Where the Spheres of Judaism and Science Meet

Gilah Langner: Let’s move to the religious sphere and hear from Rabbi Melanie Aron, who served as the senior rabbi of Congregation Shir Hadash in Los Gatos, California, from 1990 until her retirement in 2020. During that time, she also served on a variety of boards in the Jewish community, both locally and nationally, including the Reform movement’s national board, and a number of interfaith groups as well. In January 2021, she was made Rabbi Emerita, and she continues her involvement with the community.

I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Rabbi Melanie in the last couple of years when she and Michael moved to DC to be near their grandchild, and she is a strong and consistent voice for progressive Jewish values here in this area as well. She’s involved in the American Leadership Forum, Dayenu, the Jewish Earth Alliance, as well as JAMAAT – some of you might know – Jews and Muslims and Allies Acting Together. In addition to her rabbinic ordination from HUC, Rabbi Melanie holds a bachelor’s in economics and political science (so do I! That’s amazing, I had no idea) – and a Master’s of Hebrew Literature and a Doctor of Divinity from Hebrew Union College.

Rabbi Aron, so much of Jewish prayer revolves around a different view of the universe than Michael has articulated. And yet, our rabbis were comfortable speculating about universes created and destroyed. Perhaps they had a more experimental or fluid concept than we generally imagine for a religious perspective.

How should we think about all of this Jewishly?

Melanie Aron: All right, so the first thing I want to do is recommend Michael’s book, especially for those of you who come out of some kind of science background. Engineers from California did very well with it. My grandson and I are reading a book, The Universe Explained With a Cookie. And this is more my speed for this kind of physics. It also talks about pizzas, so my grandson is very happy with that.

I’m glad Michael mentioned Shifra Penzias. Her very esteemed father-in-law actually contacted Michael when she was about to marry his son, just to make sure women rabbis were okay, it’s not so terrible. There are a couple of other kind of rabbinic-physics combinations. Michael is a physicist, I’m a rabbi. We have friends from Israel, somebody who was once one of Michael’s students, a woman named Yael, a physicist at the Technion in Haifa, and her husband is Rabbi Dan Pratt. Some of you may know him – he’s an Israeli Reform rabbi. My kids thought that was hysterical. She’s the physicist, he’s the rabbi. You know, they had a lot of fun with that.

So, I appreciate being able to speak with you this afternoon. I’m going to try to put things together, tie up maybe your whole series a little bit. I apologize for the bandage. It’s moles. Many of you who are light-skinned probably had that already.

Models for Thinking About Science and Religion

So, good. Science and religion, here we are. Let’s go on to the next slide. The program that we’re a part of comes from an organization called Sinai and Synapse[s], and they provide grants for other congregations all around the country to talk about science and religion. Their director, Geoffrey Mitelman, has a way of thinking about the relationship between science and religion, and he puts it into four categories, but really there are sort of three.

So, the most common way we think about science and religion is we think about them being in conflict, and we pick one or the other. We are either scientists or religionists. We might be fundamentalists. Religion is right always, or the opposite. That some of you have probably read the new atheists, Hitchens and Dawkins and Sam Harris and so forth, who put up a form of religion as a kind of straw dog to argue against. I think also that what he calls concert – that is, when people try to bring religion and science together – is kind of the same thing, so they’ll say things like, “If you just read the Bible the right way, you’ll come up with Michael’s version of the universe, ‘because a thousand years are in God’s sight is about as a watch in the night,'” right? So you have all of that kind of stuff.

And in the other direction, you have people trying to prove religion with science. Biblical archaeology had a lot of this. “If we could only find David slept here, we’d be all set.” “Moses, you know, had lunch over there,” and so forth. So those are two ways of dealing with science and religion.

Another way, and I think this is the most common way that American Jews think about it, is as separate spheres. There’s science and there’s religion; they’re both important; they don’t have anything to say to each other. They have something to say to us, but not to each other. And then he argues for something that’s more complementary: that there’s contact – that the same person can be a scientist and a religionist. What does that mean? What can they learn from each other? And that’s probably what Rabbi Gilah was intending by having us here today.

