Ask The Rabbi 
22 May 1999 
Issue #238
Parshat Behaaloscha (in Israel) / Naso (outside Israel) 
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Researched at Ohr Somayach, Jerusalem 
This Issue Contains: 
1. Jurassic Judaism	3. Public Domain
2. Yiddle Riddle		
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___Jurassic Judaism___

The following question is one of many "Ask the Rabbi" has received 
regarding the Torah's attitude toward the existence of dinosaurs:

Dear Rabbi,

A friend recently asked me how Orthodox Judaism deals with the issue of 
scientific proof of dinosaurs' existence.  Is there an explanation to be 
found in the Torah?  Your answer or explanation would be greatly 
appreciated as we are both teachers in a Hebrew day school and the children 
argue amongst themselves about whether dinosaurs did or did not really 
exist.

************

The following essay, part of Ohr Somayach's forthcoming "Torah and Nature" 
series, deals with this issue:


	At the beginning of the nineteenth century, strange artifacts began 
to be discovered.  They were bones, bones of gigantic and monstrous 
creatures the like of which had never before been heard of.  Sir Richard 
Owen, the renowned British paleontologist, coined the collective term 
Dinosauria, Greek for "terrible lizards."

	Even the plant-eating dinosaurs were awe-inspiring.  Triceratops, 
larger than an elephant, had a fearsome array of horns on its armored 
skull.  The large sauropods, Brachiosaurus and Ultrasaurus, weighed more 
than eighty tons and stood as tall as a five-story building.  But the meat-
eating dinosaurs were downright terrifying.  And none more so than the 
greatest predator ever to walk the earth.  Twenty feet tall and forty feet 
long, with a massive head boasting six-inch fangs, Tyrannosaurus Rex, the 
"king tyrant lizard," was a fearsome beast indeed.

	Dinosaurs are terrifying creatures. Fortunately, there aren't too 
many of them around nowadays, so there is little to fear.  But some Jews do 
still walk around in fear of dinosaurs.  However, this has nothing to do 
with the dinosaurs' extreme size or their tendency to crush or eat anything 
in their way. It has more to do with their very existence. Paleontologists 
assert that dinosaurs lived hundreds of millions of years ago, while the 
Jewish calendar sets the age of the universe at under 6000 years plus six 
creation days.

	I remember a young student in yeshiva once drawing me aside in a 
conspiratorial manner.

	"Do you believe in dinosaurs?" he asked me in a hushed tone.

	"No," I replied, surprised. "I believe in G-d."

	I wasn't sure as to exactly which religion he belonged to (The New 
Age Temple of the Dinosaur Worshippers, perhaps?), but as far as I'm 
concerned, it's only G-d, and religious affairs, that are matters of 
belief. (And even with those, we're not talking about blind faith, but 
rather acknowledgment based on firm evidence and reasoning.)

	Dinosaurs aren't a matter of belief. The fossils really exist; I own 
one myself. How one interprets these fossils is a different matter.

	It has been suggested that G-d placed fossils in the ground as a test 
of our faith. There are two main difficulties with this explanation.

	The first objection is that it's not a particularly good test. As we 
shall see, there is more than plenty of room for accepting the former 
existence of dinosaurs and the Divinity of Torah.

	The second objection is that, without being overly presumptuous about 
G-d's ways, everything that we know about Him tells us that He doesn't act 
that way. G-d does not create evidence against His Torah and ask us to 
blind ourselves to it with a leap of faith. Rather, He presents us with 
evidence for His existence, and preserves free will by implanting within us 
a powerful ability to ignore that which is inconvenient.

	This point is powerfully presented by Rav Elchanan Wasserman, zatzal.  
He raises the question of how a twelve year old girl or a thirteen year old 
boy can be commanded in the mitzvah of emunah, faith, which the brilliant 
Aristotle didn't even manage. His answer is that emunah just requires one 
to draw the logical conclusions from the evidence that surrounds us; if 
great minds slip up, that is because of personal agendas.

	Nature points towards G-d, not away from Him. We are told, "Lift your 
eyes upon high and perceive Who created these!" (Yeshayah 40:26); and that 
"The heavens speak of G-d's glory, and the sky tells of His handiwork!" 
(Tehillim 19:2). Contemplating nature is not only a means to affirm G-d's 
existence, but also, as Rambam explains, the fulfillment of another 
mitzvah:

This honored and awesome G-d -- it is a mitzvah to love Him and to fear 
Him... And how does one come to love and fear Him? When man contemplates 
the great wonders of His deeds and creations, and he perceives from them 
His boundless and infinite wisdom, instantly he loves and praises and gives 
glory, and he has a great desire to know G-d... And when he contemplates 
these matters, he instantly recoils and is in awe, and he knows that he is 
a small, dismal, lowly creature, standing with a minuscule weakness of 
intellect before the Perfect Wisdom... (Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah 2:1 -- 2).

	Rabbi Yehudah HaLevi, in his famous work the Kuzari (1:67), writes 
that "Heaven forbid that there should be anything in the Torah to 
contradict that which is manifest or proved."  Likewise, Heaven forbid that 
there should be anything manifest or proved which would contradict anything 
in the Torah. If one is convinced that G-d wrote the Torah and created the 
world, then one should fear no scientific discovery. Conversely, if one is 
afraid of what the scientists will discover, then one is clearly not fully 
aware that everything discoverable was created by G-d.

