DAVID SAKS
The Torah, Rabbi Leff stressed, was nothing less than the mind of G-d Himself presented in a form that allowed the human mind to explore and recognise the infinite wisdom of the Creator. Limmud Torah itself was quite literally the energy source of the entire universe, the “engine room” that made everything else in Creation possible.
Unlike other intellectual disciplines, Rabbi Leff said that Torah study entailed not only the acquisition of knowledge, but the integration of that knowledge into the personality of the one studying it.
Through this, one came to see the world through the lens of Torah wisdom, and thereby to make the right choices in terms of one’s personal behaviour and interpersonal relationship.
“I created the Yetzer Hara [evil Inclination] and the Torah as its antidote,” was a famous rabbinical saying, homiletically attributed the A-mighty.
However, “Tahvlin” did not literally mean “antidote” but rather a spice. Just as spices improved food, so through learning Torah and applying what had been learned, could one discipline, control and channel the Yetzer Hara, thereby transforming it from a source of potential harm to a vehicle for reaching ever greater heights of spiritual growth.
Rabbi Bitton spoke on the congruence between the opening verses of the Torah and current scientific thinking on the origins of the universe.
While many within academia regarded as anathema any notion of creation as opposed to wholly naturalistic explanations of how existence came about, the “Big Bang” paradigm provided dramatic confirmation of the truth of the Torah account.
Prior to this, the prevailing mode of thinking in science and philosophy had been that the universe was eternal and had no beginning, putting proponents of the Jewish perspective on the defensive.
Science could now trace the origin of the universe back to the moment where all matter came into being, apparently ex nihilo, but could go no further. This inability to explain the primary cause of existence, was frustrating to secular scientists, who even now sought to evade the implications of this knowledge by, for example, coming up with the theory of a future “Big Crunch”, whereby the universe would eventually cease expanding and instead revert to the original single point of compressed energy and matter from which it would once again explode in a continuous cycle of expansion and contraction.
