The Great Torah-Science Controversy

And its relevance to current events

Today marks a significant anniversary. It’s exactly twenty years since the fateful morning when I received a phone call from Bnei Brak, informing me that the “Gedolei Torah” have found my books on Torah and science to be heretical, and warning me that I have until the end of the day to withdraw my books and publicly recant, or face scandal and humiliation. With no legitimate reason whatsoever to do otherwise, I went for option 2.

The rest is history. For those who remember those upsetting yet heady days, the Great Torah-Science Controversy of 2004-5 blew up spectacularly. The ban, ultimately signed by two dozen of the leading rabbis in the charedi world, was met with a ferocious backlash by many thousands of people who shared my views (which were also the views of prominent Rishonim and Acharonim), and/or were horrified at the appalling way in which the whole thing went down. Rav Aharon Feldman described it as probably the issue most damaging to (charedi) rabbinic authority in memory.

I opened a website presenting everything put out by both sides, and it was getting thousands of hits a day. (Ironically, I included a defense of the ban written by none other than myself. Although I did not accept that my books were theologically problematic, I sympathized with and defended the ban as a social policy, and respected the desire of the charedi leadership to avoid having such approaches marketed to the charedi community.) There were many rounds of polemics and counter-polemics. The thousands of pashkevilim posted around Israel and mailed to homes in New York, and the dozens of denunciations published in the Israeli Yated Ne’eman and other forms of charedi media, were countered with endless letters of protest and numerous blogs that opened up. The controversy was covered in several media outlets and even reached the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

The blow-up lasted over a year. But even a full decade later, in an editorial by Ami magazine about Daas Torah and how to prove that the rabbis in the orbit of Yeshiva University lack it, they did so based on the fact that these rabbis supported my books. And eighteen years later, a Lakewood Rosh Yeshiva declared that there is a litmus test for which rabbis Rav Elya Ber Wachtfogel, one of the most prominent Litvishe Rosh Yeshiva in the US, will hate: it’s those who fail to be “hot and angry” against Slifkin.

In the years following the ban, I identified four separate topics within it. First was the topic of the antiquity of the universe and the evolution of life, which I covered in my book The Challenge of Creation. Second was the topic of statements in the Talmud about the natural world which appeared to be mistaken, which I covered in my book Sacred Monsters. Then there was the topic of the different underlying theological worldviews that cause disputes in this areas, which I covered in my book Rationalism vs. Mysticism. And finally there is the topic of traditional and modern rabbinic authority, relating to the events of how the ban went down.

I had been planning to publish a book on this fourth topic - a history and analysis of the ban - in time for the twentieth anniversary. This time last year, I already had the book outlined and major portions written. But then the war broke out.

This affected the book’s completion in two ways. First was that I was too distracted. Over the past year, outside of my day job, I was writing extensively about the appalling lack of joining in the war effort by the charedi community. Second is that in light of the gravity of the latter topic, which not only causes great harm to the rest of the country but has the future potential to fundamentally threaten the country’s very existence, things like squabbling over dinosaurs and spontaneously-generating mice and rabbinic bans seemed too trivial to waste time on.

Lately, though, I’ve changed my mind about the latter point. Because I realized that the topics of the ban on my books and the charedi refusal to participate in the war effort are fundamentally related.

It’s the anti-rationalist approach to the laws of nature which enable charedim to delude themselves into believing that they believe that learning Torah is a replacement for military effort. (No, there was no typo in that previous sentence; it’s not that they fundamentally believe it, it’s that they believe that they believe it.) And it’s the deification of Daas Torah which causes people to blindly follow the pronouncements of Charedi Gedolim that it is forbidden to serve in the IDF or even to provide any material help for the war effort, even if deep down they might suspect that such an approach is problematic.

Furthermore, it’s the same sort of charedi rabbis who are understandably fearful of the outside world, but who rate this as the sole relevant factor with utter disregard for anything else, who are equally flatly opposed to both rationalist reconciliations with modern science and to subjecting their youth to an “outside” type of activity like army service. It’s the same rabbis who react to every new challenge that requires them to change by adopting a siege mentality and screaming that there’s a “War on Torah” to be fought. And it’s the same non-traditional concept of rabbinic authority that vests it in those who are utterly detached from real-world concerns and who are incapable of strategically dealing with them, whether it’s scientific reality or social reality or economic reality or security reality.

Relating to the above is that I realized the significance of another phenomenon. My eldest daughter, who just completed her IDF service, had a very difficult year, in which one of her friends was killed in the line of duty. But nevertheless, at her party to celebrate the completion of her service, she expressed her full satisfaction that she took this path in life of serving the nation. And in her thanks to those who led her to take this path, she emphasized her gratitude to the Charedi Gedolim who banned my books and caused us to leave the charedi community and raise our children to be dati-leumi (albeit we were expecting her to do national service rather than go to the army!).

It’s not just my daughter. The ban on my books was a watershed moment for Orthodox Judaism. I know of many, many people who left the charedi community as a result of the ban on my books, and realized that their places lay in other types of Orthodox Jewish communities. I know the children of some of them who are in the IDF today as a result. And whereas the reaction of the charedi Gedolim to the war came as a horrifying shock to many moderate people in the charedi world, it wasn’t anywhere near as shocking to those who remembered the events of twenty years ago, and who had long been disillusioned with charedi rabbinic leadership.

And so I believe that it is still important to publish a book about the ban. Not just as an analysis of a fascinating chapter in intellectual and social Jewish history, but as an illustration of the problems and danger in the contemporary charedi worldview and system of rabbinic authority. Then hopefully people will be better positioned to understand the current disastrous situation, and to respond accordingly. I don’t know if I’ll actually find the time to complete this book, but it’s on my list!

If you appreciated this post, please share it with others. A full list of my posts on the topic of IDF service is at Torah and Army: The Big Index