Are You Straight?

Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

March 17, 2023 • 25 Adar 5783 • Parshas Vayakeil (Ex 35-end)

The purpose of this email is to straighten things out at the Shabbat table. Please share.

First question for your table: Do you like to have your furniture arranged parallel to the walls or rather askew? Why is that?

Last week's solar system theme reminded me of this perhaps somewhat cliché observation:

If you think about it, you might notice that nature tends towards curves while we humans seem to prefer straight lines? Why is that?

Why do so few people live in yurts or Hobbit homes?

Not just our homes - the objects we build tend toward straight lines. When you walk through an art museum, 99 percent of the paintings are rectangular. Our phones - even with rounded edges, are rectangular. Even though an ergonomic keyboard is healthier and more sensible, you never see a computer sold with one.

Actually, there are surely scientific explanations why natural things tend toward roundness and manufactured things tend toward straightness. But that's not really the point. The point is that they do. 

This bias is so burned into our subconscious that when we see something not perfectly straight it often causes us to wince - it just doesn't look right. It can be unsettling.

By the way, this distinction can be found in the different approach of Judaism v. Hellenism when building a temple. In a Hellenistic temple - such as the Parthenon - the foundation is built with curves in order to conform to the shape of the earth on which it stands. (If fact, these curves are considered fundamental to its ingenuity.)

In our Temple, the foundation is perfectly level and the walls are perfectly straight.

Thus we have an interesting question for your table: What does that distinction imply about the values or goals of Judaism v. Hellenism?
 

Shabbat Shalom


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