Torah Ideals

Seeking direction in a misdirected world

Weighing in on Evolution

Teaching Jewish history and philosophy, I try to encapsulate for my students what I have heard and read from critics of evolutionary theory.   My purpose is not to disprove evolution per se, but to demonstrate that the theory of evolution is not as sacrosanct as the scientific community and conventional wisdom would have us believe.  Since I am not a scientist, I have to  sift though what evidence is available in layman’s terms and try to evaluate the often strident voices on each side of the argument.

Having recently revisited the issue, I remain confidant in my conclusion that evolution may have guided the formation of life, but that it could not have done so without divine guidance.  Despite the vehemence of those who reject Creationism or Intelligent Design, it seems to require a massive leap of faith to conclude that life could have developed into its present form without help from outside the world of nature.  Below I provide relevant quotes and links, which I hope interested and thoughtful readers will give the attention they deserve.  Civil rebuttals from articulate spokesmen are welcome.

“Among the structures that appeared in the Cambrian were limbs, claws, eyes with optically perfect lenses, intestines. These exploded into being with no underlying hint in the fossil record that they were coming. Below them in the rock strata (i.e., older than them) are fossils of one-celled bacteria, algae, protozoans, and clumps known as the essentially structureless Ediacaran fossils of uncertain identity. How such complexities could form suddenly by random processes is an unanswered question. It is no wonder that Darwin himself, at seven locations in The Origin of Species, urged the reader to ignore the fossil record if he or she wanted to believe his theory. Abrupt morphological changes are contrary to Darwin’s oft repeated statement that nature does not make jumps. Darwin based his theory on animal husbandry rather than fossils. If in a few generations of selective breeding a farmer could produce a robust sheep from a skinny one, then, Darwin reasoned, in a few million or billion generations a sponge might evolve into an ape. The fossil record did not then nor does it now support this theory…

“The abrupt appearance in the fossil record of new species is so common that the journal Science, the bastion of pure scientific thinking, featured the title, “Did Darwin get it all right?” And answered the question: no. The appearance of wings is a classic example. There is no hint in the fossil record that wings are about to come into existence. And they do, fully formed.”

Gerald Schroeder — Read the whole essay here.

“As I began to write this novel, I found myself returning unexpectedly to the concerns of my undergraduate studies thirty years ago. Back then, evolution was so controversial that one quickly learned to write cautiously, justifying even the mildest statement with scholarly footnotes. If anything, evolution is more controversial today. And in its modern formulations, evolutionary theory is forbiddingly difficult, and frequently counter-intuitive…
“I remain convinced that the world we are born into is a world of controversy, and that it behooves us to respect our adversaries, and to honor them as expressing another aspect of God’s will.
“Because in the end, evolution is a profound mystery. Life is a profound mystery. And we are fools if we forget that and think, even for a moment, that we know it all…

“Take bats, which have echolocation — they navigate by sound.  To do that, many things must evolve.  Bats need a specialized apparatus to make sounds, they need specialized ears to  hear echoes, they need specialized brains to interpret the sounds,  and they need specialized bodies to dive and swoop to catch insects.  If all these things don’t evolve simultaneously, there’s no advantage.   And to imagine that all these things happened purely by chance [is] very hard to believe.”

Michael Crichton

“Life as we know it is, among other things, dependent on at least 2000 different enzymes. How could the blind forces of the primal sea manage to put together the correct chemical elements to build enzymes?  The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein… I am at a loss to understand biologists’ widespread compulsion to deny what seems to me to be obvious.”

Sir Fred Hoyle (who estimated the odds of spontaneous generation as equivalent to rolling 50,000 consecutive sixes with a single die)

“Consequently, discussion often turns to vague and murky assertion. Starlings are said to have evolved to be the color of dirt so that hawks can’t see them to eat them. This is plausible. But guacamayos and cockatoos are gaudy enough to be seen from low-earth orbit. Is there a contradiction here? No, say evolutionists. Guacamayos are gaudy so they can find each other to mate. Always there is the pat explanation. But starlings seem to mate with great success, though invisible. If you have heard a guacamayo shriek, you can hardly doubt that another one could easily find it. Enthusiasts of evolution then told me that guacamayos were at the top of their food chain, and didn’t have predators. Or else that the predators were colorblind. On and on it goes. But…is any of this established?”

