Judy Brown is the award winning author of the book, Hush – a
fictionalized story about the sex abuse of a childhood friend. A friend that experienced it in the Chasidic community in which she was
raised. I heard Mrs. Brown speak passionately on this issue last winter here in
Chicago. She was dressed quite Tzanua (modestly) according to Orthodox Jewish standards
-and she wore a Shaitel. That is a wig. Which is how most married Orthodox
women in the western world cover their hair.
I had assumed from this that although she was upset by the
way her community treated sex abuse, that she was still very much a believer in
the theology of Judaism. A recent article - where she described herself as still wanting
to dress modestly even according to Chasidic standards despite the “pull” away from that by society – just corroborated my perception.
As it turns out, she apparently is not a believer. It is not that she
abandoned her belief in God. But she seems to have abandoned her belief in the
theology she was taught about the Torah… and perhaps has even crossed the path
into the world of skeptics and Orthopraxy. As she admits:
“I discovered the agony of praying to God when I knew I was talking to myself.”She now sees herself as an outsider among the people she grew up with.
I am not here to judge her. I am instead looking at the
world in which she was raised. It seems obvious from her account that it is because of what she was taught - and the way she was taught it - that upon discovering
the scientific way of looking at the world she appears to have lost her faith.
Interestingly, it was not the internet that lead her astray.
It was the book Cosmos by famed astronomer Carl Sagan. I did not read the book. But I’m pretty sure
it is based on the wonderful PBS series of the same name hosted by Professor Sagan. I absolutely gobbled that series up. I actually recorded every episode
and have watched some of them many times. I still have the entire collection in VHS.
It was an eye opener for me as well.
One of the most educational and entertaining series I have ever seen to date,
even though it was produced in the 1980s. Especially the episode on Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. And yet I
did not become a skeptic. Except for one brief remark by Professor Sagan where
he argued against the existence of God in one of those episodes, what I saw was entirely compatible with
Judaism.
But apparently Mrs. Brown had a different reaction.
She had the same kind of reaction as people who are taught that every word in the
first chapter in Genesis must be taken literally. That the world was created in
6 days and is less than 6000 years old. Even the most basic knowledge about the
sun being a star - and stars being suns was a shock to her.
No matter how much she resisted believing what she read in
that book, she eventually succumbed to the fact that there are billions and
billions of stars (suns) in the universe and that many of them are millions of light
years away, thus crashing her belief system. And now, prayer has become nothing
more that talking to herself!
What a sad thing to read just before Rosh Hashanah.
In this era of instant information that can be had any time
and any place and read in the palm of your hand, it is beyond foolish to try
and ban it… or to even use filters so as to avoid reading the science upon which
things like the age of the universe is based.
But it is even more foolish in my
view to not teach the science in the first place. Ignorance is our worst enemy.
Because the minute one finds a contradiction to the insistence that only the most literal
interpretation of the Torah is acceptable, believers can and often will sadly
go the way or Mrs. Brown.
Instead of hiding the facts of nature by ignoring the study
of science, it ought to be fully taught in every school. There are Shivim Panim
LaTorah. The idea of an ancient universe is not Kefira. Had Mrs. Brown been
armed with that knowledge she may not have had her ‘epiphany’ about Judaism.
Had she been taught the theory of evolution properly, she would have realized
that indeed it is quite compatible with the idea of God’s creation of the
world. That He used the method of evolution as the mechanism for his creation.
While there are elements of the theory of evolution that seem to contradict some
of our beliefs, the overall outline of it is compatible with them.
But for Mrs. Brown (and probably for the vast majority of
those whose secular education is so strongly limited) learning about evolution
caused her to stop believing in some of the fundamentals of Judaism.
It seems however that instead of increasing the knowledge base
of our people, religious leaders are going in the opposite direction. Virtually all Charedim in Israel have no
education in science at all. Even in elementary school only basic math is taught.
Beyond elementary school it’s Gemarah 24/7.
In the US that was not the case in the not too distant past.
Virtually all Charedi high schools taught basic science. But it has
increasingly become popular in these schools to either minimize or completely
eliminate secular studies. The problem that this causes for Parnassa purposes is
obvious and has been discussed here many times.
But what has not been discussed
that much is the vulnerability this creates in these students. The
slightest exposure to some basic scientific thinking can easily
cause them to go completely OTD or become Orthopraxic closet skeptics!
The solution to preventing them from succumbing to this
knowledge on the part of Charedi leaders is to completely ban all possible
access to the “Kefira” of science. They condemn and want to ban the internet as that is the
most readily available source of knowledge available. They even ban books
that try and reconcile that science with the Torah – like those written by Rabbi
Slifkin - in the strongest possible terms... fearing it will all lead people astray. But banning it all is about as possible as banning air.
Mrs. Brown decided to read a book on the subject after having
some spirited discussions with a friend. The book she chose was Cosmos by Carl
Sagan. Had she been fully prepared for it by a proper science education, she
may have had the same reaction to Cosmos that I did. But instead it led her to
reject her religious teachings.
Even without the kind of basic science education that I had
- had she read Rabbi Slifkin’s books, she might still be a believer today. But his
books were banned. In her mind therefore, what difference was it which ‘forbidden
fruit’ she partook of?
