Torah, Creation's cookbook

A Midrash in the Talmud brings down the legend that the Torah was actually composed before Creation itself and that G-d read it in order to make the Universe and all the things and beings in it. In fact, He spoke aloud the words in the Torah, or since there were no vowels or spaces, He uttered in one long act the one long word which brought everything into existence.

If the Torah is G-d's cookbook for Creation, then the proper science of the universe is not a logos deriving from an alphabet that promises the perfect representation of speech (and therefore intention). It is not a science in which we feel we have access to the pure intentions and mind of G-d. The proper language of science is not a transparent code like mathematics or logic in which an expression has one and only one possible meaning.

Perhaps the proper language of science, of knowing, especially as we have come to understand it in our postmodern, post-Heisenberg, post-Gödel era, is Hebrew, a highly ambiguous script that represents Creation as equally uncertain and gives rise to an episteme whose goal is not to write a single, totalizing Grand Unifying Theory (GUT) or a Theory of Everything (TOE), to express all the laws of nature in one simple, transparent mathematical formula, but to proliferate perspectives on an unstable and chaotic reality. Perhaps the proper impulse and representation of natural truth is to multiply interpretations, knowing that the scientist is always in the position of the Talmud student struggling with a difficult text where manifold meanings are simultaneously true and contradictory, trying to find the places to insert the spaces and vowels, trying to decipher the scars in meaning.

Perhaps Nature, like the Torah, that first act of letterature in the very first alphabet, is a massive and compulsive punster.