Torah Portion Chukat (5760)

With God's help. On the eve of the holy Sabbath of the Chukat portion, 5760

What do priestly garments have to do with the Human Genome Project?

Our portion describes the death of Aaron and the appointment of Eleazar his son as High Priest in his stead. At this

moment Moses is commanded by God to remove Aaron’s priestly garments and dress Eleazar in them, and thus

he does before all Israel. Rashi (on Numbers 20:29) cites a rabbinic teaching that Israel did not believe Aaron had died, saying:

“Can it be that the one who stood against the angel and stopped the plague should be overcome by the angel of death?” This claim recalls

a claim raised by the Sages regarding the red heifer passage, which opens our portion, where there is a phenomenon

whereby the heifer defiles the pure person who deals with it, and purifies the impure. We see that there is control over

death (impurity), but not complete control. In the final analysis the angel of death (acting as God’s

agent) does have power over our bodies. What remains after the action of the angel of death are the garments,

the priestly garments, which pass from Aaron to his son; over them the angel of death has no power. There is an aspect of the human being

over which, with all our technology, the angel of death has power, yet there is an aspect over which he has no

power at all, and this even without any technology. The bond between body and soul lies under the control of the angel of

death, but a person’s spirit he cannot take from him. Aaron’s priesthood, his essential

spiritual being, is not under the dominion of the angel of death, and that is what his son inherits.

All this takes on added significance these days, as we are informed of the completion of a stage in mapping

the human genome. There is sometimes a feeling, voiced by many (including experts in genetics),

that when this project is completed, everything will be in our hands. We will eradicate all diseases,

and in effect the angel of death as well.

Some go even further, like the broadcaster who asked the geneticist he was interviewing: are we becoming more

or less “religious” in the wake of these scientific achievements? He apparently meant that free

will disappears and the world becomes deterministic, for if it is in our power to control not only the diseases

expected for a newborn child, but also his character and traits, then “we are in God’s place,”

and everything is foreseen but freedom is not given—a reversal of Mishnah Avot 3:15. It seems as though free will is slowly

becoming a “belief of the religious,” an inheritance from the “pre-rational past,” while “enlightened” secularism

feels that it is becoming increasingly deterministic.

It seems to me that this problem is not a religious one but a logical (and moral) one. There is here a failure to distinguish

between the bodily and spiritual dimensions of the human being. In my opinion it will never be possible, even when science

perhaps reaches its end, to determine in a deterministic way a person’s spiritual traits and attainments by

controlling biological parameters. At most it may be possible to produce bodily traits, and also

psychological tendencies in the direction of irritability, depression, independence, sadness, and the like. The choice whether

to yield to these tendencies, and in what measure, is a quality of the spirit and not of the body, and it is this that

will ultimately determine the traits and conduct of every person. This quality is the person

himself, and of course it is not encoded in DNA.

A very characteristic expression of this confusion is the disproportionate anxiety over cloning, that is,

the genetic duplication of a human being. It is entirely clear to me that it will not be possible to clone a person in the full sense. No

expert in genetics can produce even a shred of evidence that at the end of the genome-mapping process

such an ability will be in our hands, and yet many speak of it with complete confidence. This claim is

simply a joke—a bad one—and I mean that on the purely scientific level. As stated, in my opinion it will be possible,

at most, to clone a person’s body and psychological tendencies, but his spirit will always remain

free and released from the chains of genetics.[1]

One who thinks that it is possible to clone a human being fully in fact assumes that a person is no more than an aggregate of

physiological traits that his body carries in the DNA found in every cell of his body. But if so, I do not

understand the moral anxiety over this ability. If indeed a human being is nothing but a sophisticated biological

creature, why is there any moral problem in cloning such a thing? How is he different from an amoeba? And even

if there is such a strange moral command, why is the cloner, who is also a sophisticated amoeba, bound at all by

moral commands? On the other hand, if there is in a person a spiritual aspect, then it simply cannot be cloned,

and therefore this concern has no basis in reality. This anxiety, in my view, illustrates the built-in paradox

at the foundation of modern humanism in general. On the one hand, it contains the belief that there is nothing in the world beyond the sphere

of application of science (matter), and on the other hand it contains an incomprehensible moral pathos regarding the sanctity of human

life. Why should sanctity be granted to a physiological system merely because of its evolutionary sophistication?

Aaron passes on to his son the priestly garments—his spiritual attainments. These did not come into being because of

Aaron’s genetics, but by virtue of his spiritual labor, and they will not pass from the world through

the angel of death. And the Sages already said: “The righteous, even in their death, are called living, while the wicked [that is, a body devoid of

spirit] even in their lifetime are called dead” (Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 18a).

Have a peaceful Sabbath

This may be consigned to a genizah in any synagogue or yeshiva. Comments and responses are welcome.

———————–

[1] It is true that I too have no scientific proof for my claim. I am prepared to provide anyone interested with

philosophical arguments, although this is something that anyone who is not captive to the ridiculous aura of

so-called “scientism” understands by plain common sense. Of course, I do not rely only on common sense

but also on a tradition from the One Who spoke and the world came into being, which says that indeed this is so. It seems to me that He is no

less authoritative than any professor of genetics, especially since, as stated, there is nothing in these remarks that contradicts what

is scientifically known today to all the aforesaid professors. The only contradiction lies in the

superstitious—and morally dangerous—beliefs of some of those engaged in this field, and in the brainwashing

they inflict on the general lay public in this area.

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