I was one of those kids who didn’t let school interfere with their education.
Having undiagnosed ADD in the 1980s meant I was labeled the class clown. But I had one superpower that defied that stereotype: I could sit and read for hours.
My teachers, grateful for the quiet, let me sit in the back of the classroom, absorbed in books hidden under my desk. While Stephen King was one of my regulars, my true passion was books about Judaism.
To this day, I believe that Judaism is the single greatest idea in human history. As a child, I devoured every Jewish book I could find – The JEP Rothman Foundation series (especially Lilmod U’Lelamed), The Midrash Says; Everyman’s Talmud; 9½ Mystics; The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism; and, most of all, The Torah Anthology, which introduced me to Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, who soon became my favorite Jewish thinker. (To even begin to do justice to his talent, depth, breadth, and brilliance would require an entire study of its own.)
When I discovered The Aryeh Kaplan Reader, a collection of his best writings, it felt like a jackpot – not only because it was a kind of “Greatest Hits” of one of my favorite authors but also because it had one of the coolest covers I had ever seen on a Jewish book. I urge you to Google it. It features a truly trippy painting done by Rabbi Kaplan himself.
Anyway, inside the book I found an article that was one of the most fascinating I had ever read in my young life: a discussion on the Jewish view of extraterrestrial life.
Is there anyone else out there?
As a 12-year-old, the idea of Judaism engaging with the possibility of aliens was mind-blowing. Astronomers estimate that our galaxy alone has more than 100 billion stars and that there are at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe. To put that in perspective, for every grain of sand on Earth, there are at least 10,000 stars. It has been said that our solar system is akin to the size of a molecule on a snowflake resting on the tip of an iceberg that is the rest of the universe.
Notwithstanding Fermi’s paradox (the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence), given those numbers scientists believe that intelligent life elsewhere is not just possible but probable. But for Jews, the question goes beyond “Is there anyone out there?” to “Are there other Jews out there?”
To answer that, we need to understand the nature of Torah.
THE TORAH is not just a book of laws, or stories, or history. It is a translation of the divine mind into human language and experience. The Talmud tells a story about Moses ascending to heaven to receive the Torah. The angels, outraged, asked, “What is ‘one born of woman’ doing amongst us, taking the Torah?” Moses, frightened, hid behind God’s throne. But God urged him to respond, promising His protection.
So Moses turned to the angels and said, “The Torah states, ‘I am the Lord your God who took you out of Egypt.’ Were you ever enslaved in Egypt? It commands, ‘Honor your father and mother.’ Do you have parents? It says, ‘You shall not steal.’ Do you even own anything that can be stolen?”
With each question, Moses proved that the Torah was not meant for angels – it was meant for humans. But this raises an even deeper question: How could the angels not know what was in the Torah? If they were so protective of it, surely they had read it.
The answer is that they had read it – but not our version. The angels had their own Torah, a divine wisdom translated into their celestial reality. Their mistake was assuming there was only one Torah. This is why they asked how can ‘one born of woman’ take the Torah? They could not understand how the Torah can even apply to flesh and blood.
Angels and aliens
If the Torah is divine wisdom specifically designed for humanity and the unique history of Israel, then what does that imply for life beyond Earth? Could this wisdom take on a different form, uniquely suited to other beings on other planets, just as it was crafted for us?
The Torah was not given to us because we were Jews; rather, our acceptance of it is what made us into Jews. If intelligent life exists elsewhere, would it not also make sense that some of those beings might have eventually evolved to reach out to God and be in a covenant with their creator? If true, then their covenant would be completely unrecognizable to us.
If they have no pigs, there would be no prohibition against eating them. If they don’t consume dairy, there would be no need to separate milk and meat. If they never used animal hides, they wouldn’t wear tefillin. And if their planet’s cycle differs from ours – say, a 40-hour day – who knows how they would mark time for prayer or Shabbat?
And that’s assuming they are even remotely similar to us. What if they aren’t primates? Imagine an aquatic world filled with intelligent, dolphin-like beings living in an ocean world. Their Torah wouldn’t be in Hebrew. It wouldn’t have an Abraham or Moses, or an exodus from Egypt. Their revelation might not be limited to a single group, but they might have an entire planet living in harmony with the divine.
Perhaps they are so advanced that they’ve shed their physical forms entirely, existing as incorporeal beings.
And if we can imagine Torah manifesting in such different ways in alien worlds, then we should ask: Hasn’t something similar already happened here on Earth?
Other revelations?
Is it so far-fetched to think that while our Torah was revealed at Sinai in a way that made sense to former Hebrew slaves, other divine revelations occurred in ways suited to different peoples and cultures? Could Christianity and Islam be translations of divine truth into forms that resonated with Europe and Arabia? Cannot the parables of Jesus or teachings of Muhammad, while foreign and perhaps even contradistinctive to the teachings of the Torah, be a translation of the divine?
One need not accept the theological claims of Jesus or Mohammed to acknowledge that billions of people have found deep, authentic relationships with God in their faiths. Perhaps, just as Torah can exist in multiple forms across the universe, it has also taken different forms across our own planet.
After all, if we believe that God’s wisdom is infinite, why would we assume that the only way to hear it is through the Hebrew Bible? The God of the Hebrew Bible is not God. It does not, nor cannot be a sum total of all, whatever it is, that God is. It is a personification of God, allowed to us due to the weakness of the human mind.
Divine truth, like light passing through a prism, refracts into many colors – each distinct, yet all emerging from the same source. These colors may appear different, even contrasting, but together they form a breathtaking spectrum. Similarly, the world’s religions, diverse in their teachings, may each be reflections of a singular divine reality, expressed through the languages, cultures, and experiences of humanity.
Just as chaos can give rise to unexpected beauty, and what seems like discord can resolve into harmony, the multiplicity of religious traditions need not be seen as contradiction but as a symphony of perspectives, each contributing to a greater whole. Perhaps divine revelation can be expressed in many forms, each carrying its own truth while stemming from the same divine source.
One of my favorite Jewish philosophers, Franz Rosenzweig, taught that perhaps Jesus is a path to God, but we Jews have no need of him, as we are already with God.
So back to our original question. Carl Sagan once said, “The universe is a pretty big place. If it is just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.” And if there are no other “Jews” out there, then it is an even bigger waste of space than Sagan ever imagined.