The Scientific Revolution & Jewish Mysticism
On Parshas Bereishis and the task of creating a more perfect future
The audio version of this essay is available here in partnership with the Orthodox Union’s amazing parsha learning app: All Parsha.
The story of the Tree of Knowledge occupies just 25 verses in the Torah. Beginning in the third chapter of Parshas Bereishis, the story of Adam and Eve eating from the tree quite literally changes the course of humanity.
Here is the basic synopsis: Following the story of creation, the Torah presents the story of Adam’s sin. Adam’s sin begins in the final verse of the second chapter, “They (Adam and Eve) were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed.” Enter the snake. Despite God’s earlier warning that eating from the Tree of Good and Evil will surely cause death, the snake reasons to Eve that God is just trying to prevent Eve from becoming like God. Eve eats from the tree and proceeds to feed Adam as well. Immediately afterward, Adam and Eve’s “eyes are opened” and they realize they are naked. After fashioning clothes for themselves, Adam and Eve hear the sound of God “walking through The Garden.” He calls out to Adam and Eve, “Where are you?” They hide. Eventually, Adam and Eve acknowledge their sin, and God curses them, each respectively with the pains of labor and the difficulty of child labor. The story concludes with Adam and Eve banished from Eden.
There are many questions that the commentaries ask about this story. What was the sin of Adam and Eve—was eating from the tree such a big deal?! How could Adam and Eve have sinned—they were just created?! Why did Adam and Eve sin—didn’t they realize how dire the consequence would be?!
These are all very important questions, but there is one crucial question that is too often overlooked: When did Adam and Eve sin?
As we will explore, this may be the most foundational question to the very roots of human history and the different world-views that continue to animate society.
In order to better understand the significance of this question, let’s talk about the role of Jewish thought, particularly Kabbalah, on the Scientific Revolution.
When Isaac Newton died there was a curious dilemma. The famed scientist, associated with ushering in the Age of Enlightenment, left behind boxes of books and manuscripts. Yet judging from his library, he seemed anything but enlightened. Newton had more books on theology than any other subject. As explained by Professor Matt Goldish, in his eye-opening, though slightly expensive book, Judaism in the Theology of Sir Isaac Newton, his library was filled with books on religion, particularly Judaism, including translations of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah and a recently published translation of Kabbalah into Latin called Kabbalah Denudata.
When his theological writing was offered to major universities—Harvard, Yale, Cambridge—they all declined. No, thank you. They were concerned that Newton’s fascination with religious thought would upend the more classical view that scientific thought meant the abandonment of religious ideas. Newton’s library and writing told a different story.
People quite literally thought Newton may have gone crazy. Newton’s religious writing had trouble finding a home. As described in pain-staking detail in Sarah Dry’s The Newton Papers: The Strange & True Odyssey of Isaac Newton’s Manuscripts, Newton’s theological writings were at best overlooked or at worst deliberately hidden in order to preserve his rationalist reputation. Newton left no will and no children. Eventually, most were put up for auction. The bidding was lackluster.
Two people made it their mission to buy and disseminate Newton’s theological writings—famed economist Lord Maynard Keynes and Israeli polymath Abraham Yehuda. After purchasing Newton’s writing at auction and examining their contents Keynes was stunned. He later wrote:
In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason.
I do not see him in that light. I do not think that any one who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696…can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance…
Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood.
The greatest teacher of Jewish history I ever had was Professor Elisheva Carlebach, Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture and Society. She also taught classes at Yeshiva University’s Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies. I studied the Enlightenment period in Jewish history with her. I remember she once asked the class, “What was the signature contribution of the Scientific Revolution?” Students gave all sorts of answers—more rationalism, more access to information, better scientific theories. All of which are correct, but she instead shared a basic feature that surprised us all. It was about horses’ teeth.
Imagine, Professor Carlebach, explained to us, you were trying to figure out how many teeth a horse had. Previous generations would make suggestions based on their conceptual priors. A horse should have 10 teeth because 10 is a perfect number. No, others would argue, a horse should have 15 teeth because the number 15 has horse-like qualities. It was not until the Scientific Revolution that scholars insisted on actually counting horses’ teeth. Of course, this debate never happened, but her story highlights the shift toward empirical experimentation that characterized the scientific revolution.
And this may help us better understand why so many scientists were so fascinated by Jewish thought.
Christians have long been fascinated with Jewish scholarship. For most of the Medieval Period this interest was primarily in order to convert or disprove Jewish beliefs. In the Early Modern Period a new motivation arose for Jewish studies among Christians, namely to help them formulate their own ideas. A movement known as Christian Hebraism developed that took more interest in rabbinic texts in the hopes it would point a way toward a more pure and pristine version of Christianity and religion. Figures such as John Lightfoot and Johannes Buxtorf (the Elder and Younger) immersed themselves in rabbinic literature—in the original Hebrew and Aramaic—in order to better understand their world. Lightfoot even looked to the concept of Sanhedrin to better consider how Parliament should function.
One book was particularly popular among scientifically minded Christian Hebraists: Kabbalah Denudata, the Latin translation of Lurianic mysticism known as Kabbalah. Translated by Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, the work was eventually disseminated throughout Europe by the itinerant scholar Francis Mercury van Helmont. One of the most fascinating (and expensive!) books I have ever read, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614-1698) by Professor Allison Coudert, details how Van Helmont’s travels impacted the scientific revolution. Van Helmont was a close friend of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and was very involved with the students of Paracelsus who ushered in the medical revolution.
