Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Saturday 11 April 2026¹

• In 1851, the Boston to Montreal railway was completed.² This was a moment of great celebration. In Boston, specially-decorated ships performed a show in the harbour, parades and banquets took place, there were public firework displays, and children were given a day off school to join in the festivities.³
• Just think what we have to look forward to when HS2 is completed in 2075!
• Reverend Thomas Starr King, a Unitarian minister in Boston, joined the celebrations in his own special way, with a pair of sermons totalling over 60 pages. While the companies that constructed the railway were only in it for the profit, Starr King observed, they nonetheless gave humanity a great gift as a side effect. “Providence,” he said, “had another and a higher use for those iron tracks and flying trains. After [commercial entities] had devised and secured them, God took them for Divine purposes: without paying any tax for the privilege, God uses them to … send energy and vitality where before were silence and barrenness; to multiply cities and villages, studded with churches, dotted with schools, and filled with happy homes and budding souls; to increase wealth which shall partially be devoted to God’s service and kingdom; and all along their banks to make the wilderness blossom as the rose […E]ven while the cars are loaded with profitable freight and paying passengers, and the groaning engines are earning the necessary interest, Providence sends, without charge, its cargoes of good sentiment and fraternal feeling … and fastens to every steam-shuttle, that flies back and forth and hither and thither, an invisible thread of fraternal influence, which, entwining sea-shore and hill-country … forge and factory, wharf and mine, slowly prepares society to realise, one day, the … prayer, ‘that they all may be one’”.⁴
• If the people of Boston were excited about the opening of a new railway, how thrilled would they have been by the Artemis II spaceflight! Overnight, the Integrity and its four astronauts enjoyed a safe return to Planet Earth, no doubt followed by a fairly urgent trip to the toilet after such a lengthy journey.⁵
• It’s easy, and perhaps tempting, to deride space exploration as a monstrous waste of taxpayers’ money. Who can forget Jeremy Paxman’s infamous interview with Tim Peake in which he aggressively demanded: “But what’s the point?! You’re just drifting around!”⁶
• But even leaving aside the copious benefits to scientific and medical research, I think that if we asked Thomas Starr King for his thoughts, would say the same thing about space travel as he said about the Boston-to-Montreal railway. Firstly, better by far that governments spend money on space-rockets than on artillery rockets. Technological innovation is so often turned to military ends, how refreshing to see it being used for something exciting and bloodless! “It is better to tear the earth with ploughs than with cannon.”⁷
• Secondly, though, there is something inspirational about space travel. Not in a Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic sort of way; personally, my Virgin Atlantic flight to San Francisco was cramped and boring enough, and I have no desire to holiday on the moon. No. The inspiring facet of space travel is that there is something greater in our lives than our earthbound mundanity. Starr King said of the railway: “[W]e have built a ladder of iron, upon which our ideas and blessings shall yet climb into Canada.”⁸ And now our ideas and blessings can carry humanity (not humanity the people, but humanity the quality: being humane) further and further still.
• Our parashah this morning contains another exciting scientific moment. The Talmud tells us that God did not simply dictate the lists of kosher and non-kosher animals to Moses. Rather, God gave Moses a live demonstration, physically parading one of each creature before him.⁹ The commentator Rav Zalman Sorotzkin notes¹⁰ that such a parade of animals happened twice before in the Torah: once when Adam was introduced to all the animals,¹¹ and once when Noah assembled them for safekeeping on the Ark.¹²
• Sorotzkin observes that all three of these moments had something in common: they all occurred at times of creation. Adam was present at the literal Creation-with-a-capital-C. Noah was engaged on the task of bringing a new lease of life to a small corner of a world destined for death; and when the Torah was given to Moses, when our ancestors became Jews subject to the mitzvot and in covenant with God, the world was “recreated, or [at least] reëstablished”. Something magical happened, and that magical moment deserved to be marked by a parade of animals – just as the completion of the Boston-Montreal railway deserved firework shows and banquets.
• The Creation was the dawn of our species. Noah single-handedly saved the beauteous diversity of life on Earth. Moses initiated our Jewish identity with its inspiring ethical teachings and prayers of comfort and companionship. The railroad connected communities. The Integrity has showed what human coöperation can achieve.
• All of these occasions, from Adam to Moses, from cross-border trains to lunar exploration, remind us that our relationship with the world around us should be something in which we take pride. Every step we take should not be about what we get out of it on a mercenary level, but what benefits it will bring humankind.
• Christina Koch, one of the astronauts on Artemis II, told journalists that, for her, the strangest thing about rocket travel is that: “While you’re in space, you grow in height!”¹³ Granted, she was talking about the effects of gravity on the spine, but in fact, breaking new frontiers makes it possible for all of us to grow in height: in stature, in magnanimity, in humanity. May every new technological advance, even HS2, allow us to grow yet further and become yet better. כן יהי רצון, may this be God’s will.

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Shavua tov!

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Notes

1. Leviticus 11:1-12 ↩︎
2. The Railroad Jubilee: an account of the celebration commemorative of the opening of railroad communication between Boston and Canada (Boston: J H Eastburn, 1852). ↩︎
3. Ibid: 42. ↩︎
4. Thomas Starr King, The Railroad Jubilee: two discourses delivered in Hollis Street Meeting-house (Boston: Benjamin H Greene, 1851): 17-18. Gendered language adapted. ↩︎
5. Grace Eliza Goodwin, “Artemis II astronauts have toilet trouble on their way towards the Moon“, BBC News (5 April 2026). ↩︎
6. Simon Usborne, “Further Space Oddity: Jeremy Paxman grills British astronaut Major Tim Peake in weirdly aggressive Newsnight interview”, The Independent (21 May 2013). ↩︎
7. Starr King, ibid: 15. ↩︎
8. Ibid: 22. Starr King actually referred to “the Canadas”, an antiquated term for the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada that were eventually merged in 1841. ↩︎
9. b.Chullin 42a ↩︎
10. Oznayim la-Torah to Leviticus 11:2 ↩︎
11. Genesis 2:19 ↩︎
12. Genesis 6:20 ↩︎
13. Kristen Bobst, “Interview with astronaut Christina Koch“, Teen Vogue (27 September 2017). ↩︎