Our haftarah this week – the prophetic reading coupled by tradition with our portion of scripture from the Torah – pairs the heavenly visions of Isaiah (6:1-7:6) with the account of Sinai and the Ten Commandments (Exodus 19-20).
“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Eternal One, seated on a high and lofty throne, and the hem of God’s garment filled the sanctuary. Seraphim stood above that Presence, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they would fly. And one called to the other saying: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Eternal One of Legions, the whole earth is full of God’s glory.” (Isaiah 6:1-3)
On the Festival of Weeks – on Shavuot – when we read the same passages from the Torah, recounting the revelation at Sinai, the prophetic selection is the opening of the book of Ezekiel – more heavenly visions:
“Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the fifth day of the month, as I was among the captives by the river of Chebar, that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God.” (Ezekiel 1:1)
The point of these pairings seems to be an indication that Moses’ time on Mount Sinai, receiving the Law, was somehow like the other-worldly experiences of those later prophets, Isaiah and Ezekiel – seers of the Jerusalem Temple and the heavens as viewed from Israel’s Babylonian Exile, respectively. Our prophetic readings seem to suggest that the original experience of receiving the Law was coupled with a glimpse of earthly humanity from something like a divine vantage point.
What is anything like that in our own times?
Let me venture another pairing – a juxtaposition of scripture with the perspectives of some of the Apollo astronauts of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The sudden new perspectives of these few men – the only ones in the history of our human species ever to have seen the Earth from afar – turned those voyagers into something like a species of prophet. (The Moon is 239,000 miles away, a distance at which one can hide the entire Earth from view with the palm of an outstretched hand; the International Space Station, by contrast, orbits today only 254 miles above the earth, from which viewpoint one sees grand and sweeping vistas, but not the entire planet at one glance.)
They were almost all military fighter pilots and test pilots, the twenty-four who traveled beyond Earth-orbit – they were not philosophers or theologians, nor even environmental scientists; but somehow viewing the Earth, and the universe, from on high, from out there, filled the mouths of these men with insight and with wisdom. Let me weave their words together with biblical passages that come to mind as I hear these people of Apollo speak about their voyages. They did not exactly bring back the Ten Commandments (though the Apollo 8 astronauts read the opening of Genesis from lunar orbit on Christmas Eve of 1968); however, the messages of these men, brought back from their experience of another vantage point, ring today with clear and urgent imperatives.
“When I see the work of Your fingers, the Moon and the stars that You have ordained – what is humanity that You should recall it, and the child of Adam that You should be mindful of him?" (Psalm 8:4)
Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell: “We learned a lot about the Moon, but what we really learned was about the Earth. The fact that just from the distance of the Moon you can put your thumb up and you can hide the Earth behind your thumb – everything that you’ve ever known, your loved ones, your business, the problems of the Earth itself, all behind your thumb, and how insignificant we really all are; but then how fortunate we are to have this body and to be able to enjoy living here amongst the beauty of the Earth itself.”
“...yet You have made him just a little less than a divine being, and have crowned him with glory and splendor” (Psalm 8:5)
Astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, remembering the experience of looking out from the Apollo 14 capsule at the stars in the universe’s vastness: “It was a powerful, overwhelming experience. And suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body, and the molecules of the spacecraft, and the molecules in the bodies of my partners were all prototyped and manufactured in some ancient generation of stars – and that was an overwhelming sense of oneness, of connectedness; it wasn’t 'them and us,' it was ‘That’s me – it’s one thing,' and that was accompanied by an ecstasy, a sense of ‘Oh my God, wow, yes,’ an insight – an epiphany."
Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot Michael Collins: “How peaceful and calm and tranquil and serene, and, Lord, how fragile it appeared. That was, oddly enough, the overriding sensation I got looking at the Earth. It was: My God, that little thing is so fragile out there!”
“And the gathering together of the waters God called Seas” (Genesis 1:10)
Michael Collins again, speaking of splashdown and recovery at the end of the voyage: “I can remember the beautiful water. We were out in the deep ocean, in the Pacific. It’s such a startling violet color. I remember looking at the ocean and admiring it, Nice ocean you’ve got here, Planet Earth!“
And he said: “It really is an oasis, and we don’t take very good care of it. And I think the elevation of that consciousness is a real contribution to saving the earth, if you will.”
“And God blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, replenish the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28)
Astronaut John Young (Gemini 3, Gemini 10, Apollo 10, Apollo 16, Space Shuttle STS-1, STS-9): “Earth has changed a lot since we started flying in Gemini. There are a lot of things like urban pollution, and you can see that when you hit orbit now. You can see the big cities all have their own set of unique atmospheres, they really do. We ought to be looking out for our kids and our grandkids, and what are we worried about? The price of a gallon of gasoline. In the United States we’re worried about three-dollar-a-gallon gas, and that’s awful.”
Apollo 12 Astronaut Al Bean: “Since that time, I have not complained about the weather one single time. I’m glad there is weather. I’ve not complained about traffic. I’m glad there are people around. One of the things I did when I got home, I went out to shopping centers, and I’d just go around there, get an ice cream cone or something, and just watch the people go by, and think, Boy, we’re lucky to be here. Why do people complain about the Earth? We are living in the Garden of Eden.”
Al Bean again: “I felt that I was literally standing on a plateau somewhere out there in space, a plateau that science and technology had allowed me to get to – but now, what I was seeing, and even more important, what I was feeling at that moment in time, science and technology had no answers for – literally no answers. Because there I was, and there you were, the Earth, dynamic, overwhelming – and I felt that the world was just too much purpose, too much logic, it was just too beautiful to have happened by accident. There has to be somebody bigger than you, and bigger than me, and I mean this in a spiritual sense, not a religious sense. There has to be a creator of the universe who stands above the religions we ourselves create to govern our lives.”
And they heard the voice of God walking in the garden in the breeze of the day" (Genesis 3:8)
Astronaut Charles Duke: “I say my walk on the moon lasted three days and it was a great adventure, but my walk with God lasts forever.”
(The quotations above are drawn from the documentary "In the Shadow of the Moon." Unmanned probes and vehicles have returned pictures of the Earth from great distances since the 1970s; but, to this day, the twenty-four men who traveled to the moon between 1968 and 1972, many of whom have now passed away, remain the only human beings ever to have seen with their own eyes the entire Earth all at once, as a faraway planet suspended in space.)