Bulletin08.20.2011 -Eikev

Inspiration, Insights & Ideas
Bringing Torah lessons to LIFE!
Continued from p. 11
because you will listen i.e. observe 'eikev' — the six hundred and
thirteen mitzvot which are in the one hundred and seventy-two words
of the Ten Commandments. Thus, your G-d will safeguard for you the
covenant and kindness that He swore to your forefathers."
Alternatively, the Gemara (Yoma 28b) says that our father Avraham
kept the entire Torah, as Scripture states, "eikev asher shama Avraham
bekoli" — "because Avraham hearkened to My voice [kept My charge,
My commandments, My statutes, and My laws] (Bereishit 26:5). In
light of the above, the proof that Avraham kept the Torah may be
deduced from the word "eikev," which refers to the one hundred and
seventy-two words of the Ten Commandments, that contain the six
hundred and thirteen mitzvot of the Torah.
Alternatively, the Gemara (Avodah Zarah 9a) says that the world will
exist for six thousand years. Two thousand of these are utterly void of
Torah, two thousand are years of Torah without Mashiach, and the
last two thousand years will start the era of Mashiach. The first twothousand-year
period concluded when Avraham reached the age of
fifty-two and was introduced to Torah. The second two-thousand-year
period ended one hundred and seventy-two years after the destruction
of the second Beit Hamikdash, and then the era of Mashiach began
(see Rashi).
With the word "eikev," which has the numerical value of one hundred
and seventy-two, the Torah is hinting that "eikev" — one hundred and
seventy-two years after the destruction — "tishme'un" — "you will
hear" — the footsteps of Mashiach.
Science of the Soul?
www.exodusmagazine.org
By: Jonathan Sacks
W hat
would we do for entertainment
without scientists telling us, with
breathless excitement, that “G‑d did not
create the universe,” as if they were the first to
discover this astonishing proposition?
Stephen Hawking is the latest, but certainly not
the first. When Napoleon asked Laplace, two
hundred years ago, where was G‑d in his
scientific system, the mathematician replied, Je n’ais besoin de
cette hypothese. “I do not need G‑d to explain the universe.” We
never did.
That is what scientists do not understand. There is a difference
between science and religion. Science is about explanation. Religion
is about interpretation. Science takes things apart to see how they
work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. They are
different intellectual enterprises. They even occupy different
hemispheres of the brain. Science – linear, atomistic, analytical – is
a typical left-brain activity. Religion – integrative, holistic, relational
– is supremely a work of the right-brain.
It is important for us to understand the mistake Professor Hawking
has made, because the mutual hostility between religion and
science is one of the curses of our age, and it is damaging to religion
and science in equal measure. The best way of approaching it is
through the autobiography of Charles Darwin. Darwin tells us that
as a young man he had been impressed with the case for G‑d as set
out by William Paley in his Natural Theology of 1802. Paley
updated the classic “argument from design” to the state of
scientific knowledge as it existed in his day.
Parsha Messages
12
Find a stone on a heath, says Paley, and you won’t ask who designed
it. It doesn’t look as if it was designed. But find a watch and you will
think differently. A watch looks as if it was designed. Therefore it
had a designer. The universe looks more like a watch than a stone.
It is intricate, interlocking, complex. Therefore, it too had a designer,
whose name is G‑d. Darwin, in a simple yet world-transforming
idea, showed how the appearance of design does not require a
designer at all. It can emerge over a long period of time by, as we
would put it today, an iterated process of genetic mutation and
natural selection. So the universe is not like a watch, or if it is, the
watchmaker was blind. Q.E.D.
But whoever thought the universe was like a watch in the first
place? The scientists and philosophers of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Newton. Leibniz. Laplace. Auguste Comte.
What was wrong about Paley’s argument was not the theology but
the science on which it was based. Good science refutes bad
science. It tells us nothing at all about G‑d.
Professor Hawking has done something very similar, except that this
time he plays both parts. He is both Paley and Darwin, and with
great legerdemain and panache, Hawking II, the good scientist, has
brilliantly refuted Hawking I, the poor theologian. Hawking I was the
person who wrote, at the end of A Brief History of Time, that if we
found science’s holy grail, a theory-of everything, we would know
“why it is that we and the universe exist.” We would “know the mind
of G‑d.” This is so elementary a fallacy that it is hard to believe that
Professor Hawking meant it. We would know how we and the
universe came into being, not why. Nor, in any but the most trivial
sense, would we “know the mind of G‑d.”
The Bible simply isn’t interested in how the universe came into
being. It devotes a mere 34 verses to the subject. It takes fifteen
times as much space to describing how the Israelites constructed a
sanctuary in the desert. The Bible is not proto-science,
pseudoscience or myth masquerading as science. It is interested in
other questions entirely. Who are we? Why are we here? How then
shall we live?
It is to answer those questions, not scientific ones, that we seek to
know the mind of G‑d. Hawking II has now refuted Hawking I. The
universe, according to the new theory, created itself. (This reminds
me of a joke I heard as an undergraduate about a smug business
tycoon:
“He is a self-made man, thereby relieving G‑d of a grave
responsibility”). Should you reply that the universe must be
astonishingly intelligent to have fined-tuned itself so precisely for
the emergence of stars, planets, life and us, all of which are
massively improbable, then the answer is that there is an infinity of
universes in which all the possibilities and permutations are played
out. We struck lucky. We found the universe that contained us.
I first heard this theory from that brilliant and wise scientist, Lord
Rees, President of the Royal Society. He too, as he explains in his
book Just Six Numbers, was puzzled by the precision of the six
mathematical constants that define the shape of the universe.
So unlikely is it that the universe just happened, by chance, to fit
those parameters that he too was forced to suggest the parallel
universes hypothesis. If you hold an infinity of lottery tickets, one of
them is going to win.
That is true, but not elegant. The principle of Ockham’s Razor says:
don’t multiply unnecessary entities. Given a choice between a single