From Semitic Oneness to Jewish Election Through Cantor's Infinity
From sand to stars: The quantum leap of Semitic wisdom
I stumbled upon a surprising connection between quantum physics and Semitic nomadic spirituality. It was like finding two pieces of a puzzle that seemed distant and seeing them fit together perfectly.
Neil Douglas-Klotz, a scholar and researcher of Middle Eastern spiritual traditions, writes in his "Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus": "Melta, 'the Word', in Aramaic, is a word, a sound, and an ongoing conversation. Since the entire prologue can be read in the present tense, this conversation is always ongoing, just like the Beginning from which it was born." He's not just a translator - he's one of those scholars who completely immerse themselves in the culture they study, trying to capture not just the words, but the entire worldview that generated them.
Unfolding
I found the most fascinating revelation in the concept of "unfolding." The Aramaic phrase "huwa l'wat alaha" in the prologue of John's Gospel ("b'reshith aitahiy huwa melta wa huwa melta aitahiy huwa l'wat alaha wa alaha aitahiy huwa hu melta") describes a continuous process, an unfolding of reality that happens eternally in the present. It's not a past event, but something happening right now.
Essentially, the verse affirms that in the beginning was the Word, who was with God and was God.
Abwoon
The Aramaic word Abwoon (Our Father) — pronounced Aboooon, is made up of four parts: 1) a: the Absolute, unique being, pure unity, source of all power and stability, which evokes the Aramaic word for God, Alaha, literally, the Unity; 2) bw: a birth, creation, a flow of blessing, as from within this Unity towards us; 3) oo: the breath or spirit that carries this flow, which echoes the sound of breathing and includes the forces we call magnetism, wind, electricity, and more. This sound is linked to the Aramaic phrase later translated as holy spirit; 4) n: The creative vibration of the Absolute, of God, resonates in the earth and bodies.
The rest of the phrase completes the motion of Abwoon d’bwashmaya. The central root of d’bwashmaya is in the middle, shm.
Shm can mean light, sound, vibration, breath, name or word. It indicates what arises and shines in space. In this sense, the name includes the sound, vibration or atmosphere, and the sign or name that makes Abwoon knowable is the entire universe.
Vibrations
The final aya shows that this sparkle includes every centre of activity, every place we see, as well as the potential capabilities of all things. So shmaya, the vibration or word with which we can recognize the oneness — the name of God — is the universe, and this is the Aramaic conception of heaven, the radiant vibration that shines throughout the entire universe. Because Aramaic is a language of vibration, it is particularly important to intone it aloud.
The prayer is a practice of tuning into the divine vibration, becoming one with the source of all creation. For this reason, I call this day apart “getting on the wavelength of God,” and we will participate in what Neil Douglas-Klotz, an Aramaic-speaking Sufi, calls in his book Prayers of the Cosmos “body prayers,” which encourage us to participate in the sound and feel of the words, as well as their intellectual or metaphorical meaning. Experiencing the words with all of ourselves on what Douglas-Klotz calls a mystical or universal level of interpretation.
David Bohm
Returning to the concept of the Melta, or Word, David Bohm, in his fundamental "Wholeness and the Implicate Order" (1980), describes a surprisingly similar process with his theory of the Implicate Order: "The implicate order is what is, the very process of the universe unfolding moment by moment." As philosophy of science scholar Paavo Pylkkänen notes: "Bohm's concept of implicate order suggests a deeper reality in which mind and matter are not separate, but different aspects of a single process" (Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order, 2007).
The correspondence between these visions is extraordinary. In both, unfolding is not just a mechanical process - it's how the universe reveals itself to itself. As Douglas-Klotz notes, the Aramaic word "melta" is an ongoing conversation, an incessant dialogue between the visible and the invisible.
The whole
I discovered that the Semitic nomads' vision saw this unfolding everywhere. In the concept of family (bayt) extends beyond blood ties to include the natural world. As an ancient Semitic saying states: "If you save one person, it's as if you've saved the entire world." Every ruha (soul) contains the entire universe, just as in Bohm's hologram every fragment contains the information of the whole.
The concept of "shmakh" (ܫܡܵܟ̣) particularly struck me - it's not just "your name," but the light that connects all communities. It's the spiritual equivalent of what Bohm describes when talking about "Holomovement": "The whole is in continuous movement, and what we perceive as separate particles are aspects of a single fluid process."
These connections made me think more deeply than usual about the relationship between science and spirituality. As physicist and philosopher Henry Stapp notes in "Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics" (2009): "Quantum mechanics has reintroduced into physical science precisely those aspects of reality that mechanistic materialism had expelled: consciousness, meaning, and the possibility that mind influences matter."
