Maimonides held that one should not read the Torah literally. In his view, one was obliged to understand the Torah in such a way that it was compatible with scientific discoveries. He wrote that if the Torah and science did not agree, it was for two reasons: either the scientific part was not well understood or the Torah was misinterpreted. He said that if science proved a point, the scriptures should be interpreted accordingly.

The age of the universe is one such discrepancy. Unlike the majority, a small minority of rabbis in classical times held that the world was older than the nearly 6,000 years that the literal interpretation maintains. In the Talmud’s tractate Chaggiga 13b-14a, it is written that there were 974 generations before God created Adam. And in some midrashim it is explained that the “first week” lasted much longer than seven days. (Midrash Breshit Rabbah 9).

In his Torah commentary, Rabbi Bahya ben Asher in 11th century Spain maintained that there were many time systems in the universe before the present time. He said that the earth was billions of years old.

Rabbi Israel Lipschitz of Danzig (1782-1860) commented in “Yachin u-Boaz,” his commentary on the Mishnah, that the world had had many historical cycles, each lasting thousands of years. The age of the dinosaurs was one such cycle. He said: “From all this we can understand what the Kabbalists have told us, that the Earth has been destroyed and renewed several times.”

Some Orthodox rabbis, such as Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, maintain that scientific theories confirm that God had a master plan for creating the universe and that this is consistent with modern Orthodox thought. In the early 20th century, both Conservative and Reform Jews accepted scientific discoveries as true and therefore interpreted the sacred writings in light of them.

Rabbi Kook said that the creation account belongs to “The Mysteries of the Torah” and is therefore open to interpretation. The creation account was not intended to be a literal description of how everything came into being, but rather to emphasize that it was God who called everything into existence. But furthermore, the theory of evolution agrees with the order marked out in Genesis. The most evolved beings were created last.

As C.S. Lewis says, the scientist knows while the religious man believes. Science tries to explain how the universe works while religion tries to explain what its purpose is and what place man occupies in it. One is a matter of knowledge and the other of belief.

Prepared by Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography: Jewish Responses to Modern Science, by Rabbi Louis Jacobs and other sources.