[This continues the series on our current MUST READ and MUST OWN, featuring Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. This is the continuation of Chapter 3: Diverging Paths where Rabbi Sacks narrates his journey of faith toward Judaism and the Truth it upholds in the Hebrew Scriptures. But he also gives a perspective to Judaism and Jewish rabbis which/who respect truth and wisdom whatever the source, a value worth emulating by all religionists!
In our Sinaite’s core group just recently, we discussed what has changed in our thinking when we broke away from our former religious beliefs and embraced the Torah and learned from the Jewish Sages. One significant answer relates to this post: we have become less judgmental of others of differing religious persuasions; we consider all who are travelling the path to seek to know God better as co-travellers who will eventually arrive at Sinai, the place of divine revelation. . . if they keep seeking with all their heart and mind and soul!
My free-thinker-non-religious father once wrote “Education is a shield against the intolerance of the mind.” In a way he was right; education does widen mental horizons to every kind of information out there . . . but it has been our experience that education is not enough; the will to know truth is a good start, but once truth is known, each person has yet to decide whether to accept it or not, particularly divinely-revealed truth and its source, both of which are questioned because of ‘religious’ intolerance and close-mindedness and the confusion of so much information out there. Enough said, this is about Rabbi Sacks’ mind-opening perspective-widening book, so let’s get to it.
Please refer to the previous posts if you haven’t already done so. Reformatting and highlights added, as well as images.—Admin1.]
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The second story began for me in 1993 when I was privileged to receive an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University together with, among others, James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA. It gave me the opportunity of saying the ancient blessing, coined by Judaism’s sages some two thousand years ago and still to be found in all Jewish prayer books, thanking God for bestowing His wisdom on human beings. Essentially it is a blessing to be said on seeing a great scientist, although the word ‘scientist’ was not coined until many centuries later, and it reflects a time when religion and science were seen not as adversaries but as respected friends.
I thought hard about that blessing because it is so unexpected. The Talmud says it is to be said on seeing ‘one of the sages of the nations of the world’. The sages they were referring to were either Greek or Roman. Remember that Greeks, under the Seleucid Antiochus IV, had banned the public practice of Judaism. Centuries later, the Romans had destroyed the Temple and razed Jerusalem. These were Israel’s enemies, politically, militarily, above all culturally and spiritually. The Greeks were polytheists. The Romans had a disturbing tendency to turn caesars into gods. For the sages to institute a blessing — a religious act of thanksgiving — over their scholars showed a remarkable open-mindedness to wisdom whatever its source. ‘Accept the truth, whoever says it,’ said Maimonides. There is religious dignity and integrity to science.
No less remarkable is the way in which the rabbis of the era recognised that when it came to science, their own views might simply be wrong. There is a talmudic passage — it reads somewhat quaintly nowadays — in which the rabbis are discussing the question of where the sun goes at night. First they give their own opinion, then they cite the Greek view, that of Ptolemy. They then conclude, ‘And their view seems more plausible than ours.’ That is the way the Talmud says the story. They are right. We are wrong. End of discussion.
Similarly, on a more religiously sensitive matter, the rabbinic literature records a conversation between Rabbi Judah the Prince, head of the Jewish community in the early third century and Antoninus, a Roman sage, about when the soul enters a child. Rabbi Judah says, at birth. Antoninus says, at conception. The rabbi then astonishingly declares that Antoninus is right. Thereafter when he repeats the teaching, the rabbis is careful to say, ‘Antoninus taught me this.’ This was a religious attitude to science both open-minded and willing to learn.
Yet I remained puzzled about one of the most curious facts in the intellectual history of Judaism. The first chapter of Genesis with its momentous simplicity — ‘And God said let there be . . . and there was . . . and God saw that it was good’ –was described by Max Weber and more recently by Peter Berger as the origin of Western rationality.
Image from aviewfromtheright.com
Unlike all the cosmological myths of the ancient world, there is no clash of the gods and their rivals, no cosmic battles like those of Tiamat and Marduk, Seth and Osiris, Kronos and Zeus. There is no myth at all. God speaks and the universe comes into being. The universe has been stripped of its overlay of mystery and caprice. It has been, in Weber’s famous word, ‘disenchanted’.
Genesis 1 is the beginning of the end of mythic imagination.
It made science possible. No longer was the universe seen as unpredictable. It was the work of a single, rational creative will. Nor was it — as were the gods of myths — at best indifferent, at worst actively hostile to human beings. Genesis spoke of a God who endowed humanity with his image. Evidently he wanted humans to be, in at least some respect, god-like. Had we the evidence of Genesis 1 alone, we could have predicted that the people who lived by this book would have become a nation of scientists.
The curious incident is that they did not. The Greeks did. Jews knew that they did. As we have seen, they admired their work and even coined a blessing over its practitioners. Yet neither in the biblical nor in the early rabbinic age did Jews evince a sustained, widespread, focused interest in science. It is as if from the outset Jews knew that science — what they called ‘wisdom’ –was one thing, and religion another.
