In my opinion, the prehistoric men whose remains have been discovered in our time, and who lived long before Adam, are identical with those 974 pre-Adamite generations referred to in the Talmud (Shabbat 88 and Hagiga 14) and lived in the epoch immediately before our own.
This then is the meaning of the expression from the eternity to eternity you are God (Psalm 90), literally ‘from world to world’, for the divine spark enters into world after world, in ever-ascending order of perfection.
Rabbi Israel Lipschitz, Drush Or Ha-Chayim
Comment: A similar view, stated more briefly, is expressed by Rabbi Shalom Mordechai Schwadron (Techelet Mordechai to Genesis 1:1). Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan takes up the idea that there were 974 generations before the creation of Adam.
Adam was merely the first human being created in the latest cycle. According to these opinions, it would seem that man already had the physical and mental capacities that we possess as early as 974 generations before Adam, or some 25,000 years ago.
Aryeh Kaplan, Immortality, Resurrection, and the Age of the Universe, 21
Evolution
Evolution did not figure in Jewish thought prior to Darwin, but in the twelfth century Maimonides noted the general evolutionary pattern evident both in natural and human history.
When considering the divine acts, or the processes of nature, we get an insight into the prudence and wisdom of God as displayed in the creation of animals, with the gradual development of the movements of their limbs, and the relative positions of the latter, and we perceive also His wisdom and plan in the successive and gradual development of the whole condition of each individual … Many precepts in our Law are the result of a similar course adopted by the same Supreme Being. It is, namely, impossible to go suddenly from one extreme to the other.
Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, Book III, 32
Rabbi Nissim ben Reuven (1320–80) argued that all creation evolved from a single substance, matter.
At the beginning of creation, a unified substance was created for everything under the lunar sphere … this was because the will of God was to continue the nature of existence according to the possibilities, and not to create many things ex nihilo, since it is possible to make one substance that includes everything … the creation of two substances in the lower world ex nihilo would be without benefit; it suffices to have this wondrous and necessary origin.
Rabbi Nissim ben Reuven, Derashot Ha-Ran, 1
Rabbi Bachya ibn Pakuda (eleventh century, Spain) emphasises the structural unity of life, which testifies to its common origin.
When we study the world, it shows us that it is entirely the plan of a Designer, the work of a single Creator. For we find that, with all the differences in its substances and elements, it shows uniformity in its effects and parts. The signs of the Creator’s wisdom, manifest in the smallest as in the largest creatures, testify that they all have one wise Creator. If the world really had more than one Creator, diverse forms of wisdom would be manifest in its different parts and in its species and individuals.
Rabbi Bachya ibn Pakuda, Chovot Ha-Levavot, Shaar Ha-Yichud, 7
Later commentators draw attention to the evolving nature of life as described in Genesis. Here, for example, is the comment of Rabbi Meïr Leibush ben Jehiel Michel Weiser (Malbim, 1809–79).
Creation progressed from level to level: inanimate matter, plants, animals, and man. Everything that came earlier was a preparation for that which came later … It is known that also in rising up through the ladder of stages, creation did not proceed in discontinuous leaps, but rather through intermediate stages. Thus, coral is intermediate between inanimate matter and plants, polyps are intermediate between plants and animals, and monkeys are intermediate between animals and man.
Malbim to Genesis 1:20
Similarly Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (Netziv, 1816–93) writes in terms that acknowledge micro-evolution and the nature of life as an evolving phenomenon, foreseen and intended as such from the outset.
According to their kind (Genesis 1:21). Scripture teaches that even though at the time of the Divine [creative] word, many kinds of sea creatures and birds emerged, none the less God continued to create other species from those that had already appeared, for example, the many varieties of chicken that eventually emerged from the first, all sharing the same essential constitution, and so with all other creatures.
Haamek Davar to Genesis 1:21
That God created to do (Genesis 2:3). According to the plain sense, not all things had reached their final end-point, since several things were subsequently changed in their nature. However, these changes were already contemplated then, so that God had already created them on that day [the seventh of creation] to do what they would later do.
Haamek Davar to Genesis 2:3
Rabbi Arye Kaplan notes the unusual locution of the Torah when it describes the creation of fish and animals. The text does not say, Let there be creatures or Let there be animals, but Let the water/Earth bring forth living creatures.
This suggests that God did not actually create life at this time, but merely imparted to matter those unique properties that would make evolution take place, first to lower and then to higher forms of life, and eventually to man himself.
Aryeh Kaplan, ‘Creative evolution’, Faces and Facets, 83–4
Rabbi Gedalia Nadel analyses the implications of a comment by Rabbi Ovadia Sforno (1470–1550), who argued that Genesis 2 implied that there was a two-stage creation of man.
And he blew into his nostrils the breath of life – a living soul, ready to accept the image of God … nevertheless, and man was as a living being, he was still only a living creature, unable to speak, until he was created in God’s image and likeness.
