The Chabad Lubavich and Creationism

As a college undergrad, I was a part of the FIU Chabad Lubavich chapter, and on a couple of weeks when my Mother was out of town, I even celebrated Passover with them. I've spent dozens of free Chabad dinners there at the Rabbi's house. I have nothing but good and pleasant memories about my association with that organization, and the friendships I made through the Chabad.

Though I currently have no religious beliefs, being Jewish is a part of who I am whether I like it or not and is something I can either fight and rebel against (unproductively) or embrace as a part of my identity. Besides, God must love us secular Jews. After all, He made so many.

As someone with a science and education background, however, it deeply troubles me that Chabad is the only remaining Hasidic group, indeed, the only remaining group of Judaism that still rejects evolutionary origin for life, and continues to endorse some really crackpot Young Earth theories (6,000 year old creationism).

I always found this ironic, because Judaism (including hard-assed, traditionalist Orthodox and Conservative Judaism!) have never had any compatibility problems between science and religious beliefs.

And what's more, the Jewish tradition has always endorsed an old earth anyway, and that time, to God, meant something totally different than it would to humans. In the 11th Century, Rabbi Moishe bin Asher used Kabbalah to divine that the earth was billions and billions of years old, and many midrashim have argued there were previous successive creations that were destroyed by God as unsuitable and incomplete. There have been other Medieval that claim that Adam was the last of a thousand prior generations, but he was significant in that he was the first to have the breath of God, a soul within him.

The primary voice for this rejection was one of the major figures in the history in the history of Judaism, the Rebbe Lubavich, who had enormous influence over the Chabad as its spiritual founder. Many believed the Rebbe was in fact, the Messiah (Moshiach), a view that is downright bizarre for the primary reason that he died! Well, I guess that answers that question! Along with Bar Kochba, Jacob Frank, Shabbetai Tzevi, and a certain Rabbi from the 1st century that shall remain nameless (wink, wink) the Rebbe died without fulfilling any of the Messianic prophecies.

This seems like an unfair non-sequitur since most Chabadniks didn't believe the Rebbe was Moshiach even when he was alive, but it is nonetheless relevant because the Rebbe was not a superman and he could be wrong and at times he said various misinformed things about the process of science and evolution. He once claimed that "evolution has not the slightest shred of evidence behind it," which even honest creationists must admit is untrue.

More importantly, I would not go to the Rebbe for advice on science. The divine nature of Torah is totally unfalsifiable and therefore outside any possible means of scientific investigation. The origins of human beings, however, are within the boundaries of the material world: things within the material world require materialist explanations.

The Rebbe believed that biological evolution eliminated the meaning and purpose of existence, if we were just an "accident," then who cares about moral responsibility? As a Chabad rabbi stated in this article:

"We have to be aware of the effects of our beliefs. If we believe that humans came about by accident, then life has no meaning. There can be no meaning to something that happens by chance. A random explosion or mutation cannot give us purpose. My life, your life and all human history has no real significance whatsoever. Whether I live a good life or one full of evil makes no difference. It is all a big accident anyway.

We only have purpose if we were created on purpose. Our lives only have meaning if we were created by a meaningful being. If we teach our children that they were created on purpose with a purpose, then they will know that more is expected from them than from an animal."

Whether something gives us meaning or purpose is irrelevant as to whether it is true or not. Whether something makes children behave themselves is irrelevant as to whether it is true or not (and there are many disobedient children from religious families and obedient children from non-religious families).

But more importantly, if human creation is what gives us purpose, why can't evolution give us a purpose? The fact is we're human, the first creature on earth able to make moral choices, and that ability alone implies duties and personal responsibilities. There does not need to be a contradiction between belief in a God and belief in what is revealed to us by science.

Sound the shofar! L'shana Tova!

I wish family and friends mazel and hazlocha today on the last night of Rosh Hashanah, highest of the Yamim Noraim. I wish everyone a happy 5769, full of mitzvahs.

If you like apples and honey, boy, is today ever your day. (Technically, the last day of Rosh Hashanah starts at sundown tonight, which is why I'm blogging here tonight. But you know what I mean.)

According to the Midrash, Rosh Hashanah is a day of atonement and rememberance for all the bad things we've done, as we go in judgment before God. My list is especially longer than most. I take some comfort in the fact God, being omnipotent, probably knows that guy at Macy's had it coming to him.

It's times like today I reflect on all the great Jewish men (Moses, Jesus, Einstein, Oscar Schindler), and one stands above the rest: Harlan Ellison. Neil Gaiman wrote the best description of Ellison I ever heard: "Some people live in castles, but Ellison lives in angry old Jew man world."

