Q&A: Natural Sciences — Torah in the Object Sense?
Natural Sciences — Torah in the Object Sense?
Question
Hello Rabbi,
In your second book in the trilogy, you distinguish between Torah in the object sense and Torah in the person sense, among other things according to the criterion of what it is that one studies — the word of God (as given at Sinai) or ourselves. Why can the laws of nature not be seen as the “word of God”? After all, He legislated them, and in essence we are “reading” His legislation by looking at nature. If so, it would follow that the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, geology, etc.) are an engagement with the word of God and therefore deserve to be called Torah in the object sense. What do you think about that?
By the way, if the division is based on whether there was speech or not, then according to the Torah creation too was done through speech. God said “Let there be light,” and through looking at nature and through many complex investigations we understand that His intention was the four Maxwell equations, for example.
One more point — in these investigations of the exact sciences there is almost no possibility of bringing in a position and “pushing it” into the interpretation, and therefore this is the “purest” investigation of the word of God in the world, which even more could support the view that this is Torah in the object sense.
Thank you for the amazing site and books!!
Answer
There was speech there, but not command. My debate with Rabbi Pixler in Tzohar is precisely about this point. Not everything that comes from the Holy One, blessed be He, is Torah. His commands are Torah in the object sense. What He teaches us as Torah is Torah in the person sense. The whole world came from Him, but not the whole world is Torah.
With pleasure.
Discussion on Answer
I truly don’t know what to do with this strange hair-splitting. Are you really expecting an answer? I’m sure that if you think about it a bit, you’ll understand on your own why this is nonsense.
I’d still be glad to get an answer. I’m not asking in order to provoke, and I don’t see what is so strange about the hair-splitting here. By the way, in the Account of Creation written in the Torah, in the first days the Creator commands the inanimate, the plant world, and animals even before man was created.
First, the Holy One, blessed be He, does not command a tree or a stone. He creates them through speech. And even if somewhere a command is mentioned, it is obviously metaphorical. He creates them in a certain way; He does not command them. One who has no free choice is not subject to command.
Torah is the commands of the Holy One, blessed be He, to human beings who possess free choice. I truly see no point in going back and elaborating on things that are so simple.
Why do you define Torah as commands to human beings with free choice? After all, as quoted above from your book “A Person Does Not Control the Wind,” Torah is “abstract desires and principles,” which even the angels (who lack free choice) study?
Let me sharpen my question so as not to wear out the discussion too much — why shouldn’t we learn these abstract principles from the most distilled messages from God, untouched by human hands, namely the laws of the natural sciences (which are even more distilled than Jewish laws, where it is not known what in them was processed by human beings and what was not)?
I would appreciate a sincere answer regardless of the “terrible” conclusions that might come out of it (for example, that Schrödinger’s equation is more important than the discussions of Abaye and Rava).
These are abstract principles whose expression in our world is the system of commands we received.
If you can learn those abstract principles from the natural sciences — good for you.
No connection whatsoever to any “terrible” conclusions.
It’s still not clear to me what the difference is. After all, one could also say that He commands the trees and stones to behave according to the rules He set, except that they have no free choice to resist, so they fulfill them automatically. Why is the command to them considered less than the command to us?
As you argued in the second book (p. 364): “This aggadah (the Talmudic passage in Shabbat about Moses ascending on high and the angels protesting the giving of the Torah to human beings) comes to teach that the halakhic principles are an expression of abstract desires and principles, which are the Torah, and the angels study it as do we, each through the mediation of a different conceptual world.”
Why can’t one say that abstract principles also appear through the mediation of the laws of nature, which are a direct statement of God (written in the language of mathematics, let us say, and not in Hebrew)?
By the way, I didn’t claim that the whole world is Torah. Only where there are laws that God clearly established (without our changes) is it Torah — for example, Jewish law and the laws of nature. Regarding other fields in which the human being contributes things “from himself” (thanks to free choice), I have no way to separate what the human inserted from what God inserted — for example, psychology, legal theory, economics, moral theory, etc.
And one last point (sorry for the length) — one could argue that what I’m proposing does not fit the Talmudic position that “one does not expound upon the Account of Creation before two,” but to that I would suggest that things have changed. In the past, when there were no proper scientific tools, it was easy to drift into the realms of imagination (see Aristotle’s science), and to prevent that they built a fence. But today things have changed (mainly thanks to the development of mathematical language and critical methods in scientific research), so today there is no need for that fence.