In 1610 with his refinements of the telescope to observe the
phases of the planet Venus, Galileo proved that the earth revolved around the
sun. There was a new way to see our
place in the universe, and we were not the centre of it.
Judaism teaches us this also – that despite how it looks; we
are not the centre of the universe. Our
daily prayer reminds us that we are, each of us, part of an undivided whole,
all of us made from the same star-dust. We say Ein
Od– there is nothing else -and that consequently, it’s up to us to look
after ourselves, our neighbours and our planet.
Tonight when I look up to the sky and see the stars; I want to remember to experience my place in the universe and my obligation to the world - to be kinder to others and to help preserve the only home we humans have.
God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to
separate day from night; they shall serve as signs for the set times—the days
and the years; and they shall serve as lights in the expanse of the sky to
shine upon the earth.” And it was so. God made the two great lights, the
greater light to dominate the day and the lesser light to dominate the night,
and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the sky to shine upon the
earth, to dominate the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness.
And God saw that this was good. And there was evening and there was morning, a
fourth day. (Gen. 1:14–19)
Carl Sagan’s beautiful meditation:
“Look again
at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love,
everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was,
lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of
confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and
forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization,
every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father,
hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt
politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader,"
every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of
dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.
Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this
pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how
frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how
fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those
generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the
momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion
that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this
point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping
cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help
will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life.
There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could
migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth
is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and
character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the
folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it
underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to
preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
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