Rabbi Joel Bakst on the Hidden Fourth Dimension
The God of Israel, as I understand it, is fundamentally about dimensionality, and the right place to start is with four dimensions. One of those four is missing from our ordinary experience, yet the Torah has never stopped insisting that it is here, now, that we are embedded inside it. Hold onto that. When people hear the phrase parallel dimensions they tend to file it under science fiction. It belongs there, yes, but it also belongs to the vocabulary of contemporary physics. And what we are describing is stranger than free-floating parallel worlds sitting beside one another. These dimensions are free-standing and parallel and they intersect, which flips the usual picture around.
So there is the fourth dimension (and in truth there are many more, though for our purposes we keep to four), and there are the three we live in. The three, in a sense, collapse down to one, so really you have two basic modes at work. These four alphanumeric characters matter here, because in Hebrew every letter doubles as a number, and that is why the Tetragrammaton can be read as four digits. Four dimensions, intersecting, with our familiar three being a subset of the fourth. You can picture it without much effort. Imagine a cube, and nested inside it three smaller cubes, like Russian dolls: cube within cube within cube within cube.
Let that stack stand for reality in its original, higher-dimensional Adamic state. Then something happened. The three inner cubes dropped out. Tradition calls this the fall of Adam, but calling it a fall is slightly off. It was a collapse, and to be precise about it, a prolapse. The three cubes telescoped outward and got stretched, yet they never fully detached. That is the whole reason I reach for the word prolapse: a prolapse stays joined to its source. We are only drawing stick figures here, crude sketches of something we cannot actually grasp. We do it anyway, because we have to, and because for the first time we have decent tools for the job: maps, models, metaphors drawn from the sciences.
Picture those three smaller cubes stretched so far that it looks as though we have been severed from the fourth cube altogether. We have not. The fourth cube is where we actually live. Our three dimensions sit inside the fourth. This is the operating logic of Judaism as I read it, or what I would call Adamic Judaism, and it leans directly on the maps and models and metaphors of the new sciences.
By new sciences I mean a few things in particular. The holographic model of reality is one. Another is the Mobius strip, which hands us a way to picture a single thing that expresses itself in two ways: one surface that reads as a single side, or better, a single side carrying two surfaces, able to turn concave or convex. Whatever shows up in this reality, then, is only ever one side of the equation.