I want you to go back to childhood – or at least, this was my example of the experience of Jewish children. Studies of the American Jewish community have found that those Jews who adopt the “conflict” model – science and religion in conflict – 15 out of 16 of them side with science and not with religion. So, when I was teaching in a congregational setting, invariably there would be a kid who thought he was so clever, and he would ask me, “Who did Cain marry?” Right? “If there was Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel, Cain killed Abel, who’s going to chase after Cain and kill him?” They get very excited about this.

The ages in the Bible – okay, was Moses really 120 years old? When someone has a birthday, to this day, we say, “Ad me’ah ve’essrim,” you know, “you should live to be 120.”

My son, as a science project, did a little analysis of – do we have any mathematicians here? Well, we have one mathematician, I know. Look at these numbers. These are not random numbers. They’re not how old people really were, but these are numbers that have meaning. 120 – 5 factorial – five, times four, times three, times two, times one.

My son did some other work. 175 is five squared times seven. 180 is six squared times five. 147 is seven squared times three. Think of the symmetry. Five squared, six squared, seven squared – three, five, seven. So numbers in the Bible have a meaning, but maybe not the meaning that the fundamentalists attribute to them.

Do the snakes speak? Did Balaam’s donkey speak? What about all those things that seem to defy natural law? The rabbis had this interesting idea that they were, like, implanted in creation before natural law started working. The computer people in my congregation in California thought that was really cool, because they do that too. They put things in your program that are going to pop up at some random time and totally mess things up.

Okay, and what about those plagues? If some of you have ever used the JPS, the Jewish Publication Society commentary, they’re all naturalistic, right? First the red algae grow, and that’s why it looks like it’s blood. And then the frogs have to pop out of the water because there isn’t enough oxygen. And then the frogs die, and all those dead frogs lead to disease, and so on and so forth. That tends to be how young people deal with science. I think there are some more profound challenges, though, in the relationship between science and religion, than all of these things, which are their own kind of smaller challenges.

Creation and Authority

And two of the really big challenges that we have have to do with the idea of creation and the question of authority. So, medieval Jewish philosophers spent a lot of time debating whether the world was eternal or whether the world began at a particular point. And that’s because they inherited Greek philosophy. And Plato and Aristotle have different views of this, and we see this throughout medieval Jewish philosophy. For moderns, that issue of creation, or “is there purpose in the universe,” or “is there direction in the universe,” comes out more in the discussion of evolution, because evolution allows things to happen without direction or without a directing intelligence.

The issues of authority are very important also. So right now, between Passover and Shavuot, many Jews study Pirke Avot – which doesn’t mean “ethics of the father,” it means first principles. But that’s a different lecture. We’ll talk about that another time. But anyway, that begins with – “Moses received the Torah at Mount Sinai, handed it to Joshua,” and so on and so forth. But in truth, that transmission is a non-historical view, because a lot of the institutions that are mentioned there probably never existed. Some of the people never existed. So, it’s meant to make a point, but it’s not history.

And we have that same issue in terms of the Bible. There’s a very famous book, Who Wrote the Bible?, that talks about how if you read the Bible in Hebrew, you will notice that different parts of the Bible are written in different styles, just like if I gave you a newspaper, today’s newspaper, – I get that Sunday Times still. Or Shakespeare. You would notice that the English is different, and it would be hard to believe that the same person wrote Shakespeare and wrote the Bible. We have these same kinds of issues in looking at the Bible – if you’re a Reconstructionist, I’m allowed to say that – and so we have that question of “Where does the authority of our religious teaching come from?”

Separate Spheres

So, moving on, many people are more comfortable with the idea that there are separate spheres, right? Science tells us how things happened, and religion tells us why things happen. Maybe. I have some questions about that. Another way that people tend to think about it is religion gives us ethics. That’s why we send our kids to religious schools, so that they should get trained in ethics. And to some extent, the Bible does have ethical messages in these stories about things that conflict with scientific stories.

So let’s take the story of creation, for example, okay? It’s not that story, but it teaches us important things. It teaches us that there’s order in the universe. It teaches us that all of humanity has a common origin. These are important moral teachings.