Fred Reed (linked by Rabbi Dovid Gottleib, former professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins) – Read the whole article here.

I have some doubts about including the following article, having no indication of the credibility of the author.  Nevertheless, he cites many compelling sources which, independent of his own expertise or lack thereof, are worth considering:

“Harmful mutations happen constantly.  Without repair mechanisms, life would be very short indeed and might not even get started because mutations often lead to disease, deformity, or death.  So even the earliest, “simple” creatures in the evolutionist’s primeval soup or tree of life would have needed a sophisticated repair system.  But the mechanisms not only remove harmful mutations from DNA, they would also remove mutations that evolutionists believe build new parts.  The evolutionist is stuck with imagining the evolution of mechanisms that prevent evolution, all the way back to the very origin of life.”

John Michael Fischer — Read the whole article here.

“However, on both theoretical and experimental grounds, the broad sweep of evolution cannot be based on random mutations. On theoretical grounds, the probability is just too small for random mutations, even with the filtering of natural selections, to lead to a new species.
“On experimental grounds, there are no known random mutations that have added any genetic information to the organism. This may seem surprising at first, but a list of the best examples of mutations offered by evolutionists shows that each of them loses genetic information rather than gains it.
“One of the examples where information is lost is the one often trotted out by evolutionists nowadays in an attempt to convince the public of the truth of evolution. That is the evolution of bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
“Clearly, if random mutations could account for the evolution of life, then those mutations must have added a vast amount of information to the genetic code. From the time of the first simple organism until the present profusion of life, billions of genetic changes would have to be built up by a long series of accumulated mutations and natural selection. It follows that each of these many billions of mutations must have added information. Yet in spite of all the molecular studies that have been done on mutations, not a single one has been found that adds any genetic information! They all lose information!”

Adapted from Dr. Lee Spetner’s Not By Chance — Read a more thorough synopsis here.

One of my favorite natural anomalies is the orb spider, which spins a web solely for the benefit of the wasp larvae that have been injected into it.  This must have taken a good few million years to happen by accident.

January 19, 2012 Posted by | Culture, Science and Nature | , , , | 2 Comments

Denouncing Spiritual Terrorism

On March 16, 1968, soldiers of the 1st Battalion’s Charlie Company committed one of the most notorious war crimes in American history when they brutally massacred over 300 villagers in the Vietnamese hamlet of Mỹ Lai.

Was every soldier in the American army complicit in the crime?  Did the perpetrators of the massacre act in accordance with the dictates and the mission of the American military?  Was the savagery inflicted on innocent men, women, and children indicative of the country whose soldiers wore its insignia on their uniforms?

The simple answer is:  no.

We can talk, legitimately, about collective responsibility and the mixed cultural messages that may have contributed to the atrocity.  But when Americans learned about the barbarism of their own soldiers, the untempered outrage that poured forth testified that the individuals had acted as individuals, and that their inhumanity in no way represented the values of their country.

The same was true about the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin in 1995 by the marginally religious zealot Yigal Amir.  As unpopular as Rabin may have been among the religious community, only the most extreme ideologues saw his actions as anything other than an aberration of the Torah values he invoked to justify cold-blooded murder.

And the same is true now with respect to the hideous spitting incident in the Beit Shemesh community in central Israel.  It doesn’t matter that the perpetrator may wear a frock coat and sidelocks.  It doesn’t matter that he may refrain from kindling fire on the Sabbath, may keep a strictly kosher diet, and may stand in prayer before his Creator three times a day.  It doesn’t matter that he may study Talmudic texts and analyze the finest points of Jewish law.  It doesn’t matter if his neighbors, whether few or many, sympathize with his attitudes and his actions.

At best, he is a misguided fool.  At worst, he is an imposter and a terrorist.  Whatever he is, he does not represent the ideals of Torah Judaism.

