This is the sermon I am delivering tonight at Temple Beit HaYam in Stuart, Florida, for the Shabbat of Evolution Weekend.
Tonight we begin Shabbat Yitro. This is the Shabbat on which we read the the story of the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai—perhaps the signature moment of divine revelation in all of Western civilization. You’ve seen the movie. Moses goes up to the top of the mountain and God descends from the heavens to meet him. God speaks the words and all of Israel are witnesses. The Torah of God is revealed to Israel and to all humanity.
It is a moment we re-experience whenever we read Torah at any service. We lift the Torah scroll, and we sing,
וזאת התורה אשר שם משה לפני בני ישראל על פי יי ביד משה!
“This is the Torah that Moses placed before the Israelites—from the mouth of Adonai, by the hand of Moses!”
Revelation is an idea at the heart of Judaism. We make the extraordinary and, perhaps, scandalous claim that we possess truths written in the Torah that are incontrovertible because our ancestors saw and heard them delivered directly from God.
It’s an idea that we struggle with, for we live in an age of science. We have learned that we gain understanding of the world around us by observation, by forming theories that explain how the world works, and by testing those theories through experimentation.
We live in an age of science, and science has brought unmistakable marvels. We live longer, healthier lives through science. We enjoy conveniences and we do wonders through science—like creating the internet and phones that are smarter than we are. With science, we build skyscrapers, supersonic jets, and we launch probes that travel through the solar system.
On the other hand, it is easy for us to ignore that there are truths that are outside of the realm of science. No scientific investigation, for example, could inform us of the truth that caring for people in need is the right thing to do, regardless of whether we benefit from it. No scientific theory could tell us that harming innocent people without cause is fundamentally wrong, not just because of the negative impact it has on individuals and society, but because it is evil. To understand morality as something that originates beyond human choices and circumstances, to see it as part of the fabric of our reality, we need the idea of revelation. We need the idea that there are some things that we know to be true, not because of material evidence, but because we come to recognize their wisdom in an ongoing process of revelation.
Our need for revealed truths is not limited to the realm of morality, either. For example, we know that science can shed light on the relationship between parents and children, and it can teach us something about successful parenting techniques. But, even science cannot displace the role of the heart in the way we love our children, help them to learn and develop, and the way we suffer when we see them grow up and leave us. Science can teach us about the chemical composition of the hormones that flow through you when you fall in love and their effects on heartbeat, respiration and appetite. But science can never really teach you what it feels like to be with the person you love, or how you feel heartbroken when you miss that person. Science teaches what a human being is. Torah teaches us what a human being is for, and how to be a human being.
וזאת התורה אשר שם משה לפני בני ישראל על פי יי ביד משה!
“This is the Torah that Moses placed before the Israelites—from the mouth of Adonai, by the hand of Moses!”
It is ironic that this year the Shabbat on which we read the story of the revelation on Mount Sinai is also the Shabbat that falls closest to the birthday of Charles Darwin. Sunday, February 12, will be the 203rd birthday of the father of the modern theory of evolution—the guy that all of the so-called biblical literalists love to hate for his theory that all life on earth has a common origin and that through a process of competition and natural selection, the great variety of life developed into the species we see today.
The irony, for me, is not that Darwin and Sinai are incompatible with one another—just the opposite. For me, the delicious coincidence is that we have these two complementary views of the world packaged together in such a short amount of time. This is the way that Jews, traditionally, have viewed the relationship between science and faith—a partnership in which each can learn from the other.
Jewish tradition calls on us to be careful observers of the natural world and to use the power of our minds to discover its secrets. Moses Maimonides, known in Jewish tradition as the Rambam, was one of the greatest philosophers of the Middle Ages and also a great Jewish legalist. He wrote that since God gave human beings minds that can reason, it is our obligation to use our abilities to discover scientific truths about the natural world. The Rambam went further to say that if truths proven by science appear to contradict Torah, we have an obligation to try to understand these natural truths more deeply, or to adjust our interpretation of Torah to allow for them.
