Alone in the Cosmos

Who knows what kind of loneliness is more agonizing: the one which befalls man when he casts his glance at the mute cosmos, at its dark spaces and monotonous drama, or the one that besets man exchanging glances with his fellow man in silence? Who knows whether the first astronaut who will land on the moon, confronted with a strange, weird, and grisly panorama, will feel a greater loneliness than Mr. X, moving along jubilantly with the crowd and exchanging greetings on New Year’s Eve at a public square?

—Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, 1965

This is a moment of astronautical milestones. In December, we commemorated the 50th anniversary of Apollo 8, when three American astronauts took the first picture of “earthrise” while reading aloud from the story of creation in Genesis. This was a triumphant moment for America, a theological rejoinder to the Khrushchev chortle in 1961 that “Gagarin flew into space but didn’t see any god there.” In 2019, we will mark half a century since Neil Armstrong took “one small step for man.” And as we prepare to commemorate the first man on the moon, we would do well to ponder the last (as yet).