The age of information brings along with it a new wave of skepticism as people achieve greater access to information over the Internet. Whether that leads to backing a wave of secularism is yet to be seen, but I for one believe that the importance of religion and its traditions is losing its power, influence and dominance. Of course, this is not uniform across the world, and there are places like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia that will continue to revel in more zealous forms of religion. But on a grand scale, religious authorities are facing the challenge of trying to make sense of their own values in a world that prioritizes exactitude, specificity and accuracy.

But it is very important to understand that we approach religion very differently from our ancestors. When you examine the earliest roots of religion, what becomes apparent is that religion was more a tool to make sense of this strange, unpredictable world and to provide hope and unity to a society. It was not to provide a historically and scientifically accurate account of how the world came to being and how humans descended onto planet Earth. The word “belief” wasn’t interpreted as it is today. In fact, belief had more to do with taking part in rituals rather than “having faith;" myths would make no sense whatsoever if one failed to look at the rituals or traditions they were a part of.

One such fascinating myth is Luria’s Creation myth. On Jan. 2, 1492, the Christians conquered Granada and officially ended the Crusades by taking over the Muslim Empire in Spain. Jews, who had lived a peaceful existence under the Muslim Empire, were now forced to convert to Christianity or face deportation by the new rulers. Some converted to Christianity while others fled to the Ottoman Empire, where they lived in relatively better conditions. To these Jews, exile was beginning to seem like a natural state. During this period, in which they looked for a messiah to end their misery and guide them to the promised land, they found a man named Isaac Luria. Luria would go on to become very famous after his death for the myth he brought forth during this time.

In Luria’s myth, the creative process begins with an act of voluntary exile. It starts by asking how the world could exist if God is omnipresent.

The answer is the doctrine of Zimzum, or Withdrawal: the infinite and inaccessible Godhead, which Kabbalists called Ein Sof or Without End, had to shrink into itself, evacuating a region within itself in order to make room for the world. Creation began, therefore, with an act of divine ruthlessness: in its compassionate desire to make itself known in and by its creatures, Ein Sof had inflicted exile upon a part of itself. Unlike the orderly, peaceful creation described in the first chapter of Genesis, this was a violent process of primal explosions, disasters and false starts that seemed to the Sephardic exiles a more accurate appraisal of the world they lived in.

At an early stage in the Lurianic process, Ein Sof had tried to fill the emptiness it had created by Zimzum with divine light, but the “vessels” or “pipes” which were supposed to channel it shattered under the strain. Sparks of divine light fell into the abyss of all that was not God. After this “breaking of the vessels,” some of the sparks returned to the Godhead, but others remained trapped in this Godless realm, which was filled with the evil potential that Ein Sof had purged from itself in the act of Zimzum. After this disaster, creation was awry; things were in the wrong place. When Adam was created, he could have rectified the situation and, had he done so, the divine exile would have ended on the first Sabbath. But Adam sinned and henceforth the divine sparks were trapped in material objects, and the Shekhinah, the Presence that is the closest we come to apprehension of the divine on earth, wandered through the world, a perpetual exile, yearning to be reunited with the Godhead.

You will horribly fail to appreciate this myth if you try to think of it as a scientifically accurate description of how the world came into being. But then why would anybody value a story that they understand is not essentially true? Consider the stories that came from the Jewish communities after World War II, in which Jews in concentration camps would discuss the nature of God — how helpless He must be to help them or how evil He must be to let this atrocity take place — then go back to prayer. We should value these myths because religion is meant to allow humans to transcend the mundane, the feeble, and to partake in something greater. Religions and myths of the world have a lot to teach us, and it only deepens our understanding if we understand why these myths exist in the first place.