Presented by the John Templeton Foundation "Science, Religion, and the Human Experience" Series and Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Foundation Endowed Symposia in Jewish Studies Discussant: Walter Kohn (Institute for Theoretical Physics) Thursday, March 6 / 7:30 P.M. / Free UCSB Corwin Pavilion The big bang serves as the scientific Creation myth of our culture. What does it have to do with God? How can it help us discover a spiritual dimension in our lives and recover a sense of wonder? In answering these questions, I draw on the insights of Jewish mysticism as well as contemporary cosmology. I suggest several parallels, e.g., between what physicists call “broken symmetry” and what Kabbalah calls “the breaking of the vessels.” But my purpose is not to demonstrate that 13th-century kabbalists knew what cosmologists are now discovering. Rather, in juxtaposing these two distinct approaches--scientific and spiritual--I experiment with seeing each in light of the other. Spirituality and science are two tools of understanding that should not be confused; each is valid in its domain. Occasionally, though, their insights resonate. By sensing these resonances, our understanding deepens, nourished by mind and heart. Daniel Chanan Matt, who served for over twenty years as Professor of Jewish Spirituality at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, is an internationally recognized authority on Jewish Mysticism and the author of six books, including Zohar: The Book of Enlightenment, The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism, God and the Big Bang: Discovering Harmony between Science and Spirituality, and Zohar: Annotated and Explained. “He presents the masters of the Kabbalah in a way that initiates and illuminates us,” writes Rabbi Zalman Schachter. According to the journal, Tikkun, his “sensitive and original translations, commentaries, and guideposts” offer “a deep and brilliant introduction to the Jewish mystical tradition.” The son of a rabbi, Matt was born in Troy, New York and attended school at Brandeis University, where he received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies. After serving as a teaching assistant to Gershom Scholem at Boston University, he taught at Stanford University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and finally the Graduate Theological Union. The appearance of his best-selling book, The Essential Kabbalah (1995), firmly established his reputation. “Readers will return to this book again and again,” wrote David Wolpe, “to measure their souls against its deep, poetic wisdom.” His next book, God and the Big Bang, garnered praise for its “playful, imaginative, and thoughtful” effort to establish a dialogue between science and religion. From 1998 to 1999, Matt served as a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University, Jerusalem and from 2000 to 2002, he was a Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, Jerusalem. He recently returned from Israel, where he spent the past four years working on the first phase of an immense project: a 10-volume, annotated English translation of the Zohar, the masterpiece of Kabbalah, to be published by Stanford University Press. The first two volumes of The Zohar: Pritzker Edition are scheduled to appear in 2003. This lecture is presented as part of the "Science, Religion, and the Human Experience" series at the University of California, Santa Barbara with support from The John Templeton Foundation and co-sponsorship by the Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Foundation Endowed Symposia in Jewish Studies. Top of Page <<Back