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Historian Tom Segev's new biography of the Israeli prime minister and Zionist hero David Ben-Gurion chronicles 20th-century episodes still salient today. //
Segev tells Ben-Gurion’s story happening-by-happening. His go-to format is to provide an impressionistic account of the outcome of some notable incident in Ben-Gurion’s life, then to back up and fill in details. This can be refreshing when the conclusion is an intriguing historical moment or anecdote. But in this 600-page doorstop of a book, the writing tactic is repeated without fail for chapter after chapter.
The technique also leads to confusion when a reader comes to the book with little prior knowledge of the inner workings of, say, the interwar international Zionist Congress, and can’t begin to fathom what picture Segev is trying to paint with his conclusion put ahead of the facts. Yet Segev’s handling of the facts is thorough and masterful, and we can draw our own conclusions if we don’t like his. //
Toward the end of his life, he flirted with Buddhism, but Ben-Gurion’s true religion was always the nation of Israel, and for nearly 30 years, the two were practically synonymous. The twentieth century was the deathbed for a great many fanciful nineteenth-century notions. It turned out that David Ben-Gurion’s dream of a Jewish nation wasn’t one of them. Israel survives and thrives long after his passing.
The Beresheet lunar lander carried thousands of books, DNA samples, and a few thousand water bears to the moon. But did any of it survive the crash?
Engineers on Friday released preliminary data about what they believe went wrong in the last moments of Beresheet’s flight, a day after the Israeli spacecraft crash-landed on the moon.
Engineers believe a technical glitch — likely in the component that measures the spacecraft’s altitude in relation to the surface — triggered a chain reaction of events that caused the main engine of the spacecraft to stop.
Without the main engine running as a braking mechanism, it was impossible to slow Beresheet’s speed from 1,700 kilometers per hour (1,000 mph) to 0 just above the moon’s surface. Engineers were able to restart the engine, but by this time the spacecraft was too close to the surface to slow down sufficiently.
No private company has ever achieved what SpaceIL is trying to do.
Thursday 3:35pm ET Update: The Moon remains a harsh mistress.
On Thursday, SpaceIL's lunar lander attempted to make a soft landing on the surface of the Moon, but it apparently crashed instead into the gray world. Although a postmortem analysis has not yet been completed, telemetry from the spacecraft indicated a failure of the spacecraft's main engine about 10km above the Moon. Thereafter, it appears to have struck the Moon at a velocity of around 130 meters per second.
“We have had a failure in the spacecraft," Opher Doron, general manager of the space division at Israel Aerospace Industries, which built the lander, said during the landing webcast. "We have unfortunately not managed to land successfully.” Israeli engineers vowed to try again.
The failure to land is perhaps understandable—it is extremely hard to land on the Moon, Mars, or any other object in the Solar System. In this case, the private effort to build the lunar lander worked on a shoestring budget of around $100 million to build their spacecraft, which had performed admirably right up until the last few minutes before its planned touchdown.
Original post: It has been 48 days since the Beresheet spacecraft launched on a Falcon 9 rocket and began a spiraling series of orbits to raise itself toward the Moon. Last week, the 180kg vehicle fired its engines to enter into lunar orbit, and now the time has come for it to attempt a soft landing on the Moon.
"What it means to me is that the responsibility is very high."
Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, 29/03/19 09:43 | updated: 09:41
[טוויטר]
Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis
Rabbi \Mirvis is the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom. He was formerly Chief Rabbi of Ireland.
The fact that this week’s parasha is called Shemini, which means ‘the eighth’, issues an invitation to us to answer this question.
In Kabbalistic teachings, the number six represents the natural world. Hashem created our world in six days, and therefore we work on six days. The number seven represents the perfection of people. On the seventh day we celebrate Shabbat which is known as “M’ein Olam Haba” – the closest we can come in this world, to the perfect spirituality of the world to come. The number nine represents Ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu, it is the divine number.
In maths, quite extraordinarily, a number can only be divided by nine if its digits add up to nine, or a multiple of nine. For example, in the number 459, 4+5+9 = 18 which is a multiple of 9, and therefore we know it is divisible by 9. It shows that 9 fits perfectly into the world around it, and that is a description of Hashem.
At the end of the Shema, we conclude the words “Hashem Eloheichem” – the Lord your God, but we always add the word ‘emet’ onto it which means truth. That is because the Talmud teaches us “chotamo shel HaKodesh Baruch Hu emet”, the seal of God is truth. The gematria of the word ‘emet’ adds up to 441, which is 4+4+1, which equals 9, indicating that the truth of Hashem is represented by the number 9.
So if seven represents the perfection of people, and nine represents Hashem, eight represents the bridge, connecting us with our creator.
That is why a baby boy has his ‘brit milah’ through which he establishes a covenant between himself and Hashem on the eighth day.
That is why the festival of Chanukah is eight days long when we recall the divine intervention which saved our people.
And that is why between Pesach and Shavuot for a period of 7×7 days we prepare ourselves for the re-enactment of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. Once we reach that number 49, we are prepared for the festival of Shavuot, which takes places at the beginning of the eighth week, reminding us of that ultimate revelation when Hashem appeared to us, and of the first two of the ten commandments. He delivered them directly to us – the ultimate bridge between Heaven and earth.
Now we can understand our parasha, “vayehi b’yom hashemini” – and it came to pass on the eighth day – once the Mishkan (the sanctuary in the wilderness) had been completed, and the altar was there to be dedicated, for seven continuous days the people offered sacrifices with no response from God, but after those seven days, “va teitzei aish min ha Shamayim” – on the eighth day, fire came from Heaven and consumed the animal on the altar – there was that connection between Heaven and earth.
The number eight is a special number which issues a call to us. Let us embrace the natural world represented by the number six. Let us strive to reach our greatest potential for perfection, represented by the number seven. And in that way, may we merit to live up to the aspirations of the number eight, to feel the presence of Hashem in our lives and to enable Him to bless us always.
Shabbat Shalom.