The sad truth is that the Torah, the Almighty’s guide to morality and virtuous conduct, is only as good as we allow it to be.  The Torah may be a perfect expression of the Divine Will, but it only works to the extent that imperfect humans are willing to let it shape their conduct and, even more essentially, their character.  It does not mystically or magically turn us into saints; rather, it teaches us how to transform ourselves into spiritual beings.  But it remains up to us to follow the path it lights before us.

The sad truth is also that there are imposters among us; the Talmud itself laments the “pious fools” who clothe themselves in the external trappings of religiosity with no comprehension whatsoever of true spiritual values.  The Jew who prays fervently and then cheats in business, the Jew who clops his chest in repentance then slanders his neighbor, the Jew who meticulously trains his son to read from the Torah scroll and then spits on a child who may have innocently absorbed the social mores of the surrounding secular world – a Jew such as this is worse than a fraud.  He is nothing less than a terrorist, for he brings violent derision upon the Torah and all its sincere practitioners.

Frequently at odds with contemporary Western values, Torah values are easily mocked, satirized, and misrepresented by intolerant skeptics who would rather ridicule than seek answers to their questions.  But the Orthodox community includes tens of thousands of Jews like myself, Jews raised in irreligious homes who chose to return to Torah observance, Jews who learned to appreciate the ancient wisdom of our people by asking those same questions, by searching for teachers and mentors who could articulate the answers, and by listening patiently to their explanations.

Unfortunately, many secularists and most of the media prefer to deal in stereotypes.  It’s easier to depict bearded men in long coats as fanatics than it is to examine the historical and philosophical foundations of their tradition.  It’s more provocative to caricature women wearing head-scarves, three-quarter sleeves, and knee-length skirts as burqa-clad Jewish Wahabists than it is to concede the modest elegance projected by many Orthodox women.  It suits the progressive agenda better to decry separate seating on buses in religious communities as Shariah-like segregation than it does to contemplate how sensitivity to sexual boundaries bolsters the integrity of the family structure against the hedonism of secular society.

The useful idiots who masquerade as devoutly orthodox but possess little understanding of authentic spiritual refinement empower cynics eager to smear an entire theology with the broad brush of condemnation based on the actions of a few.  But amidst the outrage, consider this:  Does it make any sense that true adherents of the culture that taught the world the values of peace, charity, and loving-kindness would endorse the public humiliation of a little girl in the name of piety?

It doesn’t.  And we don’t.

Published in the St. Louis Jewish Light.

January 2, 2012 Posted by | Culture, Jewish Unity | , , | Leave a Comment

Good Luck, Albert Pujols

Those who did the math calculated that Albert Pujols would earn $50,000 per at bat for the duration of his new contract.

If so many people think this is wrong, how did it happen?

December 28, 2011 Posted by | Culture | , , | Leave a Comment

It’s not either/ or

Apparently, I’m not the only critic of Dennis Prager’s last column.  In a follow-up piece, Mr. Prager presses the point that competence is a more important requirement for leadership than character.

I agree.  But that is beside the point.  I would much prefer a Bill Clinton in the White House than a Jimmy Carter.  But far more than either I would prefer a Washington or a Lincoln, a Teddy Roosevelt or a Harry Truman.

To ask whether we are better off with an adulterous statesman or a virtuous bungler merely muddies the waters.  Needless to say, we often have to choose between the lesser of two evils, but my objection to Mr. Prager is that he is rationalizing immorality into irrelevancy.  We need moral leaders as desperately as we need capable governors.  That we may have to make compromises when there is no Harry Truman to be found is an unpleasant fact of life, not a reason to diminish the value of virtue.

Mr. Prager goes on to prove, anecdotally, that not every case of adultery is as bad as every other.  This is obviously true, just as not all acts of robbery are equal and not all acts of spilling blood are equal.  But that is the point precisely.  It is only when we have leaders of moral stature that we retain the ability to make meaningful value judgments and not slip into the moral anarchy that characterizes so much of our society by elevating “nonjudgmentalism” to the highest strata of virtue.

Regarding Biblical interpretation, Judaism operated for over 3000 years within a system of rabbinic authority built upon the authority handed down to Moses at Sinai.  Separatist groups like the Hellenists, the Sadducees, and the Kaarites attempted to overturn those conventions with only fleeting success.  They all disappeared, and authentic Torah tradition endured.