Desert peoples
Bohm's quantum physics and Semitic nomadic wisdom seem to converge on a fundamental point: the universe is a continuous process of revelation, an eternal unfolding of the whole into its parts. It's fascinating to think that these ancient desert peoples had intuited, through their deep connection with reality, something that modern physics is rediscovering with its mathematical tools.
As Bohm writes: "The deeper reality must be the undivided totality of the whole universe, and the visible process of the world's unfolding is a manifestation of this whole." This vision resonates perfectly with ancient Aramaic wisdom, suggesting that perhaps we're not dealing with two separate truths but with two ways of describing the same, fundamental nature of reality.
This holistic vision of the Semitic nomads, so surprisingly in line with modern quantum physics, makes the evolution that led to the birth of the concept of the "chosen people" even more curious - if not ironically paradoxical. How does one go from "every soul contains the entire universe" to "we are more special than others"? Well, perhaps the answer comes from an unexpected place: Georg Cantor's theory of infinite sets. And here, allow me to make a seemingly bizarre but illuminating digression.
An infinite beach
Imagine an infinite beach. Not just any beach, but one that extends infinitely in all directions. On this beach are infinite grains of sand, all the same colour. You start counting: 1, 2, 3... and you can go on for eternity. No matter how long you take, you'll never finish counting. This is already hard to digest but wait.
Now, imagine another infinite beach. But this time, each grain can be of infinite different colours. So for each position on the beach that's infinite, you have infinite color possibilities. It's as if for each number in your infinite count, you had to add another infinite count of possible colours.
Cantor proved something shocking: the second beach has "more infinity" than the first. How is this possible? Let's try to match them up. We take the first grain from the first beach and try to match it with a coloured grain from the second. Then the second with another coloured one, and so on. We'll discover that, no matter how we try to make these matches, we'll always have coloured grains that remain "orphaned," without a corresponding grain on the first beach. It's as if the infinity of coloured grains were too "dense" to be contained in the first infinity.
Chosen people
And here's where the provocation gets interesting: what if the concept of "chosen people" was simply a way of saying "our infinity is more infinite than yours"? Kind of like saying: "Sorry, but our way of being infinite is mathematically more powerful than yours, just like the coloured grains are more infinite than the monochrome ones." Cantor would probably be turning in his grave seeing his theory used this way, but the analogy is too juicy to let drop.
The funny thing is that this mathematical interpretation of the "chosen people" might help us understand the transition from the inclusive thinking of Semitic nomads to the more selective thinking of rabbinic Judaism. It's as if someone had discovered that not all infinities are equal and thought: "Hey, this perfectly explains why we're special!"
But it gets even more interesting. In Cantor's theory, even the "smallest" infinity is still infinite. It's like saying that even the least colourful beach is still infinitely large. So, paradoxically, this theory might suggest that being the "chosen people" doesn't necessarily mean being "better" than others, but simply having a different "density of infinity" in one's relationship with the divine. Kind of like saying: "We're all infinitely special, just some are more infinitely special than others."
Aramaic
The Aramaic word "melta," which we've seen means a "continuous conversation" with the divine, takes on an almost comic flavour in this light: it's as if some had a 5G connection with the divine while others are still on 3G - both connections work, but one has more "spiritual bandwidth" than the other.
And here returns Bohm's implicate order, almost reminding us that we're all playing in the same quantum field. It's as if the universe were telling us: "Okay, you have different infinities, but in the end, you're all part of the same cosmic hologram." The "small flame" of "ahebw" thus becomes not so much an indicator of superiority, but a reminder that everyone burns in their way in the infinite fire of existence.
Perhaps, in the end, the real irony is that we've spent millennia arguing about who was more chosen than whom, when Cantor's mathematics suggests there's room for infinite types of chosenness. It's a bit like arguing about which number is more infinite when we're all swimming in the same ocean of infinity.
And..so?
And if we want to push the provocation to its limit, we could say that the only true "election" is the ability to laugh at our claim of being more infinite than others. After all, as quantum physics teaches us, the universe has a sense of humour that's decidedly more developed than ours.
In this perspective, the evolution from Semitic nomadic thought to rabbinic Judaism appears not as a break, but as an increasingly subtle elaboration of the same fundamental insight: that reality is a continuous process of unfolding, and that there are infinite ways to participate in this process. As in Bohm's quantum physics, where particle and wave are complementary aspects of the same reality, so universality and particularity could be seen as complementary dimensions of spiritual experience.
And perhaps, just like the coloured grains of our infinite beach, each spiritual tradition adds its unique shade to the infinite spectrum of human understanding of the divine. A divine that, like Cantor's infinity, continues to surprise us with its inexhaustible capacity to be always vaster than we can imagine.
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