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Rodger Kamenetz Scans The Universe

Getting ready for Dawn 2010

by
Marc Tracy
May 12, 2010

Rodger Kamenetz, author of Nextbook Press’s forthcoming Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav and Franz Kafka, will be among the presenters at Dawn 2010, the Tablet-sponsored late-night cultural arts festival going down in honor of Shavuot on the evening of Saturday, May 15 in San Francisco.

Kamenetz gets to use the planetarium at the venue, which is the (super-cool) California Academy of Sciences. “I will be co-piloting a tour of the universe, starting from Planet Earth and going out beyond the Milky Way,” he said. “I will be presenting moments from Genesis, Psalms, Talmud, and Zohar that reflect the feelings of awe and wonder, and how experiencing those feelings helps us feel into a connection to God. In a lot of cases, some of our advanced scientific cosmology, such as the theories of inflation and the Big Bang have remarkable parallels to three-fold story of creation put forth in the Lurianic kabbalah.”

This sounds almost eerily well-suited to a late-night study session, no?

Burnt Books [Nextbook Press]



Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.