However, sometimes the Bible teaches things that we might not accept as so moral. We have issues with gender. I was just teaching Pirkei Avot, the first chapter, “Don’t talk to women too much.” Well, we have a problem with that (laughs). Okay. And we have lots of behavior in the Bible that doesn’t accord with modern standards of ethics. Wiping out various peoples doesn’t. Our ancestors weren’t paragons of virtue, right? Jacob did all kinds of things. Now, maybe that’s on purpose. Maybe that’s so that we should discuss things that Alan Dershowitz, back when he was a good guy, had a very nice book about how the Bible is meant to teach us to think about ethics by providing these people who don’t act ethically and that we judge them. But be that as it may, it’s hard to argue that religion is faultless in presenting ethics.

New, Larger Challenges

All right – we have more challenges than that, though. And I think the three largest challenges, and maybe why you invited me to talk about this, is one the question of: “is there a purpose in creation, or are there just natural processes?

So, this is sometimes dealt with by looking at certain constants without which the world couldn’t exist. Well, they have to be within a certain narrow range. Oh, so maybe there is an intelligence designing, but intelligent design is a problematic thing.

What about human uniqueness? We like to think humans are unique because we have language, because we have writing, because we have creativity. That’s how we’re in God’s image. What if humans aren’t so unique? You talked about that earlier in your series.

Then, the question of particularism: is there a need for Judaism to exist, as we look at religion in different kinds of ways?

So those are the three large challenges that I see today to religion in our own time. Let’s go on and think about the sources of those challenges. So I would say, when I was growing up, the focus was on the challenges that came from biology and physics and astronomy – the so-called “hard sciences.” But I think now we have, in some ways, more significant challenges that come from the social sciences, because we now understand human beings in different ways and social structures in different kinds of ways, and that can challenge our traditional attitudes towards religion.

So in the next slide, I have this question. “What is religion about?” Well, if you study anthropology and you study sociology, religion is about social utility, right? It allows us to feel a sense of connection to a larger group. Alone, we’d only feel connected to 150 people. But you need to build bigger structures to make larger societies work. And religion allows us to care about a larger group of people, because we feel related to a larger group of people.

And there are many other things – plausibility structures. Why do we believe what we believe? Often, it’s the social influence of the people with whom we associate. There’s a sociological teaching: “Humans created religion.” It has nothing to do with the question of God. Religion, for sociologists, is something separate than the theological question of God. But humans needed religion for a variety of reasons, and therefore, it’s a social structure. Solidarity, bringing people together and so forth.

Other things that are problematic – I’m just going to give you lots of problems. Okay? Another problem: Free will. Free will is really important. We can’t be responsible for our actions if we’re not choosing them, if we’re not the ones acting. Do we have the ability to make choices, or do we just think we have the ability to make choices? I’m really intrigued with these psychological studies where they find that the decision is in your brain before you think you made the decision. Well, that’s really kind of interesting. So you’re still browsing through your options, and really, your brain has already made the decision for you. What does that mean in terms of free choice? We have that in Pirkei Avot.

Also, there’s this weird conundrum: Everything is predicted, predetermined, but free choice is given. What does that mean? Is it just that it feels like free choice to us, even if everything is known to God, as it were?

Dara Horn, in Tikvah – which I don’t usually pay any attention to because it’s a little too right-wing for me. But anyway, Dara Horn’s an interesting person. She gave this talk recently on that whole question of “all is foreseen, but free will exists.”  And she uses the Joseph story to say something, really, I hadn’t thought about before – I’m still mulling it over – that what Joseph did that was important was not interpreting Pharaoh’s dream about how there are going to be seven good years and seven bad years, because the Egyptian society was dependent on the Nile, and it must have always had good years and bad years in the flow of water and so forth.

What made Joseph interesting was that he then said, “Pharaoh, this is what you need to do. You need to collect the food.” And he did all kinds of things as a result, some of which we approve of, some of which we don’t approve of, but that sense of “everything can be determined, and yet our actions still have some kind of an impact” is something to think about – I’m not sure yet. I’ll have to think about that some more. Let’s go on a little bit more.

