first line of theShema, we place our hand over our eyes so that we cannot see.

Appearances deceive. Clothes betray. Deep understanding, whether of God or of human beings, needs the ability to listen.

—

[1] Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, New York, Basic Books, 1981, 55-78.

[2] Heinrich Graetz, The structure of Jewish history, and other essays, New York, Ktav Publishing House, 1975, 68.

[3] Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957, 3-23.

Read more: Appearance and reality (Mikketz, Covenant & Conversation 5775 on Ethics) | Jonathan Sacks | The Blogs | The Times of Israel http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/appearance-and-reality-mikketz-covenant-conversation-5775-on-ethics/#ixzz3MGteChnn

The Heroism of Tamar

The little-known meaning of the word Hanukkah
It’s not just Americans who have trouble pronouncing the name of this winter holiday. Israelis get it wrong too.
By Shoshana Kordova | Dec. 16, 2014 | 2:06 PM
Hanukkah: What does the word mean?

A menorah depicting Judean warriors bearing torches, made in around 1950. In exhibit at the Eretz Israel Museum.

Hanukkah is the holiday probably best known in the English-speaking world as the hard-to-pronounce, impossible-to-spell Jewish alternative to a certain winter festival that involves a fat bearded man, the Middle Eastern birth of a deity and, sometimes, snow.

Sure, the English spelling differs from greeting card to greeting card. But that’s just because Chanukah/Channuka/Hanukkah is a transliteration of the Hebrew, and the world hasn’t quite reached unanimous agreement on how or when to add an “h” at the end of a Hebrew word, double up on certain consonants or, most importantly, express the guttural “kh” sound often described as the kind you might make if you had a fish bone stuck in the back of your throat.

Here’s Hanukkah’s dirty little secret: As long as everyone knows what you’re talking about, it doesn’t actually matter how you spell the name of the Festival of Lights in English (though many publications, including this one, go with the Associated Press spelling for consistency’s sake). So let’s set aside the English spelling conundrum and take a look at the Hebrew word.

Desecration of the temple

Americans can take comfort in the fact that they’re not the only ones who have trouble pronouncing the name of this holiday. Israelis get it wrong too, typically pronouncing it KHA-noo-ka, though the formal (albeit widely ignored) pronunciation is supposed to be kha-noo-KA. Either way, that fish-bone sound at the beginning is all-important, followed by a “noo” that rhymes with “moo” (rather than one that, as in the common Anglicized pronunciation, resembles the vowel sound in “nook” or “book”).

The name of the holiday, Hanukkah, comes from the Hebrew word for “dedication,” “consecration” or “inauguration.” It refers to the Jews’ rededication of the Second Temple in the second century B.C.E., after the Hellenistic Greeks of Syria had desecrated it by using it for the worship of Greek gods and the sacrifice of (famously non-kosher) pigs.

A popular children’s song for the holiday begins with the words: “The days of Hanukkah, hanukkat mikdasheinu [the dedication of our Temple], fill our hearts with joy and gladness.”

Some sources are specific when describing what exactly was rededicated. The non-canonized book I Maccabees, which tells the story of Hanukkah, relates: “And they celebrated hanukkat hamizbe’ah [the dedication of the altar] for eight days, and they brought sacrifices with joy in their hearts.”

The term hanukkat hamizbe’ach is also used in the Bible, to refer to King Solomon’s dedication of the First Temple (2 Chronicles 7:9) and in the traditional Hebrew song “Maoz Tzur,” often sung right after lighting Hanukkah candles.

A spiritual victory

The story of Hanukkah is one of a Maccabean military victory and – at least as significantly – a spiritual victory over Hellenistic attempts to prohibit Jewish practices.

This spiritual victory is symbolized by the Jews’ discovery of a single sealed, pure vial of olive oil to light the seven-branched menorah (pronounced in Hebrew as me-no-RA), one of the primary ritual objects in the Temple. According to the Hanukkah story, though the oil was enough for just one day, it miraculously lasted for eight, and we commemorate this by lighting Hanukkah candles or oil lamps for (as Adam Sandler would have it) eight crazy nights.

The Hebrew spelling of Hanukkah also serves as a mnemonic device, reminding us that the date of the holiday is the 25th of the Hebrew month of Kislev, as represented by the last two Hebrew letters of the holiday, which are equivalent to 25 in the Hebrew alphanumeric system.

A rabbinical dispute

If the Hebrew word is broken down a different way, it can remind us of one of the key religious rulings regarding the method of candle lighting – and an argument between two schools of rabbinical thought about the order in which the candles should be lit.

In this breakdown, the first two letters stand for “eight candles,” since het is eight in the alphanumeric system and nun is the first letter of nerot, the Hebrew for “candles.” The rest of the word (the letters vav, kaf, heh) is an acronym for vehalakha k’veit Hillel, “and the religious ruling follows Beit Hillel.”

This refers to a dispute between two groups of scholars over whether one should light eight candles on the first night and dwindle down to one or, as members of Hillel’s school of thought argued, light one candle first and an additional one every night of the holiday, since we should strive to increase sanctity rather than diminish it. The Hillel school won out

As for what exactly to call the eight-branched Hanukkah candelabra (plus a separate branch for the extra shamash candle): it is popularly known by many English speakers as a menorah, and before the revivification of the Hebrew language it was known as a Hanukkah menorah in Hebrew as well. But in modern-day Israel, if you’re looking for the holiday candelabra, you should call it a hanukkiah (derived, naturally, from the name of the festival).

