[Avodah] moon and sun

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

R' Eli Turkel asked:

> What does it mean that moon and sun talked - they are inanimate

R' Zev Sero challenged:

> How do you know?  The Rambam says they are intelligent; what
> grounds exist to question that?

RET responded:

> I am having trouble believing that Zev is serious. Does he
> know that men have landed on the moon and they did not talk to
> the moon. The sun consists of gases undergoing various nuclear
> reactions.

Akiva Miller now says:

My first reaction was that RET's evidence ought to be enough to convince anyone. But on second thought, I'm not so sure, and I'd like to explain why.

It is quite true that we are the first generation (or, for you young 'uns, the second) who can point to fellow humans who have actually visited the moon, and can testify to its inanimate state. But "ain chadash tachas hashemesh." Is the testimony of these astronauts really that much stronger than what our fathers saw with their own eyes?

The sun, moon, planets, and stars never stray from their respective paths. Not much expertise is needed to know where they'll be in the sky at any given time. And people who *do* have this expertise can calculate these things years - or even centuries - in advance. And people have actually been doing this for millenia.

The moon in particular is such that we can see details of its surface, even with the naked eye. And people have been doing this too, also for millenia. And although different parts are lit at different times of the month (leading some to think that it is growing or shrinking), the features which are seen on the left side always appear on the left side, and the features which are on the top, bottom, or right also always appear on those sides.

The moon also seems to wobble in its path. This is called "libration", and a great animation of it is in the Wiki article "lunar phase". I don't know if the ancients noticed this; if they didn't then it doesn't matter, but if they did, then they surely noticed that it is regular and predictable.

Besides the moon, the other celestial bodies don't have features which can been seen without a telescope. But their sizes and colors were still noticeable even to the ancients. Jupiter was markedly larger than the others, and while "the red planet" is merely a nickname in English, Lashon Hakodesh gives that as Mars' proper name: Maadim. Before we began to suffer from light pollution (see Wikipedia: "skyglow"), people knew their orbits, recognized them, and gave them names like "the morning star", "the evening star", or "the north star" -- because they could be found at specific places and times.

What I've been describing are NOT the characteristics of thinking beings. They are characteristic of objects. Dull, dead, inanimate objects.

The ancients -- a term by which I mean to include Chazal, but also the chachamim of the nations -- surely knew all the above. And I think they'd be insulted if I claimed they did not notice these things. Yet despite this evidence, some of them still considered the sun, moon, et al, to be thinking and conscious beings. Beings whose appearance and location never changed, but thinking beings nevertheless.

WHY did they think this? To my mind, it is utterly incomprehensible. Why didn't they look at those unchanging things and realize that they are mere objects? Granted that they move, but the river moves too. Do we find anywhere that they thought the river was a living, thinking being (other than in a poetic or rhetorical sense)?

I don't know. I have no answer. But there must have been *something* to make them think this way.

They were a lot smarter than I am. And if a reliable calendar was not enough to convince them that the moon is dead, then a shovel of moonrocks is not enough to convince *me* of it.

Akiva Miller

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