Читать книгу The Science of Religion - Howard Barry Schatz - Страница 3

The only writings attributed to the great patriarch Abraham by the Orthodox Jewish community is a tiny sacred text called the Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation). Most Orthodox rabbis believe that this text somehow reveals the great mysteries of Scripture. I am convinced that the oldest monotheistic text on the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah has not been properly understood for more than 2500 years. That may explain why so few people are even aware of the book’s existence. Rabbis and scholars have filled libraries with their Kabbalistic speculations about the inner meaning of Scripture. These views are based on the fact that Hebrew letters also function as numbers. After years of my close association with the Orthodox Jewish community, I have found that rabbis and Jewish scholars have never understood how Hebrew letter/numbers actually extend into mathematics and science. When read through the eyes of Abraham I would suggest that there is a great deal more depth to the Bible than people realize.

The reader might wonder what could possibly distinguish my effort from the efforts of the great rabbis and scholars of the past, who have tried but failed to penetrate the great mysteries of the Sefer Yetzirah and the Bible. I would never have guessed that a degree in music composition and theory was exactly the right educational background necessary to explore the origins and history of a very real science of religion. For more than 40 years, I have been fascinated, and even obsessed, with Pythagorean music theory. Two great Jewish scholars, Gershom Scholem and Leo Baeck, both tell us that the ancient Greek Pythagorean tradition might be the only way to decipher the meaning of the Sefer Yetzirah. Although neither of these learned men understood the mathematical/musical details of this tradition, my work suggests that both men were correct in their assumption. The Pythagorean tradition, which academics often call “The Harmony of the Spheres,” is based upon the mathematical structure of sound that integrates the exact sciences of antiquity into a complete cosmology and cosmogony. The key to Abraham’s writings, and to many of the great religious and philosophical writings of the ages (including Plato’s dialogues and the Bible), must include a basic understanding of ancient music theory.

During the early 1970’s, I wrote a college paper on Pythagorean music theory for my first course in music history. The paper completely baffled my professor. I was called into the chairman of the music department’s office, and was asked to explain it to my professor, to the chairman, and to the deputy chairman. After hearing my explanation, they decided to give the paper to Professor Ernest McClain, who had spent much of his life studying this obscure subject. On Dr. McClain’s recommendation, school administrators established an honors graduate seminar that would enable him to teach me independently. Only years later did I find out that, during his long teaching career, I was his only student in Pythagorean studies.

What McClain taught me over the next few years would transform my life. He taught me that music theory unlocked the meaning of the oldest Hindu text, the Rig Veda. He also taught me how to understand Plato’s mysterious mathematical allegories in terms of Pythagorean music theory. During this period, to help defray my living expenses while attending college, I taught 4th grade in a private Chasidic school in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It was a Belzer Yeshiva, named for a town in the Ukraine called Belz. The 2nd grade teacher in the next room brought me to Crown Heights, also in Brooklyn, suggesting that I study with the Lubavitch (another Chasidic sect, named after a town in Russia called Lyubavichi). For a brief time I studied the Torah and Talmud at Hadar Hatorah, a rabbinical seminary in Crown Heights. I had been putting most of my effort into learning the “Bible of Chasidus,” called the Tanya, when I discovered the community’s library of English translations. After spending many months in this library, I realized that the mathematics and music theory that McClain had taught me during our study of Plato was also showing up in sacred Jewish texts. Before graduating and parting ways with McClain I brought him a copy of both the Tanya and the Sefer Yetzirah and mentioned to him that these were the texts we would need to fully understand if we ever hoped to decipher the secrets of the Bible. After graduating with a degree in music composition, I lost contact with McClain for more than 30 years, but I never gave up on my research.

It took me all of those 30 years to solve the Sefer Yetzirah’s mathematical riddles, which became the focus of my first book, The Lost Word of God (Tone Circle Pub., 2007). Just before publication, however, I searched for and found my old professor, Dr. McClain. He was now close to 90 years old, but still as sharp as ever. My wife and I visited him at his home in Washington, DC. Both McClain and I were thrilled to reestablish contact, and he was gracious enough to write the foreword to my first book. Once it was published, he asked me to send a copy to his mentor, Dr. Siegmund Levarie, who was 93 at the time. After Levarie read my book he told McClain that he wanted to meet me.

I arrived at Levarie’s beautiful brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He sat me down in his living room, but he wasn’t one for small talk. The first thing he said to me was: “You know son,... you are the only living person to have figured out the Sefer Yetzirah.” I was a bit rattled by his words, because I thought that I was the only person to have figured out the Sefer Yetzirah since ancient times. After seeing my incredulous reaction, he waved for me to follow him upstairs to his sanctum sanctorum — his library — where he reached up to remove a large and dusty leather bound book. As he set it down on his desk, he told me it took him 35 years just to locate this book. It was by a 19th century German judge and music theorist named Albert von Thimus. Back in the 1970’s, McClain taught me about the mathematical table that von Thimus had uncovered in Plato’s Timaeus. It was the key to unlocking Plato’s mathematical allegories in terms of Pythagorean music theory.

Thumbing through the pages of this wonderful German text was a real adventure for me. Since Levarie was Austrian the language was no issue for him. As we proceeded, it was a bit eerie to find several of what appeared to be my own painstakingly calculated diagrams. But, what shocked me was the realization that Von Thimus was describing the Sefer Yetzirah and not Plato’s Timaeus! Levarie was right. I wasn’t the first person to “crack the code.” The Pythagorean interpretations within the Von Thimus work remained in obscurity until brought to light by Hans Kayser and Ernst Levy in Switzerland during the 1920’s. Levy then taught them to Siegmund Levarie after Levy emigrated to the United States in 1941.

After relating this story to Dr. McClain, he was a bit upset that Levarie never mentioned Von Thimus’s extensive work on the Sefer Yetzirah to him. Perhaps Levarie didn’t want to distract McClain from his work on Plato. Nevertheless, I had to find my own way to the texts of the Orthodox Jewish community, and I was left to my own devices with respect to the Sefer Yetzirah. Although I was not the first to decipher Abraham’s writings, my afternoon with Levarie and Von Thimus was an absolute validation of my work. To philologists who incorrectly date the Sefer Yetzirah’s content to a period no earlier than the 2nd century AD, I have responded to them by directly linking Yetzirah’s mathematics to the mathematics of several Old Babylonian period cuneiform tablets (written during the time of Abraham: circa 1800 BC). To further establish that the mathematical content of Abraham’s writings predate the Torah, The Science of Religion attempts to demonstrate exactly how the embedded Von Thimus table functions as the Bible’s Rosetta Stone — providing the mathematical/musical framework that would later shape all Biblical allegory — and, almost 1500 years later, become the foundation of Plato’s writings. Confident in my knowledge of how Abraham’s writings structured the Bible, I realized that the Quadrivium also shaped the mythology and religious symbols of the most ancient cultures. So, like detectives “following the money,” I ask the reader to join me in my search for the origins and common scientific foundation of religion.

In writing this book I have attempted to follow the advice that Plato attributes to Socrates: “We must follow the argument wherever it leads.” Since religion was born in the cradle of science — the exact sciences of antiquity: arithmetic, music, geometry, (trigonometry) and astronomy — this text begins its narrative at the dawn of civilization, and lets the history of the science of religion unfold before us in logical sequence. I hope the reader enjoys the journey as much as I have.