“When Rebeccah looked up and saw Isaac, she slid off the camel.”
Background
We all remember the story of Isaac and Rebeccah and how Abraham sent Eliezer, his servant, as a messenger (like we learnt before, regarding messenger particles) to find a wife for Isaac. Everything we might want to learn about shiduchim, about matchmaking, can be found in this story. When Eliezer had made the shidduch with Rivkah, even her father and brother, who were not very righteous individuals, had to admit that “the matter was decreed by Havayah” (רָבָּדַא הָצָי-הוה יֵמ), whose numerical value is 378 (see previous reading), which is also the value of the ancient word used in Modern Hebrew for “electricity” (לַמְׁשַח). If you reverse the numerals of 378, you get 873, which is the numerical value of “the speed of light” (רֹאוַת הּירוִהְמ), the one essential constant of our physical reality according to modern physics. A similar example is that if you take the value of “Shabbat” (תָּבַׁש), 702 and write the numerals in reverse order, you get 207, which is the numerical value of “light” (רֹאו).
Every word in the Torah is concentrated in one location. Surprisingly, the most ubiquitous word in the verses describing the shidduch of Isaac and Rebbecah is “camel” (לּמַּג). A camel is both a particle and a wave because its hunch resembles a wave. But the camel as a whole is like a single, big particle. We mentioned that it has been shown that all elementary particles exhibit wave-particle duality, so one might say that metaphorically, they are all camels.
The Meanings of “Camel”
All phenomenon of the Hebrew language are amazing meditations. The root of “camel,” לָמָּג sometimes means “weaning,” specifically in the verse, “on the day Isaac was weaned” (תֶל אֵמָּגִם הֹיוּב קָחְצִי). This immediately connects Isaac specifically with camels.
Besides meaning “camel” and “weaning,” this same root can also mean “acts of loving-kindness” (יםִדָסֲת חּילוִמְּג), which is specifically related to Abraham who is the archetypal soul of loving-kindness. Incidentally, the English word for camel clearly comes from the Hebrew word gamal. There are certain words in the English language which are one hundred percent from Hebrew.
E=MC
The same root, לָמָּג, is also the name of the third letter in Hebrew. The English alphabet in a certain sense simply mirrors the Hebrew alphabet. In English the third letter is c, which is the first letter of “camel.” In physics, the letter c appears in Einstein’s famous equation E = mc, where the letter c stands for the speed of light. It is easy to understand why E was chosen for energy and why m is for mass, but why c for the speed of light? Even physicists are divided on the reason. One opinion is that c stands for constant, and the speed of light is the most important constant in modern physics. Another opinion states that c is the first letter of the word “speed” in Latin. But we know what it really stands for: c stands for camel. So, E=mc means: energy is equal to the mass times a squared camel!
It is difficult to square a camel because it is round, but this is an important thing for women to know. A woman who wants to have a calm husband can use a technique taught by Rabbi Avraham Abulafia, which involves rearranging the letters of a word of phrase to get something related. In this case, the letters of “calm husband” (ַעּגוָל רַעַּב) can be rearranged to spell “circle the square” (לֶגֵעַעּבוָר). A woman that wants to calm her husband down must know how to make a square into a circle. This is not just cute. In Chasidut, it is explained in length that people are uptight and tense because they have too many corners, too many sharp edges. To calm them down, you must help them round their edges and get them to change from a square into a circle.
Camels and Light
In the Pentateuch, the root לָמָּג appears 34 times. 34 is the value of the Hebrew word we have selected for “photon” (לֶגֵא). 34 is also twice the value of “good” (בֹטו), reminding us of the verse: “God saw the light that it was good.” Of those 34 instances, 18 are concentrated in the story of Abraham sending Eliezer with gifts loaded on the camels. Every other verse mentions camels.
At the end of the story, Eliezer takes Rebecca on the camels to the Land of Israel, where Isaac is waiting. The sages say that at the same time that Eliezer had gone to make him a shidduch, Isaac had gone to a well called Be’er LaChai Ro’ee where Hagar, Abraham’s banished wife, was living. Isaac’s goal was to make a shidduch for his father, Abraham. This well’s name literally means “the well of the Living One that was seen,” but it can also mean the “well of living sight,” an allusion to photons of light emerging to give life (a process we know as photosynthesis).
The camels are coming over the desert. What more amazing image is there than seeing camels as photons. It is that Isaac is like a scientist who is watching the particle and wave effect. He was contemplating sight, and light, and the electromagnetic radiation, something that is hinted to in the place that he was coming from: “the well of sight....”
When Rebecca saw Isaac and saw how beautiful he was, the Torah says that she fell off the camel. It is like she fell off her photon. She was “riding” the beam of light and fell off it. There are many explanations of what it means that she fell off the camel. To get married, Isaac had to lift his eyes and see the camels coming.
(Excerpted from Lectures in Modern Physics)
