The Messianic Role of Science & Torah

The past century and especially the last several decades have brought a great interest in expanded human potential.  There is a full and growing library in the subject of, what has been called, the confluence of mysticism and the New Sciences.  Kabbalah, the Jewish esoteric tradition, has long envisioned and even required an evolving interface between scientific discovery and esoteric truth.

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According to the teachings of esoteric Judaism, all knowledge, both spiritual and material wisdom, originally coexisted in a seamless unity within a higher dimension.  Together, these two modes of wisdom comprised a larger, all-encompassing Universal Torah (Torah literally meaning “instruction” or “teachings”). A collapse, i.e., the episode of the eating from the Tree of Knowledge, however, ensued in which the database of all knowledge split itself into “spiritual” and “material” planes of existence. Thus, we have the roots of the conflict between “religion” and “science.”  Yet, any given mystical or technological truth can only be one of two sides of the same puzzle. Thus, the material world is also a mode of spirituality, only externalized and concretized. Vice-versa, the spiritual world is a mode of the material reality, only internalized and spiritualized.

 

From both a secular and scientific perspective, as well as from a fundamentalist religious perspective, this unique synergistic re-union is very challenging, if not intimidating and appears “heretical.” Yet, this is the explicit doctrine of the Gaon of Vilna and his clandestine cadre of Talmudic Sage-Mystics of Skhlov. The ultimate truth is not revealed through the supra-natural alone nor is it only discovered through scientific development – it is more than both. Both forms of wisdom are destined to reunite.  Perforce, this is stimulating a worldwide paradigm shift in consciousness.  These stages of global evolution are aspects of the Messianic Era which is central to the teachings of esoteric as well as traditional Judaism. (5)

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According to this tradition, our role as the “Final Generation” in the re-unification of these two modes of wisdom is achieved by matching the right tool with the right job.  In other words, we must use the new maps, models, and metaphors of the “wisdom from below” in order to grasp the “wisdom from above.”  In turn, the transcendent wisdom of the Torah will cast its light of clarity and direction upon the enchanting and often overpowering tools of science and technology.