A classic critique of religion is that it is an attempt by people to explain how the world, the universe and nature work, without the wisdom of science. Created thousands of years ago by people who lack the methods of modern science, it is therefore obsolete. But this is a classic straw man argument. The creators of religion, including Judaism, lacked the tools and insights of modern science, but they weren’t asking questions of how things work, but rather why things are. Questions of meaning rather than questions of mechanics.
We see this at work in this week’s Torah portion, when Moses describes the revelation of Torah at Sinai: “The LORD spoke to you out of the fire; you heard the sound of words but perceived no shape—nothing but a voice. He declared to you the covenant that He commanded you to observe, the Ten Commandments; and He inscribed them on two tablets of stone. For your own sake, therefore, be most careful—since you saw no shape when the LORD your God spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire—not to act wickedly and make for yourselves a sculptured image in any likeness whatever: the form of a man or a woman, the form of any beast on earth, the form of any winged bird that flies in the sky, the form of anything that creeps on the ground, the form of any fish that is in the waters below the earth. And when you look up to the sky and behold the sun and the moon and the stars, the whole heavenly host, you must not be lured into bowing down to them or serving them.”
In other words, God is not a thing; to see God as such is to misunderstand God. Rather, God is the source of morality and values – as represented by the Ten Commandments – the values and code of conduct that give our lives meaning and enable us to form societies.
Morals, values, wonder: these are the reasons for religion.
Vaetchanan, Deuteronomy 3:23-7:11 – Parashat ha Shavuah for Saturday, July 24, 2021
July 23, 2021 by Dean Kertesz • Drashot
A classic critique of religion is that it is an attempt by people to explain how the world, the universe and nature work, without the wisdom of science. Created thousands of years ago by people who lack the methods of modern science, it is therefore obsolete. But this is a classic straw man argument. The creators of religion, including Judaism, lacked the tools and insights of modern science, but they weren’t asking questions of how things work, but rather why things are. Questions of meaning rather than questions of mechanics.
We see this at work in this week’s Torah portion, when Moses describes the revelation of Torah at Sinai: “The LORD spoke to you out of the fire; you heard the sound of words but perceived no shape—nothing but a voice. He declared to you the covenant that He commanded you to observe, the Ten Commandments; and He inscribed them on two tablets of stone. For your own sake, therefore, be most careful—since you saw no shape when the LORD your God spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire—not to act wickedly and make for yourselves a sculptured image in any likeness whatever: the form of a man or a woman, the form of any beast on earth, the form of any winged bird that flies in the sky, the form of anything that creeps on the ground, the form of any fish that is in the waters below the earth. And when you look up to the sky and behold the sun and the moon and the stars, the whole heavenly host, you must not be lured into bowing down to them or serving them.”
In other words, God is not a thing; to see God as such is to misunderstand God. Rather, God is the source of morality and values – as represented by the Ten Commandments – the values and code of conduct that give our lives meaning and enable us to form societies.
Morals, values, wonder: these are the reasons for religion.
~Rabbi Dean Kertesz