Religion and Natural History Clash Among the [Jewish] Ultra-Orthodox

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It was early January when the posters went up in Mea Shearim, Jerusalem's largest ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, and they signaled the start of a bad year for Rabbi Nosson Slifkin.

Twenty-three ultra-Orthodox rabbis had signed an open letter denouncing the books of Rabbi Slifkin, an ultra-Orthodox Israeli scholar and science writer. The letter read, in part: "He believes that the world is millions of years old - all nonsense! - and many other things that should not be heard and certainly not believed. His books must be kept at a distance and may not be possessed or distributed." Rabbi Slifkin, the letter-writers continued, should "burn all his writings."

Fundamentalist Christians have long championed a literal reading of the Bible that suggests the planet is thousands of years old, rather than millions. But the denunciation of Rabbi Slifkin has publicized a parallel strain of thought among ultra-Orthodox Jews, a subset of the Orthodox Jewish community that is deeply skeptical of modern culture, avoiding television and the Web and often disdaining college education.

Rabbi Slifkin has made a career of reconciling Jewish Scripture with modern natural history. He teaches a course in biblical and talmudic zoology at Yeshivat Lev HaTorah, near Jerusalem, and gives frequent lectures, sometimes wearing a boa constrictor along with his black hat and jacket. With nine books to his name at age 29, he is a young up-and-comer in the sober world of Jewish scholarship.

The controversy surrounding him has pitted Jews who are skeptical of science against their more cosmopolitan brethren, who may follow ultra-Orthodox traditions but hold jobs as doctors or teachers. "My sense is there are literally tens of thousands of people who are upset about the ban," said Dr. Andrew Klafter, an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati School of Medicine, who is ultra-Orthodox. "I'm very, very puzzled by it."

In the days after the ban, Rabbi Slifkin's publisher and distributor dropped the three books mentioned in the open letter. He himself lost several speaking engagements and saw his own rabbi pressured to expel him from his synagogue. "He was crushed," said a friend, Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, a professor of Jewish law and ethics at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. "Do you know what it's like to walk through the street and see posters branding you a heretic?"

Three of Rabbi Slifkin's books, published from 2001 to 2004, were singled out in the letter or in related materials: "Mysterious Creatures," "The Science of Torah" and "The Camel, the Hare and the Hyrax."

Predictably, the banned books have become hits. A copy of "Science of Torah" recently sold on eBay for $125, or five times its cover price. And Rabbi Gil Student, whose company, Yashar Books, has taken over the distribution of the other two books, said he had done a year's business in a month selling them.

Rabbi Slifkin's books seek to reconcile, rather than to contrast, sacred texts with modern knowledge of the natural world.

But in the process, he has sometimes cast a critical eye on those texts. In "Mysterious Creatures," Rabbi Slifkin discussed fantastic animals mentioned in the Torah and the Talmud - among them, the unicorn and the phoenix - and suggested that, in reporting their existence, Jewish sages might have relied on the erroneous writings of ancient naturalists.

He gently debunked the claim, found in a medieval text, that geese grow on trees, explaining that it was "based on the peculiar anatomy of a certain seashell." And he examined the Talmudic doctrine that lice, alone of all animals, may be killed on the Sabbath because they do not sexually reproduce - a premise now known to be false.

In "The Camel, the Hare and the Hyrax," Rabbi Slifkin examined the difficult separation of animals into kosher and nonkosher, and discussed apparent exceptions and contradictions to the claims of Jewish law. (The aardvark and the rhinoceros, for example, meet one test for being kosher but not another.)

And in "The Science of Torah," he took a scientist's eye to the Torah. Evolution, he wrote, did not disprove God's existence and was consistent with Jewish thought. He suggested that the Big Bang theory paralleled the account of the universe's creation given by the medieval Spanish-Jewish sage Ramban. And Rabbi Slifkin wrote, to quote his own later paraphrase, that "tree-ring chronology, ice layers and sediment layers in riverbeds all show clear proof to the naked eye that the world is much more than 5,765 years old."

The latter statement was particularly galling to the rabbi's critics, who support a literal reading of Genesis that they say puts the earth's age at 5,765.

The rabbis who signed the letter denouncing Rabbi Slifkin are widely respected Torah authorities; one of them, Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, 91, is a leader of Israel's United Torah Judaism Party and one of the most respected scholars in Orthodox Ashkenazi Judaism. As a result, the letter has had repercussions far beyond the congregations of those who signed it. Rabbi Slifkin's publisher, Targum Press, and his distributor, Feldheim Publishers, have stopped carrying the books. Aish HaTorah, an Orthodox outreach organization, has removed most of his articles from its Web site.

Revered though they are, however, most of the rabbis signing the letter are not known as community leaders or public voices; only one of the Americans, for example, sits on the eight-member Council of Torah Sages at the head of Agudath Israel of America, an influential national Orthodox organization. Rather, they represent the most unworldly segment of the ultra-Orthodox community, in which learning is prized and contact with the secular world, including secular education, is shunned.

The letter against Rabbi Slifkin is not the only recent outburst against science among the ultra-Orthodox. Last November, during the annual conference of Agudath Israel, Rabbi Uren Reich, the dean of Yeshiva of Woodlake Village in New Jersey, said, "These same scientists who tell you with such clarity what happened 65 million years ago - ask them what the weather will be like in New York in two weeks' time."

