Their ridiculous behavior is coherent on the level of faith and distorted on the scientific level. The questioner’s behavior, assuming he is religious, is coherent on the scientific level but ridiculous on the level of faith. To accept that the creation story is not literal but the revelation at Mount Sinai is literal—that is an interpretive absurdity on the level of basic reading comprehension. More than that, to internalize evolution and the billions of years of suffering under an impotent god who is unable to create a better world in less time, and at the same time to believe in a god revealed in fire descending on a mountain and prophesying to six hundred thousand people to observe commandments, performing miracles for a thousand years and then disappearing forever—that belongs to the realm of science fiction, with no greater grounding than that of the Haredim, who at least rely on a solid tradition. So the nasty pseudo-quasi-intellectual idea of the hot-blooded youth stems more from emotionalism than rationalism. Mark this well.

On the contrary, evolution is founded on the principle of “natural selection,” according to which the Creator does not intervene in the struggle for existence and does not assist the weak or “save him from one stronger than he.” Intervention in favor of the weak is blatantly immoral, since all the world’s development comes through the process of “natural selection,” in which only the strong survive and the weak and defective disappear from the world, so that the next generation begins from a healthier and stronger genetic starting point.

The whole point of medicine is the opposite. The doctor helps the weak and the one whom genetics did not favor survive despite his natural weakness. The social and moral outlook underlying medicine and its development is that a proper society aspires for everyone to do well. We do not throw the weak into the “garbage bin” so they will not be a nuisance; rather, we strengthen and improve them, and thus through fraternity and solidarity the world is refined.

And look at this wonder: science and medicine do not develop in the jungle, but דווקא in the modern welfare state!!

Best regards, Sim-Pan Zvi Levinger

The conception of a society committed to caring for the weak was developed to a great extent under the inspiration of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), which describes the Holy One, blessed be He, as “slow to anger and abundant in kindness,” and though exalted and lofty, He dwells “with the crushed and lowly of spirit.” God says, “For I am the Lord your healer,” and to man, who was created in Our image, He commanded, “and he shall surely heal”; it is no coincidence that many of the great sages of Israel were physicians.

On the uniqueness of the Torah among all ancient legal systems, in that it made assistance to the weak a first-rank legal obligation—see Professor Daniel Friedman’s article, “And You Shall Remember That You Were a Slave in the Land of Egypt,” on the Da’at website.

Twenty years ago I was riding on a bus and explaining to a Haredi fellow that the theory of the four elements brought in the Mishneh Torah, Laws of the Foundations of the Torah, had been scientifically disproved. Suddenly I heard a whispering voice, “None that go unto her return again” (or something like that), apparently to warn the Haredi fellow about the great danger to his soul. I had to get off then so I didn’t answer him, but afterward I thought I should have told him that the theory of the four elements wouldn’t have built him a bus or cured his diseases. So he should stop living a lie.

Gil,
I’ll answer you here instead of in the discussion on monotheistic revelation (and Y.D. are my initials). The difference between the creation story and the revelation at Mount Sinai is that the creation story has been scientifically refuted much more strongly than Mount Sinai has. In fact, there is no scientific field that does not refute the simplistic claim that the world was created 5,778 years ago—from physics, chemistry, biology, geology, paleontology, and on and on. (By the way, like in a computer game, that doesn’t mean the game hasn’t been running for 5,778 years, only that to us as characters in the game the world seems to have existed a bit longer.) As for Mount Sinai, the strongest thing that can be said about it is that there is no scientific proof for it. I would add that I believe the subject will always remain obscure by its very nature. The distance between Creator and creation will be such that any contact of His with created beings will be blurred. It wasn’t for nothing that the Sages said that this is why it is called Mount Horeb—because it brought ruin upon the world. Meir Buzaglo expands on this in Faithful Language. Any contact of the Master of the Universe with reality shakes reality itself. The only science that challenges Mount Sinai is philology. Heaven forbid that I belittle the science of philology, but it still seems to me that this is not enough to undermine the revelation. If Rabbi Michael Abraham (and apparently also Ibn Ezra) can live with additions and changes, so can I. One tremendous Torah scholar I knew told me that in his linguistics dissertation he proved that the language of Deuteronomy belongs to a later stratum than the language in the rest of the Five Books. Again, it’s hard for me to see what that proves.
So yes, there are difficulties and there are questions, but the story of Mount Sinai is too significant and too powerful for me to give it up on the basis of such a weak set of evidence. Especially since the ambiguity of reality is already built into the story itself, as many wise people have noted.

