Midterm Paper

Hi Everyone! This is my midterm paper for my Genesis Parables class. I'll be turning it in tomorrow, so I'm not looking for grammar corrections or anything along those lines, I'm just interested to know what you think and what your thoughts might be on this topic. Enjoy!

Living In the Grey with Science and Theology

“I believe in the power of the individual human mind! In a child's ability to master the multiplication table, there is more holiness than all your shouted hosannas and holy holies. An idea is more important that a monument and the advancement of Man's knowledge more miraculous than all the sticks turned to snakes and the parting of the waters.” Under the influence of today’s media, Henry Drummond’s words have the power to turn the world upside down; they turned mine long ago. The greatest impacts on my ways of thinking come from plays and books. Even when life experience forces me to see a different perspective, that new opinion is often laced with the knowledge of the writers (and greatest thinkers, in my opinion) of my literary background. In some respects, I suppose I blame “Inherit the Wind” for my many years of religious confusion. After reading the mind-blowing work in sophomore year, I found myself plagued with questions I had never thought to ask in Hebrew School, the most important of which being whether or not I was genuinely religious or if religion was a strange aspect of life that I’d been thrown into against my will. After all, one does not have to be brought up with an idea or concept in order to live and breathe it later on.

Immersed in the logical and scientific air of my high school and friends, I became more and more secular until I looked forward to Shabbas services for the sole purpose of seeing friends and hearing the gorgeous music (not invalid reasons, simply not the spiritual ones I had before). Unfortunately, secularism gave way to condescending thoughts; creationists were suddenly morons who’d never taken a decent genetics class and anyone whose actions were “in the name of the Lord” were “God’s” minions with a blind purpose. Teaching Sunday School became joke – as long as the students knew enough to memorize a Bar Mitzvah service, what did it matter if they believed the stories they absent-mindedly colored in with Crayolas? The Torah itself became the biggest joke of all. Besides the absurdity that humans should need to learn morals from a book, the science behind life and current realities made it impossible to absorb any meaning from the sacred text. Two by two is a fun fairytale, but logically improbable if one wants to assume we are not all genetically and mentally stunted. Why should anyone care about deliverance from Mitzrayim when so many still wait to be delivered today? Why should a decent person take their ethics from a text which condemns homosexuality, demeans women, and has caused the death of millions throughout history? It’s jarring to think I embarked on Year Course wholeheartedly with this much cynicism flowing through my mind.

One might ask, then, why would someone with such opinions choose to take a class on Genesis? Originally, my only interest was to see the other side of my extremism and to be challenged intellectually. Since starting the class, however, I’ve been shocked to find my opinions about the Bible changing and morphing so drastically. I suppose a few things are responsible for this. The wheels first started turning when I read “Myth and Reality: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man”. Music (emotion) and science (logic) have always been foes in the eyes of society. The clashing between passions for music and biology played a focal point in my life for the entire past two years. To read an article about just that, but from another person’s perspective, put me into a space where I could reevaluate my previous views. The point of view presented by Frankfort essentially states that man’s intellect evolved from daydreaming imagination to logical representations and analysis or “contemplation vs. experience”. He also suggests that the modern, technical mind-set is slightly superior because the “[ancients could not have imagined this type of thinking]”. Expecting myself to agree with that assessment, I was almost pleasantly surprised to find myself defending the importance of the emotional, instinctual aspect of life. That while logic and emotion, science and the Bible, did not necessarily interconnect, they were obvious complements to one another. People cannot survive on pure faith or pure logic. The former leads to a disconnect from reality, and the latter leads to an over-analysis of human relationships (both between humans themselves and between humans and spirituality). Today people are realizing the problems that arise from a complete immersion in the technical. One can see people’s fear and confusion in movies from 2001: A Space Odyssey to I Robot, in books from Fahrenheit 451 to Brave New World, and in the general response to certain technological breakthroughs (many were appalled last year when the Chicago Philharmonic played a special concert conducted by a robot). In many ways, people are reverting back to the “primitive” and trying to look at life in a more imaginative, sentimental way, while still trying to incorporate the brilliance that comes with certain instances of scientific logic.
I recently discovered that this view is not unlike many Jewish interpretations of the bible. Talmud Chaggiga 13b-14a states that there were 974 generations before God created Adam, and even Maimonides held that it was not required to read Genesis literally and the one was nearly “obligated to understand Torah in a way that was compatible with the findings of science”. In this view, “if science and Torah were misaligned, it was either because science was not understood or the Torah was misinterpreted.” This is a brilliant concept! It makes sense that one should use science to understand religion and vice versa. Science attempts to explain the wonders that God gave us and religion attempts to explain what science cannot understand or has not found a way to understand yet.

