Rounding Error

A few Shabatot ago, I ran into an old friend at a new shul. It so happened that it was March 13, the day before March 14, Pi Day. And this friend was a student of math - read, nerd. That's the context.

Pi day, of course, is the annual event when the Gregorian calendar date - 3/14 - looks a lot like the first three digits of Pi - 3.14. Nothing to sacred there. (For the record, on March 14, 2015 the date will replicate five digits. Thanks to Mr. Jackson's ninth grade math class, I know Pi out to twenty digits. See nerd comment, above.)

And this Shabbat with the new shul and the old friend, it so happened that this old friend was doing some teaching at the end of Kabalat Shabbat. And he was a mathematician and it was almost Pi day. So this was the Torah about which he taught.

So often in this modern world of ours, we take for granted the ignorance and stupidity of pre-modern peoples. We know everything, they knew nothing. We have it sorted out, we are not blinded by baseless assumptions. We are Enlightened. We are rational. Boundaries no longer exist like they once did. Or so the line of thinking goes.

You see, the pre-moderns, in their Biblical lives of togas and scrolls and animal slaughtering, even they knew a bit of the world around them. If you study some of the parts of the Bible and Rabbinics dealing with the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem, you pick up very quickly that these men had full knowledge of such a concept as Pi. Yes, they knew, maybe more than we, that the diameter of a circle is always a little more than three times it's radius squared.

Crazy.

But, you say, Pi is not three times the radius of a circle squared. No! It is 3.14... times that square number! The Bible is wrong! The rubrics for the Temple are impossible! Mathematically!

Nerd.

In this moment of lucidity, you seem to have proven the Bible of God, and, through that act, one-upped God as well. But not so fast.

The rabbis saw this Biblical error. They knew well and fine that Pi was not three. And in one midrash, we gain the following insight:

Pi, the most abhorrent of numbers, a never-ending string of non-repeating digits that nonetheless represents one of the most stable constants in reality, is, in fact, they argue, only temporary. In our world, in this time, Pi is what it is. But one day, in the world to come, in the time of Messiah, Pi, like it's Biblical basis, will actually become three.

It seems, say the rabbis, that in this time yet to be had, Euclidean Geometry goes out of the world. The very nature of nature, then, will be fundamentally different. What makes Pi Pi, will no longer exist. Pi will be a whole number. The fractional difference will no longer remain.

I could not help, as I sat and learned this Torah, about some wider metaphors that this math may teach. Because that decimal difference of the Pi of now and the Pi to be seems so present in this world, the fractional differences that make all the difference between who we are and who they are, between what I am and what I am yet to become.

And one day, those differences, those schisms between us that seem unending and infinite, one day, those differences will be flattened, they will no longer remain. They are, in fact, a mirage.

The divisions, the labels, the barriers between humans are, it seems, the rounding error that prevents us from realizing a better world, a Messianic world.

And that's all well and good. It's a nice idea that makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. But can it actually change my behavior? Can it infuse my being on a day to day life?

I walk down the street and ponder whether I can help to realize a better world just by realizing that the differences between me and my fellow - albeit important differences, ones that I will uphold as that which makes me unique in this world - are also only superficial, temporal markings of an imperfect world.

That man, over there, whom I hate, whom I find annoying, whose national existence challenges my own, whose politics are so abhorrent that I wish at times he did not exist, can I flatten the differences between us and approach him as another creation of God?

And in this time of our redemption, when I remind myself that I too was a stranger in the Land of Egypt, there seems no better a time to try.

This is the bread of affliction, let all who are hungry come and eat.

Whoever you are, it is for you. We all are afflicted. We all are slaves.

We are all strangers, and in that strangeness, one.

Comments

[toddimus]

fyi...
the diameter of a circle is TWICE its radius. Pi has no bearing. Pi is the RATIO of a circle's CIRCUMFERENCE to its DIAMETER.
or a circle's AREA is Pi x its radius squared.

however, the idea of the minute differences between the world now and to come, or pi now and pi = 3... wow. very cool post.