The State of Israel may have chosen the menorah of Temple times to represent the country on the state emblem, but ask an Israeli shopkeeper for one and you may find yourself wondering why he’s offering you a night light (menorat layla), a desk lamp (menorat shulhan) or perhaps a wall fixture (menorat kir). Hanukkah may last only eight days, but get thee to a light fixtures store like a house on fire, and you’ll find that in Israel we use menorahs all year long.

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The Revolt of the Maccabees: The true story behind Hanukkah

The ancient Israelites, led by Judas Maccabeus, did vanquish the oppressor Antiochus – but Greek rule would only be shaken off 20 years later under Judas’ younger brother. A must-read before the holiday begins Tuesday night.

By Elon Gilad | Dec. 10, 2014 | 4:21 PM

Judas Maccabeus (Wikimedia)
The warrior Judas Maccabeus, or Judah of Maccabee, drawn by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794-1872). Photo by Wikimedia Commons
Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, celebrates the Maccabean Revolt (167-160 BCE), and the narrative that Jewish rebel Judas Maccabeus vanquished the evil Greek emperor Antiochus and rededicated the Temple, at which the miracle of the oil occurred.

All true, with the possible exception of the miracle of a day’s supply of lamp oil lasting eight days: but that narrative skips over the schisms within the ancient Hebrews’ society, mainly – who exactly was rebelling against who.

In the late 6th century BCE, the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great let the Jews go home after decades of exile in Babylon, and turned Judea into a semi-autonomous theocracy run by the High Priest and the powerful priestly families in Jerusalem.

“I am Cyrus, Achaemenid King”, written in ancient Akkadian, Persian and Elamite, carved onto a column in Pasargadae. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Judea’s semi-autonomy would continue for centuries – after Alexander the Great conquered the region in the 4th century BCE; and it would persist under the Ptolemaic Kingdom, based in Egypt, and the Seleucid Empire in the north, which dominated Israel at different times.

During this time, the Hellenic domination of the Near East spurred economic development; and the dominant urban class in Judea, the priests, became increasingly wealthy and Hellenized.

But the majority of Judeans were rural farmers. They were not becoming rich, nor were they adopting the ways of the sophisticated, cosmopolitan Jerusalemites. This socio-economic divide would play a decisive role in the following events.

The rise of Antiochus IV

In 175 BCE, Antiochus IV Epiphanes ascended to the throne of the Seleucid Empire, which at that point controlled Judea.

Wanting to outdo his father and capture Egypt, and unite the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms into one superpower, Antiochus needed money. When a faction of Judean priests offered to pay him to replace the High Priest Onias III with his younger brother Jason, he took the money. Why not?

But this created a dangerous precedent. Three years later, another rich priest, Menelaus, offered even more money and was appointed high priest by Antiochus. Jason went into exile.

Menelaus however was not from the line of high priests and his appointment upset the conservative Judeans. Worse, he took treasures from the Temple to pay Antiochus, which was sacrilege – and on top of all that, he was a radical Hellenizer. His appointment was not popular, and had to be enforced by force.

Meanwhile in Antioch, Antiochus decided it was time to make history. He led his army to Egypt to achieve what his father had not. Upon rumors of his death in battle there, civil war erupted among the Jews in Jerusalem as Jason reappeared from exile, and led a popular revolt against Menelaus.

Reign of terror

But Antiochus was not dead. He had been humiliated by the Romans and forced out of Egypt. Yet while retreating, he heard of the struggle in Jerusalem – and reinstated Menelaus.

Once back in power, Menelaus led a reign of terror and set out to Hellenize the Jews. A statue of Zeus was placed in the Holy of Holies, among other violations of Jewish law.

Many pious Jews resisted Menelaus’ measures, some by martyrdom, others by escaping into the wilderness, and still others by active revolt.

Most prominent of these rebels was the group led by Mattathias of Modiin and his five sons – of whom Judas Maccabeus proved to be the most able and drew the rest of the Jewish rebels into his camp.

Judas and his band of rebels staged guerrilla warfare against Hellenized Jews; Menelaus in response summoned the Greek armies from neighboring Seleucid provinces.

Judas crushes the Greeks

The first army to arrive, from Samaria in the north, was led by Apollonius. Judas was tipped off, and crushed the small army on the road to Jerusalem. He was to take Apollonius’ sword and use it until his death.

Next came a larger force, led by Seron, from Palestine in the west. Once again Judas ambushed them, and 800 enemy soldiers were killed.

Alarmed, the Seleucids dispatched a real army, from Antioch, led by two generals, Nicanor and Gorgias. But once again, Judas proved his military prowess: he routed the army and seized its weapons.

Even after this defeat, the Seleucid army remained bigger and badder than the small rebel force. There was real danger that it would press on and crush the rebellion.

But at this point, the rebels caught a lucky break. In 167 BCE, King Mithridates I of Parthia attacked the Seleucid Empire and captured the city of Herat, in modern-day Afghanistan. Antiochus had to concentrate his forces on the Parthians.

With the Seleucid army thus preoccupied, the rebels captured Jerusalem in 164 BCE, though the Akra Fortress overlooking the Temple Mount remained loyal to Antioch (within it, Assyrian soldiers and Hellenized Jews would remain steadfast).

