This Week
Cover Story: Darwin In The Classroom
Balancing Act
Teaching evolution in a Jewish context.
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As public schools
debate teaching
creationism and
evolution in science
class, Jewish day
schools include
both, but keep
each in its place.
DIANA LIEBERMAN
Staff Writer
II
arriet Lorch, science
teacher at Yeshivat Akiva,
looks forward to teaching
her students about the
beauty and symmetry of the natural
world.
Once in a while, a student will ask
how the world could have been creat-
ed in just six days.
"I say, 'God doesn't wear a wrist-
watch.' I don't say it to be flip — but
what we see as a million years, the
Almighty could see as a few years."
Like most other Jewish day schools,
Akiva has a curriculum that incorpo-
rates theories of gradual change and
evolution in its science department. At
the same time, the Southfield school's
religion classes teach about the cre-
ation of the world and the history of
id St
12/10
1999
6
Diana Lieberman can be reached at
(248) 354-6060, ext. 247, or by e-mail
at dliebrm@thejewishnews.corn
ger — or references to God "saying"
God's creatures as recounted in the
something are not meant to be taken
Book of Genesis in the Bible.
literally.
This apparent contradiction has
Echoing these sentiments in the
existed as long as Jewish schools have
19th century was Rabbi Samson
attempted to equip their students for a
Rafael Hirsch. The German theolo-
life that includes more than religious
gian played a major role in re-energiz-
study and prayer.
ing Orthodox Judaism.
To make a point,
"Judaism does not seek
At
Hillel
Day
School's
Rabbi Lee Buckman,
science
lab,
Julia
Zaft,
to
teach
its youth any ideas
head of the Jewish
Jessie
Alperin
and
that
could
be rendered
Academy of Metropolitan
Rena
Wexelberg-
obsolete
by
the advances of
Detroit — a transdenom-
serious scientific research,"
inational high school that Clouser, all 12 years
old, conduct a flame
he wrote in his 1873 essay,
will open with two high
test to determine
"The Educational Value of
school grades this fall in
unknown salts.
Judaism."
West Bloomfield —
"Judaism does not fear
alluded to Maimonides'
the
advances
of
science," Rabbi Hirsch
written
in
the
Guide to the Perplexed,
continued.
In
fact,
it rejoices in them
12th century. Maimonides, he said,
and hails them with hope for the
"speaks about how passages in the
future.
Torah must be interpreted
midrashically, allegorically and not lit-
A Difference Of Opinion
erally, because otherwise it would
The conflict that Maimonides dis-
offend logic or philosophy."
patched
so readily 800 years ago has
For example, according to
surfaced once again in America's pub-
Maimonides, those lines referring to
lic schools.
God's physical parts — a hand or fin-
A furor arose in the nation's educa-
tion community last summer when
the Kansas State Board of Education
passed new statewide science standards
allowing school districts to eliminate
evolution from their curricula.
Not since the celebrated Scopes
trial in 1925 in Tennessee has Charles
Darwin's theory of man evolving from
apes garnered such heated attention.
"We cannot allow groups like the
Kansas State Board of Education to
grossly misrepresent the vision of qual-
ity science education," said a state-
ment by Gerry Wheeler, executive
director of the National Science
Teachers Association, issued after last
summer's decision.
Ira Forman, executive director of
the National Jewish Democratic
Council, branded the decision as the
work of "know-nothing Ayatollahs
who are pushing the pseudo-science of
creationism."
The new Kansas science standards
do not forbid the teaching of evolu-
don.