[Avodah] R' Keller's JO article on evolution

[Jonathan Baker]

R'Gershon Seif:
 
> Here's my understanding of what he wrote.

Here are some responses, but I don't have the article in front of me.
It seemed to me at the time I read it, that at least the first part
basically rehashed Xtian arguments for creationism.  Need we take our
biblical interpretation from them?

Further, the below points conflate arguments against evolution with
arguments against old-earth, which the Xtians do as well.
 
> 1. Ein mikra yotzai midai pshuto. Since the Torah has definite lines of
> demarcation of time and evolution assumes one long continuum, it would
> be against this basic rule of learning Torah to twist mayseh Bereishis
> into an evolving creation.

R' Alan Brill notes that until the mid-19th century, nobody took the
Creation narrative literally.  On his first tape from the Revelation
course he gave at YU last year (available on www.yutorah.org), he gives
a catalogue of rishonim & acharonim and how they each viewed the Creation
narrative as a metaphor: for spiritual realm, for morality, etc.

Once the outside world began to produce evidence that the world was older
than 5500 years, suddenly rabbis started taking Genesis literally, perhaps
as yet another way to reject the outside, Haskalah, Goyish world.

It's also not clear how universally "ein mikra yotzei midai peshuto"
was meant to be applied to all of Scripture, or only to those passages
where the commentators applied it.
 
> 2. The Ramban, Bereishis 1:3, and the Rashbam Bereishi 1:4 take this
> literaly.

Yes, and that's one of the fundamental arguments Gerald Schroeder uses
to argue his old-earth theory.
 
> 3. The Gemara Chagiga 12a (and rashi there explains that to mean a
> 24 hour day) says that midas yom and layla were created on the first
> day. Rashi says the gemara is based on the posuk of vayehi erev vayehi
> voker yom echad.

What does that mean?  "Midah" is an abstraction.  Midat hadin and midat
harachamim are also created entities, but we can't *see* them, they have
no associated physical reality.  So it doesn't force a reading of 24-hour
days.

Rashi, however, uses vayehi erev vayehi boker vs. creation of the Sun
on the 4th day as proof that the Creation narrative is non-literal: 
ein mukdam ume'uhar batorah.  See on the pasuk.
 
> 4. The 4th of the aseres hadibros says to remember Shabbos and sanctify
> it.. for in 6 days Hashem made the heavans and the earth and He rested
> on the seventh. - Rav Keller writes about this "Can we seriously consider
> this an allegory for a period of billions of years? Is this the lesson the
> Torah is teaching us- the greatness of God that He took 6 long undefined
> periods of time to crate the world?

Why shouldn't it be an allegory?  R' Keller's argument just begs the question.
The question presumes its own answer.

It's what I call a "vayashkem Avraham baboker" argument - how do we
know Avraham wore a yarmulke?  The verse says "vayashkem Avraham baboker"
- can we seriously consider that he went out without putting on his
yarmulke?

As an allegory it works fine.  God created the Universe in 6 stages, and on
the seventh He created rest, having finished the creation.  It's not the
story of creation that is mechayev in Shabbat, it's the commands at Sinai
and elsewhere.   So a literal Seventh Day is not forced here.
 
> 5. The torah telling us that Hashem rested, is saying that creation came
> to a halt. This flies in the face of evolution which states that this
> is an ongoing process.

It also flies in the face of Jewish philsophy, whether Maimonidean or
Kabbalistic, that says that if God ever stopped creating the Universe and
giving it sustenance, the Universe would cease to exist.  Don't we say,
every day, before Shma, "hamechadesh betuvo, bechol yom tamid, maaseh 
bereshit"?  This is a non-argument.
 
> 6. The Kuzari writes that the number of years from creation to his time
> is universally accepted by all Jews without acception. Rav Keller adds,
> even though this is nolonger the case, the mesorah is still the mesorah.
 
And Tanach tells us that all the Jews accepted David, Solomon, etc. as
their king.  That was historical reality.  Does that mean Solomon is
still our king?  The mesorah is that that was historical reality.  Now
that we have a new reality, with other sources of input about the nature
of the physical universe aside from the Bible, the mesorah is that we
should accept the reality we are faced with.  How is that not equally
a true statement?

> 7. The gemara in Kesubos 5a instructs us to have weddings on Wednesday
> because that was the day fish were created.

A cute aggadita, that is clearly not binding.  More people have weddings
on Tuesday because of two vayehi tovs, another cute aggadita.  Next?
 
> 8. Shulchan Aruch (OC 229:2) is m'chayaiv us to recite birkas hachamo
> once every 28 years, and it is on Wednesday, the day the sun ws created.

Fits with the same allegory.  I said it the year my niece was born.  Twice,
even, once at sunrise with my shul in the park, again a couple hours later
at school on the roof.  We also say Hayom harat olam, we also theorize that
Rosh Hashanah was the first Shabbos, rather than the beginning of creation,
we also theorize that the world was created in Nissan - there are lots of
competing theories as to the correspondence of the calendar to the "moment
of Creation" - none of which seem exclusively binding.
 
> 9. The Ran on the 1st perek of R"H explains that we are judged on R"H
> because the world was created on 25th day of Elul and Adam was created
> onthe 6th day which was R"H.

See previous paragraph.  How do we usually treat teshuvot that quote
only arguments that bolster their own side?
 
>  - He also writes that the Rambam agrees with a 6 day creation. He
> writes the Rambam has beenmisquoted. All the now famous Rambam in MN
> meant was that there are sodos of Kaballah that are lying behind the
> simple meaning of the words.

And this discredits the whole article.  THE RAMBAM DIDN'T KNOW KABBALAH.
All the "proofs" that he did were forgeries and wishful thinking, compared
with his own statement in the Moreh that as far as he knew, the original
esoteric meaning of maaseh bereshit was lost.  See Gershom Scholem, Mechqare
Kabbalah I.  If R' Keller accepts this claim, it shows he has a weak grasp
of the difference between truth and wishful thinking.  Funny, he seemed to 
have a pretty good grasp of the difference when he wrote his article on
post-1994 Chabad.
 
--
        name: jon baker              web: http://www.panix.com/~jjbaker
     address: jjbaker at panix.com     blog: http://thanbook.blogspot.com