The Temple was rededicated and the eight-day holiday of Hanukkah was created, modeled on the eight-day holiday of Sukkot. The story of the miraculous oil lasting eight days is apocryphal: It would only appear centuries later in the Talmud (Shabbat 21b).

Jerusalem under siege

With his power base in Jerusalem firmly established, Judas began attacking gentile cities around Judea, though the purpose seems to have been not subjugation, but spoils. Then he returned to Jerusalem and laid siege to the Akra.

By this time, following Antiochus’ death in Parthia in 164 BC, the Seleucid Empire was ruled by Lysias, regent for the child King Antiochus V Eupator. Lysias set out to destroy Jerusalem and crush the Maccabean revolt once and for all.

After beating Judas in battle south of Bethlehem, Lysias laid siege to Jerusalem.

The rebel Jews’ situation was desperate. They lacked the supplies to withstand a lengthy siege, not least because that year was a shmita year.

Once again, luck intervened. Philip, one of Antiochus’ generals, revolted and set out to storm the capital, Antioch. Anxious to return to the capital, Lysias reached terms with the Jerusalemites. Judea was restored to its former semi-autonomous state and Menelaus was replaced as High Priest by Alcimus, a moderate.

But as soon as Lysias left, fighting broke out again between Judas’ rebels and the moderates who supported Alcimus. An army led by the Seleucid general Nicanor was dispatched to aid the moderates. In 161 BCE, Judas beat Nicanor’s army in the Battle of Adasa and Nicanor was killed.

That same year, after defeating Philip, Lysias and Antiochus were killed by Antiochus’ cousin Demetrius I Soter, who ascended to the Seleucid throne. He dispatched another army, led by the general Bacchides.

They faced off in the Battle of Elasa in 160 BCE. Judas’ band was no match for that 20,000-strong army. The Jews were crushed and Judas was killed.

Thus the revolt ended in tragedy. But some years later, changes in the geopolitical landscape would lead to Judas’ youngest brother Jonathan Apphus ascending to the high priesthood, and to the establishment of the Hasmonean Dynasty that would rule an independent Judea from 140 to 37 BCE.

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DIOS Y EL BIG BANG, Daniel C. Matt

En el principio fue el big bang, hace catorce mil millones de años. Un vacío primordial que carecía de materia. Pero no estaba realmente vacío – se encontraba más bien en un estado de mínima energía, embarazado de potencial, lleno de partículas virtuales. A través de una fluctuación cuántica surgió entonces una especie de burbuja en este vacío. En el interior de la burbuja se encontraba una suerte de semilla caliente y densa más pequeña que un protón que contenía, sin embargo, toda la masa y la energía de nuestro universo. En menos de una billonésima de segundo esta semilla se enfrió y expandió enormemente, más rápida que la velocidad de la luz, inflándose hasta alcanzar el tamaño de un pomelo. La expansión del universo luego se desaceleró pero realmente nunca se ha detenido en forma completa.

En sus primeros segundos, el universo era una sopa indiferenciada de materia y radiación. Se necesitaron tan solo unos pocos minutos para que las cosas se enfríen lo suficiente como para que los núcleos se formen. ​​

Llevo por lo menos unos 300.000 años más para que los átomos finalmente aparezcan. Durante eones de tiempo, nubes de gas se expandieron y enormes esferas  resplandecientes de gas caliente formaron las estrellas. En lo profundo de estas estrellas, reacciones nucleares dieron a luz elementos como el carbono y el hierro. Cuando las estrellas envejecieron explotaron arrojando estos elementos en el universo mismo. Con el tiempo estos elementos se reciclaron en nuevos sistemas solares. Nuestro sistema solar es tan solo un ejemplo más de este reciclaje; una mezcla de materia producida por los ciclos de las estrellas – estrellas que se forman y explotan continuamente. Nosotros, junto con todo lo demás que existe en el Universo, somos literalmente polvo de estrellas.

La Tierra se formó y comenzó su enfriamiento hace cuatro mil quinientos millones de años. Mil millones de años más tarde varios microorganismos se había desarrollado. Exactamente cómo se desarrollaron, nadie lo sabe. Sabemos que la atmósfera primitiva de la Tierra estaba compuesta de hidrógeno, vapor de agua, dióxido de carbono y gases simples, tales como amoníaco y metano. Bajo estas condiciones climáticas, los compuestos orgánicos tal vez lograron sintetizarse de manera espontánea.

O tal vez la vida derivó hacia la Tierra en forma de esporas de Marte o de otro sistema solar en nuestra galaxia o de otra galaxia en el universo. Sea como sea la vida finalmente comenzó. Todas las formas que constituyen lo que llamamos vida comparten códigos genéticos similares y se remontan a un antepasado común. Todos los seres vivos somos literalmente primos.

A nosotros, los humanos, nos gusta sentir que somos el pináculo de la creación y en efecto es cierto que somos las cosas más complejas en el universo conocido. Nuestro cerebro contiene cien mil millones de células unidas por cien billones de conexiones sinápticas. Sin embargo somos simultáneamente parte del proceso evolutivo, descendientes de las bacterias que surgieron hace 3500 millones de años. En el vientre de nuestra madre, cada uno de nosotros vuelve a trazar todo el lapso del desarrollo que lleva de la ameba al ser humano. Nuestra especie – Homo sapiens – es un primate que se desarrolló en África separándose de la línea de los chimpancés hace aproximadamente siete millones de años. Todavía compartimos con los chimpancés el 99 por ciento de nuestros genes activos. Si se me permite la expresión, somos simplemente un mono mejorado.