Humans’ Distinctiveness

Other challenges – okay. “We are different than the animals.” This is a really big issue in traditional Jewish thought. And there’s a really neat kind of thing. “U’mutar ha’adam min habehemah ayin” – “man is no better than the beast.” That’s really what Ecclesiastes is saying. But this rabbi interprets it in a different way. “Ayin” can mean the ability to say no. So they say, “Ah, only people have self-control. We don’t do what’s instinctive. We can control our instincts.” And that’s the good instinct, to do good –  [and a] bad instinct to do bad.

But I just read parts of Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? I’m not so sure anymore. Animals are really kind of smart. They can do all kinds of things that we usually don’t think of animals being, or historically haven’t thought of animal, what animals can do. They can communicate. They have feelings. They take care of each other. They mourn. And very possibly, some animals have a theory of mind, which is the big thing the children to develop, and that’s what makes them human. Also, Neanderthals – we had all kinds of views about that. Now we think about them in a different kind of way. So that’s interesting.

I was reading an article that pointed out that in the 19th century, we kind of thought of three levels of humanity, right? There were the savages, and then there were the barbarians, outside the walls of Rome, and then there were the civilized people, okay? And that’s kind of how colonialism was structured, and so forth. And parallel to that was a view about religion. In a sense. That is, the savages were animists. They believed everything in the world was animated. The barbarians had religion. And we civilized people, we have science.

Now, we don’t buy that 19^th-century view anymore about savages, barbarians, and civilized people. What does that say about how we feel about religion and science? It’s kind of interesting to think about.

Our Place in the Universe

Another problem: our place in the universe. Exoplanets – there are a lot of them. Now that we know about all these galaxies, now that we can learn more about them, there are thousands of planets that could be really far away from us, that could be habitable. Must something be Earthlike to have life? Is life going to have other kinds of forms? We look for stuff in the universe by looking for a biological signature, but that’s because we assume it’s going to be kind of like us. Now they’re also looking at these things with a sort of technological signature. Can we find something out there that was made, that was formed, that was not an evolving of the natural processes? So that would be a marker of something that didn’t happen naturally. But if there’s life in various forms in various places, then the biblical centrality of us humans is challenged similarly with evolution.

In the Bible, human beings are created last because we are the pinnacle of creation, and we kind of feel that way about evolution, right? Everything was leading to us. But where do we get off saying that we’re the pinnacle of evolution? Isn’t evolution going to continue in various kinds of ways? Isn’t there going to be new complexity? Maybe we’re not the pinnacle of creation.

I’m going to take a brief detour to talk about the Sephardic tradition just with two slides. So the Sephardic Jews, the Jews who came out of Spain, had a very different experience, and they were much more familiar with Greek philosophy. We have people like Rambam, Maimonides, writing about science and philosophy and so forth, and to some extent, that has continued to be part of Sephardic society – so they see much less of a conflict, and they have a different view of how science and religion should get along. They are not literal in their reading of the Bible. That’s why the Ashkenazi Jews burnt Rambam’s Maimonides books, because this was heresy. But it’s a very different way of understanding the Bible in a non-literal way. Rambam’s son, Rabbi Abraham ben Mosheh: “One must not accept the truth of a statement simply on the authority of the person who stated it.” Oh, my goodness. This stands against the whole tradition in the Ashkenazi word. One need not and must not suppress reason to be a religious person. That’s a very different kind of teaching. Torah and science can never be in fundamental conflict. Scientific knowledge progresses, and that’s to be expected. And that’s why Maimonides had to deal with the Greek philosophers. But we now have to deal with other things in terms of science and religion being together.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite the same today, because in Israel, the Sephardic Mizrahi Jews were viewed as less civilized, less sophisticated, and to kind of win legitimacy, they have adopted, in their yeshivot, many of the practices of the Ashkenazi community, in my mind, to their detriment. But there is a movement in Israel now to raise up, to lift up the responsa of that whole long Sephardic Mizrahi tradition and to understand Judaism in a different way.

