Let’s Boogie!

This past shabbes, I read The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. Only a few pages into the introduction I found myself thinking, “cool cool, quantum physics is basically Talmud.” 

Now, I’m no physicist, so feel free to take these analogies with one, or many, grains of salt. But what I recognized throughout The Edge of Space-Time was an approach to science as a practice of learning; a way of knowing ourselves and our place in the world, not unlike the learning we do at SVARA. Dr. Prescod-Weinstein’s framework, one which asserts that the most important intellectual, spiritual, and metaphysical frameworks are those that function not merely as a means to an end or as a set of tools to advance empire, resonated with my own understanding of the rabbinic project. 

Paraphrasing their mother, Prescod-Weinstein reminds us, “it is our task to know something about this place that is bigger than the bad things that are happening to us. We have the opportunity to find joy in this incredible universe, joy that can sustain us through difficult times and motivate us to make better ones.” In my experience, this desire to learn more about the world and myself in it, through Torah, reveals both the joys and challenges of being alive in this moment. And, eventually, even learning that is lishma, for its own sake, develops into a kind of charge for how I move through the world. 

Throughout the book, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein’s work draws a connection between the practice of science and the Adinkra symbol of sankofa – go back and get it, depicted as a bird with its feet facing forward and its head looking backward. Colonialism, among other harmful human projects, has reinforced the message that “progress” and “production” within a limited framework that understands time as solely moving forward, are among the highest values, rendering an immeasurable past obsolete. Recovering and recreating a practice of science that diverges from colonial interests does not require abandoning what we have learned thus far. It does, however, require us to ask: whose hindsight are we learning from? What have we come to know that is worth retaining? What needs transforming? What needs to be let go? What other possibilities are being revealed to us? And what interventions are ours to bring into being?  

The kind of presence that we experience when learning with a chevruta, while otherworldly, is not about escapism. It allows us to carve out a pocket of space-time in which we can focus our attention and energy on facing that which is in front of us: another person, in their wholeness, and an inheritance that reaches forward and backward in time. From there, we might catch a glimpse of the world we are building together, guided by a blend of our lived experiences, ancestral wisdom, and curiosity. In other words, guided by our svara.  

And when I say that we might catch a glimpse of it, I mean, it already exists. One of the metaphors Dr. Prescod-Weinstein offers us is to understand the cosmos as fabric. Reading this, I couldn’t help but think about how the root of the word masechet, tractate, is connected to looms and weaving. This cosmic-talmudic-liberatory tapestry is at once depicting a scene (which is actively being made real in its depiction) and reflecting our vision for a better world, shaped by our histories and memories. Multiple points of time and place—both experienced and not-yet-experienced—come together in the tapestry. Dr. Prescod-Weinstein writes, “Space-time is, by definition, all the places that ever were or ever will be. Today millions, maybe billions, of people live out their lives knowing that space-time is the place where we all live.” 

Being aware of the material impact of centuries of oppression, violence and dehumanization on ourselves, our communities, and all living beings, while being immersed in a world that has not yet come into being, is what takes an escapist impulse and transforms it into a world-making project. It requires our attention and makes demands of us, in the hope that we might actualize that which already exists for us, our descendants, and our ancestors.

Maybe what we call the crumble before the crash—the fissures in our world felt first by those on the margins, but that eventually and inevitably make themselves known to all of us—is also the “boogie woogie rumble of a dream deferred”. The reverberations of a world in which we are more free and in deep alignment with our humanity beckoning us home, if only we are willing to put in the work of figuring out how to get there.