El Big Bang es una teoría, no es un hecho. Para los cosmólogos esta teoría nos ofrece la explicación más convincente de la evolución del universo, “la mejor aproximación a la verdad que actualmente poseemos”. Esta teoría como cualquier otra teoría podría estar equivocada. Lo más probable es que el Big Bang finalmente termine formando parte de otra teoría más amplia que surgirá algún día. El consenso científico es que la teoría del Big Bang es correcta dentro de su propio ámbito específico: es simplemente una explicación de la evolución de nuestro universo desde una mil millonésima de segundo acontecida luego del origen inicial llegando hasta la actualidad. Qué pasó antes de esa primera fracción de segundo está más allá de los límites de esta teoría. El término “Big Bang” sugiere la existencia de un principio definido en un tiempo finito. Pero esta teoría no se extiende más allá de ese punto inicial en la historia del Universo. El origen último del universo sigue siendo en esta teoría algo impenetrable.

Una versión de esta teoría, conocida como “inflación cósmica caótica y eterna”, fue desarrollada por Andrei Linde. Esta versión representa un universo que de forma continua va reproduciéndose a sí mismo alcanzando así la inmortalidad en forma aleatoria. Nuestro universo es tan solo uno más de los incontables universos que se van auto-reproduciendo en forma de “burbujas”. En cada una de estas burbujas, las condiciones iniciales son diferentes y diversos tipos de partículas elementales interactúan en formas inimaginables. Incluso diferentes leyes de física que ni conocemos tal vez se apliquen en cada una de estas burbujas.

No todos los dominios del universo se van inflando como burbujas hasta explotar en nuevos universos, pero los dominios que si lo hacen (como el nuestro) dominan el volumen del universo y logran en su continua expansión hacer brotar otras burbujas en una reacción en cadena perpetua. Así el universo entero es un “árbol de vida”, un grupo de burbujas unidas entre sí, creciendo de manera exponencial en el tiempo. Cada universo en potencia nace en lo que puede considerarse un Big Bang, es decir, “una gran explosión”. En realidad, para ser más precisos deberíamos decir realmente una explosión pequeña, una fluctuación de vacío seguida por inflación continua.

Si las especulaciones de Linde son correctas, tal vez deberíamos traducir las palabras del Génesis no como “En el principio…”, sino “En un principio Dios creó los cielos y la tierra.” De hecho, esto representa una traducción más literal del hebreo original: Be-Reshit: “En – un principio”.

La ciencia no tiene un consenso sobre el origen último del Universo. Algunas teorías defienden un comienzo bien definido, mientras que otras, como la de Stephen Hawking, no lo hacen. Sin embargo ambas teorías sugieren una lectura radicalmente nueva del Génesis. Si Dios creo el mundo a través de la palabra, dando órdenes “para que se haga la luz, las aguas y las estrellas”, entonces el lenguaje divino es lo que conocemos como energía; el alfabeto, las partículas elementales; la gramática de Dios, las leyes de la naturaleza. Muchos científicos han detectado una dimensión espiritual en la búsqueda de estas leyes naturales. Para Albert Einstein el discernimiento de las leyes de la naturaleza era una manera de descubrir cómo piensa Dios.

¿Pero tiene el universo un propósito? ¿Hay un sentido para nuestra existencia? ¿Por qué debemos vivir éticamente? En este sentido, la cosmología no nos puede ayudar demasiado. Darwin intensifica aún más estas preguntas. ¿Somos diferentes de otros animales? ¿Se puede superar la violencia y el salvajismo? Tal vez, como la esposa de un obispo anglicano comentó al enterarse de la teoría de Darwin, “descendientes de los monos?! Mi Dios! Esperemos que no sea cierto, pero si lo es, recemos para que no se convierta en conocimiento general!”. Su comentario se hace eco del temor que conocer la verdadera naturaleza de nuestros antepasados ​​amenaza con deshacer nuestro tejido social construido a partir de miles de años.

Hemos perdido nuestro mito. Un mito es una historia, imaginada o real, que nos ayuda a hacer comprensible nuestra experiencia humana ofreciéndonos una construcción de la realidad. Se trata de una narración que arranca el orden del caos. No nos contentamos con ver los acontecimientos como desconectados, aleatorios e inexplicables. Anhelamos comprender el orden subyacente en el mundo. Un mito nos dice por qué las cosas son como son y de dónde vinieron. Un relato como este nos conforta asegurándonos que el sentido de nuestra existencia es algo útil. En efecto un mito es algo esencial. Sin un mito no hay un significado o propósito para la vida. Sólo hay un enorme e infinito vacío.

Los mitos son mucho más que explicaciones. Los mitos sirven de guía para los procesos mentales acondicionando nuestra forma de pensar e incluso la forma en que percibimos las cosas. Los mitos cobran vida constantemente al servir como modelos para el comportamiento humano. En la noche del viernes cuando comienza Shabbat (el día de descanso judío), a veces me imagino a Dios creado el mundo en una semana muy ocupada finalizando Su Creación -literalmente- con un descanso propicio luego de semejante tarea. Según la Biblia “Dios descansó y se recuperó” (shabbat va-yinnafash). Esta imagen mítica me permite hacer una pausa, ir más despacio, apreciar la creación. Al observar el Shabbat estoy literalmente imitando a Dios según el Génesis. Así, el orden re-emerge semanalmente del caos inminente de mi vida.

