"Do you believe in Dinsaurs"

Delivered 2nd day of Rosh Hashanah, 5765

Rabbi Joshua Heller
Congregation B’nai Torah
rabbi@bnaitorah.org

To those of you who said 5765- you're clearly hoping for extra credit. But what do you do with dinosaurs? Are all those fossils just some stunt by the paleontologists to get more grant money?

To the folks who just raised your hands for “a few billion,” You’re feeling very modern. But then are you going to do when we get to the part of the service where we sing "Hayom Harat Olam"- today is the birthday of the world? Are you hypocrites going to smirk at the benighted souls who really believe this stuff?

So you see, you don't have to be a fundamentalist to raise very fundamental questions.

There are plenty of folks who fall very clearly in one camp or the other. If you want to , you can stay out of synagogue, and deal only with the scientific/modern world. Similarly, if you want to, you can go to a certain type of synagogue, send your kdis to a certain type of school (or keep them at home), and not confront ideas that are challenging. And you know what, I am not likely to sway those types of people. But they (for the most part) are not in this room. We are here in the middle. We're here in synagogue on Rosh Hashanah not just for the fashion show, not because we said "wow, any event with parking that difficult has to be worthwhile" but because something drew us here. At the same time, we had to take science in school, and if we have kids will force them to sit through the same.

So, what do we believe. So the first question is, what do we mean by "believing in" something. Take the following two statements in succession:

"I don't believe in Santa Claus"
"I don't believe in premarital sex."

If you don’t believe in Santa Claus- you are saying that someone has proposed a particular explanation for how presents got under the neighbor's tree, and by virtue of factual or faith knowledge, you know that reindeer don't go that fast, etc.

If you don't believe in premarital sex, well, if you mean it in the same way, that it doesn't happen, then you are just astonishingly naive, and I should just tell you "oh yes, God will provide the ram." What most people say when they say that they don't believe in it is that they accept the possibility that it might occur, but they are not in favor of it.

Let's take the converse- to speak about what we DO believe.

You can believe a particular theory- evolution, supply-side economics or whatever- and say "yes, I think that X is an accurate description of some phenomenon." But do you build your whole life on it? Does it affect your daily decisions, your life decisions?

To the contrary when you say "I believe in you"- I'm not questioning your existence. It's faith in the value of who you are and what you stand for, it's knowing that that thing will carry you through.

So when we say "I believe in X"- are we talking about belief, or faith.
The question of belief and faith is an essential one, because it's the one that, in my mind religion rests upon.

OK- so what about the rabbi? I hold in my hands books that I take very seriously. You might even say that I live my life by them. I BELIEVE in them. If I take them literally, then how do I function in a modern society where a lot of other things are taken for granted?
Once I start saying "I don't really believe chapters1-3 of Genesis" then what's to stop me from saying I don't believe chapter 20 of Exodus (the 10 commandments), or Leviticus 11- (the laws of Kashrut)?

The first step to addressing this bigger question, is approaching the issue of what it really means to "prove" something. One of my colleagues in Los Angeles- Rabbi David Wolpe, doesn't think that's a problem. He made a huge fuss a few years back by declaring categorically, one Passover, that the Exodus did not happen. He cited archeological evidence. How is it possible that over 600,000 people passed through someplace, a desert and didn't leave a single trace? Well- anyone who saw my parent’s house after seder might give you a partial answer to that question. Or maybe proof means something different in LA. After all, it’s 9 years ago this month that the LAPD couldn't even prove that OJ killed his wife.

I would argue that some of the most important things in life, the things that we believe in with a capital B, are the things that it can be hardest to prove a belief in, with a lower-case b.

Carl Sagan a scientist and lifelong sceptic married a nice girl from Brooklyn who happened to go to the school where my grandmother taught. As a young scientist at Cornell, he issued a simple challenge to Rabbi Morris Goldfarb, the Hillel rabbi there: “Prove that there is a God.”
Goldfarb responded: “Prove that you love your mother.”

That retort found a place in Sagan’s writings, and even in the film of “Contact.”
The things that we most want to believe, that we need to Believe, upper case B, matters of faith, transcend physical proof.

So you know what- why shouldn't God make it easy for us? What not just out his signature in the stars,:“Yes, I created it. Sorry for the inconvenience” or wherever Xavier Roberts put his signature on the cabbage patch kids.

Look at the story of Abraham this morning. "After these events, God tested Abraham" God comes to Abraham and says "Abraham" and Abraham says "Hineni."- “Here I am!” Then comes the tough part, “Take your son. The one you love, and offer him up as a sacrifice on the top of that mountain over there.” Abraham gets up the next morning (which might tell you, by the way, that this was a night vision), saddles his ass, gets his servants ready, and sets off to do God's bidding. He ascends the mountain, kindling, kid and knife in hand. At the last possible second, God's angel cries out "Abraham, Abraham" and stops him.

