Let me say a few words about science and Judaism. There are some things to get out of the way. One is the notion that Jews are smarter than other people, the other is that scientists are smarter than other people, two false arms of a bizarre syllogism forming, that scientists are Jews, or the reverse. That scientists are smart is a construction of our education, perhaps the hammering into us by a teacher of an excessive valuation of mathematical thinking. The way scientists conduct their personal or financial lives should disabuse you of that notion. As for Jews being smart or smarter as a people ˜ well you could imagine a non-Jewish American or African thinking that. But then just send him for a few years to Israel...and ask them again. How then to account for the disproportionate number of Jews in science and medicine, and their success in these professions ? Here are some personal thoughts, some not at all original, some idiosyncratic. First : There is the background in the period of prevailing observance in the Jewish community (up to 1900), of respect for learning. Not for nothing did the prophet Muhammad call the Jews the people of the Book. Jewish society valued not only the Book, but its scholars. Look at the heroic figures in exile, the role models ˜ Rashi and Saadia Gaon, Nachmanides and Maimonides. Second, the mode of religious study in the centuries of exile had (and continues to have today) a curious parallel with what came, later, to be the method of European science. The Talmud and the fifteen hundred years of commentary and responsa since then are a discourse ingeniously suspended between the real and the hypothetical, with an emphasis on the real. There is little theology as such in the Talmud. Instead the rabbis debate how one decides whether an edible side of beef found in the street is deemed kosher or not, and in the course of a discussion of the material science of sukkah construction examine a flight of fancy ˜ can one use a living elephant for the side of a sukkah. Science, a western European invention, is the channeling of human curiosity into the observation of nature for the purpose of gaining reliable knowledge. In science. flights of inspired theoretical fancy are continually checked with the reality of our senses or instruments. Contact points with the real world and daily experience are what Talmud and science have in common. Talmudic debate, as recorded 1500 years ago, or as it takes place in the study hall today, has a remarkable dialectical structure, of opposing views evoked and debated, and a logic of citation, of invoking what had been said before. To be sure, there is a vast difference between science and religion in the extent to which the Oedipal drive to ˜ if not kill then at least deny our fathers ˜is privileged relative to respect for tradition. But in both Talmud and science I see a parallel working out of a tense, creative balance between tradition and change. But something more was needed, and here my observant colleagues may be angry with me. To have the potential for science materialize in a people you need the creative flux of assimilation. If a person is the other, an immigrant to a country, a minority group within a country, if one is out and if (oh such a big if) the society opens up, a little or a lot, than those segments of the population primed with a tradition of scholarship and a family support structure will flourish. Be they Jews, Chinese or Indians. But there is something else that I see as singularly Jewish (and it leads me to an eventual worry). Throughout history, until this century, being Jewish meant only being observant, religious Jewish. This was insured by internal forces, among them the abiding belief in the compact between God and his People. And it was sealed by external forces, the relentless persecution and isolation (with some exceptions) by the nations. Then things changed. There was an opening in Europe and in America, and here in Israel the people founded a state. Through the now porous walls of the ghetto the Jews flowed out. And assimilated. In the process, most lost their orthodoxy. And had to find a new identity to replace their religious belief, for you don‚t lose millennia of tradition so easily. I think many Jews found a new spiritual center in the ideal of justice and social service ; I am certain that it is this side of socialism, now so sadly lost when we did away with marxism for its other faults, which attracted Jews. And the other replacement for the faith that Jews lost was an alternative way of making sense of this beautiful and terrible world. This was science. I think science for many Jews has been a substitute for religion. I say this not meaning to offend my brothers and sisters who have chosen a still different way, that of Ramban and observant Jewish scientists, the way of torah u madda. I admire them. But I speak of the overwhelming majority of successful Jewish scientists who are not religious. This brings me to a concern about engineers and scientists and their education, whether it is at a French University or my Cornell. A meaningful life always has been a matter of matter and spirit, of parnuse and torah in its time. Where do your engineers and scientists, our engineers, get an exposure to the spiritual signposts of our world ˜ to the poetry of Solomon ibn Gabirol and Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, to the Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, to Thucidydes account of the Peloponnesian War, Ibsen‚s "Wild Duck," to Caravaggio‚s paintings ? If I look at the education of your scientists, the answer I get is" "Try the lycee or the students‚ spare time". You know, I don‚t trust our high schools to provide the general education they once did. Moreover I believe that it takes maturity, the maturity that comes with university age, for these cultural masterpieces to be understood. The world of the transformers of matter of today and tomorrow ˜ engineers and scientists ˜ is hardly the 19th century, with its uncritical, almost evangelical valuation of technological progress into which I think Jews (you may disagree) have bought in with a vengeance. It is essential that the engineers and scientists of the future, the Jewish engineers of the future especially, be inspired by the cultural legacy and social concern of our past. It is important for all of us to create the educational structures that educate our engineers (and not just train them), to help them value the spiritual, literary, artistic sides of the only world we have.

