When Kabbalah Meets Science: A Surprising Convergence

Around 270 years ago, the Kabbalist Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto faced an intriguing request: a French philosopher visited him in Venice, earnestly asking him to teach her the wisdom of Kabbalah. At first, Ramchal was baffled by her keen interest, but as they spoke, it became clear she was knowledgeable about the writings of the Ari, and she believed this insight assisted her in understanding philosophy. Ramchal noted in his letter: "She truly knows all the words of the Ari from beginning to end, which astounded me to hear from her."

Over the centuries, philosophers occasionally discovered in Kabbalah ideas that bolstered their comprehension of philosophy. Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe wrote: "Shortly after the Ari, there lived in Germany a mysterious cobbler, Jakob Böhme (1575-1624), whose thought closely approximates the revelations of the Arizal concerning the unfolding of worlds, albeit with many distortions."

This phenomenon occurred again with Edward Shifrin, a physicist who recently authored the book "From Infinity to Man." In a media interview, he shared: "Coming from a scientific background, I wanted to believe in Hashem, but it seemed then that what the Torah and science were saying were entirely different things. I couldn't believe in Hashem without reconciling the two. I embarked on intensive research into Jewish mysticism. The more I delved into it, the more I found Kabbalah's ideas resonating with modern science, especially in quantum mechanics. I understood that if I wanted to bridge Kabbalah and science, I had to think about their shared language... Kabbalah is the most profound description of all reality, while science is a way to study a small part of this reality."

Haim Meir Shafir compared the approach of a very famous scientist, David Bohm, to the ideas found in the writings of the Ari, revealing surprising parallels. Bohm developed a theory called "The Holographic Universe." Since Bohm's time, extensive evidence supporting this theory has emerged from fields like molecular biology and neuroscience. In 2007, physicist Jacob Bekenstein noted that seemingly strange behaviors of stars fit with "The Holographic Universe" theory. Under this concept, the fundamental reality is two-dimensional, with the third dimension encoded in the two dimensions. Our brain decodes it (which, admit it, sounds very understandable).

What's astonishing is that these concepts are already present in the writings of the Ari and other Kabbalists. And it's not just this point: Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, concerning particle physics, is clearly described in Ramchal's writings. In Kabbalistic language, this principle is called "Reisha d'lo ityada". Shifrin expands on showing how within Kabbalah, there are also physical equations explaining the marvels of the universe. Of course, Kabbalah encompasses far more than this, and it is almost by chance that one finds this extraordinary knowledge there as well.