Darkness falls on a fleeing Jacob and he stops for the night. The Torah [Bereishit 28:11] tells us that he “encountered the place and stopped for the night because the sun had set.” The Talmud in Tractate Hullin [91b] explains that this was no ordinary sunset and “the place” was no ordinary place. The earth itself folded so that Mount Moriah, the site of the Binding of Isaac (Akeidah) and the future Holy Temple, came to where Jacob was resting. Jacob covered the ninety kilometers between his home in Be’er Sheba and Jerusalem in only one day. This is the miracle of the “contraction of the road (kefitzat haderech).”

This story is usually seen as miraculous and supernatural, a moment when the laws of nature seemed to bend in the presence of holiness. We can see things differently if we understand that the boundaries between science and Torah are not walls but windows to an alternate perspective. Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity gives us the mathematics for how space itself can fold. Space and time are not rigid backdrops, but, rather, a four-dimensional fabric of spacetime, curved by mass and energy.

The equations are elegant: Gμν = 8πTμν.

This is the language used to write the universe. Near a massive object, rulers shrink and clocks slow. In extreme cases, the curvature becomes so strong that two distant points in space can be brought into direct contact. In 1988, Morris and Thorne described traversable wormholes: If a wormhole is threaded with exotic matter[1], the throat stays open and one can step from one mouth to the other instantly. No violation of local physics, just a shortcut through higher geometry. If you have seen the film “Interstellar,” you have seen this idea visualized. Kip Thorne, the film’s scientific consultant and a Nobel laureate, to boot, designed a wormhole near Saturn. A spaceship enters the wormhole and in the blink of an eye, crosses light-years. The physics is real, the visuals are Hollywood, but the concept is Torah: the universe can be........

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