Pero ¿qué hacemos cuando los mitos de la tradición se han deshecho, cuando el Dios de la Biblia parece tan poco creíble? ¿Realmente hay alguien “allá arriba” controlando todo lo que ocurre “aquí abajo”, trazando el rumbo de la historia, rescatando a los necesitados, haciendo el recuento de nuestros actos buenos y malos registrándolos en los libros de la vida y la muerte, de la recompensa y el castigo? Muchas personas han perdido ya la creencia tradicional y son más propensos a experimentar un enorme vacío en lugar de vivir en plenitud de la presencia de Dios. Si creen en algo eso es tal vez la ciencia y la tecnología. ¿Y qué proporciona la ciencia a cambio de creer en ella? Proporciona el progreso en todos los campos a excepción de uno: el sentido último de la existencia. Algunos científicos insisten en que en realidad no existe algo así como “el sentido”. Como un físico destacado ha escrito: “cuanto más sabemos sobre el universo, más evidente se hace que el mismo es inútil y no tiene un sentido”.

El Big Bang es una historia contemporánea de la Creación del universo. La energía se convierte en materia y esa materia vuelve a convertirse en energía. No existe un plan preciso para lo que es creado y ni siquiera ese plan está elaborado de antemano. Por una combinación intrincada e irrepetible de azar y necesidad, la humanidad ha evolucionado a partir de y junto a un sinnúmero de otras formas de vida durante miles de millones de años. En última instancia, nuestra historia evolutiva es gratificante: nos permite ver que somos parte de una totalidad, de una misma unidad.

Ser “religioso” significa, en palabras de un físico contemporáneo, “tener un sentimiento intuitivo de la unidad del cosmos”. Esta unidad se basa en un hecho científico concreto: estamos hechos de lo mismo que todo el resto de la creación. Todo lo que es, fue y será comenzó conjuntamentea partir de un solo punto infinitesimal: la semilla cósmica.

La vida se ha ramificado desde entonces pero esto no nos debe cegar en su unidad subyacente. La maravilla más profunda es la unidad en y dentro de la diversidad. Esto se refiere a la gran variedad de manifestaciones materiales diferentes, únicas y particulares, emanadas todas de la misma fuente o energía. Tomar conciencia de esta unidad multifacética puede ayudarnos a vivir en armonía con otros seres humanos y con todos los seres vivos del planeta apreciando junto con todos nuestros compañeros en el tiempo y el espacio, nuestras propias transformaciones de energía y materia.

Si el Big Bang es nuestro nuevo mito Moderno de la Creación (la historia que explica cómo empezó el universo) entonces ¿quién es Dios? “Dios” es un nombre que damos a la unidad de todo.

¿Cómo se puede nombrar la unidad? ¿Cómo se puede nombrar lo innombrable? La tradición mística judía llamada Cabalá, nos ofrece una serie de posibilidades. Una de estas posibilidades esEin-Sof, literalmente: “Sin-Final”. Ein-Sof es el Infinito. Robando una frase de la mística cristiana, Meister Eckhart nos habla del “Dios más allá de Dios”.

Muchas veces los cabalistas utilizan un nombre más radical que Ein-Sof para referirse a Dios. Este nombre es ain – literalmente “nada” en el lenguaje hebreo. No solo encontramos este bizarro nombre entre los místicos judíos sino entre los cristianos también. Así, Juan Escoto Erígena escribiendo en latín llama a Dios “nihil”; Meister Eckhart en alemán lo llama “nichts” y San Juan de la Cruz en español lo define simplemente como la “nada”. Pero para estos hombres místicos y profundamente religiosos llamar a Dios “nada” no significa que Dios no existe. Esto no es ateísmo. Por el contrario, este nombre transmite la idea que Dios no es una “cosa”. Ni siquiera es una idea. Dios anima todas las cosas pero no puede ser contenido por ninguna de ellas. Dios es la unidad que existe en cada particular sin materialidad.

Esta mística “nada” no está vacía ni es estéril. Por el contrario es fértil y está desbordada de innumerables formas de vida. Los místicos enseñan que el universo emana de la “nada divina”. Del mismo modo, hemos visto que los cosmólogos hablan del vacío cuántico, un lugar lleno de potencial donde es generada la semilla cósmica. Este vacío no está realmente vacío. Es una espuma hirviente de partículas virtuales que constantemente aparecen y desaparecen.

¿Cómo emergió el universo desde una prolífica “nada”? Según la Cabalá y la teoría clásica del Big Bang, esta transición se caracterizó por un solo punto inicial.

Los físicos llaman a este punto una singularidad, un punto infinitamente denso en el espacio-tiempo. Una singularidad es a la vez destructiva y creativa. Cualquier cosa que cae dentro de unasingularidad se funde con ella perdiendo su identidad mientras que la energía que emerge de unasingularidad tiene el potencial para convertirse en cualquier cosa. Las leyes de la física no pueden aplicarse a ese instante de separación en el que la energía o la masa emergen.

Según Moisés de León -tal vez el cabalista judío más destacado del siglo XIII- “El principio de la existencia es un punto oculto y secreto. Este punto es el comienzo de todas las cosas ocultas que se extienden a partir de allí y emanan de acuerdo a su especie. Desde este único punto se pueden ampliar las dimensiones de todas las cosas”.