Sometimes, people who are steeped in the scientific way of looking at the world reject religion because they notice that, when taken at face value, the Torah and other sacred texts cannot be reconciled with science. How is it possible for the world to have been created in six days, they ask, when science can show that it took billions of years? Such a reading of our scriptures misses the point entirely. The Bible was never meant to be read as a scientific text book. You wouldn’t reject Shakespeare’s eighteenth sonnet—“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”—because it is impossible for a person to be “a summer’s day.” The poem, of course, speaks truth through metaphor, and that is what the Torah does, too. It instructs us with fantastic stories and poetry that open our minds to life’s challenges and pitfalls, and Torah uses law and legend to inspire us to reach for our highest aspirations.
Ironically, some religious thinkers make the same mistake as the scientific skeptics by reading sacred texts as if they contain factual information about the physical structure of the universe. They see the teaching of evolution as a threat to religion because they want to read the Bible as the only source of knowledge about how we got here. Charles Darwin himself may have felt that threat and delayed publishing his theory of evolution because he feared it would offend religious sensibilities and the pious convictions of his own wife. More than 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, the controversy remains. Yet, it is my belief that people who see the theories of Darwin as a threat to the words of Genesis, don’t really understand what Darwin was talking about. I’ll go further. They don’t understand what Genesis is talking about, either.
The stories of creation in the first two chapters of the Bible are not there to teach us how the world came into physical existence. They are there to teach us the meaning of our existence. Genesis teaches us that the world was created with a purpose. It teaches that, prior to our arrival on this planet, our lives were already invested with meaning and with a goal in mind. We are part of a plan, one that we did not devise ourselves, but which gives our lives direction and the possibility of nobility and fulfillment. We were created for blessing and holiness.
On this Shabbat Yitro, the Shabbat on which we once again hear the words of Torah from Sinai, and consider the truths that we receive from a source beyond our senses, we find renewal for our wonder and astonishment at the natural world. We recognize that this world it is not of our making; it is, rather, a gift we have received for a reason. Our existence is invested with the purpose of sanctifying creation by living lives of morality, meaning and purpose. We find that life is a process in which deep wisdom and truths are constantly being revealed to us. And we learn that these truths cannot be viewed through a microscope or derived from an equation. And this is the Torah that Moses placed before the Israelites—from the mouth of Adonai, by the hand of Moses.
Shabbat shalom.
Other Posts on This Topic:
Yitro: Science and Faith
Tonight we begin Shabbat Yitro. This is the Shabbat on which we read the the story of the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai—perhaps the signature moment of divine revelation in all of Western civilization. You’ve seen the movie. Moses goes up to the top of the mountain and God descends from the heavens to meet him. God speaks the words and all of Israel are witnesses. The Torah of God is revealed to Israel and to all humanity.
It is a moment we re-experience whenever we read Torah at any service. We lift the Torah scroll, and we sing,
וזאת התורה אשר שם משה לפני בני ישראל על פי יי ביד משה!
“This is the Torah that Moses placed before the Israelites—from the mouth of Adonai, by the hand of Moses!”
Revelation is an idea at the heart of Judaism. We make the extraordinary and, perhaps, scandalous claim that we possess truths written in the Torah that are incontrovertible because our ancestors saw and heard them delivered directly from God.
It’s an idea that we struggle with, for we live in an age of science. We have learned that we gain understanding of the world around us by observation, by forming theories that explain how the world works, and by testing those theories through experimentation.
We live in an age of science, and science has brought unmistakable marvels. We live longer, healthier lives through science. We enjoy conveniences and we do wonders through science—like creating the internet and phones that are smarter than we are. With science, we build skyscrapers, supersonic jets, and we launch probes that travel through the solar system.
On the other hand, it is easy for us to ignore that there are truths that are outside of the realm of science. No scientific investigation, for example, could inform us of the truth that caring for people in need is the right thing to do, regardless of whether we benefit from it. No scientific theory could tell us that harming innocent people without cause is fundamentally wrong, not just because of the negative impact it has on individuals and society, but because it is evil. To understand morality as something that originates beyond human choices and circumstances, to see it as part of the fabric of our reality, we need the idea of revelation. We need the idea that there are some things that we know to be true, not because of material evidence, but because we come to recognize their wisdom in an ongoing process of revelation.
