Science and Judaism

A Personal Preface

 Rabbi Shmuel Klatzkin, Ph D

I’ve loved reading as long as I can remember. As a child, that included books about science. Science was portrayed in these books as a great adventure, something incredibly exciting to explore and at the same time, productive of good on a revolutionary scale.

Round about ninth grade, my science teacher started to ask me to stick to the program rather than find a way to write about relativity when our topic was something much more elementary and mundane. If that was her way of enticing me to buckle down and master the basic discipline of scientific work, it didn’t work.

 

It wasn’t that I minded work. I just wanted to be able to feel the thrill at the same time. I could do that in history class, so that’s where I spent my time, and dropped thoughts of pursuing science in college and beyond.

 

The age when I was in high school was an age more renowned for the pursuit of thrill than the mastery of disciplines. I was no exception in that I insisted that something be thrilling if I were to invest myself in it. And not surprisingly to the “adult me” these several decades later, there were no subjects in the end that met the bar of the thrill test...except for one.

 

That was the pursuit of the knowledge of self. In the end, where was the thrill experienced? What was thrill except a state of consciousness? And it became clearer that the ultimate pursuit, the enterprise into which I could really throw myself, would be the pursuit of that higher consciousness.

 

And it became clearer that people had for a long time been engaged in trying to understand themselves. I found it in psychology, in philosophy, but most of all, in religion.  

A college-age self-directed tour through the basic writings of the world’s better-known religious traditions provided satisfaction that there was a depth uniquely to be found in religious thought. And as I began to progress from simply being enthralled with religion in general to making my personal investment into the enterprise, I began to turn increasingly to Judaism.

The compelling consideration for me was the need to grasp the whole of what I am and what I know. In the abstract, I could read and contemplate thoughts from any culture. But there was only one tradition into which I was born. To ignore that would be to ignore a crucial piece of evidence.

 

True, being born a Jew had nothing to do with any choice of mine. But then, psychology indicated that our lives are not rational, that our psychological soundness is mainly described by how we integrate the inescapably non-rational elements of our being into our personality. A healthy personality somehow integrates a swirl of instincts and primal emotions and the precision and focus of rationality into a coherent living whole.

 

And inasmuch as anyone understands anything, that is already happening in our lives. To the degree that we can attain more, so we can improve. But it all starts from something inside that we did not make ourselves that has it right already. It is a oneness that includes, coordinates and enlightens, and it is only because it exists that I can even have a thought at all, let alone embark on an adventure in consciousness.

 

Here was the root of the understanding of revelation—that there exists a given knowledge upon which our entire enterprise depends.

G‑d is the root and source of consciousness and truth. Not just in some remote and theoretical fashion, but immediately, in the present tense, in my own self…and therefore in the self of each and every other being.

This is what religion was talking about. In the light of this understanding, my previous dismissive understanding of Judaism had to be revised. The modern hypotheses I had used to understand Judaism were not describing this—they were in fact avoiding it, paying attention to something so trivial as to seem laughably obtuse and pretentious. It was as if, in the presence of someone you loved, you would not speak to him or her face-to-face, but instead, look at a scraping of his or her skin cells, and imagine that this was a relationship.

But if the modern dismissals of religion were abuses of reason, where was its proper use? For reason is a part of the human mix, and to deny it is to fall short of integration as well.

The answer to that question would begin to emerge only through study and practice. And now I was motivated and had no excuse to avoid the discipline. The measure of the adequacy of my understanding of revelation will be tested by my success in integrating rationality within it. These columns are part of the ongoing testing, and thus part of the larger enterprise.

 

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