The Revelation in Sci-Fi
As the sun rises over a craggy, barren landscape, the first rays of light penetrate the cavernous sleeping quarters of a family of primates. Off in the distance arise the sounds of an other worldly choir, an inchoate chorus. Agitated, the apes approach the entrance of their cave, situated on the side of a desert mountain, and find a mysterious object鈥攁 thin, pitch-black, rectangular monolith鈥攕tanding erect, singing to them. At first one ape, then two, and then all of them approach the monolith, touch its smooth, black surface, and are in turn touched by it. These primates鈥攐ur ancestors鈥攔eceive the gift of cognition, enabling them to evolve into Homo sapiens who transcend their earthly confines and literally ascend into the heavens aboard human-engineered space vehicles.
The scene described above is the 鈥淒awn of Man鈥� sequence from Stanley Kubrick鈥檚 iconic adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke鈥檚 2001: A Space Odyssey. This scene has always struck me as a Jungian meditation on the Sinai Revelation of Exodus 19鈥�20鈥攈ow the notion of a divine revelation of tablets on a mountain became part of the collective human unconscious. In my reading of the scene, the ancestors of human beings experienced the revelation of the monolith in our distant past,and that experience emerged as the Sinai revelation in the literature of Biblical Israel.
I see the 鈥淒awn of Man鈥� scene as a modern aggadah on the central narrative of Shavuot. It testifies to the Sinai Revelation鈥檚 continuing hold on our imagination. How we tell and retell this founding narrative also helps us understand how we interpret the human condition and the relationship between the terrestrial and celestial realms.
