To the Editor:

D

oes Jeremy England’s article, “The Partly Predictable World” [December 2015], suggest a true reconciliation between belief and the scientific method? Yes and no, depending on what we are asked to believe.  Rather than believing in the Bible, and more basically the Torah, because of the miracles written in it, let us accept the miracles because of the validity of the Torah. A manual for making the hard moral decisions, it warns again and again of what will happen if the people of Israel ignore the Dos and Don’ts (mitsvot ’aseh and mitsvot lo ta’aseh). The grand sweep of history has borne out all of these events.  Thus, we conclude, if they are all true, we will accept those that are harder to swallow.

The famous aggada (Midrash Rabba Eicha, 5) about Rabbi Akiva and his four colleagues touches on the same sentiments. Seeing a fox dart out of the ruins of the Temple’s Holy of Holies, where none could set foot except the High Priest, and even he only on Yom Kippur, Rabbi Akiva’s colleagues wept, but he laughed.  Why, they asked. Because Lamentations 5:18 was being fulfilled (“Mt. Zion which lies desolate, foxes prowl over it”), which meant that Zechariah 8:4-5 would also be fulfilled (“Old men and old women will once again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with his staff in his hand from old age; and the streets of the city will be filled with boys and girls playing in its streets.”)

Why are miracles even in the Torah? Well, how else can a nation of hopeless slaves lacking the hindsight of history be convinced to rise up against their murderous taskmasters: “Or has God assayed to go and take Him a nation from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs, and by wonders, and by war, and by a mighty hand, and by an outstretched arm, and by great terrors, according to all that the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes?” (Deuteronomy 4:34).

In our own day, the State of Israel is viewed as a miracle by many, and not without reason. Each step of its conception, establishment, and growth can be rationalized a posteriori, but the totality boggles the mind. I can still remember the panic that gripped worldwide Jewry during May–June, 1967, much like that described in the Book of Esther after publication of the decree designating Adar 14 as the day of extermination of the Jews.  I can still remember the incredulity as events unfolded, the relief, the jubilation, and the sense that, whatever the rational explanation, a great miracle had happened there.

Miracles happen as a consequence of the necessity, the commandment, to promote right and good, that which tends to promote life; and suppress wrong and evil, that which tends to promote death (Deuteronomy 30:15).  In other words, consequences are predictable.  Chaim Weizmann observed that miracles sometimes occur, but one has to work awfully hard for them.

The world gets more predictable as science advances. Even Pharaoh’s magicians were able to duplicate the first three plagues. Any one of us could duplicate the burning bush using a match and a bottle of carbon disulfide, which has a very low temperature of combustion.  But these mechanical miracles are almost irrelevant. We do not rely on miracles (Babylonian Talmud, Pesahim 64b).  Too often it seems that arguments over them are a distraction from the mitzvoth.

This brings up perhaps the ultimate human question, akin to what Moses asked God (Exodus 33:13): How might the mortal human gain an understanding of the cause-and-effect relationship of Torah and mitsvot? Consider Genesis 2:9 and 17, describing the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Let me suggest that da’at (knowledge) in this case be taken to mean “science.” We understand the physical sciences rather well; the social sciences rather less well, and the science of good and evil, or morality, hardly at all.

Efforts in this direction have been made by considering a moral society to be one at happy equilibrium. This suggests the use of an equilibrium equation such as the Gibbs free-energy equation, ΔG = ΔH − TΔS, where ΔG is the change in Gibbs free energy of the system being measured, ΔH is the change in its heat content, T is the temperature, and ΔS is the change in the entropy, or disorder. Equilibrium is defined as ΔG = 0. “Social thermodynamics” has received only sporadic attention over the past century; one particularly intriguing aspect was covered by Jeremy Bernstein in Commentary [“The Einsteins of Wall Street,” September, 2004]. The hard questions are how to define the parameters. In a social system, to what would the heat content correspond? The temperature? The entropy? Or is this not a profitable approach at all? There’s only one way to find out.

Rouvain M. Bension
Brighton, Massachusetts

Jeremy England writes:

R

ouvain M. Bension is correct that nisim (miracles) occur whenever we are shocked by the unexpected in a way that turns us towards our Maker, and Israel’s victory in 1967 is a cherished example of this in recent memory. But this is not a new idea; as the festivals of Chanukah and Purim remind us, a nes can happen because oil burns longer than anyone could reasonably expect it to, or because Jews surprisingly (but quite un-magically) defy the odds defending themselves against a fearsome and potent foe. Less important than the question of these various accounts’ forensic verifiability is the way they function to provoke the right conversation about why we think we know what is and is not possible. The Torah enjoins the Jewish people to attempt the seemingly impossible, and starts by freeing us from the narrowness of what we can imagine might happen.

Speaking as a physicist, though, I don’t recommend the formalism of equilibrium thermodynamics for making sense of human affairs; it will not get you far.