On Friday, this newsletter linked to an article providing an overview of various traditional Jewish approaches to solar eclipses. Here, Jack Zaientz takes a somewhat deeper look at some of them. He notes that by the 16th century, rabbis began to wonder whether a solar eclipse, which occurs at predictable intervals, can really be understood as an evil omen, as the Talmud suggests:
Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal of Prague, attempted to answer the question. According to him, eclipses are a bad omen that occur because of sin, but if we lived in a sin-free world, God would have created the universe without solar eclipses. Instead, God would have kept the moon and the sun from ever occluding each other. No sin would mean no need for bad omens and therefore no eclipses.
More recently than the Maharal, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher rebbe, presented another solution. Like the Maharal, the rebbe started with a statement of faith in the sages of the Talmud, stating that eclipses are, without question, bad omens. But the rebbe, who had studied mathematics and physics in Paris and Berlin, tried to wrestle with how they could also be required by the laws of nature. Where the Maharal’s explanation was mechanistic, contemplating different orbits in a sin-free universe, the rebbe’s was spiritual. He observed that the point of the bad omen was so that we would see it, repent, and return to God. Therefore, the only ones who would be affected by the bad omen would be those who had strayed from God and therefore benefit from the reprimand.
Others solve the problem by suggesting that the talmudic passages in question don’t refer to eclipses at all, but to some other phenomenon.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/uncategorized/16019/total-eclipse-of-the-brakha/