IF TIME PERMITS

I want to make some comments on another matter, which is the connection between science and religion in general. Here‚s what I believe : That science and religion only contend (it was the first President of Cornell, Andrew Dickson White, who over one hundred years ago, sitting in the cold of St. Petersburg as the US Ambassador to Russia, who wrote a book "The History of the Warfare of Science and Christendom"), or that they occupy separate compartments in our minds, one unrelated to the other ˜ these are both such impoverishing views ! Scientific knowledge, aesthetics, and faith cohabit. They speak to one another in the human soul ˜ yes, sometimes their dialogue is uneasy. But it is their intertwined voices which shape true human understanding. I have great faith in human beings, and I love and accept their complexity and seeming contradictory nature. Which shows up in their capability for good and evil, within one person. And in their capacity to believe, and doubt that belief. And, for that matter, in a molecule being both harmful and beneficial — as ozone and morphine are. It seems obvious to me (but not to some other scientists, who I then believe have abdicated the most basic scientific principle : observe) that religion is not superstition, but an unfailing companion of human nature. Religion is crosscultural. It represents as basic a human quality, a consequence of our consciousness, a way of coping with this world, as curiosity. That curiosity, eventually, combining with commerce, European philosophy and other veins, led to modern science. As a thinking human being, reflecting on matter and spirit, I am interested in how it works, this triple vision of one world, perceived and acted on by human beings, through religion, science, and art. Let me at this point retell in my own words, one of the Midrashim on creation : It was a tie ; the heavenly vote was split right down the middle ˜ two in favor, two against. At issue ˜ "Should man be created ?" The ministering angels formed parties : Love said, "Yes, let him be created, because he will dispense acts of love," while Truth argued, "No, let him not be created, for he is a complete fake." Righteousness countered, "Yes, let him be created, because he will do righteous deeds", and Peace demurred, "Let him not be created, for he is one mass of contention." The score was even : Love and Righteousness in favor ; Truth and Peace against. What did the Lord do ? He took Truth and hurled it to the ground, smashing it into thousands of jagged pieces. Thus He broke the tie. Now, two to one in favor, man was created. The ministering angels dared to ask the Master of the Universe "Why do You break Your emblem, Truth ?", for indeed Truth was His seal and emblem. He answered, "Let truth spring up from the earth." (Psalm 85 :11). >From then on truth was dispersed, splintered into fragments like a jigsaw puzzle. While a person might find a piece, it held little meaning until he joined with others who had painstakingly gained different pieces of the puzzle. Only then, slowly and deliberately, they could try to fit their pieces of Truth together. To make sense, some sense of things. This ancient Jewish allegory (with Platonic overtones) struck a chord with Shira Leibowitz Schmidt and me as we wrote Old Wine, New Flasks, a book on issues of Science and Jewish religious tradition, as we attempted to put together (the all too few) jigsaw pieces we found. And it remains to me a signpost for the way science and religion are conjoined. I would like to make a few more specific comments on science and religion : 1. A case for everyday life The word halakhah for Jewish religious law, is old, and shares its root with that of the verb "to walk", or "to proceed". Indeed one way to describe halakhah is that to the observant Jew the law indeed is "the way" to follow, again very much in the simple everyday way that we wend through life. Thus the concern of Jewish religious texts is often mundane in the true sense of the word. What about the concern of science ? Despite occasional claims to the contrary, I think science is common sense, mathematicized. It is looking at the real things of the everyday world, the mundus that surrounds us, and with our ingenious tools, cool (and hot) thought, and with measurements trying, full of curiosity, trying to understand that world. No surprise then, that the concerns of Jewish religious inquiry often intersect those of science. In the book Shira and I wrote we encountered the Chief Rabbi of Atlanta worrying about the ingredients of Coca-Cola, lest a ritually forbidden component be therein. A concern for the composition on an unknown mixture (yes, even Coca-Cola) is the stuff of analytical chemistry. We also met a hasidic rabbi in 19th century Russia journeying to Italy to find the shellfish source of a blue dye, the secret of whose production was lost to the Jews 1300 years before then. And tell how that dye was central to the heretical rebellion of Korah, a biblical tale that resonates today in the ideology of some of the West Bank settlers. Simple, material things, and the problems they pose for scientific and religious consideration lead inevitably to pivotal philosophical and societal issues ˜ of the nature of Nature, of purity and its lack, of authority (scientific and religious) claimed, contested, and conferred, of perception and representation, of the character of rebellion, of ecological concerns, of signs (and icons) of the times, of the sacred and the profane. It‚s amazing where thinking about how your left hand differs from your right can lead you ! 