Astronomers and astrophysicists are revealing, with increasing frequency, the compatibility of the Torah with the most recent discoveries in science.  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 … presented “the most dramatic support ever” for an open universe [i.e., one which supports a cosmological proof of God’s existence].… 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.”

The renowned mathematical physicist and reputed atheist 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.”

Science shows us: God gave us the Torah

In Israel, scientific research indicates, prima facie, that the Torah is not a human product.  Nevertheless, while this research has profoundly altered the lives of many secular Jews, it has had no influence on the attitudes and policies of Israel’s ruling elites who Judaism just another “religion.” Indeed, no religious party in Israel ever challenges scorners of the Torah by means of established scientific research.

Small wonder that Judaism has no champions in the Jewish State of Israel.  Perhaps this is why Arabs can so often kill Jews with impunity!  Ponder the anti-Jewish rulings of Israel’s Supreme Court. Its contempt for Torah wisdom and values is obvious, and obvious not only to Jews. This cannot but engender or magnify widespread contempt for Israel and the hatred of Jews.

Hence let me say a few words in honor of the Torah by quoting Henri Baruk, a biologist, psycho-pharmacologist, psychologist, sociologist, and member of the Medical Academy of Paris.  Professor Baruk used Torah laws for both individual and group therapy with remarkable success.  Applied with expertise, these laws, he discovered, overcome toxicities, psychopathologies, and intra-group conflict.  Having characterized the Torah as “the most complete science of man,” Baruk writes:

Though this extensive science has been vulgarized by the religions which have sprung from it, it still remains little known and even misunderstood.  The[se] religions … took mainly from its moral principles with, moreover, various modifications which left out Hebraic Law, Hebraic biology, Hebraic sociology, etc. — in a word, the concrete and material parts of the Torah.  Complete and scrupulously exact study of the Torah is indispensable if one is to capture its spirit.  Then again the Torah forms an indivisible whole, and one cannot study it in borrowed versions or excerpts without completely falsifying its meaning and spirit.” (Tsedek, 1972.)

Insights from men of science

Open Torah scroll. Photo: Lawrie Cate on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 Generic License

Professor Baruk’s discoveries are not exactly new.  In The Secret Life of the Jew (1930), Rabbi David Miller writes: “In the Pharmacological Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University … it has been recently established, apparently as a new discovery, that menstruous women generate and carry menotoxin throughout their systems.  Even in their pre-menstrual state, the onset of the period, they contaminate by contact to such an extent that it retards the development of and even kills plants” (The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, January 1924).

Hardly news to Jews.  According to the Torah a person or an article becomes “unclean” by contact with a menstruous woman.  Other quotes from Rabbi Miller’s book follow.

Dr. Peter Frank, known as “the founder of the modern science of public health,” writes:  “Very often do I read the rules of the Mosaic medical policy and their valuable sanitary laws which by far surpass many of our contemporary public health institutions…”

Dr. E. Hortzka of Germany:  “We have to admit the stupendous knowledge and the perfect competency of the Hebrew law-givers [sic] in hygiene and sanitation.  Everyone who is only slightly acquainted with the history of medicine will admit that many hygienic measures which we have introduced only in the last fifty years were known to the founders [sic] of the biblical laws.”

Charles W. Elliot:  “Modern sciences are only corroborating the ancient Hebrew precepts.”  Sir James Cantlie agrees:  “We have never upset one of  Moses’ laws in regard to hygiene, sanitation, or medical teaching.  All that the scientists of today, with their microscopes and text books, did was to prove that the ancient lawgiver was right…. We had been trying hitherto to cure disease instead of preventing it, as Moses did.”

Rabbi Miller extols the Jewish laws of family purity as “a great boon to woman according to medical standards.”  It is a preventative of many diseases of the female organs, including cancer.  “It conserves her natural faculties and prolongs her youth and attractiveness,” more so in view of the limits and obligations which the Torah imposes on a Jewish husband in regard to conjugal relations with his wife.  These limits contribute to her dignity, privacy, and independence.

The Torah thus embraces cosmology and cleanliness – heaven and earth.

The convergence of science and Torah becomes more and increasingly evident. It will bring about a vibrant renaissance of Jewish civilization that will rescue the West from the university-bred doctrine of moral relativism that has disemboweled Christian Europe and is now eviscerating the United States.