20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Science

Science Hillel Levine B eyond providing techniques for coping with life, science also constitutes a means of conceiving of life. As such, it can be part and parcel of the efforts of the religious man to make the cosmos meaningful in human terms. Until the modern period, in method and in substance science was not wholly differentiated from other modes of knowing and explaining such as philosophy, mysticism, and astrology. It has been argued that in the late Middle Ages in Western Christendom theological as well as institutional changes within the church spurred the growth of empirical science. In the modern period, as the belief becomes more pervasive that science can solve a growing number of vexing problems and as new technologies actually begin to change the contours of day-to-day life, science, its constructs, its admissible facts, its canons of evidence, and its plausible hypotheses attain a privileged position. The "cult of useful knowledge" is fostered by, as it instructs, those who seek to shape society. What is the role of science as a mode of religious knowledge and a genre of literature within Judaism? Insofar as Jews lived contiguous to the centers 856 SCIENCE of scientific exploration in the early modern period, why was their contribution to the beginnings of modern science negligible? It has often been noted that elements of biblical religion such as the belief in a universal, all-powerful, but transcendental God who created and governs the cosmos but is not identical with nature might have made of the ancient Hebrews, as much as any of their neighbors in the Near East or even in the Greek world, primary candidates to conduct scientific exploration. The intellectualism of rabbinic Judaism might have led to the development of science as one of the Jewish literary genres along with biblical commentary , liturgy, halakhah, and aggadah. Against these predictions, it must be pointed out that while biblical Judaism downgrades magic and calls for the elimination of potencies separate from God, it does not find the existence of these potencies totally implausible . Strong traditions of folk religion, Gnosticism, and mysticism influenced mainstream Judaism to a varying degree from period to period, thereby mitigating the rigors of monotheism and transcendentalism and tempering the implications of the God of Isaiah 'who is the author of everything , including evil. These cosmologies made the search for fixed patterns less promising and less rewarding than would be the analysis of a cosmos more strictly governed by conceptions of God's immutable laws or even God's will. Moreover, within the biblical tradition a strong tendency developed to shift the focus of divine concern from nature to history, from space to time. This can be seen in a particularly striking manner in the reconstitution of holy days in the Jewish calendar out of their antecedents in pagan I traditions more rooted in pastoral environments. A growing otherworldliness, resulting particularly from the traumas of the destruction of the First and Second Temples and the loss of political sovereignty , made it difficult for Jews to affirm links between the real and the ideal, between the state of nature as it is and as it should be. Sitting "by the waters of Babylon," memories of Zion rather than inSight into the nature of being abounded. External reality and mundane arrangements no longer provided the symbolic molds for spiritual aspirations. This otherworldliness contrasted with the world rejection of Christian monks, for example, who were associated with the majority and dominant societies and for whom monasticism was a choice. While the study of God's word as represented in Torah took on an expanding significance in rabbinic Judaism, there is no reason to believe, as Max Weber so glibly asserts in Ancient Judaism (1917-1919) and The SOCiology of Religion (1921-1922), that this growing Jewish intellectualism and rationalism were deflected into casuistry or siphoned off by Jewish SCIENCE 857 I needs to keep resentment against Gentiles under control, and, therefore, jewish rationalism did not contribute to the growth of market capitalism, as Weber suggests-or, for that matter, of empirical science. There are reasons to believe, however, that the need to explain jewish dispersion and vulnerability and to reconcile the vicissitudes of jewish history with the beliefs in divine providence and chosenness reduced the curi0sity that jews felt toward nature and, consequently, their involvement in scientific exploration. While the heavens might still declare God's glory, meditation...