A medida que avanza la emanación, a medida que Dios comienza a desplegarse, el punto oculto y secreto inicial se expande en un círculo. Del mismo modo, sabemos que desde el Big Bang nuestro universo ha estado expandiéndose sin interrupciones. Sabemos esto gracias al astrónomo Edwin Hubble quien midió la velocidad en la que otras galaxias están constantemente alejándose de nosotros. En 1929, Hubble determinó que cuanto más lejos está una galaxia de nosotros, más rápido se está alejando. El universo se está expandiendo en todas las direcciones. Pero no es que el universo se expande en el espacio. El espacio en sí es el que se está expandiendo.

La consecuencia más dramática del descubrimiento de Hubble es lo que nos dice sobre el origen de nuestro universo. Simplemente invirtamos la teoría de Hubble: si el universo se está expandiendo significa que una vez fue mucho menor. ¿Qué tan pequeño fue el punto desde que se expandió? Según la teoría clásica del Big Bang, si nos remontamos lo suficiente en el espacio-tiempo y desandamos los caminos de las galaxias y su formación, toda la masa y energía del universo se contrae en un punto inicial, una singularidad, aquel punto infinitesimal del cual el cosmos emergió en su totalidad.

Un cabalista, Shimon Lavi, entendió la expansión como parte del ritmo de la creación y escribió:

“Con la aparición de la luz, el universo se expandió.

Con la ocultación de la luz, las cosas que existen fueron creadas en toda su variedad.

Este es el misterio del acto de la Creación.

Aquel que entiende entenderá”.

Cuando la luz brilló el tiempo y el espacio comenzaron. Pero dijimos que el universo al comienzo era una sopa indiferenciada de materia y energía. ¿Cómo emergió entonces la materia desde esta sopa contenida en la olla universal? El místico dice que la luz se ocultó. El científico diría que la energía se congeló. La materia es energía congelada. Ningún núcleo o átomo podría formarse sin que la energía se enfríe lo suficiente para poder atarla y empaquetarla en partículas estables de materia.

Einstein descubrió la equivalencia entre masa y energía. En última instancia, la materia no es distinta de la energía sino que simplemente es energía que ha asumido temporalmente un patrón particular. La materia es básicamente energía en forma tangible, ambos, materia y energía son en definitiva estados diferentes de un mismo continuo, nombres diferentes para dos cosas que en esencia son la misma cosa.

Al igual que el físico, el místico también está fascinado por la relación íntima de la materia y la energía aunque la descripción mística está concebida en una tonalidad diferente. La existencia material surge de ain, esa “nada” que representa la piscina de energía divina. En última instancia,el mundo no es otra cosa que Dios ya que esta energía divina se oculta dentro de todas las formas que existen. De no haber sido ocultado, no podría haber surgido la existencia individual. Todo se disolvería de nuevo en la unidad o mejor dicho la “nada”.

A mediados del siglo XVI en Tzfat, una ciudad ubicada en la cima de una montaña en Galilea, el cabalista más famoso que jamás haya existido – Isaac Luria – reflexionó sobre la creación y se preguntó: “¿Qué había antes?” Luria creía que sólo había Ein-Sof, es decir Dios como Infinito. Pero si Ein-Sof invadía todo el espacio, ¿cómo podría haber espacio para algo más que Dios? Luria llegó así a la conclusión que el primer acto de la creación no fue emanación sino contracción:

“Antes de la creación del universo, Ein-Sof se retiró a su esencia, de sí mismo para sí mismo dentro de sí mismo. Desde su esencia misma dejó un espacio vacío en el que podía emanar y crear”.

Este principio se conoce en la mística judía como tsimtsum que literalmente significa “contracción”. Esta contracción sugiere una especie de “retirada”. Una “retirada” en la cual Dios hizo espacio para algo más que Dios. El vacío primordial esculpido por tsimtsum se convirtió en el sitio de la creación: no más que un punto infinitesimal en relación con Ein-Sof y sin embargo lo suficientemente amplio como para albergar la totalidad del cosmos. Pero el vacío no estaba realmente vacío sino que mantuvo una huella: un residuo de la luz de Ein-Sof.

Al igual que el vacío que procedió al Big Bang, esa gran explosión, el Universo tampoco estaba completamente vacío sino en un estado de mínima energía, embarazado de potencial creativo y lleno de partículas virtuales.

Según Luria cuando Ein-Sof comenzó a desarrollarse, un rayo de luz divino se canalizó en el vacío a través de vasijas materiales. Todo iba bien al principio hasta que algunas de las vasijas -las menos transparentes- no pudieron resistir el poder de la luz. Se quebraron y la mayor parte de la luz que contenían volvió a su fuente Infinita: “al vientre de la madre”. Pero el resto, cayendo como chispas junto a fragmentos de vasijas rotas, quedaron atrapadas finalmente en la existencia material. Nuestra tarea de acuerdo a la Cabalá, es liberar estos destellos de luz y restaurarlos a la divinidad. Viviendo ética y espiritualmente, elevamos las chispas produciendo así un tikkun, una “reparación” del cosmos.

Si los recipientes originales no se hubieran roto nuestro mundo constituido por la  multiplicidad no existiría. Nosotros existimos porque hemos perdido la unidad.

La cosmología moderna tiene una teoría que es paralela a la ruptura de los recipientes: la teoría de la “simetría rota”.

