 | We’re Being Robbed! - by Batya Medad |
| We’re Being Robbed! by Batya Medad Wednesday, November 9, 2005 posted to http://www.theraphi.com/medad/wbr.html
Just as we were trying to figure out which communities in Judea and Samaria are, G-d forbid, next in line for extinction and destruction, we were shocked to discover that Mount Zion, including David’s Tomb is being offered to the descendents of the Crusaders, the same guys who brought us the Inquisition more than half a millennium ago. If you haven’t yet heard, and Israel’s President Katzav claims to be in the dark about this scandal, even though the government is planning on using him to sign the contract. Yes, I’m calling it a contract, rather than an agreement, since it’s a business deal involving millions, tens of millions of Euros, which are worth more than dollars. Honestly, it is possible that Katzav knows nothing about it. In Israel, the president is a figurehead to be wheeled out to smile and shake hands at formal occasions. Katzav, a “traditional Jew,” keeps a kippah handy in his pocket for religious needs, and besides a ready smile, he seems pretty robotic to me. He succeeded Ezer Weitzman, his polar opposite in personality and life-style. That’s one of the reasons, probably the main reason he was elected. It’s strange that even though Katzav’s office professes ignorance and the mainstream newspapers are at best playing it down and even worse most are ignoring it, a group of Anglos have had little trouble discovering the details. Sharon Katz’s Voices Magazine will be running an article on the subject. Investigations have shown that the scheme was hatched by Avraham Poraz, of the anti-religious Shinui Party, when he was the Minister of the Interior. He promised to facilitate the deal during a visit to Rome over a year ago. The Shinui Party is no longer a member of the coalition. Previous Israeli officials, such as Rabbi Benny Elon of the National Union and former Minister of Tourism did everything to veto it. The deal to give away Mount Zion to the Catholic Church has been totally ignored by the Hebrew press. Not even the religious Jewish papers have written about it. Every time I mention it to neighbors they are in shock and can’t figure out why they have been kept in the dark. Not a peep has been heard from the politicians. It seems like all the activity is from some bloggers and emailers in English. From the amount of letters coming in to our computer, you’d think it was the biggest issue in the country, but unfortunately it’s not true. Nobody else seems to know anything. I can’t believe that nobody cares. Even if the area in question hadn’t been the location of a yeshiva, The Diaspora Yeshiva, for over thirty five years, it’s still of great religious and historical importance for the Jewish People. It shouldn’t be given, sold or leased to any other religion. It‘s a travesty of justice. Why are the civil rights of Jews always ignored? On Friday I was the demonstration outside of the President’s Residence against his signing the agreement. We were a very small group, and only one politician showed, Jerusalem City Councilwoman, Mina Fenton. She seems to be the only person in the municipality showing any interest, and she had more information, and it was bad news. It’s like living in the Theatre of the Absurd. Giving the Catholic Church such a holy Jewish Landmark endangers our existence. Our disengaged government is out to destroy the country, G-d forbid. Let’s get to work. We have a country to save. *****Batya Medad, special to TheRaphi.com, and her husband made aliyah from New York in 1970 two months after their wedding. They have five children and two granddaughters and have lived in Shiloh since 1981. Batya hitchhikes to and from Beit El, where she teaches English in the Yeshiva High School B´nai Binyamin. Author's Website |
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Kolot_JewVoice: We’re Being Robbed! - by Batya Medad
OrTorah: The Convergence of Torah and Science
| The Convergence of Torah and Science |
| The Convergence of Torah and Science* by Prof. Paul Eidelberg Wednesday, November 9, 2005 taken from http://www.theraphi.com/ppe/tcotas.html
Israel’s survival ultimately depends on national unity. Nothing is more conducive to unity than revealing the convergence of Torah and science. Hence the importance of Gerald L. Schroeder’s book, The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom. This essay is very much indebted to his work. Dr. Schroeder, a physicist, writes: “Of all the ancient accounts of creation, only that of Genesis has warranted a second reading by the scientific community. It alone records a sequence of events that approaches the scientific account of our cosmic origin.”[1] Dr. Schroeder has especially in mind the Big Bang theory. Based on Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the abundance of evidence confirming the Big Bang has made creatio ex nihilo the reigning cosmological principle in the community of scientists. The dogma of the eternity of the universe, which held sway for millennia in philosophy and science as well as among eastern religions, has thus been discarded. In fact, more and more astronomers, astrophysicists, physicists, and mathematicians—hitherto atheists or agnostics—now admit that the universe, having had a Beginning, must have had a Beginner. Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created (bara) the heavens and the earth …” contains a unique and seldom used word in the Torah, namely, bara. This word, translated as “created,” has as its primary definition “bringing into existence something that did not exist before.” In Genesis 1:1, bara means creation from nothing. Here “nothing” signifies the absence of matter and energy as well as the dimensions of space and time—hence nothing which any human being can detect and measure. The Big Bang theory therefore accords with the Genesis account of Creation. How did scientists arrive at the big bang? When Einstein proposed his theory of general relativity in 1916, the cosmological doctrine of an eternal universe held in a static state throughout infinite time reigned supreme. Although his field equations predicted an expanding universe, Einstein was trying to construct a static model universe that would not collapse as a result of its own self-gravitation. But since Hubble’s discovery in 1929 of the recession of the galaxies, the theory of an expanding universe has dominated cosmology.[2] Knowing the rate at which the universe is expanding, one can extrapolate backwards to determine the size of the universe “in the beginning,” that is, at the moment when expansion began. At that moment, about 15 billion (Earth) years ago, the entire universe—all the galaxies, with their millions of stars, the dust and gas, the intergalactic matter, all the energy and even the four dimensions of space and time—was squeezed into an “atomic nucleus” or “singularity” of infinite or near infinite density, temperature, and pressure. That singularity, at which all known physics come to an end, was itself created (bara) from “nothing.” From that singularity, whose volume is very much smaller than the period at the end of this sentence, the universe burst forth and expanded, and it continues to expand. What an incredible and unintended confirmation, by science—indeed, by a Jew who was not even a believer—of the infinite power and majesty of God! Strange indeed are God’s ways. Strange too that estimates of the age of the universe from Jewish sources antedating the fifteenth century range from 2.5 to 17.5 billion years.[3] Ponder, therefore, the words of the great Torah scholar and Kabalist Nahmanides (1194-1270). Commenting on Genesis 1:1 some seven hundred and fifty years ago, Nahmanides writes: This “primary matter” is nothing other than energy, which can be converted into matter (and vice versa) according to Einstein’s celebrated formula E=mc2. Commenting further on the first verse of Genesis, Nahmanides says, “with this creation, which was like a very small point having no substance, everything in the heavens and on the earth was created.” That point, of course is the previously mentioned “singularity” from which the Big Bang originated. Nahmanides derived this knowledge from the Talmud (ca. 500 CE). Physics has thus confirmed the first verse of Genesis, whose meaning was known 1,500 years ago by Rabbis who had received this secret knowledge via the oral tradition going back to the time of Moses. However, more fundamental than energy is wisdom: “With wisdom God created the heavens and the earth.” (See Proverbs 3:19.) Since the reliability of the evidence confirming the Big Bang depends primarily on the accuracy of general relativity’s predictions about the dynamics of the universe, consider the following. General relativity predicts that, over time, two neutron stars orbiting about one another will radiate so much gravitational energy that they will spiral inward toward one another causing their orbital periods to speed up. With measurements extending over twenty years (1974-1994), general relativity was confirmed over all to an accuracy of no more than one part in a hundred trillion. This prompted physicist Roger Penrose to say, “This makes Einstein’s general relativity, in this particular sense, the most accurately tested theory known to science.”[5] In fact, no other theory of physics has ever been tested in so many different contexts and so rigorously; general relativity has withstood all these tests, which solidifies the Big Bang theory. Given the infinite or near infinite temperature of the singularity which exploded in the Big Bang, one of the predicted consequences of this explosion is cosmic background radiation. The most compelling evidence of such radiation—which evidence showed how the galaxies were formed out of the Big Bang—was provided in the 1992 findings of the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite. Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking (a reputed atheist) said, “It is the discovery of the century, if not of all time.” Astronomer George Smoot declared, “What we have found is evidence of the birth of the universe. It’s like looking at God.”[6] Many other kinds of evidence confirming the Big Bang theory have been accumulated. Consider the Anthropic Principle, which has been elaborated during the last three decades, and which postulates a linkage between the structure of the universe and the prerequisites of human existence. The Anthropic Principle suggests a Creator-God concerned about man. Michael A. Corey writes: The gravitational constant (G), for instance, appears to be exceedingly fine-tuned for the existence of life. If it were slightly larger, stars would have burned too hot and much too quickly to support the fragile needs of life; but if it were slightly smaller, the intrastellar process of nuclear fusion would have never initiated, and life would have been incapable of arising here. The fine-tuning of the universe includes dozens of parameters whose values must fall within narrowly defined ranges for physical life of any sort to exist. Mention may also be made of the ratio of the number of protons to electrons, the carbon to oxygen energy level ratio, the speed of light (299,792,458 kilometers