This evening, after Shabbat services, the Artemis II will decelerate from nearly 24,000 mph to a gentle 17 mph — in about fourteen minutes — and splash down off the coast of San Diego. The four astronauts aboard will have traveled farther from Earth than any human beings in history. When they charted their course, there was no “Thar be dragons!” scrawled at the edges of the map—only the dark void: the vast, airless, silent emptiness between our world and the moon.
I imagine they spent most of their time with numbers — oy, the numbers! — equations tracking speed and gravity, approach angles and oxygen consumption, more variables than most of us could hold in our heads for five minutes. Yet, as they hurtled toward the far side of the moon, I hope they also felt the wonder and curiosity that come from venturing into the unknown, inspiring us all to embrace our own sense of discovery.
The sheer chutzpah of it takes my breath away.
Four people made that journey: a Canadian, a seasoned spaceflight veteran, a fighter pilot, and the first Black man to fly a lunar mission. There’s no punchline here. It’s simply an improbable gathering of souls bound together by a sacred commitment to exploring the universe — and that, all by itself, is worth a moment of awe.
It calls to mind a passage from Genesis. Abraham is brooding in his tent, weighed down by doubt. He is supposed to become the father of nations, yet that promise seems utterly beyond reach. God notices his wavering faith and, gently, issues an invitation: Leave your tent — this closed, confined space you now occupy — and look up at the sky. Count the stars, if you can. And then: So shall your offspring be. The unthinkable, God is saying, becomes possible through faith and perseverance. But first, you have to step outside.
If we stay within our familiar enclosures, surrounded by people unwilling to look beyond what they already know, we will stop growing. When Galileo built his telescope and trained it on Jupiter’s moons, he discovered that not everything in the universe revolved around us. When he brought his findings to church officials, they refused to look through the lens. They had their story, and they were going to stick to it. The cost of that refusal — to curiosity, to truth, to human understanding — was enormous.
Jewish history has been, at its best, a long argument against that kind of willful blindness. From generation to generation, our thinkers, poets, and artists have dared to leave the tent and look up. We have reimagined the nature of God, wrestled with Torah, and reinvented what it means to be Israel. We have never been content to let the story stay fixed. Our shelter, as one tradition reminds us, is less a sealed tent and more a sukkah — open to the air, open to others, its roof intentionally parted so we can look up and find the moon and stars overhead.
Now, having just celebrated Passover — the holiday of liberation, of crossing from the narrow place into the wide open — we carry that same spirit forward as we lift our eyes to the heavens. If human beings can fly to the far side of the moon and return safely home, surely we can summon the courage for smaller but no less urgent journeys: toward justice, toward deeper connection with one another, toward a more honest relationship with God.
Shabbat shalom to the crew of Artemis II, and to all who got them there and back. May your voyage remind us that the most important expeditions often begin the same way Abraham’s did — by stepping out of the tent, looking up, and daring to believe that what seems impossible is not.
Before Shabbat 