Bereisheet: Are We Asking Good Questions?

I am always amazed that in this day and age, in 2016, some people STILL insist on pitting science and religion against one another. A professor of mine, Neil Gillman, offered - what I consider - the best rebuke of this ludicrous debate.

The two are simply NOT in conflict, said Rabbi Gillman, because they are trying to answer different questions. Science wonders "How" the world was created. It then follows this up with questions like "When did it all happen?" and "What is everything made of?" Religion, on the other hand, asks entirely different queries, like "Why are we here?" and "What does it mean to live a good life?" And, quite frankly, one discipline isn't at all interested in the questions posed by the other. They are not at war with one another. This week, as we restart the reading of the Torah, back at the story of Creation, one single word shows us that we are dealing with a religious document and very much NOT a scientific one.

I suppose you COULD argue, as some do, that both science and religion examine the creation of everything... but almost immediately, they part ways. In the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, just four verses in, the Torah states: "God saw that the light was good." Good? How

unscientific to look at one's work and declare it "Good," or even "Bad," for that matter! It's unscientific, and it's irrelevant. But not to the Torah. From the very Beginning, we are invited to consider the qualitative, substantive, and moral aspects of our world. Are things good? Are we doing everything we can to MAKE them good, to enable them to help and not harm other people, animals, things, and even the planet itself? Perhaps not surprisingly, the Torah employs this (highly subjective and unprofessional) value judgment SEVEN times in its first chapter. The number seven mirrors, of course, the days of the week, and is considered in Judaism to be a number of wholeness and holiness. How very symbolic.

Our narrator applies the label "Good" to light on Day One; then nothing on Day Two (interesting in and of itself...); the separation of the Earth from the Sea AND later the creation of vegetation and fruit on Day Three ("good" is used twice); the sun, moon, and stars on Day Four;
sea creatures, creeping things (really?), and birds on Day Five; wild beasts and cattle on Day Six; and then, finally, as Day Six comes to a close, God looks back at all of God's creations and declares them "Tov Me'od," "VERY good" (1:31). Again, science would have no opinion on the question of whether things are "good" or not. But it is an essential, and central, concern for our Torah, for two important reasons.

First, it helps us see and feel that God cares about us and our world. God is invested in our success, and desperately wants this enterprise to succeed! Perhaps more importantly, however, we are meant to read the text as saying that all these things have THE POTENTIAL to be good. Especially in verse 31, we understand that anything and everything CAN BE "very good," but it won't happen all by itself. Are we helping

our world be "very good"? Are we, as human beings, living up to our potential to be "very good" for one another and for our planet? Sadly, the answer to a lot of these questions is "no." But our response cannot, and should not, be to therefore shut off, tune out, and become callous to the problems of the day. We don't have the luxury of looking at our planet through a microscope, or objectively analyzing the studies about species becoming extinct, temperatures rising, or pipelines destroying habitats. We live here too! And though science and religion diverge on origin stories, ultimately they do - and we should - converge back at realizing our planet needs help. We all need to be asking how we can do more, and reverse some troubling and alarming trends. We should stop pitting ourselves against one another, and instead get back to thinking about how to do good and BE good. Above all, we need to work on these issues together, or we might see the Creation story start working itself back in reverse. And that wouldn't be "very good" at all...

Photos in this blogpost:
1. CC image courtesy of Ydun on Wikimedia Commons
2. CC image courtesy of Wakalani on Wikimedia Commons
3. CC image courtesy of Namenlos.net on Wikimedia Commons
4. CC image courtesy of Dolovis on Wikimedia Commons