Revelation in Context
Rabbi Shmuel Klatzkin, Ph.D.
More than two hundred years before Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed appeared, the leader of Babylonian Jewry and head of the yeshivah of Sura, R. Saadia Gaon, wrote a reasoned defense of Jewish belief. Written in Arabic, its title has been translated as The Book of Beliefs and Opinions.
In his introduction, R. Saadia defends both the tradition of Torah and scientific thought. Torah commands us to think, to use our minds to their ultimate in order to deal properly with the great subjects that we need to think about in order to live with integrity. He quotes the fortieth chapter of Isaiah, in which the prophet cries out, “Lift your eyes up on high and consider: who created these?” He cites too the statements of all the men in the book of Job, who face the ultimate puzzle: how to deal with evil: “Let us choose that which is right; let us ourselves know what is good.”
All this indicates that the Torah requires painstaking thought from every one of us — rational, orderly, extended thought, encompassing everything we know. And by everything, it means from every source of knowledge, whether from sense perception, logical reasoning, intuition, or authoritative report.
At the same time, R. Saadia teaches, scientific thought does not supercede revelation. The nature of scientific thought, he writes, is that it proceeds in an orderly fashion, and requires correct methods and their proper employment. It yields its results over time.
He writes:
The person who investigates a matter rationally begins with a great many things that are all mixed up, from which he continually sifts nine out of ten, then eight out of nine, then seven out of eight, until all ambiguities are removed and only the pure extract remains.
If the person stops midway through this process, or he errs in the application of the process, the truth is missed or obscured.
On the other hand, revelation is comprehensive. At one glance, a whole complex of meaning is given. With its benefit, we need not live in a vacuum during the process of intellectual investigation and scientific thought.
The All-Wise knew that the conclusions reached by the art of rational investigation could be attained only in the course of a certain of time. If therefore, G‑d had set science alone as our religion, we would have remained without religious guidance whatever for a while…and many a one of us would never complete the process because of some flaw in his reasoning.
Thus the ongoing need for revelation.
And though flaws in our reasoning can equally affect the understanding and performance of those things known to us through revelation, those flaws are corrected through the requirement of revelation itself to validate itself through individual rational thought.
The work of the rational mind, of science, is work, and it is our work. It is a process that requires time and effort.
Revelation, on the other hand, is a gift from above. As such, it is no more our work than the world which the scientist investigates. It is no scientific accomplishment to have sense perceptions that transmit information about the world—the accomplishment would be in the sifting of the data and the ordering of it. Likewise, the authoritative traditions of the Torah are sources of knowledge, and provide the material for true thought.
But in the end, we still must sift, order and apply. That is no more done for us than it is for the scientist. And the requirements that that sifting, ordering and application place on the individual are remarkably similar to the requirements of science.
For revelation is not merely a private relation between G‑d and the recipient of Torah. The Torah begins with reference to a world that G‑d has desired to create, in which the human being is the last element. And the message of Torah is that this creation is purposeful, and that our lives are meant to reflect that purpose actively.
Revelation is not meant to be simply consumed. It is the beginning of our work, requiring reflection, analysis and action so that G‑d’s purpose is played out within the world as well as within ourselves. Our lives are in fact an ongoing experiment. We are part of the world and part of G‑d’s purpose. First and foremost, our disciplined investigation focuses on our own self and how it relates to its creating purpose and how it serves that purpose in the world.
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