For many the issue of Torah and Science is one of confrontation. You either subscribe to the traditionalism (or as some would say, superstitions) of the past, or you are open to the vast vistas of a scientific future. There is no way of truly synthesising the two.

Unfortunately, even among religious Jews there is often a dissonance between their professional lives as scientists and their religious lives as loyal Jews.

I addressed this issue at relative length this past Friday night and Shabbat morning. Here I want to briefly emphasise the following:

True Science and True Religion are not only not at odds with each other, they compliment each other beautifully. It is not at all coincidental that this year alone no fewer than six Jewish scientists one the Nobel Prize, two in Medicine, three in Chemistry and one in Physics. They come from a tradition which holds science in the highest esteem. The Talmud says that our knowledge of astronomy glorifies us among the nations. Many of our greatest rabbis were also physicians, mathematicians, astronomers, logicians and general scientists. Some of the more well-known among them are Maimonides, Nachmanides and Gershonides.

On Shabbos I quoted the famous physicist and Nobel Laurette, Werner Heisenberg - after whom the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is named - as saying:

"The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will make you an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God awaits you!"

Let me share with you another of his other observations:

"In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I am now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on. Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of thought, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point."

And as to the importance of Religion, this is what Heisenberg has to say:

"Where no guiding ideals are left to point the way, the scale of values disappears and with it the meaning of our deeds and sufferings, and at the end can lie only negation and despair. Religion is therefore the foundation of ethics, and ethics the presupposition of life."

This last statement of Heisenberg's is a very powerful introduction to our new course on Medical Ethics which you can read more about in the next section of eNews.

Rabbi Benzion Milecki OAM
Shabbat Lech Lecha 5774 - Oct 12, 2013