Vayetze 2020
In this week’s parsha God tells Yitzchak He will bless him, “because Avrohom listened to My voice, and guarded my commandments and my Torah.” According to Rash”i this verse tells us that Avrohom actually kept the entire Torah even though it was not yet commanded. The Kabbalah says that this was possible since God created the world from the Torah, Avrohom who was so great, was able, in an act of spiritual backward engineering, to infer the Torah from the world. On the other hand, according to the plain meaning of the text, the Torah only commands Avrohom several mitzvot, such as circumcision and I think there is something that feels intellectually dishonest about painting Avrohom as someone who kept every mitzvah before it was commanded or even before it made sense to keep it, such as celebrating Pesach before the Jews ever left Egypt.
This is an instance in which our rational intellect and our tradition seem in conflict, and there are others. For instance, there is the moment in the life of every Orthodox parent when one’s child asks how the world can be both millions of years old and also 5781 years old. What do we answer if we feel trapped at that moment between Jewish tradition and reason? What about when our child is in college and has taken Bible as Literature, how does one address the conflict between a Torah we believe to be Divine and yet contradictions in the biblical text that would be easily answered by a documentary hypothesis?
The Rambam faced a similar conflict between science/reason and religion/faith. Aristotle philosophically believed the universe to be eternal, and yet the Torah writes of its creation. The Rambam writes in the Guide for the Perplexed 3:25:
“We do not reject the Eternity of the Universe, because certain passages in Scripture confirm the Creation; for such passages are not more numerous than those in which God is represented as a corporeal being; nor is it impossible or difficult to find for them a suitable interpretation. We might have explained them in the same manner as we did in respect to the Incorporeality of God (metaphorically). We should perhaps have had an easier task in showing that the Scriptural passages referred to are in harmony with the theory of the Eternity of the Universe if we accepted the latter, than we had in explaining the anthropomorphisms in the Bible when we rejected the idea that God is corporeal. For two reasons, however, we have not done so, and have not accepted the Eternity of the Universe. First, the Incorporeality of God has been demonstrated by proof: those passages in the Bible, which in their literal sense contain statements that can be refuted by proof, must and can be interpreted otherwise. But the Eternity of the Universe has not been proved; a mere argument in favour of a certain theory is not sufficient reason for rejecting the literal meaning of a Biblical text, and explaining it figuratively, when the opposite theory can be supported by an equally good argument….If, on the other hand, Aristotle had a proof for his theory, the whole teaching of Scripture would be rejected, and we should be forced to other opinions.”
The Torah is Divine and at the same time science and reason play an important and Godly role in the world, and God does not wish that we jettison them. We must take care not to resolve such dilemmas by limiting the Torah, assuming the Torah to be single faceted instead of multifaceted, superficial instead of deep, we must not compartmentalize it to just one, religious, part of our life, rather than allowing all of Torah, to confront us and expand our minds. We must trust that the Torah can protect itself. We must allow the full weight of Torah and the full weight of reason to rest squarely on our shoulders. We believe the Torah, after all, can pull its own weight.