2. A (nicely parochial) case for looking specifically at chemistry, in the context of science and Jewish religious tradition. Chemistry is the craft, art, business, and finally science, of substances and their transformations. With great ingenuity and much labor, we have learned that the substances are, deep within, molecular. Though small, these persistent groupings of atoms are nicely positioned in the middle ˜ not the ultimately small quark, not the immense galactic cluster. Molecules are intermediate ˜ just where human beings are... Which is why human beings have ambiguous attitudes toward chemicals ˜ these molecular groupings of which we and everything else are made can really heal, and really hurt. Chemistry is on the human scale. So is Jewish religious tradition. Not that other religious structures (diverse as only human condition can make them) are of less spiritual value to their believers. But there is something special in Bible, Talmud and rabbinical responsa. This is the emphasis on everyday life and the way that life interacts with the spiritual realm. Open a page of the Talmud, and what do you see ? Not the soaring heights of philosophical discourse, but a meticulous, detailed discussion of the indemnity to be paid if an ox you borrowed tramples on someone’s case of wine. I do not wish to minimize the differences between science and religion. In the spectrum of being the same and not the same, science and religion are perhaps more different than alike. And, at times, in every culture, they‚ve been led into conflict ˜ be it the American textbook wars on creationism, in his time Galileo and the Catholic Church, the ultraorthodox vs. archaeologists in Israel. But I believe that science and Jewish religious tradition share this : the conviction that this world is very much real and tangible, that the world and the actions of human beings matter, and that there is order to be found. This commonality is a lot to build on. There is no need to look for fuzzy systems of religious thought supposedly more amenable to scientific thinking, nor to wring one‚s hands at the "irrational" persistence of serious religious conviction after two centuries of science. Nor will one find in science a "justification" for what is in the Bible. I also dislike a seductive identification of God with the edge of the universe, or for that matter with all the infinities of our ignorance. I think that is a copout, indeed almost an insult to the depth and honesty of religious belief. To me the resonances in the way thinking, feeling human beings confront everyday life suffice ˜ they are profoundly evocative of the spirit of both religion and science. Science indeed deals with the ordinary ˜ the wonder in that suffices ˜ but it will not remain in the ghetto of the material. To quote Richard Powers, science is A way of looking, reverencing. And the purpose of all science, like living, which amounts to the same thing, was not the accumulation of gnostic power, fixing of formulas for the names of God, stockpiling brutal efficiency, accomplishing the sadistic myth of progress. The purpose of science was to revive and cultivate a perpetual state of wonder. For nothing deserved wonder so much as our capacity to feel it. And religion ˜ well, it simply refuses to bury itself in the study of wondrously rich tomes of the Talmud, the warm tones of the Sabbath. Science and religion are both ways of trying to understand the world, to find meaning in that world‚s beauty and terror. The stories that interest me, that we tell in our book, are testimony to the struggle to understand. They bear evidence to the human condition ˜ that people seek meaning, and people act. In these stories of matter and spirit both Adams (and women too) speak, try to understand, exercise compassion, find the new. The voices of science and religion intertwine. How shall we proceed, how shall we create and understand, how shall we find the new ? For guidance, we return to Zloczow, and the words of Rabbi Yehiel Mikhal (who was roughly a contemporary of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier) : The maggid of Zloczow was asked by one of his disciples : "In the book of Elijah we read : ’Everyone in Israel is in duty bound to say : When will my work approach the works of my fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.’ How are we to understand this ? How could we ever venture to think that we could do what our fathers could ?" The rabbi expounded : "Just as our fathers invented new ways of service, each a new service according to his own character : one the service of love, the other that of stern justice, the third that of beauty, so each one of us in his own way shall devise something new in the light of the teachings and of service, and do what has not yet been done."