If nothing else, this past months’ worth of parshiyot has made one thing clear…God is a detail fanatic. Everything in God’s house has an exact place, an exact measurement, a perfect set of assembly instructions. The instruction manual for the Tent of Meeting, the Mishkan, and its contents that God gives to Moses and Moses, in turn, gives to the People of Israel has chapters and chapters of complicated and wordy building specifications. These specifications are then echoed in the Haftarah sections paired with our Torah readings – now detailing the objects for the Temple in Jerusalem built by King Solomon. For sure, these how-to guides would never pass Ikea’s standards of simplicity.
All of these details seem like they’re the part of the Torah written just for architects and engineers. And while my brain might appreciate the attention to numbers and obscure details, this is one of the sections where I struggle a bit to maintain my curiosity. So, like I usually do, I try to find one little interesting or odd tidbit and take a deeper dive: One of the many details we’re given in 1st Kings describes a huge vessel, a pool big enough to be called a “sea.” It says: “Then he made the tank out of cast metal, ten cubits across from brim to brim, completely round; it was five cubits high, and it measured thirty cubits in circumference.”
Ten cubits across and thirty cubits around?! A 1:3 ratio of diameter to circumference. Ask any mathematician, something is off about that calculation.
Today we know the ratio of diameter to circumference as Pi, an irrational constant, that approximately equals 3.14 not 3 as the text suggests. How is it that God would detail a vessel in that is just one in a long list of annoyingly detailed specifications but not get the measurements correct? Is God capable of miscalculation?
In both of God’s sanctuaries the detailed instructions are missing one piece of the puzzle. In each project there is one place that we don’t know what its interior looks like. This mysterious place is the place that God claims only for God’s self. The Holy of Holies, God’s private sanctuary in which only the High Priest can enter, and even then, only once a year. This act of hiding God’s presence is the physical representation of a metaphor for the abstract concept – a concept that expresses our human inability to fully understand God.
We can know so much about the things around God. What they look like. What they’re made of. How big they are. But we can never really know God. There is always a piece of God hidden from our understanding. God is infinite and can never fully be quantified or measured like things.
This is the essence of Pi. This is the reason we’re so interested in Pi. Not only modern mathematicians but great rabbis have pursued this curiosity as well. They also tried to understand the nature of Pi, the nature of God’s instructional oversight. They even used the same technique to calculate Pi as centuries of pre-computer mathematicians – saying in the Babylonian Talmud that calculations of this round object were “looked upon as if [they] were square” – because, truthfully, squares are much simpler than circles. And it is in our nature to attempt to understand life’s complexities – and God’s – by making comparisons to simpler things.
Maimonides – rabbi, physician, scientist, and mathematician – responds to the puzzled rabbis by saying: “You need to know that the ratio of a circle’s diameter to its circumference is not known and is never possible to express it precisely. This is not due to a lack of our knowledge…but it is in its nature that it is unknown, and there is no way [to know it], but it is known approximately…As it will never be perceived but approximately, [the Hebrew sages] took the nearest integer…and they contented themselves with this.”
So in essence, our pursuit for a full understanding of Pi, and of God, could be an exercise in futility. According to Maimonides it doesn’t matter how much we know or how many calculations we do – we will never quite reach the fullest understanding of Pi or of God.
Maimonides also said in his philosophical book “Guide to the Perplexed” that “All we understand is the fact that [God] exists and is a being to whom no creature is similar… [and every metaphor for God] serves only to convey to us the idea [but not the wholeness] of God sovereignty.”
Maimonides explains that no matter how much we try to understand the mystery that is God through other things, we will never reach the truth. We can only approach understanding of the true divine nature. Perhaps this is why the People of Israel put so much effort into following the instructions for the Mishkan, and built the Temple as they did, and spent centuries studying and calculating Pi. Perhaps, it is through all these acts that we attempt to bring our tangential understanding of God a little bit closer to truth.
This week we get to celebrate a wonderful holiday. A holiday where we celebrate a little irrationality, with a lot of frivolity and a tasty fruit filled pastry. No, not the Purim carnival… Pi Day.
When you read this, it will be Thursday, March 14th, 3/14, will align with the first three digits of Pi, 3.14. This is a day that nerds and geeks alike set aside not only to have a holiday of their own, but also to acknowledge the wonder that is Pi – a Transcendental and irrational number. Pi goes on forever and we can never predict what the next digit might be because it has no pattern. There is no logic to Pi. And yet, we see Pi again and again in creation.
As the never fully-calculatable Pi teaches us, sometimes it is easier to get lost in the details than to see the beauty of the bigger picture. It is fun to see just how many digits we can know of Pi (the current record is 10 trillion digits). But in trying to be extremely precise in the value of Pi, we might never be able to know areas of circles. Similarly, its fun to ask all sorts of specific questions about God, God’s true nature, God’s exact role in creation, or God’s relationship with humanity. But at what point does asking all those questions distract us from noticing the beauty of God’s presence in our lives.
In both cases, we must work to value, but not get lost in, the details. In both cases, we are challenged to find our own balance in the unanswerable questions of existence. Perhaps that is why we are given such specific details for the Mishkan and Temple – both take extreme skill to construct and to fill according to God’s wishes. And both spaces are meant to help bring us a sense of closeness to God. We find meaning by appreciating the details, and by looking beyond them.
Shabbat Shalom