On Torah readings days at URJ Six Points Sci-Tech Academy—Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays—campers, counselors and staff get to engage with the Sci-Tech Torah. Lovingly hand crafted with deep respect and resourcefulness, the Sci-Tech Torah matches a traditional weekly Torah portion with a scientific fact inspired by it. When it was my turn for “Torah talk,” I turned to Lekh Lekha, when Abram and Sarai follow the divine command to journey toward a new, as yet unknown place. Wanting to share the insight of the Sefat Emet (Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter, a late 19th century Hasidic rabbi), who taught that the “call” that Abram and Sarai heard was not a momentary incident but was actually a sort of divine frequency to which they were uniquely attuned, I double checked the definition of “frequency.”
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the unit of measurement we use to describe frequency—a hertz—is named for Heinrich Hertz, a German scientist from a Jewish family who proved the existence of electromagnetic waves and was the first person to send and receive radio waves. Dr. Hertz and Rabbi Alter were born 10 years apart, one in Hamburg and the other in Warsaw (about the distance from Byfield to Washington, DC) so something was definitely in the air, as it were, during their lifetimes. Despite the wide divide between their respective understandings of Judaism, both men were not only both fascinated by frequencies but used them to describe communication across long distances and wide expanses. Their examples bring home for all of us one of the lessons that the Sci-Tech Torah teaches: discovery and application belongs equally to both Judaism and science not in competition but rather in connection with one another especially when we least expect it.
