Prof. Sam Lehman-Wilzig: Monkeying Around with Modernity: True Believers in Israel and America
Here’s a tough question. What’s the connection between: 1) the most sensational trial in American history (not O.J. Simpson!); 2) the Trump Administration’s massive cuts in science and education funding; and 3) the ongoing political maelstrom in Israel over the place of the haredim in Israeli society and its military? If you can’t guess – read on.
Exactly 100 years ago (July 10–21, 1925), America was torn and riveted over what came to be called the “Monkey Trial”. In Dayton, Tennessee, a high-school teacher by the name of John Scopes was put on trial for violating the recently passed state law outlawing the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Scopes was found guilty, but the verdict was later overturned. The underlying issue was to what extent American education would be allowed to contradict religiously-based “biblical facts.”
A century later, the U.S. finds itself with much the same unholy mixture. First, President Trump is reducing the National Science Foundation’s funding from US$8.9 billion to US$3.9 billion, and similar cuts are planned for NASA and the National Institute of Health. Perhaps even more striking, the Trump Administration is trying to abolish (!) the Department of Education, ostensibly because of “waste” and over-reliance on “Diversity & Equity” issues. However, the real goal here is to give the states total control over educational policy (instead of the 90% they already have), so that the more conservative states can reinstitute religious education without hindrance. Indeed, this past April, the U.S. Supreme Court came within one vote (it split 4-4) of allowing the State of Oklahoma to enable a Catholic school to become the country’s first religious charter school (i.e., receive state financial support).
Meanwhile, in Israel – never having America’s Constitutional separation of religion and state, the ultra-Orthodox haredim have managed to receive state funding despite teaching very little of the required “core curriculum” (English, science and math). Other than basic arithmetic and some Hebrew grammar, most haredi primary schools (and almost all high schools, except for haredi girls’ seminaries) avoid science and English like the plague.
In two interconnected ways, this ties in with the other major issue in Israel’s headlines this past week: the haredi parties leaving the governing coalition because of the proposed army draft law. On the one hand, without core educational basics, they don’t constitute good material for serving in an increasingly technology-oriented army. On the other hand, joining the army might actually provide them remedially with some of those basics – precisely what the haredi leadership is afraid of, because then they can fit into the Israeli economy and (Heaven forfend!) Israeli general society as well.
Here we come to the crux of the matter. What is it about “general knowledge” (especially science) that so frightens many hard-core religious believers? In a nutshell: the innumerable contradictions between what science has found and what the religious believe the Bible and other traditional, theological sources assert.
Was the world created 6,000 years ago? Certainly not. More like 13.7 billion years ago. Were Adam and Eve our sole progenitors? Hardly. We evolved from apes over millions of years. Is homosexuality really an abomination? If so, then why did God create 10% of male humanity (approximately 3% of females) everywhere around the world to be homosexual? Are leprosy and other ailments truly a result of sinning? Nope. We know which viruses and bacteria cause most ailments.
The list of religious “conventional wisdoms” failing the evidentiary test goes on and on – not only in the natural sciences but in the “softer” social sciences as well. For instance, many of the Hebrew Bible’s stories duplicate much earlier legends from Mesopotamia and other Middle Eastern civilizations. Indeed, a good part of the bible’s specific laws are found in the much earlier Code of Hammurabi (for anyone interested, see: David P. Wright, Inventing God’s Law: How the Covenant Code of the Bible Used and Revised the Laws of Hammurabi. Oxford University Press, 2009) not to mention the field of ”Biblical Criticism” that philologically shows the Five Books of Moses to have been written not by Moses but by different authors.
Does this mean that religion is “bunk”? Of course not. As spiritual sustenance, it serves an important human need – otherwise, why would we find every human society to have religious belief of one type or another? It even has “physical” benefits: religious people who regularly pray together within a society valuing religious culture (churchgoers, synagogue attendees, mosque participants) tend to have a longer lifespan! (https://www.weforum.org/stories/2018/06/one-thing-you-ll-find-in-the-obits-of-many-long-living-people/)
The problem lies in “literalism” – the belief that the “sacred book” must be taken at face value as “God’s word.” Given that these texts were spoken or written in a pre-scientific age, they will naturally contain stories and “explanations” that don’t bear up under careful scientific evidence. However, this need not be an insurmountable obstacle to squaring the circle between science and religion. For example, the great Jewish philosopher (and medical practitioner) Maimonides argued that the “Seven Days of Creation” are not to be taken literally, but rather as a metaphor; each day could be a millennium or even an eon.
More generally, in any conflict between science and what some perceive as “Jewish Truth,” it is worthwhile to consider Judaism’s highest value: “Anyone saving a life, it is as if he saved the entire world” (Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 37a). Given how science – and accumulating human knowledge in general – has led to a huge expansion of humanity’s lifespan, not to mention far better nutrition and the eradication of several diseases (e.g., smallpox) plus the huge reduction in others (e.g., bubonic plague, polio, measles etc.), one can easily argue that learning and applying science and other related subjects is a supreme Jewish value.
Religious believers shouldn’t (actually, they can’t) avoid scientific progress and modernity in general. (Which is not to say that everything “modern” is ipso facto positive and automatically accepted; certainly not.) Rather, these are two areas of life best left separate; however, within each of us, both together add up to a whole. For that matter, that’s a message appropriate for religious societies as well, whether haredi Jewish, evangelical Christian, or Sufi Moslem.