Y.D., I’d be glad to know why you accept the story of the revelation at Mount Sinai. True, there are no significant refutations of it (contrary to what you wrote, philology does not even pretend to refute it, only to say that there are several versions of the story), but there are also no refutations of the claim that I am a demon from Mars (not even merely philological ones!). \

I was thinking of all the words that look like later changes and additions. Different versions don’t bother me.

Absolutely—as far as I’m concerned, you really could be a demon from Mars 🙂 .
You’re asking a general question—why be religious?—of which one particular aspect is: why accept the story of the revelation at Mount Sinai?
If I have privately decided that I am a religious person who believes in the God who revealed Himself at Sinai, then from my perspective I also have no problem believing in the revelation at Mount Sinai. It’s part of the same package deal. The deeper question is why I believe in the God who revealed Himself at Sinai.
I don’t know. I haven’t the faintest idea. It’s simply a fact. At a certain point in my life I came to the conclusion that I simply believe, that’s it, without too many further questions. Maybe it is connected to the fact that I grew up in a traditional home. Maybe it’s connected to various psychological facts of one kind or another, but the truth is that it doesn’t really matter. I believe. I live in relationship with God. I fear God (not necessarily in my innermost chambers, but at least outwardly). I hope to behold the face of God (after I repent; before that it would be a catastrophe) and to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life. I don’t have too many other demands. In the end I work for Him, not He for me, and that is what it comes down to.

Y.D. (it was obvious that those are your initials. Just as it is obvious that Petel Juice has a first name, except that it is unknown) your words are precious and stirring. Thank you for the response, but I am still waiting for your fuller explanation about the two signifiers of God according to the Kuzari, namely the Torah and Israel. To me that sounds sufficient. Revelation in the plain sense—if I had lived the life of a shrimp or a Leviathan and seen it, fine—but I do not see its principled importance, just as in my view perhaps none of the prophets of Israel who lived before the writing of the story about it saw such importance in it either (according to the scholars, of course). Obviously, if it happened, that is preferable in the sense that a true myth educates better (as early Michi held, who is no more, and mark this well), but even if it is “only” myth and it educates even without being true—that is enough for me. I am waiting for an answer as to why in your view that is not enough.
Why is it not enough to say that God is revealed within the people of Israel and its Torah? In the context of this thread, I think it is more coherent to say that the entire Torah is a kind of symbolic-ideational text than to split between creation and Sinai. It is the same author who said both things with the same seriousness. The Haredim—“as birds flying, so will the Lord protect them”—are also coherent because they maintain that everything is literal. Your zigzagging (which, sadly, I too am subject to not a little) is, in my view, what sometimes leads to attacks on the Haredim, because deep down you feel that they are right—continued

that they are right in their coherence, and that is infuriating because it is a caricature of intellect. This is a familiar phenomenon that the Sages called the hatred of the unlearned for Torah scholars. The hatred stems from ideological closeness, etc., but I don’t have the energy to get into that. It’s also not the topic of the discussion.

With God’s help, 10 Elul 5778

Regarding the truth of the Torah and its testimony to the Exodus from Egypt and the revelation at Mount Sinai—

It is impossible to implant in the mind of an entire people a story that never happened and claim that their ancestors experienced it and saw it—especially a story that tells of their humiliating origin as slaves and demands that they observe 613 commandments while clashing with all the religious and moral norms of their time.

