In the summer of 1995, Robert Williams, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, received two visits from John Bahcall, one of America's most respected astronomers and one of the founding fathers of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Bahcall had come to talk him out of something.
As director, Williams controlled a slice of Hubble's observing time, and he had decided to spend a large chunk of it pointing the telescope at nothing. Not at a nebula or a known galaxy, but at a tiny dark patch of sky near the handle of the Big Dipper, chosen precisely because nothing appeared to be there. The patch was about the size of a tennis ball seen from a hundred meters away, and he planned to stare at it for ten days.
Bahcall thought it was a terrible idea. In 1990 he had published a paper stating flatly that astronomers should "not expect HST to reveal a new population of galaxies." And the HST program could not afford another embarrassment. When it was launched later that same year, it was discovered to have a flawed mirror. The first images were blurry, and it took a designated space shuttle repair mission to fix it.
"The telescope had become a big joke," Williams later recalled. "Political cartoons lambasted NASA." Ten days of precious telescope time spent photographing an empty square of black would hand the cartoonists fresh material. But Williams would not be talked out of it. If it failed, he told Bahcall, he was "willing to fall on my sword."
And so, between December 18 and 28, 1995, Hubble took 342 separate exposures of that empty patch. When the combined image was released in January 1996, it contained around 3,000 galaxies, each made up of billions of stars, some so distant that their light had been traveling for most of the history of the universe. The emptiest patch of sky anyone could find turned out to be one of the most crowded.
The most famous stargazing moment in the Torah is in Parshat Lech Lecha. Abram is old, Sarai is childless, and he complains to God that his servant Eliezer will end up as his heir. God takes him outside (Gen. 15:5): הַבֶּט־נָא הַשָּׁמַיְמָה וּסְפֹר הַכּוֹכָבִים אִם־תּוּכַל לִסְפֹּר אֹתָם – "Take a look at the heavens and count the stars, if you are able to count them… so shall your offspring be."
It reads like a simple, beautiful image. But the Talmud (Shabbat 156a) hears something else. Abram, says the Talmud, was an expert astrologer, and he had looked at the sky long before God told him to. He had read his star chart, and what he saw was conclusive: "I examined my astrological map, and I am not fit to have a son."
God's reply was sharp and unequivocal: "Get out of your astrology." That, the Talmud informs us, is the real meaning of "He took him outside" – God was not taking Abram out of his tent, He was taking him out of his predictions.
The conclusion the Talmud draws has echoed through Jewish thought ever since: ein mazal le'Yisrael – the Jewish people are not ruled by the stars.
Rashi, quoting the Midrash, adds a remarkable detail. God tells Abram that his chart is not wrong – it is simply out of date. Abram is not destined to have a son, but Abraham will have a son. Sarai will not give birth, but Sarah will give birth. I will give you new names, says God, and your destiny will change. The stars had been reading the wrong man.
And there is one more twist. The word in Hebrew for "look" – habet – implies looking down from above. God lifted Abram above the stars, so that the sky that had been dictating his future was now beneath him.
What strikes me about this whole story is that Abram's problem was not ignorance. On the contrary, according to Chazal, he had made a learned calculation and was certain of the result: there was nothing there.
Which is exactly what John Bahcall told Robert Williams — and Bahcall was no fool. His conclusion rested on serious astronomical assumptions about what Hubble was likely to reveal. The assumptions were reasonable. But they were also wrong.
The command that opens the parsha, lech lecha, is usually understood geographically: leave your land, your birthplace, your father's house. But the Talmud's reading suggests that the harder journey was internal.
It was one thing to leave Haran at seventy-five, but it was something else entirely to walk away from a forecast you have spent your whole life learning to trust – especially when the forecast is about you.
The same page of Talmud brings this down to earth with a story. The great Babylonian sage Shmuel was once sitting with a gentile astrologer named Ablet, watching a group of men head out to a lake.
Ablet pointed at one of them: "That man will go and not come back; a snake will bite him and he will die." But later that day the group returned, and that same man was with them, very much alive. Ablet went over, threw down the man's bundle, and a dead snake fell out, cut in two.
Shmuel asked the man what he had done that day. The man explained that the workers always pooled their bread for a shared meal. Today one of them had none, and was ashamed. So when it was time to collect, this man had offered to go round and gather the bread, and when he reached the man with nothing, he pretended to take from him too, so that nobody would notice.
Shmuel told him, "You performed a mitzvah" – and went out and taught that charity saves from death. Ablet had not been wrong about the snake – the snake was there. What Ablet could not see was that a quiet act of kindness had rewritten the star chart.
Most of us no longer read horoscopes, or at least won't admit to it. But we have no shortage of charts. We have prognoses and statistics, demographic projections and expert forecasts, school reports and performance reviews.
We have the things people say about us and, worse, the things we say about ourselves: "I'm not the kind of person who…", "It's too late for me to…", "Nothing is going to change." Every one of them is a version of Abram's chart – a confident reading of the sky that concludes there is nothing out there.
Sometimes the charts are right, but Judaism begins with a man who was told to stop treating them as the final verdict. His descendants have spent four thousand years outliving every forecast – a small people that, by every reasonable calculation, should have disappeared long ago. But God promised them they would be as uncountable as the stars.
Hubble has since produced even deeper images, and now we have images from the James Webb Space Telescope. It seems like every time astronomers look harder at a patch of darkness, they find more light. As it turns out, the emptiness was never empty – we just hadn't looked long enough, or we had decided in advance what wasn't there.
The most important thing God told Abram that night was that the stars you can see are never the end of the story, because there are always more stars beyond the ones you can see. Look again at the dark patch everyone agrees is empty, and stay with it a little longer. That is where the galaxies are.