Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel

Less than a month ago, I had the opportunity to be one of four national rabbinic scholars who spoke on the Psalms and their relevance for us today at Gordon College. For members of my community who are unfamiliar with this program, every year Gordon College produces a series of talks given by Jewish scholars from all around the country. As an evangelical school, Gordon College is a strong advocate for better Jewish and Christian relations. I must say it was a most memorable experience. While I was there, I met with the faculty, as well as with many classes of students where we engaged one another on the importance of interfaith dialogue in a society that has traditionally kept themselves apart from one another for centuries. True, Jews and Christian leaders do work on cooperative ventures, e.g., social issues, but seldom has there been an honest exchange where leaders speak honestly about the issues that have traditionally divided both our communities.

During the week I spent with the students and the local churches, I wanted to give a personal narrative how I came to embrace interfaith dialogue with the Christian as well as Muslim communities. True, there are many obstacles that face us all, but we have a duty to reach out. Rabbi Tarfun, a first century sage, expressed the thought best, “It is not incumbent upon you to finish the task. Yet, you are not free to desist from it” (Avot 2:21).

In my discussions, I maintain that it is essential for us to be honest with one another and speak about the historical mistakes each side has made over the ages. As with any family conflict, there are two sides of the story. Unfortunately, the family break-up of the Jewish and Christian communities that took place in the early centuries following the destruction of the Second Temple might have spared us centuries of anti-Semitic attacks; Jewish leaders were no less pluralistic then they are now; once the Jewish community threw out the Jewish-Christians from their synagogues, the seeds for revenge were sown for millennium that followed. Frankly, we can see many of the same intolerant attitudes threatening to split world Jewry today emanating out of the ultra-Orthodox circles in Israel today. Continue Reading

Why did the early rabbis of Late Antiquity believe that the sun revolves around the earth?

On the surface, the Sages wanted to uphold the belief that the earth is still the center of God’s universe.  However, in all honesty, one cannot blame the ancient rabbis for thinking that way; the majority of them were unacquainted with the science of the Greeks, many of whom (like Aristotle)  believed that the earth revolves around the sun. One would be hard pressed to find a modern rabbi of the last five centuries who would argue otherwise, yet, in modern times there is one famous rabbi who unabashedly believes in the science of Ptolemy over Copernicus–the late Lubavitcher Rebbe. Here is an extraordinary letter the Rebbe wrote (dated: September 16, 1968):

I am in receipt of your letter of September 10th, in which you touch upon the question of whether the sun revolves around the earth or vice versa, in view of the fact that you heard from a college student that the truth is that the earth revolves around the sun. It greatly surprises me that, according to your letter, the student declared that science has resolved that the earth revolves around the sun. The surprising thing is that a person making such a declaration would be about one half a century behind the times insofar as the position of modern science is concerned. This belief is completely refuted by the theory of Relativity, which has been accepted by all scientists as the basis for all the branches of science.

One of the basic elements of this theory is that when two bodies in space are in motion relative to one another (actually the theory was initiated on the basis of the movements of stars, planets, the earth, etc.), science declares with absolute certainty that from the scientific point of view both possibilities are equally valid, namely that the earth revolves around the sun, or the sun revolves around the earth.

Cited from Herman Branover, Joseph Ginsburg, and Menachem Mendel Schneersohn (trans. Arnie Gotfryd) Mind over Matter: The Lubavitcher Rebbe on Science, Technology and Medicine (Jerusalem: Shamir 2003), 75-77.