Bereisheet and Science 2013

At the beginning of June, after years of fighting, I finally broke down and joined Facebook. I have enjoyed reading about friends and family I rarely see, and it has helped me feel connected to my congregants, so I am not sure why I waited so long. Anyway, since I joined, I have SLOWLY been getting my profile completely filled out. A few weeks ago I listed some of the books I have read and liked over the years. Among the list of books I put down were all of the books in Jean Auel's Earth's Children series simply known to some as the The Clan of the Cave Bear series. I have loved this series since I was a teenager, and I had to wait almost until I was forty for her to finish it, so it has been a big part of my life. But something funny happened when I posted on my Facebook page. One of my friends from high school, who is a very devout Christian, wrote to me privately via a message and said, "Michelle, I can't believe you still love those books! Now that you're a rabbi I would have thought you'd know better. How can you be a rabbi and like those books!" I responded, "Kay, I don't know what to say, except that I like the books."

Kay is not the only person to be surprised that I like those books. For some people it may not seem to make sense that a rabbi would love stories of primitive human beings. After all, it conflicts with the Torah. During my time as a rabbi I cannot tell you how many times I have been asked by students and congregants - young and old - how to reconcile the theory of evolution, dinosaurs, and the existence of primitive human beings with the Torah's account of creation. Over and over I have shocked one and all by explaining to them that there is no conflict between the two.

But before I explain how come the two are not in conflict, let me assure you how very important it is that we help people understand that no conflict exists. It is a vital educational effort, because if someone believes that the very first story in the Torah is clearly and scientifically false - they can lose faith in the Torah as a whole. If the Torah's "history" of humanity is wrong, why should anything it says about how human beings behave or should behave be relevant?

Now that you know the gravity of the situation, I will explain why I say there is no conflict between science and Torah. To truly parse this problem I usually start with the absolute basics. That is the fact that what we read in parashat Bereisheet today is not "THE" story of creation, but rather two very different stories of creation. Genesis 1 is the famous story of the six days of creation - first light, the heavens, the seas, plant life, the sun & moon, sea creatures and birds, land animals, and finally human beings - male and female - followed by the creation of Shabbat. Genesis 2 is radically different with Adam created first, followed by the Garden of Eden, then other animals - which he names - and finally with the creation of Eve.

Because of these two different accounts, Jewish tradition does not insist unequivocally on understanding either one literally. While some have determined the world to be exactly 5,770 years old, the great scholar of Jewish law Maimonides said in the 12th century that the Genesis story should be understood as a way to explain God's relationship with the universe, planet earth, and with human beings, and not as a scientific text. This idea helps some people, but causes problems for others. Again though, there are ways to reconcile seeming contradictions.

The first step is to note that the first thing we read about God's act of creation is vayomer Elohim yehi or - vayehi or, God said let there be light and there was light. Why is this significant? Because according to the same text the sun isn't created until the fourth day. Since we count our days as the 24 hours that it takes for earth to revolve on its axis in relationship to the sun, but the sun isn't created until the fourth day, it is quite probable that the first several days were not the same as ours. Perhaps those first three days equalled billions of years.

A second idea that is very helpful is the belief of some rabbis as far back as the 6th century as noted in Midrash Genesis Rabbah that this is not the first world God created. Basing themselves on a verse in Isaiah where God says: "I create new heavens and a new earth," they believed the world we live in is not God's first creation, rather God's most recent. As Rabbi Abahu said: the Holy One, blessed be He, went on creating worlds and destroying them until He created this one and declared, 'This one pleases Me; those did not please Me.'

Many medieval rabbis of Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, had a very interesting understanding of these previous worlds. They said it's not that God built and rebuilt new planets, rather God had cycles of creation on earth called shmeetot, what we would call epochs. Since dinosaurs and Neanderthals lived during a previous shmeetah, or cycle, we don't read about them in the Torah, which focuses only on the current cycle that we live in. This means that the fact that the Torah does not discuss primitive human beings or dinosaurs has no relationship to whether or not the Torah is telling us they existed. According to this understanding the Torah is designed to explain OUR world, not some previous world or epoch which God chose to end. The Torah focuses on the world God began in which we modern human beings would thrive and exist.

Okay, so I've resolved the problems of the existence of Neanderthals and dinosaurs, but what about Adam and Eve? Did I really mean it when I said that the Torah is not supposed to be literal? Yes and no. You see, even if we assume that this is not the first world, that other people existed prior to Adam and Eve, there STILL had to be a beginning for modern human beings. And when I read the story of Adam and Eve that is how I view it - the story of the first human beings who participated in what we call modern civilization - with building, agriculture, etc. Even the scientists know there had to be a first modern human being - I even remember a science magazine a few years ago with a headline - Meet Eve, explaining how virtually all people on the planet could trace their maternal ancestry to a woman in Africa thousands of years ago. Someone had to be the first - and in my mind that was Adam and Eve.

I said earlier how important it is for us to help people reconcile the stories of the Torah with scientific knowledge so as not to turn rational people away from devotion to God. But these explanations are important for another reason as well. We live in a world where many times, people demand either/or, black & white answers to very deep, profound questions. Shades of gray, nuance, and interpretation are shoved quickly aside for simple one word anwers. But in my mind, not everything is either/or. Indeed, I think very few things are either/or. A person needn't be either a scientist or religious, a rationalist or a person of faith. It is quite possible - and in my belief - to be both. Albert Einstein once said that faith without science is blind, and science without faith is lame. Along these lines the Rabbinical Council of America, an organization of Orthodox rabbis once wrote about this subject: "Judaism has always preferred to see science and Torah as aspects of the "Mind of God" that are ultimately unitary in the reality given to us by the Creator. In other words, science and Torah do not contradict one another, they complement one another, each giving us a different glimpse at how God operates in the world and in our lives.

The total ease and comfort our tradition has with questions and interpretations of our holiest texts, the tradition of debate, our embrace of science, rational thinking, and the quest for ever more knowledge is one of the many aspects of Judaism that makes me so proud to be a Jew. More than pride though, I have to confess to a feeling of comfort and intellectual and spiritual safety being part of a tradition that says I do not have to be either a person of faith or a person of science, but rather I can be both without compromising either.

In this world in which many people seem to seek out reasons to hate one another, I am grateful to the Torah which teaches me to use my mind and my soul to recognize the truth that "all human beings are created in God's image," even when they disagree with me.

Rabbi Michelle "Mina" Goldsmith
September 28, 2013