The second mishnah in the last chapter of Brachos discusses blessings that are to be said on natural phenomena. It states: On comets, earthquakes, lightning, thunder, and storms say, “Blessed [is He] . . . whose strength and might fill the world.” On mountains, hills, seas, rivers, and deserts say, “Blessed . . . [be the] maker the works of the creation.” R’ Yehuda says, One who sees the great sea says, “Blessed . . . who made the great sea”, but only if he sees it occasionally. On rain and on good news say, “Blessed is He who is good and does good”.
The halacha though concerning lightening is not like the Mishnah, rather one says on it, “Maker of acts of the creation (i.e. natural phenomena). If thunder is heard shortly after, no blessing is made as it is covered by the preceding blessing as both are part of the same event. The Gemara adds a number of other celestial events on which one would say the bracha over natural phenomena. It states (Brachos 59b), “Our Rabbis taught: He who sees the sun at the beginning of its season, the moon in its strength, the planets in their orbits, and the signs of the zodiac in their sequence, should say: Blessed be He who has wrought the work of creation. When does this happen? — Abaye said: Every twenty-eight years when the cycle begins again and the Nisan equinox falls in conjunction with Saturn, on Tuesday evening , before Wednesday”. The passage is brilliant but can also be absurd.
The Gemara starts by analyzing a 28 year cycle of the sun. Once every 28 years the sun returns to the position it was in when G-d created the world. When creating the planets the Holy One blessed be he started with the one furthest from Earth and proceeded to the closer ones. Therefore Saturn was created first followed by Jupiter and Mars. The sun was created in the middle and the moon last. In Hebrew the word used for all of them is star, because any celestial that emits light is referred to as one form of a star or another. Because of their poor visibility Uranus and and Neptune are not counted, and neither are dwarf planets like the asteroid Ceres or Kuiper belt objects like Pluto and Makemake.
On the other hand the date of an evening typically is confusing because according to tradition the date changes when it becomes dark enough to see the stars rather than at midnight. Consequently the Gemara needs to be very specific. In any case the blessing said is עוֹשֶׂה מַעֲשֶׂה בְּרֵאשִׁית. The last time it occurred was on April 8, 2009 (14 Nisan 5769), and it was recited by thousands with great ceremony.
Concerning the moon in its strength the English Soncino Talmud explains that it is the time when the tidal influence of the moon is strongest and cites Maimonides, “Guide for the Perplexed” (2, 10). The Mishna Brura, though, says that it is not the custom today to make a bracha neither on this nor on seeing the first appearance of the stars and constellations in their periodic cycle .
The idea of the blessing is to praise God for the creation of various natural phenomena. Astronomy though is more greatly emphasized and this fascination has spread to all people throughout the world. Maimonides in Guide for the Perplexed has an extensive discussion of astronomy and says the verse, “the heavens declare the glory of G-d”, (Psalm 19:2) should be taken literally. The influence of this section of the book is incredible. The Rambam wrote the book to answer philosophical questions posed to him by one of his students. It was written in Arabic then accepted by Islamic scholars. Promptly after its publication, the church translated it into Latin and made it one of its important texts. Today secular philosophers regard it as a major work. Its reasoning about astronomy is followed by astronomers today in places like the most prominent universities and NASA. There is a major branch of astronomy called cosmology whose purpose is to see the beginning through observing the stars.
In fact the description in the Kabala, that at creation the universe spread out and the celestial objects were created sequentially later, is a foundation of modern astronomical thought. It is called the “Big Bang Theory”. Everybody agrees with the theory but many people ignore the question as to whether the Big Bang was started by Hashem. For this reason many religious people say the whole idea is a form of denial.
In the 1950’s Pinchas Kahati in his commentary on the Mishna explains that when G-d created the heavens it first was little particles which gathered together and formed the stars. One can look it like scattered hairs in a mikvah sticking to each other to make clumps. However a small number of hairs remain detached and floating around. At the same time scientists began to speculate that this was the way the universe as we know it came into being. In 1964 scientists for the phone company heard a constant hiss on their communications satellite. They noticed that the static came from everywhere and believed that this was all that remained of the original creation of the universe. In other words this static became the planets a very long time ago.
In fact it takes many years for the light of a star to reach Earth. When we look at a distant star, it would seem that we see what happened a long time ago. For some stars it would take billions of years for the light to reach Earth. For this reason scientists, especially if they are atheists, claim the universe started 14 billion years ago. The Christian creationists say the world is only about 6000 years old and at the time of creation the speed of light was faster. The atheists say that’s nonsense but don’t really give an explanation. The Rambam says that one cannot draw any strong conclusions about how an article was created based on its normal behavior as a finished object. This is because the way things behaved in their creative stage is much different than they way they are in their finished state. He details the behavior of an embryo as an example.
In any case on 18 November 1989 NASA launched a satellite to research the static more carefully in an attempt to find out if the theory was true. The satellite itself cost 140 million dollars and after that the project absorbed more that 2,000 man years making the total expenditures to be around 450 million dollars. When the scientists examined the data they could discern the particles in the sound gathering together to form stars. With that the project leader George F. Smoot called a press conference to announce their results. In it he spontaneously said it was "like seeing the face of God". Another astrophysicist, Joel Primack of the University of California, called it, "the handwriting of God. Smoot was given the Nobel Prize for his research.
The idea of searching for the voice of G-d is in the Talmud. It tells us it can be found in a flash of lightning, a shooting star, or seeing the sun where it was during the six days of creation. A yeshiva student does not need billion dollars to hear it, provided his learning is really worth a lot of money. Nevertheless, it is still necessary to listen very carefully. For this reason, when we see these things, we make a blessing to He who performed the acts of the creation.
לע"נ הסבא אהרן בן יוסף ז"ל נלב"ע כז טבת תשכ"ו
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