But their spiritual descendants keep coming back.  The lessons of Jewish history rest upon a solid understanding of how the prophets and sages chose to transmit their teachings.  We cannot reinvent them to fit the sensitivities of our times, although sometimes we have to try to find a new way of explaining them to which modern ears will be receptive.

Of those who have commented, some clearly have not read or do not care about what I wrote in the linked essay about David and Bathsheba.  Others have offered explanations, even in David’s defense, that have no basis in Torah tradition that I know of.  Oddly enough, the same people who would never argue against going to a doctor for medical advice, going to an accountant for tax advice, and going to a mechanic for auto advice, believe that they are fully justified in offering their own unschooled interpretations of manuscripts that have been analyzed and annotated by the most brilliant minds over the last hundred generations.

This is what we call chutzpah.

December 13, 2011 Posted by | Culture, History, Philosophy, Politics | , , , , | 4 Comments

The Issue of Character

I have a lot of admiration for Dennis Prager. His ability to articulate common sense conservative values and politics without resorting to dogma or hyperbole is refreshing; his passionate defense of Israel against the groupthink of Western academics and politicians is reassuring.

However, even the best and the brightest sometimes wander off the reservation.

Read my rebuttal here.  Then go to the JWR homepage to read Mr. Prager’s sincere but unconvincing response to his critics.  More on that soon, I hope.

December 13, 2011 Posted by | Culture, History, Philosophy | , , , | 9 Comments

Vengeance is Mine

There are few indicators of popular outlooks and attitudes more accurate than the seasonal television lineup. This year’s programming clearly reflects a popular passion for justice. But a closer look reveals that passion to be somewhat more conflicted than it first appears.

Is there really a moral imperative to exact an eye for an eye?

December 7, 2011 Posted by | Culture | , , | Leave a Comment

The Secret of a Long Life

By Michael Gartner, Pulitzer Prize winning writer, editor, and president of NBC News.

My father never drove a car. Well, that’s not quite right. I should say I never saw him drive a car.

He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.

“In those days,” he told me when he was in his 90s, “to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it.”

At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in:  “Oh, baloney!” she said. “He hit a horse.”

“Well,” my father said, “there was that, too.”

So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors all had cars — the Kollingses next door had a green 1941Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford — but we had none.

My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines , would take the streetcar to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.

My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we’d ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none. “No one in the family drives,” my mother would explain, and that was that.

But, sometimes, my father would say, “But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we’ll get one.” It was as if he wasn’t sure which one of us would turn 16 first.

But, sure enough , my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown..

It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn’t drive, it more or less became my brother’s car.

Having a car but not being able to drive didn’t bother my father, but it didn’t make sense to my mother.

So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The cemetery probably was my father’s idea. “Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?” I remember him saying more than once.

For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps — though they seldom left the city limits — and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.

Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn’t seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage.  (Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.)

He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin’s Church.  She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish’s two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home.  If it was the assistant pastor, he’d take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church. He called the priests “Father Fast” and “Father Slow.”

After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to the beauty parlor, he’d sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio. In the evening, then, when I’d stop by, he’d explain: “The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored.”

If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out — and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream.

As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, “Do you want to know the secret of a long life?”

“I guess so,” I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.

“No left turns,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“No left turns,” he repeated.

“Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic.  As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn.”

“What?” I said again.

“No left turns,” he said. “Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that’s a lot safer. So we always make three rights.”

“You’re kidding!” I said, and I turned to my mother for support.

“No,” she said, “your father is right. We make three rights. It works.”  But then she added: “Except when your father loses count.”

I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing.

“Loses count?” I asked.

“Yes,” my father admitted, “that sometimes happens. But it’s not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you’re okay again.”

I couldn’t resist. “Do you ever go for 11?” I asked.

“No,” he said ” If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can’t be put off another day or another week.”

My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90.

She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102.

They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000.

(Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom — the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.)

He continued to walk daily — he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he’d fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising — and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died.

One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news.

A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, “You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred.”

At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, “You know, I’m probably not going to live much longer.”

“You’re probably right,” I said.

“Why would you say that?” He countered, somewhat irritated.

“Because you’re 102 years old,” I said..

