I came across this (2 year) old blog entry, but found it interesting. It quotes extensively from (and adds some minor comments to) an article from Moment Magazine. The piece in question is about an orthodox rabbi Natan (or Nosson) Slifkin, who is interested in zoology. Indeed his own website is ZooTorah.com (Torah is the five books of Moses, the very first part of the Bible.) The problem is that he found evolution the most plausable explanation for the “complex web of life.” At least that’s what the article claims and also those communities that banned his books from yeshivas (schools.) His books were declared to be “full of heresy, twist and misrepresent the words of our sages and ridicule the foundations of our emunah [faith].”
I wonder thought whether though whether he really believes in evolution. For his latest book (Challenge of Creation: Judaism’s Encounter with Science, Cosmology, and Evolution) the executive vice president of the Orthodox Union wrote the foreward. That signals a certain level of acceptance for me. I copy here his disclaimer to show his real stance:
This book was written for those who are committed to the tenets of Judaism, but also respect the scientific enterprise and possess an advanced education in the natural sciences, and who are therefore disturbed by the challenges that are raised for their understanding of Torah. It addresses these challenges by following the approach of Rambam (Maimonides) and similar Torah scholars towards these issues, which, while firmly within the framework of authentic Orthodox Judaism, is not the method of choice in many segments of the ultra-Orthodox community. But many have found that no other approach works as well in solving these difficulties.
The point I am trying to make that book banning can happen on the basis of any number of principles. We most often here about people’s concern from a moral perspective and often from Christians. But they don’t have exclusive rights to do so as it appears from the affair above. I also wanted to show that there are other contexts, not just the public library, where book banning can become an issue. Such as the relatively closed private communities of the orthodox and ultra-orthodox Jews.
This entry is part of my Intellectual Freedom series.