QUOTATION FROM:
Rabbi Hillel Goldberg, Genesis
and Cosmology, published in Jewish Action, Summer 2000. (Jewish Action is published
quaraterly by the Orthodox Union, a mainstream Orthodox Jewish
organization.)
Rabbi Goldberg writes:
Genesis' process of creation is directed, while science proposes random
evolution from inorganic to organic matter, then from simple to ever
more complex life. The discrepancies between Genesis and science seem
irreconcilable. However, a subtler and sharper reading of both the
religious and the scientific sources reveals a different picture.
Genesis emerges as scientifically accurate, not just by analogy or
metaphor.
This is difficult for the non-Hebrew reader to accept because of what I
term the "Orthodox fallacy". Simply put, when it comes to the Torah,
Orthodoxy is not orthodox. The only readers who take the Torah both
literally and unidimensionally - who are fundamentalists - are
non-Hebrew readers. The simplicity ascribed to the Biblical account of
creation within Western culture is not and never has been a part of the
intellectual heritage of even the most Orthodox Jewish believers. The
scientist, however, sees a Jewish reader back off from a literal and
unidimensional understanding of Genesis, expressed in the translations,
and exclaims, "bad faith!"
To engage in an objective, cross-disciplinary analysis of Genesis, the
scientist must acknowledge that even the most traditional reading of
the Torah is never orthodox (with a small "o"). The only text that
counts is the original, whose Hebrew is multi-layered in a way that is
alien to the English language. What a scientist calls a "re-reading"
may be an example of a time-honored hermeneutic endemic to Hebrew,
generously indulged long before Galileo, Darwin, or Einstein. For
millennia, the interpreter of the Torah has lived congenially with the
multiple denotations and connotations of Hebrew words, phrases, and
themes. Indeed, he has gloried in them, without, however, violating the
plain sense of the text - without twisting its clear intent.
If a reader lets Genesis be Genesis, not a translated stultification
thereof, Genesis is scientifically accurate.
