Rebbe by Joseph Telushkin

Author:Joseph Telushkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-03-11T04:00:00+00:00

Rooting His Arguments in Science, Not Religion

One figure to challenge the Rebbe concerning his position on evolution was Dr. Herbert Goldstein, an American physicist and the author of a standard graduate textbook, Classical Mechanics. Goldstein received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), taught physics at Harvard and Brandeis, and later served as professor of nuclear science at Columbia University.

Although we do not have a copy of Dr. Goldstein’s letter to the Rebbe, we do have a copy of the Rebbe’s reply to him, in which he emphasizes that when he speaks of these issues with scientists, he roots his arguments in science, not Torah.

He opens his November 14, 1962, letter with a prefatory remark, intended to fend off Goldstein’s assumption that the Rebbe might in some way be antiscience: “It should be self-evident that my letter does not imply a negation or rejection of science or of the scientific method. . . . I hope that I will not be suspected of trying to belittle the accomplishments of science.”

He then addressed a comment that he had heard attributed to Goldstein, the thrust of which was that the Rebbe had no business issuing public statements on science-related matters: “Just as Rabbinic problems should be dealt with by someone who studies Rabbinics, so should scientific problems be left to those who study science.”

The Rebbe acknowledged that he accepted the validity of this dismissive comment, but what he didn’t accept was that it applied to him: “I studied science on the university level from 1928 to 1932 in Berlin, and from 1934 to 1938 in Paris, and I have tried to follow scientific developments in certain areas ever since.”

The Rebbe also acknowledged that “scientific theories must be judged by the standards and criteria set up by the scientific method itself” and cannot be challenged as a result of rabbinic texts alone: “Hence I purposely omitted from my discussion any references to the Scriptures or the Talmud.” (In yet another letter to a different correspondent, he returned to this same point: “I uphold the truth of the Creation account in Bereishit [Genesis] on scientific grounds.”)10

What the Rebbe affirmed in his correspondence with Professor Goldstein became the substance of the challenge he posed to the scientific world. He did not tell scientists that they should accept the Torah’s account of Creation; he knew that such an argument would fall on deaf ears. What he wanted from the scientific community was the acknowledgment that evolution is a theory, a theory that does not have any “[irrefutable] evidence to support it.” Thus, the theory of evolution might well contradict the biblical account of Creation, but scientists should have the humility to acknowledge that it doesn’t disprove it.

As the Rebbe assured one correspondent bothered by this issue: “If you are still troubled by the theory of evolution, I can tell you without fear of contradiction that it has not a shred of evidence to support it.”11

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