Tonight we begin our celebration of Rosh HaShanah. One of the several names given to this holiday is יום הרת עולם, the day on which the world was born. Rosh Hashanah marks the beginning of the year 5764 because 5764 years ago, according to rabbinic reckoning, God began to create the heavens and the earth, a process that took six days and is set out in the first two chapters of the book of Genesis. Right here, at the very beginning of the New Year we confront a profound dilemma, graphically presented to me some years ago when I was serving another Reconstructionist affiliate. One of the congregation’s most active members and the mainstay of our Hebrew school asked me what she should have said to a bright student who, during a class devoted to the first chapter of Genesis, asked “was the world really created in six days?" Lurking beneath this seemingly simple inquiry lies a profoundly important question that I want to address this evening: how should twenty-first century Judaism respond to the scientific revolution?
One approach is to try to reconcile science and the Biblical account by "interpreting" the text. That's what the teacher had done. Taking a leaf from certain nineteenth century Reform Jewish thinkers, she told her class that the word יום , day, doesn't have the same meaning in Genesis that it does in ordinary speech. Rather, the six days "really" mean the billions of years science tells us elapsed between the beginning of the universe and the creation of human beings. Her answer didn't satisfy her, and that is why she wanted to discuss it with me.
Serious scholars, most of them orthodox, have taken a similar tack. Thus, "Genesis and the Big Bang," written by an American/Israeli applied physicist and an "applied theologian" (whatever that is), tries to reconcile the Bible's six days with the modern cosmologist’s thirteen billion years by focusing on Einstein's discovery that time is not absolute but is different for two observers that are moving relative to one another. Time begins to slow markedly as an observer approaches the speed of light. Genesis and The Big Bang argues that in the period shortly after the universe began, particles were moving so fast that time was slow indeed, and that therefore a "day" would have lasted....well, the argument is neither mathematical (in which event I might not have understood it) nor, so far as I could see, the result of calculation.
My response to the Hebrew teacher I mentioned a moment ago illustrates the point I want to make tonight: that modern religious Jews should embrace science, not obscure the consequences of its discoveries. "In all of literature, few documents rival Genesis," I said."It sets out the fundamental realities of the human condition-- birth, knowledge, love, and death, in a few terse sentences that speak more powerfully each time we read it. And it posits assumptions that have inspired, perhaps underlie, the whole of the scientific enterprise. Genesis says God created the heavens and the earth with words. What does that imply? It means that there is a structure, an order, to existence that one way or another must be accessible to a creature that has language, and its close relative, mathematics. That is the fundamental faith of all modern science. Whatever we ask, however confusing, nay paradoxical, the data may be, there must be an answer. As Einstein stated that faith, "God does not play dice with the universe. "Further, Genesis taught us that there was a 'beginning.' So we search for it."
Perhaps not a useful reply to a young boy, but illustrative of what I think we religious Jews should be doing: making connections between the world of science and our religious life. Far from opposing science, as Christian creationists and some fundamentalists are doing here and some dati Jews are doing in Israel, I believe we Jews should celebrate science. We should integrate its discoveries into our prayers, as we have largely neglected to do. We should celebrate its virtues, absolute fidelity to truth, free sharing of knowledge, respect for keen minds, no matter the race, gender, religion, nationality or physical condition of the person. We should celebrate the men and women, and especially the Jewish men and women, who have pioneered in the great work of science. We should enrich our Shabbat observance by broadening and deepening our knowledge of the exciting new discoveries that scientists are making every day. When a visitor returns from the outer reaches of the solar system and becomes visible in the night sky for the first time in 4,000 years, as Hale Bopp did in 1997, we should not ignore it because it's not mentioned in our sacred writings. We should pronounce the blessing our rabbinic forebears created for just such an event: ברוך אתה ה' אלוהינו מלך העולם עושה מעשה בראשית. Blessed are You, God, who performs the work of creation. We should be in the forefront of the struggle against those who would silence science in the name of our scared texts, or belittle it because it is complicated. In short, we should infuse our religious life with the bracing air of science.
