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This was the final email from Eli regarding his insights on the Torah/Bible. I have enjoyed his 25 years of friendship, partnership and collaboration with israelseen. We will all miss him dearly.
It saddens me to inform all of our supporters that Dr. Eli Lasch, a close friend and contributor to israelseen, passed away April 1, 2009. He was scheduled to visit Israel in a few weeks for his 80th birthday celebration with family and friends.
By Dr. Eli Lasch
The fifth and the first half of the sixth day follow exactly the accepted scheme of evolution. Having disengaged itself from rootedness life started moving: The first to be created were “the animals of the sea”, then the dinosaurs – the Torah designates them as “the big Taninim” usually translated as “crocodiles” – then the birds appeared and finally did the mammals. How did the author van der Post[i] characterize evolution: the laboratory of nature on the way to the carrier of consciousness, to man. As already shown previously, and in contrast to Darwinism, evolution in the Torah is however not caused by a successive transition from one species to another – each one was created directly by God and each at its proper time, and we are back at the idea of a time line underlying it all. This is also the answer to the most confounding question – how did intelligence arise? Animals, however advanced they may be, are lacking what makes man to become what he is: self-consciousness – awareness of time, the ability to speak and the skill of writing are probably all a part of it. Now time was ripe for the next step, for the transition from consciousness to self-consciousness, from animal to man: a quantum leap!
“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea …” “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”[iii]
At this point, we first have to ask ourselves what it means to be human; especially we should be concerned with the question regarding the difference between man and animal. Among all the living beings on Earth, only man has got self-consciousness and an awareness of time, only man knows the difference between past and future.
One more belief system of our time is the notion that the construction plan for animals and plants are contained in the genetic code. This code is complex and the number of possible variations enormous. Could it be that a code like that has developed at random? A simple look at the numbers shows that this is totally impossible. If for example a monkey would sit before a type-writer and bang one key every second, it would need 17 millions years in order to write a word containing twelve letters. For the random development of a single molecule of protein 10.130 years would be needed since creation. The probability for the random development of a single sentence with 100 letters is so low that the chances against it exceed the amount of atoms in our universe. The time that is supposed to have passed since the Big Bang is simply not enough for the development of the highly differentiated organisms existing today. Continue Reading »
To the next step. In the last chapter we have claimed that the creation of the luminaries symbolize the beginning of a new cycle – a cycle introducing consciousness and leading to self-consciousness, to human beings. How is that happening? It is fascinating to perceive that in the biblical account of creation the appearance of the different animals follows exactly the same steps, the same pathway as the one used by modern day paleontology. Exactly, like modern theories based on Darwin’s theory of evolution, the Torah speaks of a development from primitive to more complex forms. But here the similarity ends, since the underlying philosophy of the Biblical account is totally different from the one propounded by Darwin.
Past and Future in the Gaza Strip
an interview with Dr. Eyad El-Sarraj, director of GCMHP (Gaza Community Mental Health Program)
by Dr. Eli Erich Lasch, former Israeli director of health services of the Gaza Strip
