Kabbalah, Evolution and Intelligent Design

BS"D

Chanukah, 5766 - The Israeli Center, Jerusalem

Lecture 3

Transcript of seminar by Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh Shlita

 

One of the basic premises that we would like to convey these evenings is the fact that when God plans the world there is a basic plan, which in the terminology of the Kabbalah, as we mentioned already before, is called shi’er be’atzmo beko’ach kol mah she’atid lihyot befo’al it’s like a diagram, a blueprint of reality and the blueprint itself is related to the primordial Torah, of which it says that the Torah was already there two thousand years, meaning two Divine days before the beginning of  creation itself. And about that primordial Torah, chazal say that God looked into the Torah and created the world in accordance with that blueprint, that plan. Since we believe that creation is also an on-going process, it means that God is continually looking into His blueprint and following His own instructions, because He planned it and He wrote out His own instructions and now He looks at what He’s supposed to do and does what He is supposed to do every split second. Our general thought is that the concept of evolution need not necessarily negate faith, and just the opposite – it can even enhance faith in a certain way if we just understand it properly and define the parameters properly it can enhance our understanding of the Creator and the creation and enhance our relationship to God. Let us begin by saying that the secular evolutionary biologist begins with the assumption that everything happens by pure chance. That is from the very outset there is a denial, either an explicit or implicit denial of purpose, as we were talking about last night, and of direction, that it is our consciousness that is directing the course of events, the course of history, the course of universal history. One of the very first things that a Jew believes - or a non-Jew – any believing person who believes in God believes that nothing happens by chance, that things do not occur by chance, ein mikreh. The Torah describes our leaving God as walking with Him bekeri. Keri means chance, it means entering into a mindset in which everything in the world happens by chance. We believe that ein mikreh, nothing happens by chance, everything is “on purpose, for a good purpose”. On purpose means that it is not happening by chance, and for a good purpose means that God has a good objective in mind when things happen. The most paradoxical thing, as we will explain, is that even my own free choice – that I can choose evil and not good – that’s the gift that God has given me – is also not by chance and from some very, very deep perspective on reality which, even for the great Jewish thinkers/philosophers – the Rambam and all of the great thinkers – this still remains a paradox in certain respects. God foresees, even though He doesn’t take away my free choice, but He does foresee what I am going to choose in a certain way. Very often in the Torah it says that God foresees that the Jewish people is going to go away [from the Torah] nonetheless the course of history that He is directing is always pointing for the good. Sometimes you have to go down a hill in order to come up a higher hill, that’s yeridah tzorech aliyah [that’s why Hashem is always creating new mountains in accordance with seeing when people have to go down in order to come up]. In any event, things are being directed.

Now the secular – who calls himself - scientist/biologist will say that everything is by chance. One of the ways to understand chance is – secular evolutionary biologist base it all on random – random mutations and then natural selection but then the mutation which is the beginning of any change is purely random – pure chance. That is the one postulate that we can say that we do not accept. Everything else in evolutionary theory we can get along with – almost everything but the one thing that we can say that we definitely can’t agree with is that things are really just by chance, just random. Now statistically, it’s now been demonstrated very, very clearly over the past few decades that based upon the postulate of pure chance and random mutation, even one DNA cell could not “happen” over  a period of even fifteen billion years it would have to take literally billions of billions of years statistically. So the postulation of the Big Bang that the world is fifteen billion years old is not anywhere near enough time for one living cell to “happen” by chance. So much as we can overcome this problem of chance then our way is already paved, we have a paved way to explain and connect almost everything biologists will tell you with the Torah.

What is the simplest way to say what is chance and what is not chance, what has purpose and direction? The simplest way is to call it tohu and tikun, the secular scientist indoctrinates himself to believe in a world that is basically chaotic, olam hatohu. He’s like those seven primordial kings of Edom that ruled and died. To rule and die is very similar to what we were talking about yesterday – a species or an order or a class, comes into existence and then it disappears, it becomes extinct. So this whole concept of appearing and disappearing in the course of nature and evolution is a very tohu-dikker concept. That’s exactly the way that the world of Tohu is described, that things come into being and then they go out of being. Yesterday we said that we also called that vayehi erev vayehi boker, evening and morning.

