Zero - Charles Seife [30]
Maimonides’ argument was, indeed, a “proof” of God’s existence—something incredibly valuable in any theology. Yet at the same time, the Bible and other Semitic traditions were full of the ideas of the infinite and the void, ideas that the Muslims already embraced. Just like Saint Augustine 800 years earlier, Maimonides tried to reshape the Semitic Bible to fit into Greek doctrine: doctrine that had an unreasonable fear of the void. But unlike the early Christians, who had freed themselves to interpret parts of the Old Testament as metaphor, Maimonides was unwilling to Hellenize his religion completely. Rabbinic tradition compelled him to accept the biblical account of the universe’s creation from the void. This, in turn, meant contradicting Aristotle.
Maimonides argued that there were flaws in Aristotle’s proof that the universe had always existed. After all, it conflicted with the Scriptures. This, of course, meant that Aristotle had to go. Maimonides stated that the act of creation came from nothing. It was creatio ex nihilo, despite the Aristotelian ban on the vacuum. With that stroke the void moved from sacrilege to holiness.
For the Jews, the years after Maimonides’ death became the era of nothing. In the thirteenth century a new doctrine spread: kabbalism, or Jewish mysticism. One centerpiece of kabbalistic thought is gematria—the search for coded messages within the text of the Bible. Like the Greeks, the Hebrews used letters from their alphabet to represent numbers, so every word had a numerical value. This could be used to interpret the hidden meaning of words. For instance, Gulf War participants might have noticed that Saddam has the following value: samech (60) + aleph (1) + daled (4) + aleph (1) + mem (600) = 666—a number that Christians associate with the evil Beast that appears during the Apocalypse. (Whether “Saddam” has two daleds or one would make no difference to the kabbalists, who often used alternate spellings of words to make sums come out right.) Kabbalists thought that words and phrases with the same numerical value were mystically linked. For instance, Genesis 49:10 states, “The scepter shall not depart from Judah…until Shiloh come.” The Hebrew phrase for “until Shiloh come” has a value of 358, exactly the same for the Hebrew word meshiach, messiah. Hence, the passage presages the coming of the Messiah. Certain numbers were holy or evil, according to the kabbalists—and they looked through the Bible for these numbers and for hidden messages found by scanning through it in various ways. A recent bestseller, The Bible Code, purported to find prophecies by this method.
The kabbalah was much more than number crunching; it was a tradition so mystical that some scholars say that it bears a striking resemblance to Hinduism. For instance, the kabbalah seized upon the idea of the dual nature of God. The Hebrew term ein sof, which meant “infinite,” represented the creator aspect of God, the part of the deity that made the universe and that permeates every corner of the cosmos. But at the same time it had a different name: ayin, or “nothing.” The infinite and the void go hand in hand, and are both part of the divine creator. Better yet, the term ayin is an anagram of (and has the same numerical value as) the word aniy, the Hebrew “I.” It could scarcely be clearer: God was saying, in code, “I am nothing.” And at the same time, infinity.
As the Jews pitted their Western sensibilities against their Eastern Bible, the same battle was under way in the Christian world. Even as the Christians battled the Muslims—during Charlemagne’s reign in