Personally, I am an evolutionist, but I now accept that at some point even scientists must take a leap of faith. If one pictures the world, and then slowly moves outward in one’s imagination, to the solar system, to the galaxy, to the farthest stretches of the universe, there comes a time at which one cannot picture infinity, or one imagines “white space”. It is here that it is hard to deny the existence of some supreme being, of some divine energy that created the potential for everything that exists. The world is simply too incredible, the universe too vast, to lend itself to the possibility of mere chance. Even closer to home, we can see this phenomenon in our own bodies. When one looks inside the body and analyzes all the intricate processes that go into pure, daily existence, how can one not be awed? In the fact that our bodies can heal themselves, that our brain knows when to release certain hormones and when to turn them off, that our hearts beat 100,800 times per day without missing a beat (on average), there is just as much divinity as in the Torah itself.

This is my variation on Henry Drummond. Not that thought is more holy than faith, but that each is equally important. As Drummond states later, “The Bible is a book, a good book, but not the only book.” I used to take this to mean that the Bible was a bunch of meaningless fairytales, but now I understand that as fiction novels can teach important life lessons, so can the Torah. Noah’s Ark may never have existed, but we learn the importance of the need to take care of each other through its messages. I understand that we all truly are standing at Mt. Sinai. We all live in anticipation, in hope, in fear, and for those of us who’ve been privileged enough to have our ancestors fight our battles so we could have better lives, it’s our turn to be those same fighters for others who struggle. This concept has been taught to me so many times, but with the realizations and the thinking that have come both through looking at parables and experiencing the personal change that’s come through Year Course, I now understand and feel the responsibilities with more clarity than I thought I ever would.

Still, I am in no way resolved. A couple of weeks ago, a group of friends and I went to dinner at an Orthodox household. While the discussions around the table were certainly stimulating, it was disturbing to see the opposite of my previous extremism: the people who looked at me like a disgrace to the Jewish people because I believed in Darwin’s words, the people who didn’t understand how falling in love could be more important to a marriage than the religious orientation of the couple, the people who insulted homosexuality and made me feel ashamed to be a daughter of lesbian parents even though I had never felt that way about my upbringing ever before. Being around such closed-mindedness nearly made me revert back to my old self, the me who wanted to jump up and shout how wrong they were, how they had no right to criticize people for the crime of different beliefs when none of their arguments could be proven, how it couldn’t be true that “Charedi are the happiest people on earth” when anyone born into an Orthodox or Chasidic family grows up with huge pressures to fit into a mold. When the mother of the family asked, “how can they be Jewish and not believe in Adam and Eve or Noah’s Ark?” (referring to secular Jews), I didn’t know what to say. I tried to formulate a nice response attempting to explain the concept of the cultural Jew, but I kept my mouth shut for fear of being chided again. In a religion that’s supposed to be endlessly open to questioning, Orthodox Judaism confuses me. Why bother being observant when you’re constricted by so many rules that keep you from forming an opinion about what traditions feel more spiritual to you?

In an article written by an Orthodox Rabbi, he says, “This will never change, not even if the latest scientific notion that the genesis of all the multitudes of organic forms on earth can be traced back to one single, most primitive, primeval form of life should ever appear to be anything more than what it is today, a vague hypothesis still unsupported by fact. Even if this notion were ever to gain complete acceptance by the scientific world, Jewish thought, unlike the reasoning of the high priest of that notion, would nonetheless never summon us to revere a still extant representative of this primal form as the supposed ancestor of us all.” This is unbelievably hypocritical. One cannot base one’s life on an unprovable phenomenon (God), and deny another opinion because it too is unprovable.

However, this is logic speaking. Based on human instinct, if you live by faith, it makes psychological sense to deny other opinions because if you cannot prove your own opinion, what is there to say you are right other than your own convictions? Still, the encounter with this family brought forth yet another obvious truth: when people are around extremists, it’s very easy for them to become extremists themselves (on either side).

It’s not possible for every human being to live their lives in the grey, because then no grey would exist, but it’s interesting to think of what would happen to the world if more people were open to accepting the existence and validity of other opinions. I hope that is where I’m heading now…