Maybe God is the kind of God that tests us, too. God put a lot of bones in the ground, and a 3-degree background radiation in the sky, and DNA in our cells, to test our faith. We have to be smart enough to reject what scientists tell us.
I don't think God is out to trick us. I hope God has a sense of humor. And if you've seen a platypus, God probably does, but I don't believe in a God that I can't believe in, a God who’s hiding behind the door waiting for me to mess up and then jump out and yell "Aha! Heretic."

So why put in anything at all about the origin of the world. Why not just start the Bible with Abraham, or with Exodus? Different commentators will give you different reasons. To prove that the world belongs to God. that we Jews have a right to the land of Israel. On a more basic level, the answer is that our ancestors were surrounded by pagans who believed all kinds of crazy stuff, and God had to give them a plausible, comprehensible, alternative.

There’s a classic story that you all probably already know, so I'm not telling you, I reminding you. A mother asks her child, Joey, what he learned in Hebrew school that day. "Well, Mom, our teacher told us how God sent Moses behind enemy lines on a rescue mission to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. When he got to the Red Sea, he had his engineers build a pontoon bridge and all the people walked across safely. Then he used his walkie-talkie to radio headquarters for reinforcements. They sent bombers to blow up the bridge and all the Israelites were saved."

"Now, Joey, is that really what your teacher taught you?" his mother asked.
"Well, no, Mom. But if I told it the way the teacher did, you'd never believe it!"

In each generation, our cognitive abilities are limited. The Torah may not reflect every detail the way a modern historian would, but history is a human endeavor. I remember learning about the Civil War in high school- political issues, economic issues, moral issue of slavery. Then, a few weeks ago, I visited Stone Mountain. Whoo-eee, that’s a whole different version of the story. What God is trying to do in the Torah is not to write history as we understand it, but to give us moral history, moral lessons. If you focus on the details, you miss the point of the story.

There are some who try to harmonize the Biblical text and modern science word for word- and show that a careful reading of Genesis is not out of whack with whatever theory the quantum physicists have come up with this week. For example, a scholar by the name of Dr. Gerald Schroeder wrote a book called "Genesis and the Big Bang" He does a remarkable job of analyzing the Biblical text, particularly in the context of Nachmanides' commentary on it, and he can relate every event in the first chapter of Genesis to a real event- the point at which symetry was broken, the point at which photons burst out the quark soup. He even uses relativity to explain the issue of the six days- if you are going fast enough, time itself slows down. So for God, zooming in from the edge of the universe to us, only six days passed while 15 billion or so went by over here.

That's not a bad project. I guess I believe in the big bang, but who knows, maybe next year there will be some other theory. You run a risk when you make religious truths subject to scientific truths. Scientific truth is subject to change and re-assessment in a way that eternal truths are not.

Torah codes, drosnin. Mathematical bacground, I jumped at it. Make it dependent on math.

Dibra Torah Kilshon Benei Adam- over 40 times in the Talmud- Two parts of that statement, that you take together. The first is that God speaks in human language- sometimes there's an impreciseness that comes out of the need to filter it through our imperfect analytic abilities, our human needs and desires. But the big one- the Torah speaks to us!!!! God speaks to us!!!
Something else I learn from the story of Abraham- sometimes, what God wants us to do one day, or one millenium, is not what God wants us to do the next.

One of my favorite details in the story- to get Abraham's attention, to sacrifice Isaac, just has to say "Avraham" gets an hineni.
The angel has to say Avraham, avraham. before hineni.
Midrash reads the verse- don't kill him, don't do anythiing to him.
Angel is saying, don't kill him, Abraham is saying- can I just nick him a little. Maybe another bris?
If you come back and study with me during the year, you will see that I am always fascinated by the order of development of mitzvot and practices. Look at the Torah, the prophets, the Mishnah, the Talmud and parallels, into the legal codes and responsa. and I'm not afraid to use scientific tools. I'm not afraid to dig out the dusty manuscripts. It's not that God changes- it's not that the Torah itself changes, it's that what WE are able to get out of it, what God wants us to do. But we have Abraham's sensibilities- if we know what we think God wants, we had better think pretty hard- get two Avrahams, before we set about changing it.

Evolution of people, of texts. I can believe that God created a universe, with the constants just right, so that you could have carbon-based life, evolution. I am every bit as much in the image of God if God took dirt in God's hands. to make pie from scratch, first you have to invent the universe.

Ultimately, there are the things in life that we belive, and the things in life that we truly have faith in. God did sign the universe, and if you are able to see the movements of the stars as dance, the letters of DNA as poetry, then perhaps you can try to read it. The things that society tells us to believe may change. Sometimes we have to have faith even when the belief is shaky. God knows that we are imperfect. God also knows that we are getting better.

So, I come back to where I started. Later today, we will sing Hayom Harat Olam. Is today the 5765th anniversay or the 15 billionth? That's a matter of belief. What really matters is the process of faith- if the world came into being once, no matter how long ago, then we have the power to renew it, to be partners inthat process of creation. Today, the world is not just born, but REBORN. And so may we be reborn.