Because science has vastly expanded human understanding of ourselves and our world, past, present, and probable future. Out of that understanding has come the means to increase the quality and extend the length of human life, to protect humanity from the ravages of disease, injury, and climactic upheavals; to preserve and present the precious legacies of past generations of builders, artists, musicians, writers, and actors, in short a myriad of blessings. Inevitably and properly we accept the teachings of the scientific revolution. A vital religion must give us faith, and a faith that is insulated from and rejects the discoveries of science cannot sustain us. In fact, the rejection of modern science on religious grounds has led to the death of little children whose parents let them die rather than seek medical care. We should insist that far from being an implacable enemy of science, or foolishly ignoring it, our religious faith must be compatible with it. Indeed, I would go further. We should draw inspiration from science.
That’s not a simple matter. We need to examine our fundamental assumptions about the role of humans in the universe and in life on earth and ask to what extent they should be reconstructed in light of the discoveries of science. You would think that would be second nature to us Reconstructionists, for our founding philosophers courageously set out to reinterpret and where necessary revise our inherited religion so that we might have a faith more securely grounded in the twentieth century. But in fact that work largely ceased when the founding generations died out. Most practicing Reconstructionists do not and probably cannot read the writings upon which the movement was founded. More than that, today’s scientific world view is very different from the one they knew.
In making this point I draw upon no less an authority than William Shakespeare. He put the matter beautifully, as you would expect. You remember Claudius' cry of woe: "my words fly up, my thoughts remain below; words without thoughts never to heaven go." Claudius' spirit was choked by sin; but the point is equally valid when our inherited religious concepts reflect, as they largely do, ways of thinking about life and the universe that we inherited from the ancient Greeks and their medieval expositors and that have gradually become irrelevant. Is it meaningful any longer to follow the medievals in dividing the universe between matter and spirit, or between angels and disembodied souls on the one hand and the vast panoply of living creatures that science has literally unearthed? I seriously doubt it. Certainly, we cannot begin to answer that question unless we explore the marvelous discoveries of the life sciences and astrophysics, among others, that have and will transform the ways in which we conceive the world and ourselves, unless the destructive forces that seem to have been unleashed at the outset of the twenty-first century tear up the delicate fabric of our civilization. I refer, of course, to the apostles of hate that are amassing human and technological power in the service of the basest instincts of the human being---hatred and destruction--- and to the growing political power of absolutists, certain that the answer to every question lies in their particular interpretations of ancient texts, both supposedly written word for word by God Himself.
But there is an even more important reason for embracing science in our religious life. There is a new/old religious excitement in our midst. It’s called "spirituality." Perhaps the term is imprecise, but the quest is not. We want Judaism to speak to our inner selves and come to our aid when we are in straits. Many of us articulate that wish in traditional terms: we want to feel God’s presence. And we are mining other religious traditions for spiritual disciplines and experimenting with until recently dormant Jewish practices in the hope of generating that feeling, the sense of oneness that the medieval cabalists and their modern expositors have dubbed d’veykut. Undoubtedly, those explorations are enriching our religious practice. But there is another side to the human spirit. It's called the mind. Once upon a time we imagined that thinking was a right-brained activity, to be reduced simply to reason in the technical sense, quite independent of spirit. But now we know that is not the case, that indeed, thoughts often begin outside the cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, and that much of what we imagined was "pure intellect" is heavily interlaced with the operations of unconscious mechanisms. And the opposite is also true. If your thoughts are confused, your feelings will be at war with one another. The fact is that the human mind and the human body, the conscious and the unconscious, in Freud’s terms, are deeply interlaced with one another. If your intellect is at war with your understanding of spiritual practices you will find their riches harder, if not impossible, to mine.
But most important of all, and this may surprise you, science itself can, and for a growing number of us does function as a source of spiritual excitement. Some of our most gifted scientists have encountered in their work not only the religious awe that infuses our scripture but even evidence of Intelligence (with a capital 'i') at work in the universe. One writer calls his book summarizing the revelations of the life sciences over the last several decades The Fifth Miracle. He, along with others, has suggested that when we find, as scientists have, that mathematics, an obscure, not very well distributed capacity of the human mind that seems to have had no survival value until very recently, enables humans to unlock the secrets of the universe, from quarks to black holes, from galaxies and systems of galaxies down to the singularity with which most scientists today have inferred our universe began, we are encountering "The Mind of God." I believe that "The Greater Judaism In the Making," as Kaplan called it, will be one infused with spiritual excitement that will fire the imagination of our descendants, and lead to a new renaissance of Judaism of a kind we have not seen since the Golden Age In Spain: a Judaism infused with modern science. Just possibly it could begin right here at Adat Shalom.