It is impossible to sell such a story to a split and fragmented people, who aside from a few decades of unity in the days of David and Solomon—a unity that fell apart immediately after Solomon—was politically divided; and it is even more impossible to sell such a story to a people scattered to the ends of the earth.

The fact that despite the split and fragmentation, the entire people possesses one Torah (which even the Samaritans, who came to the land in the days of Sennacherib, after hundreds of years of division between Israel and Judah, hold in essentially the same form with only slight changes) testifies that all the tribes bore one story: that God took them out of Egypt through Moses and gave them a Torah with which they entered the land.

Even the high moral level of the Torah and of those who transmitted it makes the possibility of forgery and fabrication of stories that never occurred implausible.

As for the creation story, it is a schematic description of the process of creation. Even if you insist that the process of creation lasted billions of years, the Torah has no interest in elaborating on that story. Since “day” in biblical language also expresses a “period,” the Torah determines that there were six days—that is, six stages of creation, from the simple to the complex—at the end of which the world reached stability and the Creator “rested from His work.”

And besides, the Torah’s story is revolutionary relative to what was accepted in the surrounding cultures, in whose creation stories the sun and moon serve as creator-gods of the world, while the Torah lowers them from their greatness and places them among the vegetation and animal life, in the role of lamps—so the Torah should get entangled in stories that would have seemed absurd to any reasonable person about billions of years and the Cretaceous, Pleistocene, and Paleozoic?

The plain meaning of the creation story conveys the main message: one Creator created everything gradually, from the simple to the perfected, with the starting point being light and the high point being the human being, who from that point onward is the Creator’s agent to manage creation.

Best regards, S.Z. Levinger

By the way, even the possibility that creation occurred literally in six days is not refuted. The assumption of the researchers is based on the assumption that the world has always proceeded according to the same laws and at the same rate. But this assumption is not necessarily valid if we are speaking of a created world, for it is possible that at its beginning the process proceeded in an accelerated way.

And an example of this is the creation of a human being. In his mother’s womb, over nine months, a person goes through a developmental process resembling evolution. In the next twenty years development continues in an ever slower way until he reaches a stability that lasts for decades. If researchers from Mars were to encounter a twenty-year-old man and measure his rate of development, they would conclude that at that rate he needed thousands of years to reach the state in which they found him 🙂

Thank you, S.Z.L. The points you raise about the division and the Samaritans are fascinating and persuasive. What is the source of that claim? Yours? B. I feel that you did not answer the essence of my difficulty. I accept the truth of the Torah, but I am trying to formulate a rational and lean argument that does not require miraculous hypotheses that go beyond what is familiar to us. On that basis I argue for the credibility of the Exodus from Egypt and the formation of the people of Israel in the Sinai wilderness, the receiving of the Torah or its core from a chosen man named Moses, and its writing in one stage or another in the First Temple period based on traditions, in the manner of the Oral Torah. According to this, everything was done under God’s providence, as is evident that He watched over all the history of our people. The traditions passed down in ancient Israel were aggadic, in the manner of the midrashim of the Sages, according to which God literally walked with us in a pillar of cloud and gave His Torah in fire and lightning. On this point I am trying to clarify whether one can dispense with that by explaining it as allegory and parable. What would remain is a covenant made between Israel and God by Moses sometime in the Sinai wilderness (or at the foot of the mountain that was already sacred in the days of Elijah, and as the tradition seems to appear in the archaeological finds at Ajrud). What is wrong with that? Arthur Green takes something like this approach in his book. According to this, there was no extraordinary prophetic revelation to the whole people, but the monotheistic message of a God who is interested in every individual and reveals Himself to him, as it were—that is the revelation.

What can we do, when the Torah itself describes a miraculous process in which, in a short period, they left Egypt with signs and wonders and heard the voice of God speaking to them at Sinai, and during forty years Moses received Torah from God—a Torah that was sealed at the end of the forty years and written in a book with a warning not to add to it or subtract from it.

