Britannia Radio

 

Reflections on Tisha B’av

 

Paul Eidelberg

 

After transmitting two articles concerning the Temple—which represents the pinnacle of design in the universe—I decided to look again at one of my recent acquisitions, Haim Shore’s Coincidences in the Bible and in Biblical History (New York: iUniversity Press, 2007, 2008).

 

From Chapter 4, on the Name of God, a summary of its main points (bearing in mind that the letters of the Hebrew alphabethave numerical values).

 

● The Divine Name in Hebrew [the Tetragrammaton YHVH]* is numerically equivalent to 26.

            [ Yod = 10,  Hei = 5,  Vav = 6,  Hei = 5 ]

 

[*The Tetragrammaton is a name exclusively used by Jews, for as Judah Halevi states in The Kuzari, “no other people know its meaning.”]

 

● The first letter in the Hebrew Divine Name, yod, is plotted as a floating point (zero dimension). Modern cosmological theories refer to the Big Bang as a singularity point, emphasizing its spatial zero-dimensional property.

 

● The first letter in the Hebrew Divine Name, yod, has a numerical value of 10.  This is the exact number of spatial dimensionsrequired by modern cosmologies to describe the universe at the moment of creation.

 

● The written letters of the name of the letter yod [’ > ו  > ד ] plots a point, a line, and a coordinate two dimensional system (in that sequence), conveying the dynamics of an expanding universe with changing dimensionality from zero ( ’ ), to one (ו )  to two (ד  ), in that particular order (apparently the latter dimensionality is the highest that may be conveyed by written letters).

 

● The first letter of YHVH (yod) appears also in the name of that letter. The value of yod, 10, is split in the succeeding two letters into 6 (for the vav) and 4 (for the dalet). This partition of the 10 is identical to the splitting, at the moment of creation or soon thereafter, of the 10 "original" dimensions into a four-dimensional universe, in which we live, and another unobservable six dimensions that have "curled up."  That the numerical values of the letters comprising the name of the yod may be associated with dimensions is strongly insinuated by how the name of the letter yod [ ’ ] is  written. 

 

Chapter 3, On Randomness, Shore writes:

 

“The Bible relates to any indication that randomness rules our universe as an abomination. God is the ruler of the world, not randomness. True, the actions, or the results of the actions, of the Divine are sometimes hidden.  God occasionally hides, or conceals, His face, and sometimes also hides the hiding.  But the truth is that the world is conducted by the Divine, and if this is ignored, then the wrath of the Divine will befall the blind, who believe in the god of randomness. Furthermore, the wrath itself will appear in the form of sheer randomness (or coincidences).”

 

Since the advent of Darwinism and the doctrine of evolution—of “chance mutation and natural selection”—the concept randomness has permeated Western culture.  The militant British atheist Richard Dawkins is the most notorious example of biologists who deifies randomness as the precondition of natural selection and evolution.  Perhaps it’s not mere chance that England today is deemed the most decadent nation in the West, indeed, a dying culture that prompted the gifted Theodore Dalrymple to write Our Culture, What’s Left of It, and Melanie Phillips, an extraordinary English journalist, to write The World Turned Upside Down?

 

Both Dalrymple and Phillips attribute the decadence that permeates all levels of British society to the ascendancy of the academic doctrine of moral relativism, a doctrine spawned by the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes.  Hobbes offers in his Leviathan the most lucid and succinct definition of relativism:

 

Whatever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good; and the object of his hate or aversion, evil ... For these words of good [and] evil ... are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: there being nothing simply and absolutely so, where there is no commonwealth.

 

It follows that what one calls “good” or “evil” is no more valid than another’s. All moralities are therefore equal (since none is objectively true). We have here a democratic or leveling conception of man. Moral relativism or equivalence permeates British society, including the Church of England. Relativism spawns random men, hence a society rotting in randomness.

How ironic that England is succumbing to totalitarian Islam!

 

What needs to be emphasized, however, is that randomness is intrinsic to the secular democratic state, to its paramount principle of one adult, one vote—a principle oblivious of the rational and ethical constraints of the Bible.

 

It was this principle that put Barack Hussein Obama—a relativist who hates America—in the White House!  Obama repeatedly heard his mentor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright preach “God damn America.”  And so it has come to pass.  America, having abandoned the rationalism of its Founding Fathers, and having thereby succumbed to randomness, elected a Muslim for its president!

 

Viewed from a Biblical perspective, one may relate two other calamities that have struck America: its hemorrhaging economy and the oil hemorrhage in the Gulf of Mexico. Note their fundamental difference, and relate this to Shore’s remarks above on randomness, which I have italicized.