“Did the dinosaurs live before or after Adam and Eve?” the puzzled eight-year-old daughter of a colleague asked one day.

Many an American child may well be asking this or similar questions these days. Schools and parents all over the country, including in Wisconsin, are struggling over how public schools should, or should not, teach those scientific concepts that challenge a literal understanding of the creation story found in the biblical book of Genesis.

Even President Bush has entered the fray. He told reporters on Aug. 1 that he believes schools should “expose people to different schools of thought” on this topic.

He thereby “essentially endorsed efforts by Christian conservatives to give intelligent design equal standing with the theory of evolution in schools,” according to a Knight Ridder News Service report (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Aug. 2).

Earlier, in November 2004, the school board in the northern Wisconsin town of Grantsburg made national news by revising its schools’ science curriculums to allow teaching of creationism with evolution.

“Creationism” is a body of thought and a social-political movement that strives to uphold a literal or nearly literal account of Genesis; to deny the truth of not only evolution, but also of much geology and astronomy; and to have this taught in science classes in public schools.

In response to protests from throughout the state and nation, the Grantsburg board revised its policy in December, saying the policy won’t “call for the teaching of creationism or intelligent design,” according to a Dec. 8 Associated Press story.

“Intelligent design,” as an article by H. Allen Orr in the May 30 New Yorker magazine describes it, is a relatively new variation on creationism, according to most biological scientists.

Intelligent design’s advocates, however, say they are not creationists, do not uphold the literal truth of Genesis and do say that evolution through natural selection plays a role in nature.

But they do contend that “There are things in the world, most notably life, that cannot be accounted for by known natural causes and show features that, in any other context, we would attribute to intelligence,” wrote Orr.

Meanwhile, the New York Times on Feb. 1 reported that in some public schools throughout the country, science teachers and principals refuse to teach evolution in order to avoid antagonizing Christian fundamentalist students and parents.

Jews divided

The Jewish community, in the U.S. and throughout the world, is not central to this controversy. The public clash has tended mostly to involve groups of Christian biblical literalists who have been at war with evolution theory ever since British scientist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) proposed it in his books “The Origin of Species” and “The Descent of Man.”

Nevertheless, the Jewish world also is divided on the subject. A Jan. 18 JTA article discussed how Orthodox Jewish views clashed with those of liberal Jewish movements and groups regarding controversies over teaching evolution in Georgia and Pennsylvania.

In that same month, according to news reports, 23 fervently Orthodox rabbis signed an open letter that was posted in the Mea Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem denouncing three books by “Zoo Rabbi” Nosson Slifkin.

Slifkin is a British-born Orthodox rabbi and self-taught zoologist who “has made a career of reconciling Jewish scripture with modern natural history” (New York Times, March 22).
His books include one on “The Science of Torah.” But the letter-signing rabbis regard three of his books as “complete heresy” (New Jersey Jewish News, July 7).

In this educational-intellectual-political climate, the officials of the five Milwaukee-area Jewish day schools have given careful thought to how to handle evolution and related subjects.

‘Not a science book’

The “non-denominational, pluralistic” and generally “non-Orthodox” community school, Milwaukee Jewish Day School, has the least difficulty accepting and teaching scientific views of nature.

“I can comfortably teach the narrative in the Torah about creation and at the same time embrace the theories of evolution that we teach in our science program,” said Rabbi Philip Nadel, co-director of MJDS.

And he can do that, he said, “because those two very different perspectives on the creation of the world are rooted in very different ideas.”

“The Torah is not a science book,” he continued. “The Torah exists to teach certain life lessons and values.”

The Torah’s creation story “is there to teach lessons about the place and role of humanity in God’s world. It’s about the order of the universe and the dignity of all God’s creations,” Nadel said. “It’s not trying to teach us science. Science comes from a different place.”

“I look at the world and I see God’s work in front of me,” he said. “For me, theologically speaking, it makes great sense that there is great order in the world God created.
“I think as a person who sits comfortably in the modern world, but is ennobled through a religious tradition I take great pride in and have great love for. I look for places where those things can come together.”

At the Hillel Academy, “a Torah-based school that embraces the entire Jewish community,” as principal B. Devorah Shmotkin describes it, “Our approach is that Torah and science are compatible,” she said.

“In fact, the more one delves into the natural sciences, one experiences the full beauty and awesomeness of God and the created world.”

Hillel Academy exposes students to the scientific theories, but also to “many other responses, all valid, all steeped in a Torah perspective,” she said. “We show kids how the different theories are looked at through the lens of Torah.”

And she believes this must be communicated at a fairly high intellectual level. “We make a mistake in speaking down to children,” she said. “We need to speak to them intelligently and in a way that is respectful of their intellectual ability.”

In contrast, Rabbi Eliezer Speiser, principal of the Orthodox Yeshiva Elementary School, said, “We don’t think kids that age have developed enough critical thinking to get into [evolution].” That is one reason “we go right past it” in YES’s science program.

But there is another reason. “We don’t believe in it,” he said, so “it is not something we talk about.”

If within the science materials the school uses “there’s a reference to the universe being billions of years old, we explain that God created the world old, with all the elements that make it look and feel old,” Speiser said. “If God is omnipotent, He can do that.”

It is also true, however, that “there is so much stuff in science,” which is another reason the school doesn’t take time to discuss evolution and the related issues, he said.

Showing alternatives

Suzanne Zigun, the science teacher for the past eight or so years at the Torah Academy of Milwaukee Orthodox high school for girls, also doesn’t have a lot of time to devote to evolution.

She told The Chronicle that she spends maybe “a day or two” on the topic in the course of a science curriculum spanning about two years that includes basics of both the physical and biological sciences.

But she doesn’t shy from the issues, which have meaning for her personally. Raised Reform, she became Orthodox while she was attending Emory University in Atlanta; and there she took a double major in biology and religious studies concentrating on Judaism. (She also has a master’s degree in education from the University of Connecticut and has done religious study in Israel.)

“I do not teach creationism,” she said, but “I am a person of faith. And I think it is important to any person’s faith that not everything has to be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

“When I teach evolution,” she continued, “I present it as a theory, because there is no way beyond any doubt to suggest that or prove that the reptiles came from the amphibians or the birds came from the dinosaurs. There is no proof; there is an inference.”

Even so, “I allow for the fact that evolution can be considered as a mechanism for creation, and that it’s possible that the world is so many millions of years old,” she said.
“I do emphasize one important difference about what science states as fact and that which we observe: that man did not descend from apes.”

Above all, “It is important for the girls to understand that science does not always have the answers to everything,” she said.

The Wisconsin Institute for Torah Study, an Orthodox institution for boys, takes a completely different approach in its high school program. Assistant principal Rabbi Yitzchok Shapiro said that WITS doesn’t teach evolution in its general studies or science curriculums.

Instead, it discusses evolution and related issues as part of its hashkafa, or Torah perspectives, program, which is part of its Jewish studies curriculum. There, “we will discuss scientific theories that seem to be in contradiction to Torah teachings,” Shapiro said.

In that context, Shapiro continued, the school teaches the following: “There are some thinkers in the Orthodox world that feel that the age of the universe and the general outline of the theory of evolution are not irreconcilable with Torah teaching. But the mainstream, traditional yeshiva approach is that in fact these scientific theories are not reconcilable with traditional Torah teaching.”

“We feel it is sufficient to explain the various options, and explain that one is more mainstream without presenting it as an ideological certainty,” he said.

However, the school does “embrace … the basic concept and logic and philosophy” of intelligent design, because “we consider [it] to be conclusive proof of the existence of a creator,” he said.