God, History, and Torah

There is an ongoing tumult occurring in America.   The arguments are on campus too, largely waged between religionists on the right and religionists of the left together with secularists.  The distillation of the argument reached its apex a few years back in a courthouse in Pennsylvania.  The trial in Harrisburg is received a lot of coverage nationwide on CNN, FOX and virtually every newspaper in the nation.  The argument centered on the opening passage of the Torah describing creation.  How should biology –evolution -- be taught (if at all) in our school systems?

     One poll taken cites that 50% of Christian America                   believes the Biblical story of creation in the Bible should be          taken literally.  Various politicians have taken their stance on “intelligent design.”

What does Judaism have to offer on the subject?  In the Middle Ages, Maimonides one of greatest thinkers, teachers and physicians of his era and ours determined that science, by definition, could not be in conflict with religion.  That is, Maimonides believed that truth is not negotiable.  Torah is truth and to the extent that science would come into conflict with Torah, the Writ must not be understood properly.  If science proved something that contradicted Biblical thought, Bible required re-interpretation.    

Rabbi Abraham Kook, the first chief rabbi of Israel, wrote that there is no contradiction between the Torah and evolution.    Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, another Orthodox thinker, wrote that if the theory of evolution proved to be correct, it would be a testimonial to the wisdom of the Creator.

Albert Einstein said that science without religion is lame.  Religion without science is blind.

Jews must not be lame or blind. 

In the first Sidra of the Torah, Beresheet, the Text says, Vayhi ha-adam lnefesh chayah, “Man became a became a living soul.”  What does “living soul” mean?  Rashi, the medieval expositor said it indicates two things; Death and dibbur.  Rashi believed that the gift of God to humanity was that we were endowed with the faculties of reasoning and speech.   To deny these gifts is to deny our destiny.

Kabbalah has long taken that philosophic stance that the Torah is far above the tales we all learned in Religious School.  The Torah is about lofty principles.  It is not a history book; it is a book about God. 

Here is one obvious biblical fact: In its own narrative, Torah depicts light as having preceded the sun.  Two questions should be shouting at the reader: How could there be light without sun? And, how could there be a literal “day” of creation when there was no rotation of the earth around its star?

Our answer is that Torah wishes to say something powerful about humanity, God and, the universe without being reckoned as a textbook.  Truth is always the goal.