S.E.T.I. Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence - Nonplussed In Crown Heights, Orthodox Jews Say We Could Use Some

'I knew it', said Abe Finkelstein to his lifelong friend Shmuel. 'I always said we needed it', referring to a headline stating that the first messages from an extraterrestrial intelligence had been received. 

Abe and Shmuel had joked for years about the dumbing down of America, and how they would welcome an alien intelligence which might up things up a bit.  They both lived in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the most Orthodox Jewish neighborhood outside of Jerusalem, a place of faith, learning, and modest living. 

 

Abe owned a small clothing store on Flatbush Avenue, catered to the old yentas of the neighborhood who still made their own clothes, as severe as Iranian burqas, but with none of that Islamic panache.  

At least those Iranian women wore their drapes in style - the finest gabardine and silk, tailored to perfection, the line impeccable, the cut magnificent - and Abe offered advice to Mrs. Pinkus and Mrs. David to look, just look at what could be done with the severe clothes they were expected to wear. 

 

'You're a beautiful woman', Abe said to Sadie Pinkus, 'and with all due respect to you and your husband, please look, just look at what I can do for you'.  Abe Finkelstein was not only a clothier but a tailor who had learned his trade on Seventh Avenue, cutting fabric for Lowenstein & Markus in an industrial loft but the magic of his scissors, how he turned a bolt of cloth into something the Queen of Sheba herself would wear, became the talk of the trade.  

When he decided to buy his own shop in Crown Heights, Lowenstein himself took him aside and said, 'Money is no object', but of course money was always the object for the old Jew who had made more than a king's ransom thanks to pinching pennies and squeezing the cutters.  No, Abe said, thanking his patron, I want to go on my own. 

Shmuel was a rabbi, a Talmudic scholar, one of the few Jews in Crown Heights who had memorized the entire Pentateuch in the original ancient Hebrew, could quote chapter and verse with ease and always with exact and pertinent reference.  He was proud to be one of the People of the Book, a caretaker not only of the Bible, but of Jewish history, the Semitic tribes of the Arabian desert, the Babylonian exile, the Kingdoms of David and Saul.  It was all one, universal whole.  Every time he read Exodus he thought of his own travels from Egypt to Jericho, reliving the hegira of Moses. 

Shmuel wished that his friend Abe would return to the book, not just sit seder every once and a while, or go to temple on Yom Kippur and Purim,; but travel to Israel, pray at the Wailing Wall, and reconfigure his life to resemble Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 

But Abe had no patience for such Biblical academia. The world needed only so many rabbis but how many tailors of his genius and clothiers of his canny business sense were there?  Ok, many, but that was beside the point.  Life was to be led, enjoyed as far as tradition, culture, and society permitted, and to die a prosperous man. 

What the two men shared was an incredulousness about the state of the nation.  Morons on every streetcorner, standards lowered to let anyone with racial sob story into Harvard, jungle music, pimps, tarts, hookers all breeding and interbreeding until New York was seething with addicts, delinquents and criminals.  'Another flood', said Shmuel, 'even if it involves us.' 

'Did you read the paper?', Abe asked Shmuel one afternoon when they met at Rapaport's for mushroom barley soup.

'Why?', said Shmuel. 'What did I miss?

'Only the biggest story this side of Pearl Harbor', said his friend. 'We have been visited', and went on to tell the story of the coherent, constant, repeated algorithmic signals coming from outer space.  For the first time since S.E.T.I, the agency in charge of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, was formed, its parabolic antennae pointed towards Alpha Centauri and beyond, and information concerning life on Planet Earth was sent, was there a response.  

 

In a guarded public announcement, the Defense Secretary simply said that 'We're working on it' and deferred questions of a coming alien presence on earth.  Yet, of course there was no way to gloss over the bare fact that an intelligible, intelligent, highly complex series of mathematical equations were being sent from an unknown extraterrestrial source. 

'What else is new?', said Shmuel, 'God is infinite, and I'm still hungry'.  The soup and sesame rolls were never enough but Abe never wanted to go the extra block to Katz's ('I've gotta watch my heart') and so they ate light.  

'Don't be so nonplussed', said Abe, incredulous at his friend's nonchalance. 'This will change everything'; but Shmuel was unmoved.  A few equations didn't mean the end of the world, and maybe they could help.  

'As I said' replied Shmuel, 'if they're so smart, we could use a little of it. '

Not everyone took the news so calmly. Across town in Tenafly, a meeting of the Baptist Ecumenical Ministry was hastily called to discuss the meaning of this astounding news. 

The pastors fought like cats and dogs.  One said that Earth was specially created by God and the sin committed on Earth would affect the rest of creation. The Bible makes it clear that Adam's sin affected the whole universe. This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam's sin, but because they are not Adam's descendants, they can't have salvation. Christ's work of salvation can only apply to humans as the descendants of Adam. 

Another took the floor and insisted that although God’s dominion extends to all beings in the universe, if  an extraterrestrial lacks a spiritual aspect, an eternal soul to save, then it does not need saving.

A third contested the others and said that  perhaps extraterrestrials aren't sinners, like humans, and therefore aren't in need of saving.  But given the fact that all known intelligent beings (human beings) are sinners, it is likely that all other intelligent life in the universe would also be. 

Assuming that the latter argument is true – all intelligent life must sin – than God may have incarnated himself multiple times according to the particular configurations of sin and intelligence on other planets.  Noted Baptist theologian clotured the argument with this:

Another possibility is that God incarnated multiple times, sending a version of himself down to save each inhabited planet separately. However, based on the best guesses of how many civilizations we might expect to exist in the universe, and how long planets and civilizations are expected to survive, God's incarnations would have had to be in about 250 places simultaneously at any given time, assuming each incarnation took about 30 years. 

'That's what resurrection will do for you', commented Shmuel. 'No wonder why Christians are upset'.  That was the thing about Judaism - no frills, no cannibalism, just a majestic universalism. 'Whoever sent those messages we could invite for seder'. 

Now, Jews have crackpots too and Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah, is home to many of them.  They are convinced that each letter of the Torah has a numerical equivalent and the sum total adds up to the Fibonacci sequence or the Golden Mean, God's word, universal. 

'There's a Kabbalah in Red Hook', said Shmuel. 'They'll give an arm and a leg for those alien number sequences'. 

'And do what with them?'

'A ticket to ride.  There has to be someone at the head of the line on the spaceship'. 

'Don't be so Jewish', said Abe.  It's not a wedding. 

It turned out to be nothing.   A Chinese kid from East Orange hacked into the S.E.T.I. computer and fed it quadratic equations from his cousin's math book, set them on a timer for regular intervals, and went off to help his parents at the restaurant.  When the Defense Department finally figured out that they had been had, and not only that could not trace the hacker, the quickly covered their tracks, issued a non-committal statement of 'dysfunctionality' at the central New Mexico parabolic site, and let it go at that. 

'Too bad', said Shmuel when the hack became public. 'Kids today can't add 2+2, so we all could use a boost'.