One of my van buddies gave me a book yesterday: The Challenge of Creation: Judaism’s Encounter with Science, Cosmology, and Evolution by Rabbi Natan Slifkin. My Moleskine is full of a page’s worth of notes on the introduction and first chapter, which I finished in the van this morning. (I didn’t get through all of my notes, ending at the introduction. Fatigue found me and beat me repeatedly over the head until I gave up and posted and went to bed.)

I spoke recently about how insular the Orthodox Jewish community is. On my visit to Eichler’s Judaica store in Brooklyn to buy a Menorah, I mentioned how I thumbed through the book section (a very large section), and noticed that all the books had a certain philosophical point of view, which seemed to feed exclusively to the Orthodox teachings. There were no dissenting voices in the section. I didn’t expect to find a book on the Kabala movement (I’m thinking of the one that snared Madonna, which is far outside mainstream Jewish thought), but I did expect to see books on Jewish mainstream beliefs, such as conservative and even reform Jewish thought. (There was one book that I found particularly interesting: a book discussing why some of the younger Orthodox people were leaving the movement, and how to ebb that flow.) I didn’t find any such books.

In the introduction to Challenge, Slifkin begins by addressing by describing his thesis: there doesn’t have to be a conflict between modern scientific thought and Orthodox Jewish beliefs. To orient you, there are many within the Orthodox community who believe as the Christian Fundamentalists. They read the story of Genesis (the first part of the Torah—or Old Testament as Christians call it) literarily. They believe that the creation of the world happened as it is described in the first chapter: by God over six days. And this creation happened, when you trace back the starting point of the first day of creation from the details given in the Torah (at least according to the rabbis), around five thousand years ago, give or take a few hundred. This seems to be at odds with what the scientists are teaching today with respect to evolution, the big bang, and their attempts to find a theory of everything.

Slifkin’s goal in Challenge is to reconcile the Orthodox Jewish teachings with the newer scientific views. He admits in the introduction that none of the arguments he presents are original thought (OT). It is all borrowed and summarized from other great Jewish, scientific, philosophical, and theological thinkers. It is an attempt to fit the Jewish teachings within the secular world. To reach people who either (like me) were not raised within the Orthodox community (and, seemingly, therefore grew up questioning these fundamental conflicts), or were raised in an Orthodox community, but delved deep enough into science to question how their scientific learning reconciled with the Orthodox Jewish teachings.

This isn’t Silfkin’s first attempt to reconcile these teachings. It is clear from his introduction that his first attempt did not go over very well. He received much criticism and even hate mail from within the Orthodox community. Similar to most traditional (I resisted the “conformist” tag here) organizations, there’s a desire to keep new thoughts that seemingly conflict with the traditional thoughts away in the hopes of protecting members of the flock (and, yes, I’m using a Catholic term here). When there are teachings that threaten a traditional outlook, people in authority tend to form up in ranks and shout down the teachings. Think of the flat earth, the sun revolving around the earth, the teachings of creationism verse evolution.

What I did not realize was that this conflict was happening within my very own religion. Even in my atheist days (and I’m still not too far away from those days), I did not think of my religion as anti-science. I didn’t imagine that there were well-educated Jews who questioned the theory of evolution. Only silly fundamentalist Catholics did that. His introduction to this book disillusioned me of my (elitist) thinking.

There’s an anecdotal in the book that perfectly captures this dichotomy: an Orthodox school teacher brings her class to a natural history museum. When she arrives in the halls of the dinosaur, she stands in front of her students with the dinosaur skeletons looming over her, and tells her students in no uncertain tones that there is no such thing (and there we never such a thing) as dinosaurs. That it was all lies. The ridiculousness of her position while standing in the halls of the dinosaur must have been very funny, if it wasn’t so pathetic.

For what it’s worth, I checked, and Silfkin’s book is not available for purchase at Eichler’s. Whether that means he’s treated as an apostate or just someone outside of the main Orthodox thought remains to be seen. It might be available at other Orthodox bookstores. I will not judge the Orthodox movement by the book list of one of its stores.

There is much more I want to say about his introduction and first chapter. But I’m not going to get there today. Hopefully I will return to this discussion. (Hopefully is the key term.)