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When Judaism Meets Science
Posts Tagged ‘B’reishit’
The Lessons of the Bible Code
Let’s start at the very beginning. It is, as Oscar Hammerstein once wrote, a very good place to start. Let’s go to the biblical book of Genesis, or, more specifically, to the Hebrew text of it, known as B’reishit, and look at the first four verses. Let’s start with the first word in the first verse, b’reishit. The last letter of b’reishit is the Hebrew letter tav. Now let’s look for the letter which is fifty letters away from that tav. Let’s repeat that process two more times, each time skipping forty-nine letters and seeking the next letter that is fifty letters away from the one we just found. If you count carefully, when you reach the third letter in the second word of the fifth verse in B’reishit, the four Hebrew letters you find in this sequence are tav, vav, resh and hey. Together, in that order, they spell Torah, the first five books of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible.
Congratulations! You have just uncovered a hidden Bible code, one formed by an equidistant letter sequence, or ELS. Skeptics can repeat the exercise, and get the same result, as the beginning of the next book in the Hebrew Bible, the book of Exodus, known in Hebrew as Sh’mot. Find the first tav in the first verse of Sh’mot (it’s at the end of the second word) and the next three letters each 50 letters apart. Again, if you are careful, you should find the sequence tav, vav, resh and hey, or Torah.
Too simple? A mere coincidence, you say? Wait, there’s more. read more
Brains, Bosons and the Hebrew Letter Bet: The Higgs Field and the Jews
Just guessing, of course, but most of the particle physicists from forty-five nations who have been conducting experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (“LHC”) at the European Center for Nuclear Research (“CERN”) near Geneva, Switzerland probably never heard of B’reishit Rabbah, much less contemplated the discussion there about why God created the world with a word (B’reishit) beginning with the Hebrew letter Bet and not a word beginning with Aleph, the first letter in the alphabet. In the course of that discussion, some eighteen centuries ago, Jewish sages offered various and inventive explanations. Among other things, they noted that the letter Bet is closed at the top, bottom and back (right) side, but open in the front. According to one of the scholars, Bar Kappara, this configuration indicated that one may think about what happened after the days of creation unfolded, but not what occurred before then. (See Neusner, Confronting Creation (U. of South Carolina Press 1991), at 39-41.)
If the CERN scientists had read Bar Kappara’s words, they might understand them as an anti-scientific admonition. But that would be a misreading of the somewhat idiosyncratic scholar, for Bar Kappara favored scientific investigation. In particular, he valued and encouraged the study of astronomy. Channeling the prophet Isaiah (at 5:12), he suggested that one who could make astronomical calculations, but failed to do so, did not appropriately regard God’s works. (See, 4B Encyclopedia Judaica (Keter Publishing 1972), at 227.) What Bar Kappara did not like was metaphysical speculation. read more
The Wise Scientists of Chelm and the Setting of the Sun
Credit: ESA/NASA/SOHO (Published 2/17/2011)*
Some time ago, in the Old Country village of Chelm, the wise men were studying Torah. It was Shabbat B’reishit, or, as it was known in Chelm, Shabbes Breshis. The men — and it was just men — were focused on Chapter 1, Verses 14-18, where it is written that on the fourth day of the first biblical week God made two big lights, the Sun and the Moon, and set them in the expanse of the sky. They were trying to figure out how there could have been an evening and a morning on each of the three prior days without the Sun. read more
Science and Judaism: The Strange Claim of Dr. Schroeder (Part III)
Fernando Botero – Adam and Eve
In two prior posts, we have reviewed Dr. Gerald Schroeder’s strange claim in The Science of God (“TSOG”) (Rev. Ed. 2009) that billions of years of cosmic evolution and six biblical days of creation actually occurred simultaneously. With his self-imposed standard of not bending the Bible to science or science to the Bible in mind, we have analyzed how objective Schroeder actually was with respect to the Bible and science. In both instances, we have found Schroeder’s work sorely lacking. He has failed to meet his own standard and other more objective ones as well. read more
The Science Challenge
Judaism does not deal well with science. To be sure, there are many Jews who are scientists and many scientists who are Jews. Some Jewish scientists even win Nobel prizes for their work. Indeed, the numbers and percentages of winners are astonishing. See, http://www.jinfo.org/Nobel_Prizes. Still, as a community, and a supposedly smart one at that, Jews do not deal well with science.
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