The Two Sides of One Creation: Bridging Torah and Science

This essay is written in memory of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. May his neshama have an aliyah.

     As I sat in my biology class, listening to my teacher lecture about golgi bodies and transcriptional regulation, I couldn’t help but let my mind drift back to the Tanach shiur I’d just had, and began to connect the pictures flashing across the Smartboard to ideas my Rabbi had explained just moments ago. How miraculous it was that lysosomes performed autophagy before toxic cells consumed my body. How incredible that I could jump and smile and dance and laugh. And then I wondered, is this allowed? Can I even associate science with Torah? Aren’t they too different? Won’t I just end up confused at all this seemingly contradictory information? I couldn’t understand how it was possible to be sitting on my spinny-stool in a laboratory, solving mysteries of the universe through mere technicalities and test tubes while being completely in awe of the material I was analyzing. From a scientific perspective, I appreciated the straightforwardness of it all. However, from a religious perspective, it felt arrogant to assume that I, the “equivalent of dust,” could, in one or two class periods, learn how these creations operated. 

     My concern for correlating these different fields nagged me until I decided to research and explore. The first source I came across was Rabbi Norman Lamm, former president of Yeshiva University, on Torah u’Madda, emphasizing his belief in integrating Torah and secular wisdom. Another source, Rav Joseph Soloveitchik, echoed Rabbi Lamm’s philosophy and explained that this synthesis was not only doable but essential. A third source introduced Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch’s personal mantra: Torah Im Derech Eretz, representing his belief that Jews are capable of successfully integrating into secular communities while remaining loyal to the Torah. In fact, during the Haskalah, Rabbi Hirsch allowed German Jews to embrace society as long as they remained loyal to the mitzvot. 

     I appreciated these opinions, but they weren’t sufficiently specific to science, focusing generally on worldly knowledge, so I continued to read until I came across Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’s book titled The Great Partnership. In his remarkable work, Rabbi Sacks, z”l, develops the concept of Torah v’Chochma through engaging with the ideas of his predecessors and adding his own twist to address the specific relationship between Torah and science. According to Rabbi Sacks, Torah and science are the “two essential perspectives” of the world, each contributing differently but crucially. Rabbi Sacks emphasizes the importance of preserving tradition and succumbing to the appealing logic of science because “we cannot lose faith without losing much else.” Science is the how; religion is the why. Religion guides us through celebrating morals, dignity, humility, and finding meaning in life. Without religion encouraging us to develop ourselves and our relationships with others and with Hashem, the best we’ll do is see ourselves as a work-in-progress in a world of hollow reality. 

     Throughout the course of his book, Rabbi Sacks develops a theory insisting that we integrate Torah and science while acknowledging their profound differences. Countless of his beautiful divrei Torah illustrate his effort to seamlessly weave Torah and science together. Yet he devotes a large part of the book to elaborating on how fundamentally, extraordinarily different these perspectives are. He goes so far as to compare them to the two sides of the brain: both necessary but utterly different. 

     I would like to take these ideas and propose an even more radical approach: we must relax our focus on the differences between Torah and science because the more we allow these differences to influence us, the more likely we are to conclude that they are irreconcilable.

     The problem is the presumption of two lenses to begin with. We view Torah and science as two entirely separate and incompatible fields, then proceed to try and integrate them. Continuing this way will only lead to confusion and conflict. Hashem created both, giving us the responsibility to integrate them and even celebrate their integration. At SAR High School, ouR mission statement’s emphasis on The Grand Conversation between Torah and the world encourages students to draw comparisons from multiple points of secular study and Judaics despite their seemingly oppositional principles. We strive to craft meaningful connections between science and Torah, and we use them to enhance each other. 

     Rabbi Sacks once wrote a brilliantly innovative dvar Torah on Parshat Beshalach titled, “The Divided Sea: Natural or Supernatural,” introducing science into the miraculous Kriyat Yam Suf. He quotes Shemot chapter 14:21:  וַיֵּ֨ט מֹשֶׁ֣ה אֶת־יָדוֹ֮ עַל־הַיָּם֒ וַיּ֣וֹלֶךְ ה׳ ׀ אֶת־הַ֠יָּ֠ם בְּר֨וּחַ קָדִ֤ים עַזָּה֙ כׇּל־הַלַּ֔יְלָה וַיָּ֥שֶׂם אֶת־הַיָּ֖ם לֶחָרָבָ֑ה וַיִּבָּקְע֖וּ הַמָּֽיִם׃. Then Moses held out his arm over the sea and GOD drove back the sea with a strong east wind all that night, and turned the sea into dry ground; the waters were split. This verse seems to convey a supernatural miracle, but Rabbi Sacks chooses to read into it a rational explanation. He interprets the “strong east wind” as the cause of the water separating, which exposed a sea ridge, creating the passageway through which Bnei Yisrael escaped. He proves his theory by citing a prominent physicist who noted that water elevation differences are common. Employing scientific knowledge to support his Torah perspective, Rabbi Sacks concludes the dvar Torah by arguing that despite the scientific reasoning for Kriyat Yam Suf, we should still consider it to be a miracle from Hashem. This synthesis creates a singular perspective that both explains the scientific reasoning of the miracle and chooses to integrate Hashem into the picture. That’s what being a Jew means; we choose to integrate Hashem even if everything adds up without His presence. This is the solution to struggling with the seemingly disparate principles of Torah and science. However, it may feel uncomfortable to suddenly bring science into the versions of foundational Jewish miracles we’ve known for so long. 

     I hope what I’m about to share makes Rabbi Sacks very proud. On the day of that biology class, what sparked my curiosity was one particular image on the smart board. The image displayed families of aquatic creatures thriving in their underwater homes in a lake, which was covered with a thick layer of ice. My teacher explained that ice is less dense than water because when it freezes, its molecules spread out rather than condensing, causing ice to form on top of the water and prevent the belly of the sea, center of underwater wildlife, from freezing as well. She emphasized that ice being less dense than water is the only phenomenon in the world where liquid enlarges but doesn’t become heavier. My teacher went on to say that this was clearly the work of Hashem. While I couldn’t initially understand how to integrate Torah and science, I realized that my teacher had the answer all along. She was a biology teacher who integrated Hashem into her understanding of the world even when the world might have made sense without it. Science can describe how natural phenomena happen, but only religion can explain why the world was designed so thoughtfully to ensure that life could survive. 

     This is the perspective we need while examining the world; not just a lens of Torah or science, of miracles or logic. Once we break through the presumed separation, integrate the ideas, and merge our perspectives, we’ll finally grasp the true symbiotic relationship between Torah and science. When we begin approaching the world with both an open mind and an open heart, we’ll finally begin to truly understand this Godly Earth. If Rabbi Saks can do it, and my biology teacher can do it, then the least I can do is try.