Torah and Science Conference: Putting the Universe in Perspective

When Rabbi Sholom Ber Lipskar first met Professor Herman Branover in the early 1970s, not long after the latter’s emigration from the former Soviet Union, he was tasked with introducing the religious refusnik to professors at various Miami universities.

“Professor Branover was a celebrity at the time,” says Lipskar, the Chabad-Lubavitch emissary who since 1981 has been the senior rabbi at the stately Shul of Bal Harbour in southeast Florida. “He was one of the highest-ranking scientists to be allowed to leave the Soviet Union, and I was asked to take him around here. We forged a relationship then that has continued even to this day.”

In 1987, when the idea was first raised to establish a conference to speak to the interface between Torah and science—the two seemingly opposite worlds inhabited both by Branover and other religious scientists—a partnership developed between the rabbi and the professor, and the Miami International Torah and Science Conference was born.

“We talked about creating such a conference and spent quite a bit of time developing this concept,” explains Lipskar. “When we wrote to the [Lubavitcher] Rebbe [Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory] to ask for a blessing, he was very pleased.

“The Rebbe told us that Miami was a perfect place to make such a conference because its central location made it accessible for people from all over the U.S. and Canada, as well as South America and internationally.”

This year’s four-day conference, titled “Beginnings, Endings & Renewals: Conversations Between Torah Wisdom and Scientific Knowledge About the Universe, Human Life and the Mind,” will touch on the universe’s beginning and end, the definition of human life and whether the mind derives from the brain or vice-versa, among other cutting-edge conversations. It will be held at the Shul of Bal Harbour, in Surfside, Fla., attended by scientists, rabbis, philosophers and laypeople—an estimated 400 participants in all.

Prominent presenters from the scientific community include Dr. Barry Baumel, founder and medical director at the Baumel-Eisner Neuromedical Institute, a leading medical research center in south Florida; Dr. Daniel Drubach of the Behavioral Neurology Division at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.; and Dr. John Loike, director of special programs at Columbia University’s Center for Bioethics in New York. Rabbis presenting various topics include Chabad.org’s Rabbi Tzvi Freeman; Rabbi Dr. Avraham Steinberg, author of the Encyclopedia of Jewish Medical Ethics; and Rabbi Dr. Moshe Tendler, a prominent authority on Jewish medical ethics.

The conference is subtitled “Absolute Standards in a World of Relativity.”

Lipskar explains that when the Rebbe blessed that first conference, which was held in December of 1987, he circled the word “relativity” on the invitation, remarking that Albert Einstein’s research probed the nature of light. The Rebbe said then that the same way the speed of physical light provides a measure of absoluteness to the physical world, the light of the Torah, invoked by kindling the Chanukah lights, signifies another level of absoluteness.

“The Rebbe told Professor Branover that the conference and the B’Or HaTorah journal should not be apologetic,” says Rabbi Simon Jacobson, author of the bestselling Towards a Meaningful Life, and a presenter on the topic “Does Life Ever End?” at this year’s conference.

“It’s a question of approach,” he continues. “Do you see the world and know that it functions according to its own rules, and then have to fit G‑d and Torah into it? Or do you see a world that functions according to G‑d’s rules that science can help explain.”

‘An Ongoing Conversation’

Born and raised in Riga, Latvia, Branover,who has suffered from an illness in recent years—is a world-renowned expert in the field of magnetohydrodynamics. While still behind the Iron Curtain, he became involved with underground Jewish activities and because of that was routinely harassed by the KGB. When, after a 15-year struggle he was finally given an exit visa by authorities, he became the first Jew holding a Doctor of Science, as well as a full professorship, to be allowed to leave the Soviet Union.

Branover first settled in Israel, where he founded the SHAMIR organization for religious-scientist émigrés of the Soviet Union. In 1981 he began the B’Or HaTorah Torah and science journal, which under his editorship quickly became the premier publication of its kind, as it remains today.

Four years ago, after concluding 16 years as president of the Jerusalem College of Technology, Professor Joseph S. Bodenheimer became the editor-in-chief of the B’Or HaTorah journal, and is now one of the Miami conference organizers. An expert in electro-optics, Bodenheimer holds 11 patents and has worked to make Israel a world leader in that field.

“Science enhances Torah,” he states. “The conference accomplishes in a concentrated way what the journal seeks to accomplish: to explain that Torah permeates our lives and environment, and science, rather than to be in conflict with Torah, is actually encompassed by it.”

Bodenheimer explains that science alone, without the values of the Torah and G‑d, can quickly become a slippery slope: “Darwinism, the survival of the fittest, for example, was understood by some as a struggle between the fit and the less fit, and a reason to dispose of the ‘less fit.’

“Those who look to science for moral values can get lost in very dangerous places.”

Coming Out of One's Framework

Professor Nathan Katz teaches spirituality at the Florida International University in Miami, where the conference has been held in previous years, and has been one of the organizers of the conference since 1999. He says that looking askance at the interface between Torah and science is an increasingly rare viewpoint in today’s world.

“In recent years, there has been a trending interest in the interplay between religion and science,” he says. “There has been an increasing interest from both those who study religion and religious leaders, and scientists as well. This has really become an emerging field of study.

“Today, neuroscientists speak of the G‑d gene; there is the G‑d particle in physics. We’re beginning to see that the universe as one whole. We’re starting to see health sciences embrace the concept of meditation in the healing process, and so on.”

Katz points to the interaction between the various gathered scholars as one of the unique aspects of the Miami conference. “Scientists are scientists and rabbis are rabbis, and they seem to live in different worlds, but at the conference they make that leap and come out of their regular framework.

“At each conference, the interactions continue, the understanding grows and the conversations deepen. The scholars look forward to the conference because it’s this interaction between so many kinds of scientists and rabbis. It’s really an ongoing, 20-year-old conversation.”

One presenter, Rabbi Tzvi Freeman—a senior editor at Chabad.org and the author of Bringing Heaven Down to Earth—will be speaking on the concept of human consciousness in Judaism.

“Human consciousness is a crucial matter in halachah (Jewish law), and has been discussed extensively in Gemara and Kabbalah. Neuroscientists have been discussing it in recent years, and the Torah has thousands of years of scholarship to share on the subject.”

Freeman notes that an important factor is the free exchange of ideas that takes place at the conference, allowing experts with very different views to have an open and uncensored dialogue.

“Ultimately, for me, the most exciting thing is to be able to see how science helps us to understand the Torah better,” he says. “You can understand human consciousness, but you can understand it so much better when it is accompanied by a clinical study.”