Sforno, Commentary to Genesis 2:7
Regarding Sforno’s basic point, that the creation of man in the image of God was the conclusion of a lengthy process, which began in a non-rational being under the category of animals, then proceeded to develop until it acquired human intellect, and also the physiological appearance of man with which we are familiar – it is reasonable that this is a correct description. The evidence of Darwin and of palaeontologists, regarding the existence of earlier stages, appears convincing …
As long as there is recognition of the Divine will that functions in nature via spiritual forces, there is no need whatsoever to negate the description of events that scientific investigation presents today. There are discoveries of skeletons of bipeds with a small skull, whose brain could not have been like the brain of the human being that we know. The man about which it is said, Let us make man in our image, was the final stage of a gradual process.
Rabbi Gedalia Nadel, Betorato shel Rav Gedalia, 100
Rabbi Abraham Kook sees the idea of evolution as essentially in harmony with the general Jewish view of the structure of time and history.
Evolution itself, moving upwards coordinately and undeviatingly from the lowest to the highest, demonstrates most clearly a prevision from afar – a preset purpose for all existence. Divine greatness is thereby enhanced and all the goals of faith confirmed, and trust in and service of the Divine is all the more justified – since all strives upwards and man has it in his power to improve and perfect himself and his world, he is manifestly thereby doing the will of his Creator. Spiritual perfection is thus seen to be in the centre of all existence.
Rabbi Abraham Kook, Orot Ha-Kodesh, 565
The idea that evolution shows that life emerged by chance does not impress the religious mind, which knows from many biblical examples that what appears to be random is in fact providential. The book of Esther, like the story of Joseph, is a providential narrative in which everything happens at the right time in the right way to bring about the fated end, yet the word ‘God’ does not appear in the book, and the festival to which it gave rise, Purim, means ‘lotteries’ or chance. In general, what appears to human eyes as chance is seen through the eyes of faith to be divinely intended. ‘When the lot is ca
st in the lap, its entire verdict has been decided by God’ (Proverbs 16:33). On this Malbim comments, ‘There are things that appear given to chance but are actually providentially determined by God.’
Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler (1892–1953) takes this to be characteristic of appearance in general. We see the proximate causes of events, but the task of faith is to track them back to their source in the First Cause, God himself.
Why was the world created in such a way that it appears as though it came about by way of evolution? However, this is the way of the revelation amidst the concealment. We see a long chain of cause and effect, which is the concealment. But it is up to us mentally to climb from the last to the first until we reach the First Cause, blessed be His name, and this is the revelation.
Rabbi Dessler, Michtav Me-Eliyahu, IV, 113
The Views of Individual Thinkers
RABBI SAMSON RAPHAEL HIRSCH
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88), one of the leaders of nineteenth-century German Orthodoxy, wrote in the early days of the Darwin controversy, but saw immediately that, were Darwin’s views to gain acceptance, they would in fact testify to increased wonder that God had created all life from a single source, using a mechanism both astonishingly simple yet capable of generating almost infinite diversity (the point I make in chapter 11).
Even if this notion were ever to gain complete acceptance by the scientific world, Jewish thought … would never summon us to revere a still extant representative of this primal form, as the supposed ancestor of us all. Rather, Judaism in that case would call upon its adherents to give even greater reverence than ever before to the one, sole God who, in His boundless creative wisdom and eternal omnipotence, needed to bring into existence no more than one single, amorphous nucleus, and one single law of adaptation and heredity in order to bring forth, from what seemed chaos but was in fact a very definite order, the infinite variety of species we know today, each with its unique characteristics that set it apart from all other creatures.
Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Educational Value of Judaism, Collected Writings, vol. 7, 264
RABBI ABRAHAM ISAAC HACOHEN KOOK
Rabbi Abraham Kook (1865–1935) consistently took the view that evolution, though it seemed at first sight and to unsophisticated minds to be at odds with Jewish teaching, was in fact in accord with them, and people should be educated to see this. This is one of his many observations on the subject.
My opinion on this is, that anyone with common sense should know that although there is no necessary truth in all of these new theories, at any rate we are not in the least bit obligated to decisively refute and oppose them, because the Torah’s primary objective is not to tell us simple facts and events of the past. What is most important is the Torah’s interior – the inner meaning of the subjects – and this message will become greater still in places where there is a counterforce, which motivates us to become strengthened by it. The gist of this has already been recorded in the words of our earlier sages, headed by The Guide for the Perplexed, and today we are ready to expand more on these matters.
It makes no difference for us if in truth there was in the world an actual Garden of Eden, during which man delighted in an abundance of physical and spiritual good, or if actual existence began from the bottom upwards, from the lowest level of being towards its highest, an upward movement …
And in general, this is an important rule in the struggle of ideas: we should not immediately refute any idea which comes to contradict anything in the Torah, but rather we should build the palace of Torah above it; in so doing we are exalted by the Torah, and through this exaltation the ideas are revealed, and thereafter, when not pressured by anything, we can confidently also struggle against it.
Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, Iggrot Ha-Re’iyah 134, 163–4
CHIEF RABBI DR J. H. HERTZ
In his Commentary to the Pentateuch, published in 1929, Rabbi J. H. Hertz (1872–1946) gives a magisterial summary of Jewish views on creation and evolution. He notes that ‘while the fact of creation has to this day remained the first of the articles of the Jewish Creed, there is no uniform and binding belief as to the manner of creation’. Citing Genesis 1, Psalm 104 and Proverbs 8:22–31, he shows how the Bible itself describes it differently depending on perspective and context. That diversity continued into the rabbinic period and beyond, now including midrashic, philosophical and mystical approaches. That God created the universe is central to Jewish faith. How he did so is not.
It follows that there is ‘nothing inherently un-Jewish in the evolutionary conception of the origin and growth of forms of existence from the simple to the complex, and from the lowest to the highest’, provided we acknowledge that ‘each stage is no product of chance, but is an act of Divine will, realising the divine purpose, and receiving the seal of the divine approval’.
Hertz quotes Darwin’s contemporary and co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, whose approach was far more amenable to classic Jewish belief. Wallace argued that ‘the unseen universe of Spirit’ had intervened at least three times in the development of life: first in the creation of life from inorganic matter, second in the birth of consciousness, and third in the appearance of the higher mental faculties of humankind. Wallace believed that purpose was discernible in nature.
Hertz dismisses any inference from the prehuman origins of Homo sapiens. Man remains ‘the goal and crown’ of creation. ‘Man, modern scientists declare, is cousin to the anthropoid ape. But it is not so much the descent, as the ascent of man, which is decisive. Furthermore it is not the resemblance, but the differences between man and the ape, that are of infinite importance.’ The point of the biblical account ‘is not to explain the biological origins of the human race, but its spiritual kinship with God’.
The aim of the Genesis creation account ‘is not to teach scientific facts; but to proclaim highest religious truths respecting God, Man, and the Universe. The “conflict” between the fundamental realities of Religion and the established facts of Science is seen to be unreal as soon as Religion and Science each recognizes the true borders of its dominion.’ He calls Genesis’s declaration of man as the image of God ‘the Magna Charta of humanity’.
RABBI JOSEPH SOLOVEITCHIK
The most profound exploration of the religious implications of evolution was undertaken by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik (1903–93) in his posthumously published The Emergence of Ethical Man. Far from seeing evolutionary biology as a threat to Judaism, he sees it as a vindication of Judaism as against the Greek tradition that influenced Christianity (and, he adds, the medieval Jewish philosophers). It was the Greeks who set man apart from nature in virtue of his powers of reason. Contemporary biology has restored man to nature where, according to the Hebrew Bible, he belongs.
According to the Torah, all life – plant, animal and human – has a common origin, the Earth. ‘The story of creation is a biography of nature’ and we are part of nature. ‘Man in the story of creation does not occupy a unique ontic position. He is, rather, a drop of the cosmos that fits into the schemata of naturalness and concreteness.’ It is precisely the fact that we are part of nature that explains the Torah’s emphasis on our ‘biological integrity and welfare’. Death, in Judaism, is not the result of sin but of biology. It is because we are as much animal as divine that we need ‘religious faith and commitment to a higher authority’.
As part of nature, we are commanded to ‘serve and protect’ nature, avoiding cruelty to animals, and acting as guardians of the integrity of the environment. ‘As long as man lives within the bounds set by his Creator, which accentuate his naturalness, he remains ben adam, the son of Mother Earth, and may claim asylum in her lap.’ It is the human encounter with the divine command that starts the dialogue out of which slowly emerges the ethical personality as we transcend our loneliness by recognising the integrity of the human other as a reflex of the divine Other.
It is impossible in brief summary to do justice to the subtlety and de
pth of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s analysis. What is striking about it, as with all his work, is not only its scientific and philosophical sophistication and his taken-for-granted certainty that Judaism is compatible with modern science, but also his deep sense that modern science has liberated Judaism from certain Greek ideas that have long distorted its own self-understanding.
I have always felt that due to some erroneous conception, we have actually misunderstood the Judaic anthropology and read into the Biblical text ideas which stem from an alien source … The sooner Biblical texts are placed in their proper setting – namely, the Oral Tradition with its almost endless religious awareness – the clearer and more certain I am that Judaism does not accent unreservedly the theory of man’s isolationism and separatism within the natural order of things.
The Emergence of Ethical Man, 6
Conclusion
The argument I have advanced in this book is within the spirit and substance of the Jewish philosophical mainstream as represented by Saadia, Judah Halevi and Maimonides in the Middle Ages, and Rabbis Hirsch, Kook, Hertz and Soloveitchik in the modern era. Needless to say, on this as on other fundamentals Judaism contains a range of views within the normative tradition, some more open to science than others. It is, though, striking how unthreatened these thinkers were by new developments in science, and that too has been part of my argument.
The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning Page 37