Integrating Science and Mysticism, Article 11

We’ll conclude our short foray into the whole topic of science resuming its role as handmaid to religion, by going a little deeper into the story we referred to in the previous article, the story of Jacob’s four wives, which, as we said, can be seen as a symbolic pre-figuration of Torah and science coming together. We shall examine some of the seemingly minor details of this story (as they appear in the Bible and in the midrash, the Jewish homiletic tradition), and attempt to learn what they may correspond to in the field of Torah and science.

A Family Reunion

First off, one of the midrashim says that Bilhah and Zilpah were no less than Rachel and Leah’s sisters! They shared the same father, Lavan, but were the children of his concubines rather than his wife, and thus became handmaids. Remarkably, this idea reflects another idea found elsewhere in the Torah, that while the people of Israel are God’s official wife, with the prophecies and the oral Torah being their official children, the rest of the nations are not strangers to Him but are His concubines, and bear Him many unofficial children—the prophecies and wisdom found in their various cultures. Bringing together Torah and science will therefore be like a family reunion, in which the Torah wisdom is reunited with its long lost sibling– secular knowledge (much like the higher and lower waters remerging, see article 1).

From Handmaids to Wives

Another important thing we know about Bilhah and Zilpah is that gradually they were elevated from the position of handmaids to the positions of wives. This reflects a point we discussed previously, that science becoming a handmaid to Torah (in the new and rectified way we explained in article 9), is but a prelude to its promotion to a status equal to that of Torah. Science is eventually to become Torah’s mate, an integral and inseparable part of it, differing from it only in that it’s discovered from below rather than revealed from Above.

New Insights

After Bilhah and Zilpah bore Jacob children, Rachel and Leah, who could not conceive at that point (Rachel hadn’t been able to at all and Leah stopped), inexplicably became pregnant and bore two more children each. One could suppose that Rachel and Leah had undergone some psychological change after their handmaids had children, but one could also equally suggest it was Jacob himself who was changed by his meeting with the handmaids, that his procreative powers had somehow become stronger. Interpreting Jacob as the Torah scholar, this idea means that learning science gives us new insights into Torah, enabling us to discover new things within it we wouldn’t have been able to discover otherwise.

Unifying Art and Science

We corresponded the mistresses to Torah and the handmaids to science, but we have yet to ask why there are two of each? Well, a correspondence between Rachel and Leah and two sections within the Torah already exists: Rachel signifies the exoteric or revealed part of the Torah (the nigleh) and Leah signifies the esoteric or hidden part of the Torah (the nistar). Picking up from this, it would appear that Bilhah, Rachel’s handmaid, symbolizes natural science, which deals with objective, empirical phenomena, while Zilpah, Leah’s handmaid, symbolizes the arts, humanities, social sciences etc., which deal with subjective, human phenomena. The unification of Torah and science will therefore also involve healing the huge rift within Western culture today, that between art and science. Indeed, it makes sense that it would take a third and higher wisdom to unite the two. This is illustrated by one of the most beautiful gematria equations recently discovered by Chasidism: that the numerical value of the word Torah (תורה) is exactly equal to the sum of the words science (מדע) and art (אמנות)!

The Younger Sister

When the Torah recounts the birth stories of Jacob’s twelve sons, it says of each pregnancy that the mother “conceived” and then “bore a son”—each, except Zilpah’s two pregnancies. The midrash explains that Zilpah was so young that her pregnancies didn’t show, and that’s why the Torah doesn’t mention them. This raises the question, how did Zilpah, the younger handmaid, ended up the servant of Leah, the older sister? The explanation given is that on the night Lavan cheated Jacob and gave him Leah instead of Rachel, he also had the younger handmaid go with her, so that Jacob would believe he was marrying the younger sister.

These details tell us three very interesting things: (a) they reflect the simple fact that humanities and the social sciences are the ‘younger sister’ of natural sciences; (b) they tell us that at their root, each of the two scientific worlds really belongs in the other’s place, or put otherwise, that to deeply understand the natural sciences one needs poetic sensibilities, and to deeply understand the arts and humanities one should think like an exact scientist—think about this; (c) on the outside it appears that the arts and humanities, being the youngest and least rigorous of the two, are mere ‘pseudo-science’, unable to conceive and bear children, but the truth is, their pregnancy is not immediately apparent, but takes time to show.

A Child of Two Worlds

Of all the twelve sons born to Jacob from his four wives, the Torah concentrates most on Joseph. A surprising reason why Joseph is unique is that he was the only son who was raised by both a mistress (his mother Rachel) and a handmaid (Bilhah). Since before he acquired his dream interpretation skills, and before he descended to Egypt, Joseph was already a child of two worlds, versed in both the language of Torah and that of science. This reflects beautifully in a brief episode mentioned in the midrash, according to which the sons of the mistresses used to treat the sons of the handmaids as slaves, and it was Joseph who came to their defense and treated them as equals. Joseph therefore represents the open-minded Torah scholar, who is not disdainful of science and scientists, but rather welcomes them as bearers of a wisdom equally important to his.

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/the-kabbalistic-multiverse/

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