Hit numbers are up this week so I thought I’d take the time to welcome my new readers. Open posts are for anybody to write whatever’s on their mind in the comments. It’s a good way for me to get an idea of what my readers are interested in.
The topic is Judaism as interpreted as broadly as possible. To my regular readers who never leave comments (you know who you are!), now’s the time to introduce yourself.
R. Soloveitchik often emphasizes the indepedence of religious or halakhic concepts and the danger of “translating” such concepts into the respective languages of science and philosophy. He believed, and I strongly agree, that many conflicts between science and Torah (evolutionary theory is the most popular but there are many) stem from misunderstanding this point. In The Halakhic Mind (pp. 47-50), the Rav offers the concept of time as an illustration.
There is the question of God in His full transcendence beyond time, and God in His immanence in time. This problem does not only bear upon the idea of God but also upon the idea of time. God in the temporal world presents the composite of time and eternity; it implies the intrusion of eterninty upon temporality…
In this connection, the problem of the calender bears some investigation. The division of time into days, weeks, months, and years is quite incongruous with the time concept of the scientist for whom time is a continuum with no milestone. The seasons of the year or the astronomic phenomena of sunrise and sunset do not, in the least, determine the character of time. On the contrary, like other phenomena they occur in time. The religious type, in his experience of this category, indentifies the incessant flux of the chronos with the artificial form of the calender… He sees God not only in eternity but also in time quantified and measured by the calender.
The specific religious apprehension of time as cyclic motion or as an eternal repetition (Kierkegaard) is likewise utterly unintelligible to the scientist who measures spatialized time or to the metaphysician who views time as a directed flow. The experience of time as repetition is rooted in the typically religious time-awareness and is closely associated with the concept of the calender that is indeed pure repetition.
…
[Here, R. Soloveitchik works out the details of how the religious ideas of Creation, Revelation, and repentence bear out this theory of time]It must be understood that these time concepts are not mere fantasy. They are inherent in the religious consciousness which apprehends time in its own fashion.
Torah, philosophy, etc.:
A blog, by David Fryman