And I have one more slide on this topic, and this is about Rabbi Mark Angel, who’s actually an American rabbi in New York, who, as an Orthodox rabbi, because the Sephardim never developed Reform Conservative, all of that, he has to fight all these kinds of battles. So he has written about how terrible it is that there are Orthodox Jewish schools where kids are taught that the dinosaurs are really dog bones from Noah’s flood, or that Rivka, Rebecca, was three years old when she brought the water to Eleazar’s camels, or that Vashti had a tail, all kinds of way out things. He says, where does this come from? Why are we teaching it in our schools? And he’s fighting the good battle.

The general principle: we need to emphasize to our children and students that Hazal (the rabbi)’s statements on science were based on their level of scientific knowledge. Rabbi Chaim David Halevi, an important Sephardic rabbi, observed: if it becomes clear through precise scientific method that a specific idea expressed by the sages is not correct, their words on general topics were stated from the depth of their human knowledge alone.

It’s like when the Pope speaks, the Pope can speak two different ways. The Pope can say all kinds of things – that’s not Catholic law. When the Pope speaks as an authority, that’s Catholic law. So what Haim David HaLevy is saying that when the rabbis speak about Judaism, they’re speaking out of the tradition, but when they speak about science, they’re just speaking about their general level of knowledge, and we don’t have to accept what past generations have said on those topics. So I think that’s really interesting.

And I think it’s interesting in Israel, where the Sephardic Mizrachi Jews are really a majority right now. And anything you buy that’s kosher for Pesach from Israel now has kitniyot in it – things may change. That whole way of looking at Judaism may have more prominence.

Contemporary Figures

I’m going to talk about two different contemporary figures who try to bring this together in some kind of way.

So, Art Green is the dean, or has been the dean, of the rabbinical school up in Boston. He’s a Neo-Mystic, and he talks about the One, which is his way of talking about what many people would talk about as God, reveals itself to us through the diversity of the evolving world around us. So that’s a very different way of viewing: evolution is not a religious problem. Evolution is sort of – I think it’s kind of pantheistic. Is God kind of spreading out in the world?

And he says the purpose of religion – and he is very much influenced by Abraham Joshua Heschel – is wonder, that nature in and of itself is a miracle. And we human beings are part of nature. Nature is purposeful in the sense that it is always moving towards greater complexity. But that isn’t quite the same as saying it’s directed. So, he would not be accepted by more traditional Jewish viewpoints, but it’s kind of interesting. So he says that we can accept Darwin and tell a creation story that still answers the question of “How did we get here and where are we going?” And that this One is not outside the universe, but is within the universe.

Another interesting person who is given some talks and writes on this topic is a guy named Jeremy England. He’s a physicist and an Orthodox Jew. His credentials as a physicist are good. He was at MIT and various other places. And he says that science is about predictability and treats everything as kind of instrumental. If you think of Buber, “I-it and I-thou,” it treats everything as “I-it, “because we’re using things. That, therefore, there’s a danger of worshiping science, that what he calls epistemological overreach, that as if science is everything in the world and can swallow up everything, and maybe there are other things that are not predictable in the world. And he’ll talk about God saying, “Ehyeh­-Asher-Ehyeh,” “I will be what I will be,” which is sort of intrinsically unpredictable. And he says the Torah sees value in science, but at some level, it sees Pharaoh as the expression of instrumental science, and that led to bad things, so that we need some kind of counterbalancing.

And he talks about how things can happen that are unpredictable. If Joseph was sensible, he would have accepted Potiphar’s wife’’ advances, because he could have predicted in his mind what the result of not accepting them was going to be, and it wasn’t going to be good. Moses took everybody out in the desert totally unprepared. That was kind of depending on things that were not predictable – unpredictability.

I’m not sure those of us who are less orthodox will accept everything that Jeremy England has to say, but it’s interesting to think about how we might need to create a new theology that’s less dependent on those old core values – that we are the center of the universe; that humans are not part of a continuity with animal life; with other forms of life; that religion has its social function; and that, therefore, maybe the uniqueness of Judaism is different than the way we’ve thought about it so far. So I’ll stop there. Hopefully I’ve raised lots of questions.