You walk across the living-room carpet, scuffing your feet, to turn on the light switch and ZAP!  You’ve been hit by static electricity.  That very same static electricity  holds the atoms of table salt into the form of those little white cubes.  How does it work?   It’s all due electric charge, a fundamental property of all matter.

Charge comes in two types, called “positive” and “negative.”  These two types of charges push and pull on each other according to a simple rule:  Two objects having the same charge push each other away.   If they have opposite charges they pull toward each other.  When oppositely charged objects are held slightly apart, the charges may leap across a short distance to join each other, creating sparks—miniature lightning—as they go.  (You can see this with just-laundered sheets or clothes taken hot out of the dryer.  Turn off the room lights and pull the pieces apart.  The crackling sound you’ll hear is miniature thunder.  The shirts stick to the sheets because their natural, hidden charges were rubbed apart during the tumble-drying.)

The world contains equal amounts of both types of charge.  Equal amounts of positive and negative charges neutralize each other.  It’s like mathematics:  (+1)  +  (-1)  = 0,  (+75)  +  (-75)  = 0, and so on.  That explains why we don’t normally see the push or pull of electricity in everyday objects.  The positives and negatives are still there, but the object’s total charge is zero so it can’t push or pull on other neutral objects.

What could be more common than table salt?  The white stuff we sprinkle on vegetables and meats is a poster child for electric charge.  How do we know?  Anyone who’s taken high school chemistry has probably seen this demonstration:  An electric circuit is set up with a light bulb and a power supply–either a battery or a plug that goes into a wall’s electric socket.  The circuit is broken by a space between two electrodes.  When the electrodes are placed into pure water, nothing happens.  But when some table salt is added to the water, the bulb lights up.  That means something in the water is carrying electric current from one electrode to the other.  This observation, combined with the knowledge and experience of centuries, leads chemists to believe that the salt is made from electrically charged atoms, called “ions.”

In fact, experiments done at the beginning of the twentieth century convinced scientists that all matter is made of electrically charged particles.  The positively charged particles, called protons, lie in the central core, the nucleus, of every atom.  The negatively charged particles, called electrons, move around the nucleus.  That gives rise to the well-known image which is the emblem of the United States Atomic Energy Commission.  That image is no longer believed to be exactly correct:  discoveries of quantum mechanics have “blown it away.”  But it suffices for an introductory idea.  And like any good scientific idea, it raises many more questions than it answers. 

 

Opposites in Creation

The insight that all of matter is made of oppositely electrically charged particles connects to a question raised by a careful reading of the Torah’s account of Creation.  Six days are described, each with its own particular creation.  The first day, G-d created light:  “…And G-d saw the light, that it was good.”  (Genesis 1:4)  On the second day, G-d created the “firmament”–a word whose meaning is not as clear as we (naively) think of light as being.  However, the description goes on to relate the firmament as a kind of separation, or dividing barrier between the waters above and the waters below.  No pronouncement of “good” for this second day’s creation.  But on the third day, with the creation of the seas and the dry land, and vegetation on the dry land, G-d twice called the results “good.”  Once perhaps to make up for the omission on the second day, and once for the third day itself.  And so on for the fourth, fifth and sixth days of creation, G-d pronounced the results of each day of His divine work “good.”

So what was the problem with the second day?  Why couldn’t it immediately enjoy G-d’s approval?  And what does this have to do with electric charge, anyway?

A midrash explains:  The firmament is a division between the spiritual Upper Waters and the physical Lower Waters.¹  The Lower Waters were very unhappy about this arrangement.  G-d withheld His approval, because, as Rabbi Chanina said, “… on that day, strife was created.”² 

If division leads to strife, why was it created in the first place?  And why are divisions so common in the world?  In fact everywhere we look, we see divisions so extreme that we call them opposites:  up and down, life and death, past and future, give and take, good and evil, positive and negative.    Recognizing differences enables us to make sense out of all the world’s seemingly endless number of objects.

But focusing on the world’s differences increases strife.  Throughout history human, societies have worshipped “good” and “evil” as distinctly different powers, as gods and devils.  Even those who don’t bow to idols may fail to understand the Oneness of G-d and the unity of Creation.  Such divisions lead to wars and destruction that bring billions of people to the opposite of life.

But on the third day of creation, the Lower Waters were gathered into oceans, allowing dry land to appear.  G-d pronounced this separation “good.”  Why?  Because it culminated in the creation of trees and grasses and other forms of vegetation.   The third day was doubly good, because it completed the work of the second day, and also showed that what appeared as strife was in fact the preparation for future life and growth.

Taken together, the Second and Third Days illustrate a concept essential to human well-being.  We must learn to understand the world, not as a harsh realm of extremes, but rather as place where opposites meet and unite.³  For example, we live in the present, where past and future touch.  To hold up a Torah scroll requires a single body with two arms, left and right.  Creating a child requires two physical parents, male and female.  (And of course a third partner:  G-d).

 

A “Higher” Unity

Therefore the rabbis ask an ancient riddle: “Which number represents greater unity, one, two,  or three?”

The answer is three.  Obviously it’s not two, the number of separation.  It’s not one because, “When something exists alone…It remains completely at peace, without regard for anything else.”    But… “The number three … merges the two [seeming opposites] to create a new entity, one that harmoniously includes both opposites.”⁴

Pure sodium and pure chlorine react so violently that they can’t exist alone in nature.  But the product of their reaction, oppositely charged ions, fills the land and seas.  United, they form a third substances, those white crystals that are essential to life.

Through science we now see the greater unity-of-three in nature and in a grain of salt.   “When…we see two apparently contradictory qualities joining, we can appreciate that this is possible only because He has manifested Himself.”⁵

[1] Midrash cited by Rabbeinu Bachya on Leviticus 2:13

[2] Bereishit Rabba 4:6.

[3] In the Garden of the Torah, Brooklyn: Sichos in English, 1994, vol. 1, Bereishis p. 3.

[4] Rabbi Eliezer Posner, “On the Meaning of Three,” www.Chabad.org, accessed July 14, 2016.

[5] In the Garden of the Torah, p. 3.