Our need for revealed truths is not limited to the realm of morality, either. For example, we know that science can shed light on the relationship between parents and children, and it can teach us something about successful parenting techniques. But, even science cannot displace the role of the heart in the way we love our children, help them to learn and develop, and the way we suffer when we see them grow up and leave us. Science can teach us about the chemical composition of the hormones that flow through you when you fall in love and their effects on heartbeat, respiration and appetite. But science can never really teach you what it feels like to be with the person you love, or how you feel heartbroken when you miss that person. Science teaches what a human being is. Torah teaches us what a human being is for, and how to be a human being.
וזאת התורה אשר שם משה לפני בני ישראל על פי יי ביד משה!
“This is the Torah that Moses placed before the Israelites—from the mouth of Adonai, by the hand of Moses!”
It is ironic that this year the Shabbat on which we read the story of the revelation on Mount Sinai is also the Shabbat that falls closest to the birthday of Charles Darwin. Sunday, February 12, will be the 203rd birthday of the father of the modern theory of evolution—the guy that all of the so-called biblical literalists love to hate for his theory that all life on earth has a common origin and that through a process of competition and natural selection, the great variety of life developed into the species we see today.
The irony, for me, is not that Darwin and Sinai are incompatible with one another—just the opposite. For me, the delicious coincidence is that we have these two complementary views of the world packaged together in such a short amount of time. This is the way that Jews, traditionally, have viewed the relationship between science and faith—a partnership in which each can learn from the other.
Jewish tradition calls on us to be careful observers of the natural world and to use the power of our minds to discover its secrets. Moses Maimonides, known in Jewish tradition as the Rambam, was one of the greatest philosophers of the Middle Ages and also a great Jewish legalist. He wrote that since God gave human beings minds that can reason, it is our obligation to use our abilities to discover scientific truths about the natural world. The Rambam went further to say that if truths proven by science appear to contradict Torah, we have an obligation to try to understand these natural truths more deeply, or to adjust our interpretation of Torah to allow for them.
Sometimes, people who are steeped in the scientific way of looking at the world reject religion because they notice that, when taken at face value, the Torah and other sacred texts cannot be reconciled with science. How is it possible for the world to have been created in six days, they ask, when science can show that it took billions of years? Such a reading of our scriptures misses the point entirely. The Bible was never meant to be read as a scientific text book. You wouldn’t reject Shakespeare’s eighteenth sonnet—“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”—because it is impossible for a person to be “a summer’s day.” The poem, of course, speaks truth through metaphor, and that is what the Torah does, too. It instructs us with fantastic stories and poetry that open our minds to life’s challenges and pitfalls, and Torah uses law and legend to inspire us to reach for our highest aspirations.
Ironically, some religious thinkers make the same mistake as the scientific skeptics by reading sacred texts as if they contain factual information about the physical structure of the universe. They see the teaching of evolution as a threat to religion because they want to read the Bible as the only source of knowledge about how we got here. Charles Darwin himself may have felt that threat and delayed publishing his theory of evolution because he feared it would offend religious sensibilities and the pious convictions of his own wife. More than 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, the controversy remains. Yet, it is my belief that people who see the theories of Darwin as a threat to the words of Genesis, don’t really understand what Darwin was talking about. I’ll go further. They don’t understand what Genesis is talking about, either.
The stories of creation in the first two chapters of the Bible are not there to teach us how the world came into physical existence. They are there to teach us the meaning of our existence. Genesis teaches us that the world was created with a purpose. It teaches that, prior to our arrival on this planet, our lives were already invested with meaning and with a goal in mind. We are part of a plan, one that we did not devise ourselves, but which gives our lives direction and the possibility of nobility and fulfillment. We were created for blessing and holiness.
On this Shabbat Yitro, the Shabbat on which we once again hear the words of Torah from Sinai, and consider the truths that we receive from a source beyond our senses, we find renewal for our wonder and astonishment at the natural world. We recognize that this world it is not of our making; it is, rather, a gift we have received for a reason. Our existence is invested with the purpose of sanctifying creation by living lives of morality, meaning and purpose. We find that life is a process in which deep wisdom and truths are constantly being revealed to us. And we learn that these truths cannot be viewed through a microscope or derived from an equation. And this is the Torah that Moses placed before the Israelites—from the mouth of Adonai, by the hand of Moses.
Shabbat shalom.
Other Posts on This Topic:
Yitro: Science and Faith
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