Many science-minded ultra-Orthodox Jews say it is spiritually wrenching to see leaders they revere endorsing views they oppose.

Rabbi Adlerstein of Loyola said: "I know rabbis, I know teens in yeshivas who were on the verge of quitting" when the letter first came out. "They look at themselves in the mirror and they say, 'What have I been representing?' "

Of course they do. If one assumes that physical laws are absolute and unchanging. One could also claim that these were a product of the Geat Flood. But each explanation is an assumption based on preconceptions, though only the latter will admit this. And again, why evolutionists are so eager to get everyone to agree with them on the utter naturalism of the world's origin that they are willing to compromise on other things (the splitting of the Sea, the Revelation at Sinai, [lehavdil], the alleged resurrection of J*sus, etc.) is beyond me. It doesn't seem a logical position.

Indeed. Creationists have been ridiculed as heretics, innovationists, and "19th century positivists" for decades by the religious establishment. Hey, I'm a Creationist who's been Catholic, so don't ask me what it feels like to be considered a heretic!

So when do the "indigenous pipples" of the world have to modify their traditional beliefs in light of European science and rationalism? And how come the Darwinists and third world fundamentalists spend all their time pounding Bible-thumpers and never get mad at each other?

My son was told by his Hebrew teacher that there were no such things as dinosaurs. I didn't quite know what to say to that, as I do believe those skeletons belonged to some interesting creatures that obviously roamed the earth.

We don't really know what interesting creatures may be roaming the earth today (this is the field of cryptozoology).

Since I do believe in an omnipotent Hashem, I believe all things are possible. I find I can believe in the Torah and science both. Not that science isn't wrong once in a while. Isn't it supposed to be impossible for bumble bees to fly?

That depends on how one defines "science." The word itself comes for the Greek word for knowledge. So how is this knowledge obtained? The traditional method is by observation, a method not available to people who speculate on the origin of the universe. Therefore they take the world and its physical laws as they exist today and backwards extrapolate. It is well and good to extrapolate about historical times like our own, but retrojection of natural law as we know it into the very Creation of the Universe is a presupposition with a capital "P." Furthermore, while I understand atheist materialists discounting the Mabbul (Flood) as a possible cause of many of the things invoked as evidence for evolution, I fail to understand the total discounting of this possibility by "kosher" theistic evolutionists (see below). Do such people truly believe that the Mabbul, which they accept, would have had absolutely no effect on the geological record whatsoever? Why do so many who claim to believe in the Flood then insist that the condition of the earth today must be the result of unalterable physical laws during the Six Days of Creation?

All Torah Jews, even those who subscribe to "theistic evolution," believe that once Adam and Eve were created on the Sixth Day, everything in the Torah happened exactly as written (all the early generations, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, the Patriarchs, etc.) and that human history is measured precisely by traditional Jewish chronology. This is not scientific evolutionism, as logic dictates that physical laws that remained unchanged during Creation certain would have remained unchanged since that time. However, as I have stated in a previous post, evolutionists have a strange habit of trying to get people to simply believe in their origins theory by promising that it won't interfere with a belief in all sorts of miraculous "zapping" later on. I don't quite understand the logic behind this trade-off.

There is simply no need for anyone who believes the world was created to insist this creation must have followed physical laws that were not then in existence (they were in the process of being created themselves, just like the universe of which they are a constituent part). To say this is akin to saying that a ticking clock could only have ticked its way into existence. The universe, physical reality as we know it, was first created, and only after this (in fact, also after the eating of the fruit, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel) did the laws of physicality gel into what we know today. Nor is the assertion that G-d created a fully functioning universe (or an Adam with the body of a 20 year old) the claim that the world was created with the "illusion of age." It is an "illusion of age" only to someone who dogmatically insists that the world must have developed much as the things within the fully functioning universe do today before our eyes (an analogy).

I would also point out that those who insist on relativizing time so that they may absolutize natural law are making an arbitrary decision not to take the opposite approach, ie, to relativize natural law and absolutize time. Simply put, the universe contains natural law, and this law could not have pre-existed it or governed its creation (unless, like our old "friend" Gecko, you want to claim that the laws of physics exist outside the universe as absolute platonic ideals).

Finally, I would offer a word to all those who think that Fundamentalist Protestants, who have remained faithful while everyone else either wavered or were invisible to the world, are being unreasonable. So far as I know, most evolutionists claim to support religious freedom, but they have to redefine religion as an allegorical method of inculcating ethics via culturally conditioned rituals and symbols. Freedom of religion, in other words, applies only to practices and not to beliefs (on this matter our contemporary materialists share the philosophy of the pre-modern Catholic Church, namely, that error has no rights). However, not all religions have rituals. Fundamentalist Protestantism is particularly devoid of rituals and customs (its worship service consists of listening to a lecture), and it consists almost totally in believing certain things about the real world and about what has happened in history. If this were taken away from them there would be nothing left. It's too bad that people who shed crocodile tears for the "genocide" of the native American cultures or of the peasant Catholic Irish during the potato famine can't treat Fundamentalist Protestants with the same respect. Oh well.

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