La simetría puede ser inestable. Imagínense en una elegante cena de bodas, sentados junto a una docena de invitados alrededor de una mesa circular. Copas de champán se han colocado en forma precisa entre cada plato de comida y la siguiente: una perfecta simetría entre derecha e izquierda. Un camarero llena las copas con champán y todo el mundo se sienta, esperando a que alguien levante una copa. De golpe sentimos un poco de sed y al darnos cuenta de que las burbujas de color rosa no va a durar para siempre, decidimos tomar un sorbo. Pero, ¿qué copa deberíamos tomar? No estando completamente versados ​​en las reglas de una cena de etiqueta, podríamos fácilmente elegir la copa de la izquierda como la derecha. De cualquier manera al momento que tomemos una decisión eligiendo una copa o la otra, la simetría se rompe. A menos que todo el mundo tome simultáneamente la misma decisión, alguien tendrá que estirarse a través de la mesa para conseguir una copa restante. Uno de los retos de la ciencia es descubrir la simetría oculta dentro de la maraña de la vida ordinaria.

El universo empezó en un estado extremadamente caliente de máxima simplicidad simétrica. A medida que se expande y se enfría, esta simetría perfecta se rompe dando lugar al mundo de la diversidad y la estructura en que vivimos.

Para nosotros las fuerzas fundamentales de la naturaleza parecen hoy diferentes: separamos entre “la gravedad”, “el electromagnetismo” y otras dos fuerzas conocidas como “fuerzas nucleares fuertes y débiles”. El equilibrio entre estas fuerzas determina la existencia y el comportamiento de todo lo que existe en nuestro universo visible. Originalmente las cuatro fuerzas estaban vinculadas y hoy los científicos sueñan con encontrar un único conjunto de ecuaciones que describan la unión de ellas en una simple fórmula. En los últimos años, al chocar las partículas subatómicas, los físicos han descubierto que a temperaturas extremadamente altas las diferencias entre las fuerzas comienzan a desaparecer.

Hagamos un último acto de imaginación. Imaginen que viajan atrás en el tiempo llegando cada vez más cerca del momento del Big Bang. Cuanto más lejos en el tiempo viajan más caliente y más denso se torna el universo y las simetrías rotas comienzan a restaurarse. Viajan millones y billones de años en el tiempo. Finalmente llegan a la más mínima fracción de tiempo que un físico puede imaginar: 10 a la menos 43 segundos después del Big Bang, es decir una diez millonésima de una billonésima de una billonésima de billonésima de segundo, después del comienzo. Ir más allá de este punto es difícil porque la densidad de la materia se vuelve tan grande que la estructura y tal vez el sentido del espacio y el tiempo se descomponen. En este punto todas las interacciones entre las fuerzas fundamentales son indistinguibles. Alcanzamos así una simetría perfecta.

¿Cómo fue que la simetría del comienzo se distorsionó tanto en el transcurso del tiempo? A medida que el universo se expande y comienza a enfriarse, la radiación y las partículas pierden energía. Así es como las diversas fuerzas se distinguen unas de las otras.

Mientras tanto la materia también está perdiendo su unidad. En el momento en que el universo es sólo una mil millonésima de segundo de edad, hay cuatro fuerzas y dos docenas de partículas elementales. Esta fractura de la simetría crea las partículas de materia y energía que se encuentran hoy en día a nuestro alrededor – y dentro de nosotros mismos.

La simetría perfecta suena atractiva, pero es estéril. Si el motor principal no se hubiera roto en cuatro fuerzas, el universo sería un lugar muy diferente, si es que de hecho hubiese alguna vez existido. Las pequeñas desviaciones en la uniformidad perfecta dan lugar a los núcleos, átomos y moléculas; seguido de galaxias, estrellas, planetas y personas. Nosotros existimos en nuestra condición presente (con todos nuestros defectos e imperfecciones) gracias a la simetría rota. Al igual que nos enseña la Cabalá, nuestra confusa y manchada realidad se deriva de la ruptura de los recipientes o vasijas de luz divina.

La ruptura de la simetría y la ruptura de los vasijas son teorías distintas, cada una generada por un enfoque diferente con respecto a la cuestión del origen del universo: sin embargo, su resonancia es intrigante. La mente humana ha ideado estrategias alternativas – científicas y espirituales – para encontrar nuestro origen. Las dos estrategias son distintas pero complementarias. La ciencia nos permite sondear las partículas infinitesimales de la materia y las profundidades inimaginables del espacio comprendiendo cada una a la luz de la otra al buscar a tientas el camino de regreso hacia el principio. La espiritualidad nos conduce a través del espacio interior, nos desafía a recorrer nuestro camino interno hacia la unidad para vivir a la luz de lo que descubrimos.

Como hemos visto, los místicos judíos imaginan chispas divinas en cada cosa que existe. Un científico diría que hay energía latente en las partículas subatómicas. La tarea espiritual es elevar las chispas con el fin de restaurar el mundo a Dios siendo conscientes que cada cosa que hacemos, vemos, tocamos o imaginamos es parte de la unidad, parte de un patrón de energía. La elevación de las chispas divinas es una poderosa metáfora; transforma la religión de una larga lista sobre lo “permitido” y lo “prohibido” o una lista de dogmas en una aventura espiritual.