That belief in the future of Judaism is rooted in my religious training and experience. As most of you know, I was raised as a Reconstructionist at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, the "mother church" of the Reconstructionist Movement. Our own beloved Ira Eisenstein, זיכרונו לברכה was my rabbi, and Mordecai Kaplan, founder of the S.A.J., was still active as Rabbi Emeritus. They taught me that a modern approach to the Jewish religion not only does not ignore science; it prepares the heart and mind to embrace it. The first Reconstructionist prayer book, published in 1945, celebrated the great discoveries of contemporary astronomers, rather than ignoring the world we now know as so many contemporary prayer books do. As a youngster, I went "religiously" to the Hayden Planetarium. What I saw and learned there and in the science books I read excited and thrilled me. When I went to synagogue, we described and extolled the incredible "real" world in which I, we, the earth, even the whole solar system are nearly infinitesimal dust particles. And we did so in prayer.
My rabbis taught me that the goal of the Jewish religion was to integrate our knowledge and experience, indeed, our lives, and that Judaism had and must continue to evolve in order to achieve that lofty goal. As a result, my religious training and practice laid the groundwork for one of the most marvelous moments of my life.
Some years ago I went back to Harvard to spend a week studying modern cosmology. One evening a few of us snuck off to the Harvard Observatory about a half hour’s drive from Cambridge. When we arrived we were invited to pick a celestial object for viewing through a telescope and someone suggested the globular cluster in the constellation of Hercules. Our student guide obliged. He explained that we were about to see a densely packed (from a galactic perspective) group of stars lying 12,000 light years closer to the center of our galaxy than we. The center of the galaxy is 36,000 light years from us, he explained, which meant that the star cluster we would see was one third of the way "in" towards the center. The cluster was also situated ten degrees above the galactic plane, an imaginary disk centered on the midpoint of the whole revolving star system of which we are a part, and along which most of the galaxy's stars lie.
I looked through the telescope, and there it was, the globular cluster in Hercules. Dozens of closely packed stars surrounding a ball of diffuse light that was all one could see of the hundreds of others clumped together in that cluster, the entire cluster set in pitch blackness precisely because we were looking above the plane of the galaxy. While I was looking, the student reiterated that the cluster was 12,000 light years away, so distant that the light I was seeing, though traveling at eleven million miles per minute took twelve years thousand years to reach my eye----which meant, I suddenly realized, that I was seeing the globular cluster not "now" but 12,000 years "ago." Suddenly, in an intuitive flash, I grasped the "meaning," the integrated whole of what I'd casually learned over several decades: the non-absolute character of time, the shape of the Milky Way galaxy and the distribution of stars, what it means to look in towards and away from the galactic center, how a globular cluster differs from the usual distribution of stars and the incredible distances between celestial objects. I responded with the only word that came to mind. "God," I whispered.
I have no doubt that our ancestors, who crafted the opening chapter of Braeshit, had the same experience as the one I just described. In fact I am sure of it. You recall that every Shabbat, as we did tonight, we sing out the words of the 92d psalm, מה רבו מעשך יה. מאוד עמקו מחשבתך "How myriad are thy works, oh God, thy thoughts are very deep?" How fortunate we are, that in our lifetimes our knowledge of the wonders of creation, the macrocosm, the microcosm, the structure of genes, the gorgeous, reticulated complexity of the human brain and nervous system, and so much else has increased exponentially and, if peace prevails, will continue to increase. Scientific awareness, then, far from driving us away from religion, draws us Jews closer to it ---and to the anonymous ancestors from whom we have inherited it.
It is through science, not despite it, then, that our days and nights are filled with religious awe. For this evening we celebrate the very conception of the world הרת עולם whose wonders we extol because, like the authors of the Genesis story, the psalmist, and all the generations who meditated upon their words, we sense in the universe the handiwork of God who made it. May the year that has just begun, 5764, be enriched with that awareness so that it will be for all of us ומתוקה a good and a sweet year.