And that mode of formation suits a revolution. What the Torah created in the ancient world was a complete revolution, a challenge to the entire system of beliefs and values of the cultured world of that time. A revolution is born in a storm. Once it has come into being and become a fact that can no longer be undone, the revolution needs to “shift gears” into gradual development, full of rises and falls, trial and error, allowing it to be internalized in people’s hearts, deepening its understanding and detailing the ways it is to be applied in life, and following that, expanding the circle of its influence.

Best regards, S.Z. Levinger

A person’s creation begins in the emotional storm of his parents. Then he develops very rapidly: within nine months he grows quickly from a single-celled creature to a primate, passing through stages that naturally should have taken billions of years in the span of nine months (see Wikipedia, “biogenetic law”).

After that he comes out into the air of the world, but still receives everything—food, protection, and knowledge—from his parents, “as a nurse carries a suckling child”; then he becomes ripe to stand on his own merit and cope with his own powers on the firm foundation granted him by his parents and teachers, and he “hears and adds,” building layers of knowledge and wisdom on the basis he received from his predecessors.

And thus the revolution of the Torah is built. It begins in the storm of the Exodus from Egypt and the revelation at Mount Sinai, continues in growth “as a nurse carries a suckling child,” and afterward the people goes to school, learning Scripture from the prophets, Mishnah and Talmud from the Tannaim and Amoraim, and on the basis of the foundations it received, each generation builds additional layers that stand firm on the basis of their predecessors and apply the eternal principles to changing circumstances of reality.

Best regards, S.Z. Levinger

Gil,
I wonder where you get the confidence that “to internalize evolution and the billions of years of suffering under an impotent god who is unable to create a better world in less time… belongs to the realm of science fiction and has no great grounding,” etc.

The prevailing view in classical monotheism, and in my opinion the most serious, objective, and comprehensive account of the concept, is that evil is nothing but a privation in the proper functioning characteristic of an organism, and not suffering as such. For example: injury, blindness, ignorance, or illness. These are usually accompanied by psychological mechanisms of **aversion and warning** called pain or suffering, but without these the world would be very problematic, and this is not the place to elaborate on what happens with babies born without the ability to feel pain (they tend not to survive very long).

From this it follows that the question is not why God created a world that requires so many years of suffering, but why He created a world that requires so many events in which creatures are injured, damaged, eaten by other predators, and the like (with suffering being only a side effect of these). One must note that the phenomenon is extremely general: everything that comes into being in the world—including galaxies, human beings, plants, or animals—must cause the destruction of other objects or organisms along the way. Even a simple activity like breathing requires the destruction of the oxygen you breathe and its emission as carbon dioxide. Such is the nature of the physical world: nothing comes into being without creating absence in something else.

When you ask why God allowed such a thing to happen, you are really asking why He decided to create a physical world at all, rather than leaving in His creation only angels and spiritual beings. We see that it was decided to prefer a universe with a physical world including human beings like us despite the necessary evil that exists within it. But how does this observation turn into a question about the existence of God? How can we presume to know that a universe including a physical world like ours is worse than one without it?

The simple answer is that the existence of evil does not undermine the monotheistic claim in the slightest and is nothing more than a stale bludgeon for demagogic purposes.

As for “in less time,” either you think God intervened and therefore it really happened in less time, in which case all the arguments against that—which are necessarily based on the assumption that there was not and in principle cannot be intervention—are null and void; or you think He did not, and then the reason it took so long is that this is necessarily the amount of time required, given that the Creator wants a physical world like ours that is free to develop itself according to its own internal causal capacities.

Thank you, S.Z.L. (a remnant of righteousness endures?) Your analogies are thought-provoking and really make sense. Much appreciated.

