Worth Knowing

“A World Worth Knowing” is the title of a new series on The History Channel that features William Shatner. But is its premise, that we live in a world “worth knowing”, true? After all, ‘the standard model of contemporary cosmology’ holds that the universe arose, uncaused and with no purpose, from nothing and that it will inevitably return without a trace back to nothing. Why would such a universe be “worth knowing”?

Out of the Hasidic tradition of Judaism, renowned author Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907 – 1972) offers an answer:

“I’ve come to sow seeing in the world – To unveil God – who has disguised himself in the world – And wait to give the first cry: ‘It’s becoming light!’”

According to Hasidic tradition a divine spark resides in everything that is – every person, every animal, every plant, and every inanimate object; and it is the same spark, regardless of where it resides. Our task, each of us, is to uncover the divine spark that is in all things and to enable that spark to reunite with God, thereby bringing the temporal world and eternal world ever closer together.

This is the antidote to entropy, to mortality, and the origin of ‘purpose’ which the ‘standard model’ precludes.