On Science and Rabbis

For me, sad to say, my high school Yeshiva experience
was largely negative. I was the prototypical
"square-peg" that wouldn't be shoved into the "round
hole" that my Yeshiva tried to shove me into.

There could be several reasons for it. When I was
younger, I was a bit of a rebel. I would (admittedly)
sometimes look for ways to get on my Rosh Yeshiva's
nerves.

But, more to the point, I didn't share the
fundamentalist attitude of the Yeshiva. Maybe it's
because I wasn't frum for the first nine years of my
life, but I understood, even when I got to the Yeshiva
I'm talking about at age eleven, that I had a much
different outlook on life than my classmates. I
already understood, even at that I can't take what is
told me simply on blind faith and that as statement
slide further along the unbelieveablity and
implausibility scale, they must be taken with bigger
and bigger grains of salt.

So, when I first heard the Midrash that Moshe was ten
amos high (or is it twenty, I keep forgetting), my
credibility alarm went off. When I heard the saying
that Pharoh was only one amah tall, my alarm went off
even louder, especially when, taken together, the two
teachings sound like a simple attempt to make the bad
guys look silly.

When I first heard the Midrash that Og was forty amos
tall, it boggled my mind (keep in mind, 40 amos is,
what, sixty to eighty feet? My house isn't that
tall.) But, OK, the Torah says he was a giant, so
I'll buy it for the moment, though it strains my
credulity. But then I heard that I was mistaken, that
Og wasn't forty amos tall, he was forty amos at the
ankle! That sent the alarms up so high, they have yet
to come down. I suppose that the writers of the
Midrashim did not realize that while area doubles by
the square, volume doubles by the cube and that a
creature that size could not possibly hope to move (to
say nothing of the region probably being completely
incapable of supporting such a creature, of his head
being so high up he couldn't possibly hope to take in
enough oxygen to sustain himself, etc.) The idea that
a creature that large could hang off the end of the
Ark to survive (and yet not cause it to capsize or
sink) was just too much to accept.

But even that wasn't the final straw. The final
straw, in my mind, came from a Rebbe I had in the
ninth grade. I don't remember how the conversation
came to the subject, but he asserted that any of the
Tana'im or Amoraim could have built anything that we
have today - that they were technological geniuses who
understood the world better than the greatest
scientists of today. To me, that was so far off the
deep end that it was the point of no return. I think
I can date to that very day my skepticism in anything
that sounds utterly beyond the pale. The idea that a
Tanna or an Amora could have built an airplane, or
could have cured cancer or smallpox, or built a
telephone and *chose not to* is just so... I'm at a
loss for superlatives to use. You know what I mean
anyway.

And I find this same anti-intellectualism still goes
on today. A perusal of several "frum" boards found
people who honestly believe that the sun revolves
around the earth. I always wonder what these people
think; that NASA faked it all? For what purpose?
(Oh, yes, because they are evil and want to turn the
world away from God.) There are those who believe in
spontaneous generation. When asked why it's not
observed today, the glib answer I get is "Nishtana
Ha-Teva" - "Nature has changed." Why creatures would
spontaneously generate seventeen hundred years ago but
not today is beyond me.

I don't know why people simply cannot accept the fact
that while our Torah leaders of the past may have been
experts at the Torah, they simply weren't scientists.
It's not taking anything away from any of them to say
otherwise - I don't think Rabbi Akiva was any less
great because he couldn't build a nuclear power plant
- but let the man's accomplishments stand in the
context of the time period that he lived in. Don't
turn him into something that he wasn't and could not,
in his time, ever hope to be.

The Wolf