The Place of Halleluyah in the Pesukei D'Zimra

The Place of Halleluyah! in the Pesukei D'Zimra Praise Cuts ~ , Through the ~ Dreadful 6asea on '}.{p'f(eligionis an Js{muf6y 2((166i Jl6rafwm JosfiuaHescfze{p. 2, The Place of Halleluyah! in the Pesukei D'Zimra Prai e Cuts The Halleluyah section is found in the heart of the Pesukei D'Zimrah. Usually translated as verses of song, Zimrah also means cutting and pruning, the type of work one might do to reduce overgrowths of thorns and brambles. The Pesukei D'Zimrah are verses which cut through the thorns and dilemmas of life which burden us, narcotizing the soul, killing our sense of Divinity and muffling our perception of wonder. Singing the Halleulyah prayers is not the futile attempted seduction of a primitive god; praise is a courageous cutting away from a cynical reality. Praise is not the whistling in the dark of our existential angst; it is a piercing of the silence. Praise cuts through, reaching across space and time to awaken a sleeping giant the Divine reality in ourselves and within the silence of the universe. Hallelu-Yah! Harlu et Yah min hashamai-yim, hal'luhu bam'romim. Hal'luhu kol malakhav, hal'luhu kol tz'va-av. Hal'luhu shemesh v'yaray-akh, hal'luhu kol kokh'vay or. Hal'luhu sh'may·hashamai-yim v'ahamai-yim asher may-al hashamai-yim. Y'hal'lu et shai m Yud Vav Hay, ki hu tziva v'niv'ra-u. IS 'IO JO19{TJ{~ COSMOS {j((!J Jfescfi Praise Yah! Worship Yah from the heavens; praise Yah in the high realms! Praise Yah all messenger - forms; praise Yah swarms of things. Praise Yah suns and moons; praise Yah stars of light. " Praise Yah heavens above heaven and the fluid watery stuff above that heaven. Let you-it -all praise the name, the pattern YodHay Vav Hay, which joined the cosmos all together, from which creation ensued. Early experimenters were confounded when they discovered "radiation coming into our antennas from all directions, just flooding in at us, and it was clearly of orders of magnitude more than what we expected. We were left with the astonishing result," Penzias explains, "that this radiation was coming from somewhere in really deep cosmic space, beyond any radio sources that any of us dreamed existed." The conclusion was that they were picking up a signal whose source was far beyond everything else in space. The radiation was uniform in all directions. (It is like the uniform glow when the inside of a kiln and its batch of pots reach a steady, even temperahrre; the glow fills the whole space, washing out the• detail of the individual pots.) This radiation is 99 per cent of all the radiation in the universe, washing out by comparison that emitted from bright stars, galaxies, supernovas and even quasars, the most powerful individual emitters of radiation in the sky. WHAT WE HAVE THEN IS A TREMENDOUS AMOUNT OF ENERGY EMANATING FROM A SOURCE THAT WE CAN'T SEE BUT THAT IS EVERYWHERE. This background radiation is the glow of a most ancient heat, deep in the universe and farther away than anything else we can see. If, by magic, we were able to follow the radiation from our planet back to its source, we would travel back in time as well as out in distance, back toward the moment roughly 20 billion years ago when the Big Bang happened. We would fly past the moon, past Jupiter, to the bright stars in the Milky Way, then to the edge of our own galaxy and into the distant realm of the other galaxies. Finally we would pass the outermost galaxy into a region beyond the reach of telescopes, to the time when the galaxies themselves were being formed. And then we would reach the source of the whispers, a misty wall of white-hot gas, an opaque mist of matter and radiation caught in a state of equilibrium, a white-hot wall known as bland plasma, a mist of electrons and protons too hot to join together into an atom of hydrogen. Hydrogen is transparent and so is the _universe. On this side of the plasma, once the universe cooled, the radiation trapped in the plasma was set free and has travelled through the universe unimpeded ever since. The radiation we detect in our antennas now brings us news of this event, marking the time when matter and radiation were separated. This event is measurably the same time from everywhere in the universe. We stili are bathed in this radiation daily, a whisper of the earliest times of creation, a song of the cosmos from the beg- 9 g .4 inning of time. 6asetfonJl. 'WliisperfromSpace in Ji£!!!! Pu6. 6g 'W(j'BJf'Boston