It was inevitable that someone would find the Jewish angle in Halley’s comet, now making its appearance in our skies.
It wasn’t discovered by Edmond Halley, the British astronomer-explorer and colleague of Isaac Newton 200 years ago — even though he established that the comets which had appeared in 1531, 1607 and 1682 were one and the same and predicted it was to appear again 76 years later, in 1758, when it was given Halley’s name — even though he did not live to see its predicted reappearance.
A comet which appears every 70 years is mentioned in the Talmud. The Jewish angle was mentioned by Rabbi Zvi Ilani, of the religious-oriented Bar-Ilan University in Romat Gan during an Israel Radio program last week on the comet.
The Talmud’s Seder Nezikin, section Horayoth, page (Daf) 11, tells that Rabban Gamliel, on a journey to Rome in the year 95, was accompanied by Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Hananya, sailing in a ship which was beset by storms and went off course owing to faulty navigation.
Gamliel had taken only bread with him, but Yehoshua had also taken a reserve supply of flour, which he shared with his companion when Gamliel’s bread ran out because of the delays.
“Did you know that we should be so much delayed that you brought flour with you?” the Talmud quotes Gamliel as asking. Yeshoshua replied: “A certain star rises once in 70 years and leads the sailors astray, and I suspected it might rise and lead us astray.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
