Technology is causing a distressing growth of ignorance. I am not talking about automatic spell checkers/correctors, which increases both for the readability and humor (due to correctly spelled but horribly out of context words creeping into my message) these Thoughts for the Day. Nor am I talking about calculators, which relieve our young'uns of having to memorize their times tables. I am not even even talking about Google, which relieves all us of the burden of actually remembering anything. Nay! I speak of a must more pernicious ignorance: being able to read a clock. (I refuse to call a box with numbers on it a clock. A clock has a face and hands. I even finally found an app for my phone that will put a clock dial on my phone. Not that I am stubborn or anything.) Worse, for all us physics and engineering teachers; the younger members of our society just sort of glaze over when you say "clockwise".
Before your eyes go into a permanent spin... do you know where clockwise comes from and why there are 12 hours in a day? Well, completely true or not, this is what I heard from my research adviser (who once jointly taught a class on the concept of time with a philosophy professor; so there). Ancient mariners needed to know the time to calculate their position (because there were no satellites, let alone GPS!), so they had an instrument that was a disc with hole in the middle and an a hand. They would site the North Star through the hole an move the hand to point to one of the twelve constellations. So there you have it, 12 hours, hands, face, and clockwise. Btw, it's called and astrolabe.
I suppose now you are going to ask where 12 constellations came from. (From whence came the 12 constellations for your grammar sticklers.) I always thought that we about as random as random could be. I mean, yes, once you draw a picture of a guy shooting an arrow in the sky, I can see how there are three stars in a line that would lie on his belt. But, please, draw Donald Duck and you can make those same three stars his buttons. Ergo, 12 hours in a day is random; or so I thought.
Then I saw the Shelah HaKodesh on parshas va'yeitzei. The Shelah starts with the tetragrammaton (the four letter name of HaShem) and notes that if you take away the yud, you are left with hei-vav-hei, those three letters can be arranged three different ways: hei-vav-hei, hei-hei-vav, and vav-hei-hei. Same with the vav. Taking a hei away leaves you with yud-vav-hei, which can be arranged in six different combinations (left as an exercise for the interested reader). Since there are two hei's, you get two groups of arrangements of three letters each. Hence you get four groups (the yud group, the hei group, the vav group, the other hei group) each containing three subgroups. Now, says the Shelah HaKodesh, that's why you have four seasons with three months each, four camps of three tribes each when Klal Yisrael traveled through the midbar, and four groups of constellations.
While I have no idea what all that really means, one thing is crystal clear. The cosmos is one expression of HaShem in this world and Klal Yisrael is another. One big difference: HaShem runs the rest of the world through the constellations (mazal), but He runs mazal through and for us.
Before your eyes go into a permanent spin... do you know where clockwise comes from and why there are 12 hours in a day? Well, completely true or not, this is what I heard from my research adviser (who once jointly taught a class on the concept of time with a philosophy professor; so there). Ancient mariners needed to know the time to calculate their position (because there were no satellites, let alone GPS!), so they had an instrument that was a disc with hole in the middle and an a hand. They would site the North Star through the hole an move the hand to point to one of the twelve constellations. So there you have it, 12 hours, hands, face, and clockwise. Btw, it's called and astrolabe.
I suppose now you are going to ask where 12 constellations came from. (From whence came the 12 constellations for your grammar sticklers.) I always thought that we about as random as random could be. I mean, yes, once you draw a picture of a guy shooting an arrow in the sky, I can see how there are three stars in a line that would lie on his belt. But, please, draw Donald Duck and you can make those same three stars his buttons. Ergo, 12 hours in a day is random; or so I thought.
Then I saw the Shelah HaKodesh on parshas va'yeitzei. The Shelah starts with the tetragrammaton (the four letter name of HaShem) and notes that if you take away the yud, you are left with hei-vav-hei, those three letters can be arranged three different ways: hei-vav-hei, hei-hei-vav, and vav-hei-hei. Same with the vav. Taking a hei away leaves you with yud-vav-hei, which can be arranged in six different combinations (left as an exercise for the interested reader). Since there are two hei's, you get two groups of arrangements of three letters each. Hence you get four groups (the yud group, the hei group, the vav group, the other hei group) each containing three subgroups. Now, says the Shelah HaKodesh, that's why you have four seasons with three months each, four camps of three tribes each when Klal Yisrael traveled through the midbar, and four groups of constellations.
While I have no idea what all that really means, one thing is crystal clear. The cosmos is one expression of HaShem in this world and Klal Yisrael is another. One big difference: HaShem runs the rest of the world through the constellations (mazal), but He runs mazal through and for us.
Comments