Copenhagen, I assume it took Him a long time to create a world because in one way or another He is subject to the limitations of matter (as Michi and Maimonides explain). This is also the source of evil. Precisely because of that, the anthropomorphic revelation that presents a transcendent, all-powerful figure may fit the Genesis creation story in its plain sense, but not modern science. Coherence with the sciences will also reshape our relation to revelation and present it as something human beings arrive at from within themselves and as part of the Creator’s providence. I’ll elaborate later.

You may be talking about a different god—that really is not possible. If we are dealing with the primary principle of reality, it must have necessary existence—otherwise it is not primary, but rather something *caused* it to be. Correspondingly, anything else that exists must *receive* its existence from the necessary being, according to the general principle that every contingent property requires a cause that unites it with the substance in which it is realized (for example, someone dyes her hair and therefore it becomes, say, green. You always need the activity of the cause—the chemical bonds that attach the dyeing substance to the hairs—in order for her hair to persist in its greenness).

It follows, then, that there is no entity or external principle that can interfere with God in actualizing what He actualizes, because anything else, insofar as it exists, exists as a result of His causal influence, and insofar as it is possible at all, even that very possibility depends on His causal capacities (that is, God’s).

Matter cannot exist in and of itself, because there is always some kind of complexity there, and every complex thing is logically subject to destruction or creation; that means it is contingent, that is, it receives its existence from something else, and therefore it is not the primary principle of reality.

This is the essence of the idolatrous conception: to take the contingent created world, or some object within it (something “subject to matter”), and stick onto it the title “god” and worship it.

“As Michi and Maimonides explain”? Where?

With God’s help, 11 Elul 5778

To Gil—eternal youth,

The revelation at Mount Sinai is an antithesis to the conception underlying evolution, which claims that the world is built and develops as the result of a cruel struggle for existence in which the strong devour the weak, and therefore the strong are the ones who survive.

The entire event is an antithesis to the idea that “the strong win.” The strongest of all, the Creator of the world, chooses דווקא the weakest of all—frightened slaves who have just emerged from decades of harsh bondage—and with these very weaklings the all-powerful Creator makes a covenant and crowns them as His “treasured possession,” the king’s beloved treasure.

The conception that the world is built on a cruel struggle for existence is not new. All pagan mythologies are founded on a cruel struggle for existence among the gods, in which the strongest wins, and man worships the gods stronger than he is in order to receive their help.

And here the Torah sets forth a new model: not the strong win, but the good. The one who has faith and moral values. The one who recognizes the goodness of his Creator and the goodness of his parents. The one whom the economic struggle for existence does not drive out of his mind. He will not swear falsely; he will know how to stop the chase after money and devote one day a week to his God and to doing good to his son and daughter, but also to his male and female servant, his ox and his donkey. A person who not only will not physically harm his fellow or his fellow’s property, but who in his heart will not covet or crave what is not his.

This is the Torah of Mount Sinai: the days of chaos and void are over, when the “struggle for existence” leads to a situation in which darkness rules the earth with no place for light. A new evolution has arisen: the one who will survive and prevail in it is the one who believes in the good and strives for it.

The chaotic period of the cruel struggle for existence was not in vain. It brought the world to the realization that a free struggle for existence leads to chaos and void. The darkness will not be abolished; the drives of existence and achievement receive their domain in the “six days of labor,” but they are subordinated to the limits set for them by the Creator—limits of faith and morality that harness achievement to a positive goal.

This exalted event gave a “push” to absorbing the revolutionary message among the people, and from there begins a work of thousands of years, of slow progress filled with struggles and crises, rises and falls, until the people, and following them humanity, begin to truly absorb the message. About a thousand years pass, along with the trauma of destruction and exile, before the people of Israel are weaned from idolatry; another thousand years pass before humanity partially accepts monotheism; and another thousand years pass before humanity begins to free itself from the distortions of the partial Judaism it adopted.

