Liturgy Against the Laws of Physics

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Outside the tiny circle of orthodox practitioners, almost no one grasps the significance and meaning of Judaism’s complex religious law. In a much broader sense, the ceremonial acts of the whole Judeo-Christian world are increasingly a mystery to modern man. All such religious ritual has been dismissed as morally irrelevant superstition. But science, specifically thermodynamics, helps to write a commentary on religion. In this area, as in so many others, science sits at the feet of religion.

Study and observance of the halakha (or religious law) is central to rabbinic Judaism. Reform and Conservative Jews acknowledge far fewer obligatory rituals than do the Orthodox and Hasidim. But all practicing Jews — and Christians too, including the whole wide world of Protestants and Evangelicals — perform ritual acts of some sort. Gathering for communal worship is a basic ritual in all of these communities.

But why bother?

The question has always been acute in Judaism, where the rabbis insist repeatedly that commandments must be done “for their own sakes!”, “out of love,” never “in expectation of a reward.” And Judaism has always been vague on the topic of life after death. The Christian tradition centers far more on the soul’s career after the body dies, on heaven and hell and the last things. But some devout Christians are uneasy with this focus. Some branches of Christian thought are likely to become more “Jewish” (in focusing ultimately on living rather than dying) in the future. But why bother with religious ritual, if not for the practical gain? Why should 21^st-century man spend time and energy on this sort of thing?

One obvious answer is to make life beautiful. William Butler Yeats explains, in the celebrated “A Prayer for My Daughter” (1919). The poem ends:

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

But there is another answer too, that centers not on beauty but on a man’s mission on this tiny speck of a planet in this dusty out-of-the-way corner of the universe.

The second law of thermodynamics is one of science’s biggest, boldest, chart-topping hits. It has recurred in popular science and scientific philosophy for years.

The Second Law tells us that the universe runs down. The entropy of the universe relentlessly increases. Entropy is chaos, disorder, mixed-upness. In physical systems, it can be measured precisely. The Second Law tells us that nature works inexorably to disperse, to eliminate distinctions, to bring all things up or down to the same level. Sometimes it’s called “time’s arrow”; it explains (among other things) why time can run only one way. For time to run backwards, nature would have to bust open the locked door of the Second Law.

Now look at halakha, a system that is large and wide-ranging and alive. From outside it seems shapeless, but it has a recurring theme: separation, in space and time. Keeping kosher means separating meat from dairy, kosher from unkosher food. Keeping the Sabbath means separating the day of rest from the forward-tumbling chaos of ordinary time. Keeping the Jewish community alive means maintaining its integrity by keeping it separate, in certain well-defined ways, from the rest of mankind — above all when a Jew marries, casting (in that very act) a sharp beam forward into the foggy future.

For the rabbis, sanctity means separation; means untangling nature, taking the trouble to set things apart. The Second Law helps us see the deeper meaning of Judaism’s obsession with separateness and sanctity. Jews defy nature by defying its most fundamental impulse, the deadly onrush of chaos. Above all, they defy death. Death ordains the inexorable re-mingling of the organism with its environment. Death is unstoppable, but the powerful symbolism of halakha means that Jews defy it anyway: in many ways choose life is, of all commandments in the Torah, the most important. Man is part of nature but strives to transcend nature. Man is an animal but must never be only an animal. Human beings must strive to be more than animals, better than animals — must strive not just to be but to be good, just, kind, holy.

Animals have no such obsessions.

The Jew patiently separates, draws sanctity on the sand knowing that the tide will erase every last line — and that he will then create holiness once more. The tide wins every round, but can never triumph.

In Christian ritual too, sanctity is a matter of setting apart. Christianity too opposes the onrush of chaos in the name of life. The most striking example of this impulse is the set-apartness of the priesthood in Catholicism: priests must be celibate. (In the Eastern Orthodox Church, they can marry before but not after they are ordained.) The set-apartness of monastic communities is a variation on the theme. The ritual of the Eucharist in Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism centers on the set-apartness and transformation of the consecrated bread and wine. Anglicans and Lutherans (and some other Protestants) celebrate the Eucharist also.

All Christians celebrate, in some form, the ritual of baptism. And all Christians gather for communal worship; this gathering-together (the opposite of melting into the crowd) is the most fundamental of all symbolic separations. We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing: thus the first line of an old Protestant hymn that celebrates the ritual acts of gathering and prayer.

Ritual that creates sanctity and separation teaches the Second Law implicitly. It teaches us that raw nature is a long, long fall into chaos. Consider in this light the last lines of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, one of the great achievements of modern literature: speaking of catkins and raindrops falling to earth, the poet concludes, “And we, who have always thought/ of happiness as rising, would feel/ the emotion that almost overwhelms us/ whenever a happy thing falls.” (This is Stephen Mitchell’s fine translation.)

But the rituals we perform teach more than the Second Law: they teach us to defy the Second Law.

David Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale University, a contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, and a regular contributor to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The most recent of his many books is Judaism: A Way of Being.