Dios no es un ser independiente que hasta “allí arriba”. Ella está aquí, en la corteza de un árbol, en la voz de un amigo, en el ojo de un extraño. El mundo está lleno de Dios. Puesto que Dios está en todo uno puede servir a Dios a través de todo. En la búsqueda de la chispa divina descubrimos que lo común es realmente espectacular.

El mundo está fracturado y Dios nos necesita para que lo arreglemos. Al arreglar el mundo – social, económica y políticamente – vamos curando a Dios, cuyas chispas se encuentran dispersas por todas partes.

Pero no debemos engañarnos a nosotros mismos. Nunca habrá un tikkun completo, una reparación completa del mundo. Las cosas nunca serán perfectas. La sociedad nunca será completamente justa. ¿Cómo terminará todo esto? ¿Hay un Mesías que viene a redimirnos? Los Mesías cautivan nuestra imaginación porque el mundo es injusto y la historia es volátil. Se nos dice que cuando venga el Mesías todo será corregido definitivamente: el bien finalmente triunfará y el mal será eliminado. Esa sería una buena noticia…pero ¿es esa la forma en que las cosas funcionan?

¿Cuál es el futuro a largo plazo de nuestro planeta según la ciencia? He aquí el pronóstico:

Nuestro Sol tiene unos cinco mil millones de años y es aún confiable. Sin embargo, cinco mil millones de años a partir de ahora, el combustible de hidrógeno en el núcleo del Sol se acabará. El núcleo se hundirá mientras que la atmósfera del Sol se expandirá engullendo varios de sus planetas más cercanos entre ellos probablemente la Tierra. Poco a poco la mayor parte de esta atmósfera se caerá dejando una bola densa y caliente de materia inerte.

La vida no necesariamente llegará a su fin. Para ese entonces los seres humanos (o cualquier tipo de vida inteligente relacionada cósmicamente con nosotros) habrán desarrollado la tecnología necesaria para pasar a otro sistema solar más seguro.

Mientras tanto, aquí estamos. Todavía tenemos bastante tiempo hasta el año 5 mil millones. No habrá perfección final. Nadie ha dispuesto el futuro antes de tiempo, nada está predeterminado. La probabilidad jugará un papel importante en la forma en la que se desarrollarán las cosas, del mismo modo que siempre lo ha hecho. Debemos aprender a negociar con el azar. Debemos trabajar en arreglar nuestras propias quebraduras, nuestro tejido social y nuestro planeta, de la mejor manera que podamos.

¿En qué clase de Dios podemos creer? La palabra hebrea emuná, “creencia o fe”, originalmente significaba confianza y fidelidad, tanto humana como divina. Sino confiamos en otras personas, no podemos amar; sino confiamos en los demás, no podemos construir ni sostener una comunidad. Pero, ¿cómo podemos confiar en el cosmos o en este Dios de la unidad?

Podemos confiar que somos parte de algo mayor: una vasta red de existencia en constante expansión y evolución. Podemos detenernos en el camino, abrazar un árbol y sentir la savia que corre por las venas. Cuando miramos el cielo nocturno podemos reflexionar que estamos hechos de elementos forjados en las estrellas y de las partículas que nacen en el Big Bang. Podemos sentir que estamos buscando aún la vuelta a casa. La vuelta al origen. Cuanto más lejos miramos en el espacio más viajamos atrás en el tiempo. Si vemos una galaxia a diez millones de años luz de distancia, estamos viendo esta galaxia tal como era hace diez millones de años luz. La galaxia se toma este largo tiempo para que su luz antigua pueda llegar hasta aquí ahora en forma nueva. Más allá de cualquier nueva estrella que alguna vez identifiquemos, se encuentra ante nosotros el horizonte del espacio-tiempo a catorce mil millones de años luz de distancia. Pero ni Dios ni el Big Bang están tan lejos. El Big Bang no ocurrió en algún lugar fuera de nosotros. Por el contrario, nosotros comenzamos nuestra historia en el interior de la gran explosión; hoy encarnamos la energía primordial. El Big Bang aún no se ha detenido.

¿Y qué hay Dios? Dios no es un objeto o un destino fijo. No hay una sola manera definitiva para llegar a Dios. Pero nuevamente, no es necesario llegar hacia algo que está en todas partes. Dios no está en otro lugar oculto de nuestra vista. Dios está aquí pero nosotros no podemos verlo. Estamos esclavizados por las rutinas. Corremos de un evento a otro, de una tarea a la otra y rara vez nos damos una pausa para observar el esplendor que está justo enfrente de nosotros. Nuestro sentido de la maravilloso se ha marchitado por culpa de nuestro ritmo de vida.

¿Entonces cómo podemos encontrar a Dios? Una pista la proporciona uno de los muchos nombres por como se llama a la Shejina -el aspecto femenino de Dios, la presencia divina en este mundo. En la Cabalá Ella se llama océano, jardín o huerto de manzanas. En hebreo Ella también se llama zot, que significa simplemente “esto“. Dios no está “afuera y arriba”. Dios esta “abajo y adentro”. Dios está aquí contigo en este mismo momento, renovado, inesperado, tomándote por sorpresa. Dios es “esto”.

Según tomado de, http://www.judiosyjudaismo.com/2012/06/dios-y-el-big-bang/ el lunes, 15 de diciembre de 2014. Este documento existe en castellano gracias al trabajo realizado por Diego Edelberg.

Direccion del documento original, en inglés:

http://www.srhe.ucsb.edu/lectures/text/mattText.html