Human progress proceeds through a combination of revolution and evolution: the “first tablets,” given amid “thunder and lightning” and then shattered, and the “second tablets,” which grow through slow labor little by little and endure over time.

Best regards, S.Z. Levinger

Gil, forgive the delay,
The verse in Deuteronomy says: “Keep them therefore and do them, for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, who shall hear all these statutes and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For what great nation is there that has God so near to it, as the Lord our God is whenever we call upon Him? And what great nation is there that has statutes and judgments so righteous as all this Torah that I set before you today?” From this verse one can see that for the nations, God is not revealed directly. He is revealed through Israel, which has God near to it whenever we call upon Him, and through the righteous statutes and judgments of the Torah that He gave. Israel and the Torah reveal the name of God in the world.
This analogy between Israel and the Torah has several halakhic implications that I found (if anyone found more, or wants to correct me, I’d be glad). On one side of the analogy, one who sees Israel at the time of his death is obligated to rend his garment, and the Talmud explains: to what is this comparable? To a Torah scroll that has been burned. On the other side of the analogy, we bury a sacred object that has become invalid just as we bury a Jew. This is true for sacred writings, but also for the stones of the altar that were desecrated by the Greeks and that the Hasmonean court stored away. In all cases, burial is seen as the proper treatment for a sacred object that has been damaged. Study of the Talmudic passage characterizing a sacred object as opposed to an object used for a commandment, in tractate Megillah, shows that a sacred object signifies the name of God, whether directly, as in sacred writings, or as a result of God’s name being called upon the place, as happened with the altar. The analogy we saw between Israel and sacred objects teaches, accordingly, that God’s name is also called upon Israel, and therefore the law that applies on one side of the analogy should apply on the other side as well.
The Talmud assumes that the name of God evokes awe. One might wonder whether there is some kind of fiscal proof for the existence of God here (only something real evokes awe -> the name of God evokes awe -> God is something real). Be that as it may, the Talmud’s certainty about this assumption leads it, together with Jeremiah, to wonder why the name of God called upon the Temple did not inspire awe among the nations at the destruction of the Temple. In the end the Talmud concludes that indeed the name of God on the Temple does not inspire awe, but the name of God upon Israel does inspire awe, since the probability of the existence of a sheep among seventy wolves is close to zero (a kind of pseudo-ontological proof). In this context let us mention that a year ago, following the placing of magnetometers on the Temple Mount, the Arabs refrained from entering the Temple Mount for two weeks; something that had not happened for 2,500 years (in the Second Temple period gentiles did not refrain from entering the Temple Mount, as one sees in Josephus). The event was so unusual that for two weeks the first question I asked when I got to work was whether the Arabs were still outside. Then it ended and they went back in. In any case, according to the Sages, the revelation of God’s name continues in the world through the awe it continues to cast upon those who encounter Israel, and that has preserved Israel in exile.
If you are following the discussions with Doron, you can understand why the question of to whom the name Israel applies—to the Jews or to the Christians—is so significant. The question is: who reveals the name of God in the world? A similar dispute takes place regarding Islam with respect to the Torah. Regarding the Temple Mount, the two religions agree that it should lie in ruins with a house of prayer of another religion on it. I hope this answer addresses what you asked.

In connection with creation in six days, there is Gerald Schroeder’s book Genesis and the Big Bang, which tries to measure the six days of creation according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, that time is relative to the speed of the body. I haven’t read it myself, and I also don’t have the physics background to evaluate it, but I understand it is worth reading.

Thank you. Your words are interesting. I’ll think about it. As for Gerald Schroeder’s book The Science of God, which Michi also mentioned in one of the answers about the age of the world—well, Natan Aviezer in his second book on Torah and science brings physicists who rejected Schroeder’s option as beginner’s mistakes. I have no idea and no way to evaluate that.

Y.D., not according to the speed of the body (that’s special relativity), but according to mass density (general relativity). The rate at which time flows changed with the expansion of the universe because the mass density decreased.