per second), and the fine structure constant necessary for DNA to function. Although the validity of the Anthropic Principle has been challenged by various scientists, its general formulation is consistent with the Torah, according to which the universe was created for man. Scientist and former skeptic Fred Hoyle concludes that “a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology.” Paul Davies has moved from promoting atheism to conceding, “It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe. The impression of design is overwhelming.” No less than Stephen Hawking concedes: “It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”[8] But let us return to the big bang. Since the Big Bang theory entails a finite universe, the question arises: What is there beyond? Outside the universe there is no space. The notion of emptiness, as opposed to fullness, applies only inside the universe. It bears repeating that space was created at the moment of the big bang. Hence there are no dimensions outside the universe (and of course the human mind reasons and calculates in terms of spatial dimensions). The same applies to time. The question of what went on before the big bang is meaningless, since time itself was created with that awesome event. Leaving aside the two religions derived from Judaism, only the Torah unambiguously states that time is finite, that time has a beginning, and that God created time, as should now ring true from the Genesis account of Creation. Indeed, Dr. Schroeder, using Einstein’s equation for gravitational time dilation, shows that the duration and events of the billions of years which followed the big bang, and the events of the first six days of Genesis, are in fact one and the same! Here are some relevant passages from his The Science of God. Schroeder suggests that we read the opening chapter of Genesis a few times, paying particular attention to the description of the events and the flow of time related to those events. Then read any other chapter in the entire Bible, again concentrating on the flow of events and the related flow of time. Note how the context changes. The description of time in the Bible is divided into two categories: the first six days and all the time thereafter. During those six days, blocks of time are described and then we are told that a day passed. This is repeated in a totally objective fashion six times…. There is no intimate relation between the events and the passage of time.… Rather, we are told that the land and waters separated, plant life appeared, “And there was evening and there was morning a third day” (Gen. 1:9-13). No hint is given for the time each of these major events took. After explaining the equality between the six days of Genesis and fifteen billion Earth years during which the entire universe was created, Dr. Schroeder refers to Nahmanides’ above quoted commentary on Genesis 1:1, and points out that the great Kabalist learned from his teachers that the first word of the Bible, beresheet— “In the beginning of”—means in the beginning of time. Biblical time thus begins with the appearance of matter—an extraordinary insight. Of course, it remained for the mathematics of general relativity to show how the six days of Creation recorded in Genesis is equal to fifteen billion (Earth) years. It follows from the preceding discussion that the modern dichotomy between science and religion, or rather, between science and the Torah, has been placed in question by science itself. Indeed, a recent scientific article in one of the foremost international journals of physics bears the title, “Creation of the Universe from Nothing”: At the 1990 meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Professor John Mather of Columbia University, an astrophysicist who also served on the staff of NASA’s Goddard Center, presented “the most dramatic support ever” for an open universe [i.e., one which supports a cosmological proof of God’s existence]. According to a journalist present, Mather’s keynote address was greeted with thunderous applause, which led the meeting’s chairman, Dr. Geoffrey Burbidge [an atheist astronomer], to comment: “It seems clear that the audience is in favor of the book of Genesis—at least the first verse or so, which seems to have been confirmed.”[10] This is only the beginning! Footnotes: [1] Gerald L. Schroeder, The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom (New York: Broadway Books, 1997), p. 80. [2] See Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2001), pp. 24-25. [3] See Aryeh Carmell & Cyril Domb, Challenge: Torah Views on Science and Its Problems (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1976), p. 282, n. 10. [4] Ramban (Nachmanides), Commentary on the Torah (5 vols.; New York: Shilo Publishing House, 1971). I, 23, Chavel trans. [5] Cited in Ross, p. 104. [6] Cited in ibid., p. 31. [7] Extracted from the Internet. [8] Quotes in this paragraph are cited in Ross, pp. 157, 159. [9] Schroeder, pp. 45-47. [10] Cited in Lawrence Kelemen, Permission to Believe: Four Rational Approaches to God’s Existence (Jerusalem: Targum/Feldheim, 1990), p. 40. *(The Jerusalem Post recently published rather superficial articles regarding the relationship between science and religion. No mention was made of Dr. Gerald L. Schroeder’s illuminating work on the subject. Hence this essay, which is based on my latest book “A Jewish Philosophy of History.) *****Prof. Eidelberg, special to TheRaphi.com, is a political scientist, author and lecturer; co-founder and president of The Foundation For Constitutional Democracy and is the President of the Yamin Israel movement. |