“Yes,” he said, “you’re right.” He stayed in bed all the next day.

That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night.

He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said: “I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet”

An hour or so later, he spoke his last words:

“I want you to know,” he said, clearly and lucidly, “that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have.”

A short time later, he died.

I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I’ve wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long.

I can’t figure out if it was because he walked through life,or because he quit taking left turns.

Hat tip:  Todd Rush

November 18, 2011 Posted by | Culture | 2 Comments

In Memoriam

My remarks from the memorial service of Donna Jones, secretary of Block Yeshiva High School for the last 18 years:

Among the most extraordinary figures in Jewish history were the sage Rabbi Meir and his wife, Bruriah.

Rabbi Meir returned home one evening and was surprised when his wife met him with the following question:

“Some time ago a man came and left a precious object in my care,” she said.  Now he has come and asked for it to be returned. Should we return it or not?”

He answered her: “My dear, I don’t understand the question.  Obviously, whoever receives a deposit in trust must return it when the owner asks for it back.”

Beruriah took his hand and led him to the bed in the next room, then drew pulled back the sheet to show him the lifeless bodies of their two sons, who had died suddenly from a plague.

Rabbi Meir began to weep, but Bruriah said to him: “Did you not tell me that we must return a deposit to its owner?” she said.  “Our children were never our own possessions.  They were entrusted to us, and now their Owner has taken them back” (Midrash Proverbs 37: 76-29).

And so it is for us here today.  The Almighty gave a most precious gift into our trust.  But now He has taken Donna back.

We always want to speak well of those who have passed on, but in the case of Donna we don’t have to exaggerate, we don’t have to embellish, we don’t have edit or omit or revise.

In a world of constant complaints, Donna always had a smile.  In a world of constant criticism, Donna always had a compliment. In a world where it has become fashionable to be a cynic, Donna saw the best in everything and everyone.  In a world plagued by faithlessness, Donna was fiercely loyal to the core.

She was a constant source of strength to every member of our faculty, reminding us of the priceless contribution we give our students daily when so many found fault, encouraging us to persevere while so many were trying to pull the rug out from under our feet.  Donna was our angel, our gift from G-d for every moment that we had her.

The sages tell us that the truly righteous make the transition from this world to the next effortlessly and easily, without anguish, for their souls are so lofty they can barely be contained within their worldly bonds.  Donna slipped away far too soon for us, but her spirit was truly a spirit that belonged in Heaven.

Donna, you did more than touch us, more than reassure us, more than reaffirm our mission.  You became part of us, part of each and every member of our faculty, part of each and every student.  We won’t merely remember you; you will live on in all of us, for as long as we are able to carry on in the work that you valued so much, and of which you were so much a part.

September 19, 2011 Posted by | Culture | Leave a Comment

New Subscription Link

Please check out the new subscription link at the top of the right hand sidebar.  New articles are posted, on average, every week or two, so you won’t get flooded with more emails.

My articles on Jewish World Review, Aish.com, and other outlets examine current events and contemporary issues through the lens of classical Judasim, as well as Torah philosophy and ethics.

For those who are already subscribed to my Yahoo group email letter, I will be phasing that out over the next few weeks.  If you would like to continue receiving articles, add the new subscription by clicking the sidebar link.

Thanks for your readership and interest.

August 2, 2011 Posted by | Culture | , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment

Legal Larceny

Some people have found a new way to turn fool’s gold into the genuine article.

In an effort to popularize its new one-dollar coins, the United States Mint has offered to mail coin orders to buyers free of shipping charges. Enterprising “travel hackers” quickly figured out that they could buy the coins, rack up frequent-flier points on their credit cards, then deposit the coins to their bank accounts to pay off their credit card bills. Officials began catching on when they noticed repeat orders adding up to as much as $600,000 worth of coins; they got another clue when banks reported receiving deposits of coins still in their Mint wrappers.

“We’ve used them to go on trips around the world,” Jane Liaw told NPR, saying that she and her husband are planning trips to Greece and Turkey, “all on miles and points.”

But it’s not illegal.

August 2, 2011 Posted by | Culture, Philosophy | , , | Leave a Comment

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