My Jewish Seminary

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CAN THIS QUEST BE PURSUED RATIONALLY?

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The Jewish seeker accepts that "the truth comes from whatever source it proceeds" (Maimonides), meaning that where the Torah is incompatible with science, the Torah is not to be read literally. "We can't apply Torah to the world, or speak to the world, if we don't understand the world." (Rabbi Jonathan Sacks) 

Judaism's myths, metaphors, parables, and rituals are not an "ultimate, final formulation of truth." (Fishbane) Yet they are stabilized and preserved--across millennia and cultures--because they convey foundational accounts about existence, the nature of life, "the very ground of being" (Fishbane), in a more profound, memorable way than flat declarative statements. Judaism "refashions the Torah into verbal prisms in the hope that primordial wisdom might be refracted through them into the heart of the seeker. So viewed, the mythic imagination is a tool of the spiritual quest, and mythmaking a ritual of divine disclosure." (Fishbane)  Judaism is a proven way of transmitting that wisdom globally and passing it down from generation to generation.

If the Torah is just fiction from which we cherrypick the parts that make us feel good, then we could write a better book in our own day. But to do so would ignore vast historical experience: Judaism has spent 2,500 years interpreting the Torah, “opening its outer form in order to find the wisdom within, lifting the veil to see beyond the surface appearance of the text. What’s inside? Can it help me see beyond the surface appearance of the world and other people? Can it help me relate to other people, and myself, on a deeper level? Does it help me understand God and soul? Can it help me see people as being in God's image, and help them see themselves that way? What do I do with these insights on a boring Tuesday afternoon? How do I live with them in this world and integrate them into my life? How do I create a bridge between peak moments of insight and ordinary life? All of Judaism is a response to these questions." (Rabbi Art Green)

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"But that is not religion, say people of today. The question of religion is settled. It is ancient ignorance that is incompatible with reason and knowledge, ridiculous, contradictory, superstitious, incomprehensible, frivolous, useless, and harmful. It was a particular phase in the development of humanity that is long outdated and interferes with progress. There is a great delusion in such assumptions. To claim that the supernatural and irrational form the basic characteristics of religion is much the same as noticing only the rotten apples and then claiming that the basic features of the fruit named apple are bitterness and a harmful effect produced in the stomach." (Leo Tolstoy)

Maimonides, Sacks, Fishbane, Green, and Tolstoy are saying that Judaism, in its best forms, does not contradict science and archaeology. It does not tolerate ignorance. It is a straw man argument to paint all of Jewish practice with one brush, reducing Judaism to the belief that Moses at Sinai was God's unerring stenographer and every word of the Torah is to be taken literally. Rather, Judaism (understood and practiced intelligently, especially in today's Neo-Hasidism) is a means of awakening and living with the wonder described by Albert Einstein: "Mystery is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds​ cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness." 

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Crucially, as Paul Fleischman said in his book Wonder: "​Although I experience the wonder of life and want to convey why, I do not want to be misunderstood as promoting ideas that purport to know the long-term goal of our universe. I have not gotten close enough to the universe's embryonic start or to its senescent demise to issue proclamations about the intentions or the destiny of the exploding billion-galactic cosmos. Neither as scientists nor as theologians can we claim privileged access to statements about the universe's origins, intentions, or goals. Knowledge of the meaning and end of the universe would require measurement from an external platform. We are cameo players in a drama whose heroes include plate tectonics and supernovae. Our ability to trace the gossamer of wonder is shattered by the bad breath of our self-important bombast. Self-appointed narcissism is not religion. It is pseudo-religion to cage the universe in security-seeking fatuous explanations. Authentic worship contains reverence for what is."

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Carl Sagan (whose deep, challenging thoughts stimulated my theological readings in the first place) provides, in the video below, an astronomical context for the quest described above. I know what Sagan's response to this website would be, because he wrote it in The Varieties of Scientific Experience: "My response to the claim that humans aren't just physical beings but spiritual entities, too, is that it remains to be proved. What is the evidence that we are more than material beings? What is the compelling evidence that matter is not all of our makeup? First you have to show that spiritual faculties exist before you can have a major program to encourage them." I disagree and answer with all of the links above. 

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I wish I could have a conversation with Sagan. I'm confident it would be cordial and robust since we agree, 100%, on a bedrock idea of his: "In the sense of seeking the deepest interrelations among things that superficially appear to be sundered, the objectives of religion and science are identical or very nearly so. But the question has to do with the reliability of the truths claimed by the two fields and the methods of approach."  Furthermore, as his wife wrote in the introduction to The Varieties of Scientific Experience: "The varieties of Carl's scientific experience were exemplified by oneness, humility, community, wonder, love, courage, remembrance, openness, and compassion." Anyone who increases these qualities in the world--through religion or not--is someone I want to know, help, and highlight.