	But doesn't the apparent age of the dinosaurs contradict the Torah? 
Well, to claim so, one would have to claim to understand what the Torah 
actually means with its account of Creation. But this raises many matters 
of interpretation; for example, how do you measure a "day" when the sun is 
only created on the fourth one? How do you determine the flow of time when 
it varies depending on how near you are to objects of large gravitational 
mass? Since we have so little understanding of these matters, how can 
dinosaurs frighten us?

	Far from being frightened by dinosaurs, Rabbi Yisrael Lifshitz, 
author of the Tiferet Yisrael commentary on the Mishna, received the news 
of fossil discoveries in the nineteenth century with delight. As he had 
undoubtedly expected, they confirmed everything that we knew all along. He 
writes:

"As regards the past, Rabbi Abahu states at the beginning of Bereishet 
Rabbah that the words "and it was evening, and it was morning" (in the 
apparent absence of the sun) indicate that "there was a series of epochs 
before then; the Holy One created worlds and destroyed them, approving some 
and not others."

The Kabbalists expanded upon this statement and revealed that this process 
is repeated seven times, each Shemita achieving greater perfection than the 
last.They also tell us that we are now in the midst of the fourth of these 
great cycles of perfection.[Editor's note:  Interestingly, many 
paleontologists also consider there to have been four eras: the 
Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic.]

We are enabled to appreciate to the full the wonderful accuracy of our Holy 
Torah when we see that this secret doctrine, handed down by word of mouth 
for so long, and revealed to us by the Sages of the Kabbalah many centuries 
ago, has been borne out in the clearest possible way by the science of our 
generation.

The questing spirit of man, probing and delving into the recesses of the 
earth, in the Pyrenees, the Carpathians, the Rocky Mountains in America, 
and the Himalayas, has found them to be formed of mighty layers of rock 
lying upon one another in amazing and chaotic formations, explicable only 
in terms of revolutionary transformations of the earth's surface.
Probing still further, deep below the earth's surface, geologists have 
found four distinct layers of rock, and between the layers fossilized 
remains of creatures.  Those in the lower layers are of monstrous size and 
structure, while those in the higher layers are progressively smaller in 
size but incomparably more refined in structure and form.

Furthermore, they found in Siberia in 1807, under the eternal ice of those 
regions, a monstrous type of elephant, some three or four times larger than 
those found today.

Similarly, fossilized remains of sea creatures have been found within the 
recesses of the highest mountains, and scientists have calculated that of 
every 78 species found in the earth, 48 are species that are no longer 
found in our present epoch.

We also know of the remains of an enormous creature found deep in the earth 
near Baltimore, seventeen feet long and eleven feet high. These have also 
been found in Europe, and have been given the name "mammoth." Another 
gigantic creature whose fossilized remains have been found is that which is 
called "Iguanadon," which stood fifteen feet high and measured ninety feet 
in length; from its internal structure, scientists have determined that it 
was herbivorous. Another creature is that which is called "Megalosaurus," 
which was slightly smaller than the Iguanodon, but which was meat-eating.
From all this, we can see that all that the Kabbalists have told us for so 
many years about the repeated destruction and renewal of the earth has 
found clear confirmation in our time.

(Tiferet Yisrael, in Derush Ohr HaChayyim, found in Mishnayot Nezikin after 
Masechet Sanhedrin)

	Huge and fearsome creatures that they were, dinosaurs can't possibly 
be a threat to the religious Jew. As G-d's creations, they are another 
example of His wondrous might. There's nothing to be afraid of.

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Yiddle Riddle

Shimon Goldstein from Neve Yaakov wrote with the following riddle:

	My friend told me the following Yiddle Riddle: Rabbi Yehuda 
Hachassid, in his famous will writes that nowadays a person should not have 
a mechuten (someone whose son married his daughter or vice versa) with the 
same name as he.  What three people in the Chumash had a mechuten who had 
the same name as they?

Answer next week....

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The Public Domain
Comments, quibbles, and reactions 
concerning previous "Ask-the-Rabbi" features

Re: CyberBranch:

	Great page! (http://www.ohrnet.org)  You should open a branch of Ohr 
Somayach in Ashdod.

* Akiva Kotler <akiva@barak-online.net>

**********

Re: Liberty Through ALL the Land 
(www.ohrnet.org/tw/5759/vayikra/behar.htm#COM1):

	Regarding Ohrnet's "Torah Weekly" for Parshat Behar:  I should like 
to point out that the inscription on the Liberty Bell, "Proclaim liberty 
throughout all the land," is in fact a deliberate misquotation from Parshat 
Behar, although nobody seems to point this out.  The Torah actually states 
"Proclaim liberty throughout the land" (and this is the version in the King 
James Bible that they presumably used) and it seems that the Americans 
changed it into "all the land" in order to make it apply to America, and 
not just to the Land of Israel.  Biveracha.

* Prof. Vivian (Haim) Halpern, Physics Dept., Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-
Gan, Israel <halpern@physnet.ph.biu.ac.il>

Re: Adobe Acrobat Format:

	My brother came home from Yeshiva in Israel with a stack of Ohrnets.  
My entire family is in love with them and that's the reason that I am now 
subscribing.

* Chaya from Canada <Chaya@Email.Withheld>
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