Everyone even remotely connected to science fiction knows who the guy is, and has a favorite Ellison story. My favorite is definitely that one where the sound effects guy in charge of "sweetening" the laugh track on a sitcom uses the communication reel to have a conversation with a long dead woman whose voice was recorded for the tracks. In the end, instead of laughing at the sitcom, the track boos and hisses their unfunny gaffes.

It's not the most popular story, but it's the most utterly Ellisonesque one. It combines sweetness and sentimentality with humor and bitter, opinionated cynicism, along with its glorification of average people.

Any story of Ellison's that glorified the average man was that one he did about a bitter nebbish that was revealed, by visitors from the future, to actually father children that would start a nuclear war that destroys the world. The office worker agrees to kill himself to save the world - because it was the first and only time in his life he was ever important. A very bittersweet ending.

Discovering Ellison's science fiction was something of a revelation for me. I started off as a science fiction fan reading Heinlein's juveniles, which I still love (especially HAVE SPACE SUIT, WILL TRAVEL and STARSHIP TROOPERS, which I read to the point of memorization). I read a few of the Poul Anderson FLANDRY OF TERRA books, and I thought he was one of the best heroes in science fiction. I had read Phillip Jose Farmer's VENUS ON THE HALF-SHELL, which to this day, I insist is his best book even over RIVERWORLD, and I was just getting into Andre Norton, Leigh Brackett, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and A.E. van Vogt.

I found the "New Wave" writers all around the same time, around fifteen: Ellison, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, and the rest. I got into them after I read 1984 - which was a shocking book to someone that thinks of science fiction in terms of Heinlein and Burroughs. I was astonished there was no space patrol to come around and save the day at the end. It was a totally different kind of science fiction that I looked for ever after, and that's how I discovered Ellison and the rest of his contemporaries.

This was science fiction that wasn't formulaic, or adventure stories (though with his astonishing gift for flexibility Ellison could write both of those). Ellison's canon of work is legendary: "Repent, Harlequin!" and "A Boy and his Dog" among them.

To this day, I dislike admitting that I'm a Heinlein fan, because on the off-chance the other person is also a Heinlein fan, they'll start falsely thinking we have something in common. Heinlein fans, by and large, are a creepy bunch that close ranks around their hero with cultlike defensiveness.

They read Heinlein not for the spirit of adventure, but for a search for competent white male father figures they can project themselves into to forget their own very real human weaknesses and insecurities. Come to think of it, they remind me a little of the more loathesome fans of Hal Jordan or "Classic" Superman, who perpetually demand his immortality and guaranteed, constant victory with such loudness that it's psychologically intriguing.

Me, I already have a father figure: he's called my Father. And even he's a mortal, fallible human being.

And Edgar Rice Burroughs? Forget it. Every single fan of his, except Genevieve back in High School, was a giant tool. True story: I went to an ERB convention hosted on Miami Beach. The first sign I noticed something was up was that every other car in the hotel parking lot was a bright racing-red "Midlife Crisis" douchecar. When I finally got there, I was the only person in the convention to be under 30 that wasn't a trophy wife. It was like you got one as a door prize, available in your choice of Blonde or Asian.

The two kinds of fans I'm most comfortable around are Ellison fans, mostly because you can't appreciate Ellison without a sense of humor. Also, I have a passionate distaste for moralists, godbotherers, hypocrites, nosy people, busybodies, preachers, and the smug in general, prudes who dislike curse words and nudity on television, or who object to wholesome, All-American bloodthirsty violence.

Oscar Wilde once said that patriotism is the virtue of the vicious. If so, courtesy is the virtue of the hypocrite. Ellison's work tends to repel these people like crosses repel vampires.

Anyway, Ellison as a person is just plain cool. Admit it: it was one of the coolest moments in science fiction when Ellison backed Raymond Palmer in a corner and got that midget to admit that the Shaver Mystery was all a hoax he invented to sell magazines. Or remember when Christopher Priest (author of THE PRESTIGE) turned his Richard Dawson-like smarmy, sarcastic British wit on one of Ellison's dead friends? When Ellison tacked Christopher Priest, Priest's words were "You wouldn't dare hit me in front of all these people."

Big mistake!

Ellison has an acid wit and doesn't suffer fools gladly, but he's likeable because he only goes after the big guys, the same way Don Rickles only insults guys like Frank Sinatra. Ellison called Shatner an exhibitionist that would have sex with a moose in a store window for attention. He pulled his entire "Star Trek" scripted movie (that by the sound of things was absolutely mindblowing - the Enterprise journeying to the dawn of time) because the idiot executive said something like, "And could we have Mayans at the dawn of time? I like Mayans." Ellison's reaction was as hilarious as it was predictable.

I guess that's the lesson we can take away this Rosh Hashanah from Ellison is this: there's a little Harlan Ellison in all of us. Now that's something I can dip my apple to!

Ketiva ve-chatima tova!