Comets, Meteors, and overcoming Vertigo

A few months ago, I had vertigo. For those of you who have never had it, it is a terrifying experience: the world is spinning, and you just need to close your eyes and hang on to something, so you don’t fall and hit the floor. There’s nothing you can do to stop the world from spinning.
Learning of the Earth being hit by a massive meteorite this past week, and almost being hit by a comet, was terrifying. Can you imagine what would’ve happened if the comet had hit? It is like vertigo—we are spinning around in space, uncontrollably, around other rocks also spinning around. Or like balls in a pinball machine, just being wacked around, maybe they’ll go the right place, maybe not. And we are tiny dustspecks on that pinball..
The midrash claims that in a very real way, the earth is the physical center of the universe. We read in today’s Haftorah about the Temple, which was placed in Jerusalem. The reason Jerusalem was chosen for the Temple was because of the rock under the temple, the even shtiyyah, the foundation stone on which the world was built. This stone plugs up the chaotic abyss, and forms the physical center of the universe. On this model, the earth is the only thing fixed, and everything else revolves around it.
In a physical sense, it is untrue; the earth rotates around the sun, the sun around the milky way, et cetera. There may not even be a \true physical center to the universe—you can pick an arbitrary point, like the 0,0 point on a grid in geometry; there is no x=0, y=0—it is a construct, you can put it anywhere.
And it can be dangerous to think we’re at the center of the universe. It leads to abuse of animals and the earth—think mountain top mining and fracking, or the thousands of retired lab chimps who need housing, and the government funding for that housing has run out. It leads to the offensive fantasy of non-Jews serving as our servants in the world to come. It leads to people thinking that tsunamis and earthquakes are punishments for some sin of the Jewish people, who are the only ones God really cares about.
Really, there is no center of the physical universe, no starting point. The starting point is really everything—what astrophysics calls the singularity, the entire universe being contained in this singularity at the first moment of the big bang, so every place was inside that singularity. It is what the Zohar calls the botzina d’kardinuta, the spark of blackness containing an infinite fire, but so infinitely small it cannot be seen.
So Jerusalem isn’t really the physical center of the universe, and it may be, like us, a speck whirling around on the outside of a pinball machine.
But spiritually, we need a center, and it’s a mitzvah to see ourselves in relation to Jerusalem. We need to choose where to put that center point of our grids. When are we at home? When we are away, how do we locate ourselves? For most of us, the center is our home, we go out and come back. But in Judaism, our center is Jerusalem. We davven facing Jerusalem: all Jews, facing the same way, radiating from that same point. We are all in exile, having been once in Israel, and hopefully returning. In the book of Esther, when it introduces Mordechai, he is described as being one of those who was exiled from Israel. We should never get so comfortable with being an American that we forget that we’re Jews in exile, that we are not in our true home. This is why we break the glass at the wedding. The Shlah says to leave our houses slightly unpained, a corner of the table unset, to remind us of this. This is a central part of Jewish identity, to orient ourselves spatially in relation to Israel.
It is also a mitzvah to orient ourselves Jewishly in time. The first mitzvah in the Torah is Rosh Chodesh, counting the jewish months. Keeping Jewish time. There is a wonderful story about a Jew who sold his cow to his non-Jewish neighbor, and the cow wouldn’t work on shabbes—it worked hard six days, but on shabbes just lay down and wouldn’t budge! The neighbor goes and complains, and the Jew explains to the cow that now that he is owned by a non Jew, he has to work on shabbes; and he gets up and works. The neighbor is so impressed that even the cow is so dedicated, that he converts to Judaism. Keeping shabbes is part of putting ourselves on a jewish rhythm of time.
Aryeh Kaplan cites a midrash which says the world is an eye, the ocean is the white, the land is the iris, Jerusalem is the pupil, and the Temple is the image on the eye (reflecting the supernal jerusalem). Based on this, he says that the Temple is a focal point, where our spiritual energies converge and “break on through to the other side.” Perhaps the veil between physical and spiritual is thinner there, or perhaps it is simply the power of our prayers converging at a single point. But Jerusalem is the nexus between the physical and spiritual realms. It is like a magnifying glass which brings all the rays of light together to a single point, and can even start a fire at that point. This is why we all davven facing Jerusalem.
It also goes the other direction: spiritual energy flows into the universe through Jerusalem, spreading to the rest of the world.
One interesting contrast between the torah and haftorah today is that even though the Temple is in a fixzed place, the tabernacle was not—so apparently, it is possible for this nexus to be somewhere other than Jerusalem. The Zohar says that whenever jews get together to davven, they form a mikdash meat, a miniature Temple. It also says the tablets symbolize our hearts, the divine spark at our core. So our communities and our own holy soul can also be that spiritual center point where we can burn a hole in the veil between heaven and earth.
In a physical sense, there is no center. We are a speck on a pinball hurdling through space, hopefully not hitting other pinballs. But having this spiritual center, knowing where we are in relation to Jerusalem, to our spiritual home, holding on to the spiritual center of our hearts and our communities, can gives us something we can lean on to, despite the world spinning around us.