Warning: Category 5 Emunah Threat
Reconciling Breishis with Science is good, clean fun. It doesn’t really matter at the end of the day if Adam and Noah were actual people or not, and it’s fun to speculate and debate wondrous peshatim about miracles and dinosaur extinctions and the like. One commenter here, Chaim, is convinced that if he can just put together the right collection of miracles, everything will work out. Currently he has figured out that the flood water wasn’t regular water, but was of course miraculous water, the kind of miracle water that doesn’t leave any damage to buildings or rock, though it does remove all traces of human life. We haven’t got to the end of his theory yet, but I assume at some point we will get to the miracle of the kangaroos magically hopping from the Ark all the way to Australia. When I told him he can’t just make up miracles like that, he responded ‘Yes I can, to answer questions’. All good fun, and highly entertaining too, especially for the Geek Orthodox. Even the Gedolim are not too bothered by all this.
A much bigger problem though is reconciling the rest of History with Orthodox Judaism. Starting with Yetzias Mitzrayim and ending around the year 500CE, there are two entirely different accounts of what actually happened. Most frum Jews are so shielded from academic scholarship that they take the entire OJ story for granted. They are aware that of course Reform and the Goyim don’t believe in Sinai, but they think that’s about it. Unfortunately modern scholarship dates what we now think of as Orthodox Judaism to the period of 0-500CE, in other words Chazal pretty much made up Torah sheBaal Peh as they were writing it down. One scholar even suggests that Rabbinic Judaism was created as a reaction against Christianity.
This is a much more difficult subject to get into. The Science around the creation and evolution of the world is well documented and well understood, and mostly accepted by all the world’s scientists. However the theories around the creation and evolution of Rabbinic Judaism are just that: mostly theories. It’s hard to determine what is fact, and what is theory. Each side is dogmatically entrenched in their own positions. Plus, this whole debate is mostly of interest only to historians interested in the evolution of Judaism. Orthodox Jews themselves mostly ignore this area of study, as they are content to just believe the standard frum account. This is in contrast to the Science & Torah issues where there has been a lot of interest over the years from all sides.
So what to do? This is below the radar of most kiruv organizations (which is probably a good thing), and I haven’t seen any material on it. I don’t even know where to start, and probably shouldn’t go there. But your fearless Godol will now go and read up on all this kefirah so you don’t have to. Book suggestions are welcome (but don’t tell the Rebbetzin).