- Science was about natural law, religion about moral law.
- Natural laws are laws that predict and explain, moral laws are laws that command or constrain.
- Science was about things, religion about people and their freely chosen acts.
Having established the preconditions of science, Jews evinced no further interest in it at least until the Middle Ages.
Why then is Genesis 1 there?
1. The most obvious reason is that it is not a myth but a polemic against myth. Unlike the gods of myth, God is not part of nature. He is the author of nature which he created by a free act of will. By conferring his image on humankind, God gives us freedom of the will. This generates the entire moral world of the Bible with its vision of the human person as a responsible, choosing moral agent. Rejecting myth, the Bible discovers freedom.
2. Second is the insistence on the goodness of the world. Even times we read that ‘God saw that it was good.’ This too was revolutionary. Most religions, ancient and modern, have contrasted this world and the next, Earth and heaven, the world of the senses and that of eternity, this life and the afterlife. Here is chaos, there is order. Here is suffering, there is its reward. To a remarkable degree the Hebrew Bible is reticent about life after death and never uses it to reconcile people with their condition on Earth. The religious drama takes place here. This world, this life, is where we meet God and either do or fail to do his will. The universe is good, but humans are free to do evil. This frames the entire religious drama of humankind.
3. Third is the orderliness of the universe. Gone is the mythic mindset of ever-threatening chaos. The narrative is tightly structured. For three days God creates domains — light and dark, sea and sky, sea and dry land. For the next three days he populates those domains with moving things: the sun, moon and stars, fish and birds, land animals and man.
The seventh day, the day of rest, is holy: an enduring symbol of the world at peace with itself and its maker. The implication is clear. God creates order; it is man who creates chaos.
Equally radical is the fact that, since God created everything, he is God of everywhere. For the first time, God and religion are de-territorialised. There is no longer a god of this place and a god of that; a god of these people as opposed to those. Abrahamic universalism is born here. This will prove crucial in the book of Exodus when God intervenes to deliver one nation out of another, what we would call today an international intervention in defence of human rights. His authority extends, as it were, not only over the Promised Land but also over Egypt. God is the God of everyone, though not necessarily in the same way. Unlike Plato, the Hebrew Bible emphasises both the universal and the particular.
It is a worldview of extraordinary simplicity and power. The buzzing confusion of the polytheistic pantheon has disappeared and the entire universe has been cleared for the drama between the lone God and lonely humanity, who have, as it were, only each other for company. Nature has been demystified and demythologised. All Earthly power has been relativised, allowing for the desacralisation of kingship and the eventual secularisation of the political domain.
So Genesis 1, a text that might have been a prelude to science, turns out not to lead in that direction at all. Its frame of reference is moral and spiritual.
- It is about freedom and order and goodness.
- It is about a God who creates and makes a bing, Homo sapiens, able to create;
- a God who is free and bestows on his most cherished creation the gift of freedom.
Virtually everything that follows in the Bible is about this personal relationship between Creator and creation, at times tender, often tense. To be sure, from time to time the Hebrew Bible expresses wonder at the divine wisdom within creation — the wisdom tracked by science — but that is not where its interest lies.
I have told this second story to show that there was an alternative to the synthesis that eventually emerged in Christianity, namely the way taken by the Judaism of the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic sages. It saw science as an autonomous activity with its own dignity. It was the wisdom of the Greeks, not the gift of the Jews. Science reveals the wisdom of God in creation, and wisdom is itself the gift God gave humanity when he made us in his image and likeness, which Rashi, the classic Jewish commentator, reads as ‘with the capacity to understand and discern’.
But there is a difference between wisdom and Torah.
- Wisdom tells us how the world is. Torah tells us how the world ought to be.
- Wisdom is about nature. Torah is about will. It is about human freedom and choice and the way we are called on to behave.
- Wisdom is about the world God makes. Torah is about the world God calls on us to make, honouring others as bearers of God’s image, exercising our freedom in such a way as not to rob others of theirs.
The difference between the two is freedom. The natural universe is as it is because that is how it is. The planets are not free int heir movements. Chemical elements do not choose which way to combine. Genes do not make decisions. But we are free; we do choose; we do make decisions.
If the movements of the planets fail to obey Aristotle’s law of circular motion, that is not because they are disobedient but because Aristotle’s law is wrong. But if human beings fail to obey the laws against murder, robbery or theft, that is not because there is something wrong with the laws but because there is something wrong with us. Moral laws are not scientific laws. They belong to a different world, the human world, the world of freedom, God’s most fraught and fateful gift. The Hebrew Bible is entirely about this drama of human freedom. Hence the possibility of admiring science as wisdom while at the same time seeing it as a separate discipline best left to scientists.
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