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Sunday, July 10, 2005

Heshy vs. Hirsch

Once again Heshy, of his eponymous house, has endeavored to speak for all Jews, and again he's revealed himself to be a perfect fool.

Here for example is Heshy:
As Jews, we strongly oppose the teaching of the myth of evolution. We feel it denigrates mankind by such foolish claims that we evolved from animals. We advocate the teaching of Creationism, which points to an Almighty Creator. The vast array of wisdom in the Universe on every level leaves much evidence of a Divine fingerprint. Only a drunken fool could ignore such evidence and make the claim that any part of creation happened by accident. When we see creation, we know there is a Creator. Nothing happens by itself.
Thanks Heshy. That was obnoxious, yet also rambling and poorly considered. Now, speaking for the opposition, a group we like to call "Torah Jews," Sampson Repahel Hirsch:
Judaism is not frightened even by the hundreds of thousands and millions of years which the geological theory of the earth's development bandies about so freely. Judaism would have nothing to fear from that theory even if it were based on something more than mere hypothesis, on the still unproven presumption that the forces we see at work in our world today are the same as those that were in existence, with the same degree of potency, when the world was first created. Our Rabbis, the Sages of Judaism, discuss (Midrash Rabbah 9; Tractate Hagigah 16a) the possibility that earlier worlds were brought into existence and subsequently destroyed by the Creator before He made our own earth in its present form and order. However, the Rabbis have never made the acceptance or rejection of this and similar possibilites an article of faith binding on all Jews. They were willing to live with any theory that did not reject the basic truth that "every beginning is from God." (Collected Writings, vol. 7 p. 265)
In other words, there is no theological problem with evolution and Judaism would accept the theory were there sufficient scientific proof - regardless of what some lunatic from Brooklyn would have you believe.