A copy of Kabbalah Denudata was one of many Jewish books that found its home in Newton’s library. Newton likely never even had a serious interaction with a Jew, but he was fascinated by Judaism. While he may have been a skeptic of Kabbalah—he debated its merits with his co-founder of Calculus, Leibniz—he saw something within Jewish thought that motivated rather than hindered his curiosity.
What attracted these scientists to Lurianic mysticism?
Coudert explains:
The Lurianic Kabbalist could not retreat into his own private world. He had to participate in a cosmic millennial drama in which his every action counted. The Lurianic Kabbalah was the first Jewish theology which envisioned perfection in terms of a future state, not in terms of a forfeited ideal past, and as such it contributed to the idea of progress emerging in the West.
Like the new spirit of experimentation ushered in with the Scientific Revolution, Jewish thought also saw perfection as a future state rather than a forfeited past. No longer would scientists sit back and contemplate the universe, instead they would proactively search and explore to find meaning within the grand riddle of the universe.
This brings us back to the question of “When?”
The Torah is deliberately ambiguous about when the story of Adam and Eve eating from the tree took place. A plain reading of the Torah seems to indicate that it happened after the story of Creation. Meaning, God created a perfect world and only afterward was the world corrupted by mankind.
The Talmud, however, is very explicit: The story of the Tree of Knowledge is a part of the Creation story. It took place, according to the Talmud, on the Friday of Creation.
This presents a radically different worldview. If the story of the Tree of Knowledge is a part of the Creation story that means that the world was not created with perfection—that task remains the responsibility of mankind.
I remember I was invited to a conference on sin that was supposed to take place in Eichstätt, Germany. I hope I was invited because of my book, Sin•a•gogue: Sin and Failure in Jewish Thought, which expounds on many of these ideas, rather than my reputation as a sinner. Either way, the conference ended up being virtual due to Covid, but I presented the Talmudic dating of the story of The Tree of Knowledge to my fellow panelists, each of whom was representing a different faith tradition. One of the Christian scholars gasped, “That is impossible!” So much of the traditional Christian worldview, most notably their approach to Original Sin, assumes the world was created perfectly and it was only mankind that corrupted it.
This Christian scholar then asked me a fantastic question: How could this story have taken place as a part of Creation if, at the end of the sixth day, when this story supposedly occurred, God looked at the world and said it was “very good”?! Surely a world that just experienced such a catastrophic sin should not be described as good, no less, very good!?
It is a fantastic question because it gave me new insight into the interpretation of the Midrash. On the only day of creation that is described as “very good,” the Midrash actually interprets the word “very” to be the creation of the evil inclination. “Very,” according to the Midrash, highlights the subjective rather than objective perception that clouds mankind’s judgment. A very good question with a literal very good midrashic interpretation.
Perfection, according to the Jewish tradition, always lies in front of us. It is not a forfeited state, but one that needs to be created and recreated within each generation.
A common refrain within the liturgy of the High Holidays is a prayer from the book of Lamentations (5:21): השיבנו ה' אליך ונשובה חדש ימינו כקדם — Bring us Back to You, O Lord, and we shall return, renew our days as of old.
To “renew our days as of old” is a somewhat contradictory request. Days, presumably, can either be old or renewed—how can we ask for both? Based on this seeming contradiction, the Midrash reinterprets the term kedem—קדם; it is not referring to an antiquated time, but rather it refers to a place. The term kedem, explains the Midrash, refers to the Garden of Eden, which in the Torah is referred to, on two occasions, as kedem. Curiously, when demonstrating the association between the word kedem and the Garden of Eden, the Midrash ignores the first reference in the Torah, which reads “God planted a garden in Eden, to the east,” and instead chooses the second reference to the Garden of Eden as kedem. The latter reference, “and having driven out the man, he stationed east of the Garden of Eden,” does not refer to Adam’s idyllic residence in the Garden, but rather his exile. Why does the Midrash when interpreting our plea to “renew our days of old” skip the first reference to the Garden and instead read our prayer as a reference to Adam’s exile?
A dear friend, Rabbi Dr. Simcha Willig, showed me a remarkable interpretation of our prayer to “renew our days of old,” from Rabbi Rob Scheinberg. His words:
The word 'kedem' in Genesis 3:24 is not a word associated with the Garden of Eden itself, but a word associated with the exile from the Garden. The decision to quote the word 'kedem' from this verse, rather than from 2:8, indicates that, from the perspective of this quotation from Eikhah Rabbah, "hadesh yameinu ke-kedem' does not mean "renew our lives as they were in the Garden of Eden."
Rather, it means, "Renew our lives, as you renewed our lives after we were exiled from the Garden of Eden." "Hadesh yameinu ke-kedem" is then not a plea for restoration of a formerly perfect condition, but rather it is a plea for resilience, a plea for the ability to renew ourselves after future crises and dislocations, just as our lives have been renewed before.
As Elie Wiesel said, "God gave Adam a secret—and that secret was not how to begin, but how to begin again."
Similar to the Lurianic shift in perspective, the focus of the story of Tree of Knowledge is not about reclaiming a utopian past, but having the resilience and grit to create a more perfect future. We did not forfeit perfection with Adam’s sin, but assumed the responsibility to create it ourselves.
Shabbos Reads — Books/Articles Mentioned
The Newton Papers: The Strange & True Odyssey of Isaac Newton’s Manuscripts by Sarah Dry
Judaism in the Theology of Sir Isaac Newton by Matt Goldish
The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614-1698) byAllison Coudert
18Forty Podcast—“Professor Allison Coudert: How Did Religion Influence Science?”
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Reading Jewish History in the Parsha has been generously sponsored by my dearest friends Janet and Lior Hod and family with immense gratitude to Hashem.
“Resume”== begin again. Star up one’s car again. Like after Shabbat, go back to working on things. ?