As we said yesterday, physics in general is one step ahead of chemistry and chemistry is one step ahead of biology so as we know in many disciplines, until things come down it takes time, it’s also an evolutionary process, until things integrate into lower level disciplines. In modern physics there is a very, very important new theory that is already several decades old, that is called Chaos Theory – there are even secular books written about Chaos Theory and this is one of the most exciting new avenues in physics. The basic, bottom-line idea is that things that were previously considered to be chaotic – that you couldn’t give any rules to it and it seems that purely things are happening by chance. To say that something is happening by chance is to say that it is impossible to describe what is happening mathematically – phenomena that have no rational description – that’s chaos. This new theory discovers some deep mathematical principles and some deep hidden order within chaos meaning that within chaos itself there is some order deep down. Order is tikun, that’s the basic definition in Kabbalah of tikun, of rectification is called order and what does not have order is tohu. Now tohu is also very powerful we know that there is what is called the lights of tohu are very powerful. Because they are so powerful they create big things and then they die. The most classic example of a species that appears or a class that appears and then becomes extinct are the real big ones – the dinosaurs – they’re really from the world of Chaos, they are orot merubim – they also have big bodies. The dinosaurs are the classic, perfect example of chaotic creation that reigned for a period in the course of history and then they died, they became extinct. Now we’re saying several things at the same time. If this thought of chaos theory in physics would seep down and reach biology – and it definitely will – then even the biologists would become convinced that there is no such thing as pure random. Things can appear random but in a deep, hidden dimension, there is order, something is in control. So the first thing that we have to try to convince is that there is some conscious control of what is going on in the world, from the very smallest phenomenon to the very biggest phenomenon – the micro to the macro. Now, our postulation is that first of all, everything is planned and that plan is before creation even begins. That plan is called the shiur or the hashara sheshi’er be’atzmo bekoach that Hashem outlined and planned in potential everything that is going to become actual in the course of history, then He looks into His plan and He creates the world in accordance with that plan. When that plan appears or reappears after the initial contraction of Hashem’s light (we began to speak about this last night), then that plan is called Primordial Man, Adam Kadmon, meaning that according to Kabbalah there is something engrained in the very core of all of the worlds, when we speak of a high world we don’t mean that it is up there in the sky, we mean that it is very deeply engraved within all of reality. When we speak of something being high we mean that it is deep inside. The deepest kernel of reality inside everything is this reality which is called Adam Kadmon, Primordial Man. The deepest thing is called Primordial Man which seems to be a much more tangible concept than the other worlds that “cover” it, Atzilut, Emanation and then Creation, Formation and Action which seem to be less tangible concepts as opposed to “Man” because when you’re speaking about man you’re speaking about something tangible you’re talking about limbs – even in Kabbalah, when the Arizal talks about Primordial Man he talks about eyes and ears and mouth and limbs, because it is just like a man. Again, this is infinitely higher and deeper than the world of Emanation which is pure Divine consciousness and even it’s name – there is no inference of anthropomorphism whatsoever. When you study Kabbalah in the world of Atzilut there are also persona, partzufim and when you are talking about Atzilut you’re talking about light, pure light that is emanating from the head, from the source of light so how is it that something which is so anthropomorphic is inside Atzilut, Emanation and certainly inside the other worlds that cover over Emanation – Creation, Formation and Action. So again, what is that? That is the plan, already from the beginning of the universe in the Big Bang or before the Big Bang according to  Inflation theory – that there were stages even before the Big Bang – that there is some picture of the objective. So first thing is that if the world didn’t have a picture of where it’s heading, then evolution could not work. That’s what this proves that just by random mutations you could never get to the first cellular organism – you wouldn’t reach it and certainly you wouldn’t reach totally different variations of classes and orders and phyla of all of the multitude – millions of species of living organisms that exist.

There is some Primordial Man at the core of reality, meaning that there is a picture of where it’s going and that picture motivates things from the very beginning of creation. Even in a bacterial cell in a certain way that bacterial cell has a picture some place in his mind – again these are all concepts which our secular scientist.

(We’ll call him just “Darwin” or maybe we’ll call him adam d’beliya’al – adam is rashei teivot: Aristo, Darvin, Mendel that’s the adam of biology. Because actually, biology and even evolutionary biology, philosophically, began with Aristotle. It begins with the Greeks, that’s now our holiday of Chanukah, to overcome the philosophy of the Greeks. In our text, the basic text of evolution that is used in schools, undergraduate studies it says that the basic thought the idea of evolution really begins with Aristotle, with the Greeks. He’s the beginning, just like he’s the beginning of a lot of other things in the secular world. Then comes Darwin, but Darwin’s theory would never have made it, as we will go onto explain, would never have continued to exist without Mendel who was also a komer [monk]. That Mendel is the Mendel of genetics. Without genetics evolution would not have made it, would not have continued. So this whole theory of evolution itself has its own three stages of evolution that it begins with Aristotle then it skips a long way until it reaches Darwin. Darwin puts a great new input into the theory of evolution and then it skips not too much, just a few decades to Mendel, and then it also disappears for a period of time because he wasn’t recognized for another several decades and then suddenly it became rediscovered and evolution took off. So this is just a game and we like making acronyms, so this is the evolution of man. Man is alef- dalet- mem, which is the acronym for these three in their order, Aristo, Darwin and Mendel, that’s the adam of evolutionary theory. This particular adam is the adam of tohu not the adam of tikun. There are two adams as it says, shofech dam ha’adam be’adam damo yishafech, called the adam of tikun and the adam debeliya’al. Nonetheless, we want to convert this adam to Yiddishkeit. That’s what our agenda is.)

So once more, he obviously could never accept that a bacterial cell – or even before a bacterial cell – yesterday we were talking about dust that even inanimate reality of the mineral kingdom has a mind or has consciousness or has vision. To him that’s absurd that’s crazy but we say that it does because we say that even inanimate objects have a spiritual soul, they have a sar it has a spiritual officer to it. Like, a river has a sar, a mountain has a sar everything in the world has spirituality behind it, the stars have spiritual souls to them. It sounds like a real ancient, old-fashioned superstition, but in the Torah it is not superstition, it just has to be understood properly. So we’re coming from a place where everything has, in addition to its material dimension a deep spiritual dimension to it and basically, what we are saying is that everything in the world is programmed towards the objective of creation and because it’s programmed, that’s why the mutations can take place over a much shorter period of time, even though it appears to be random. But the order that exists within the chaos is this hidden program. Nature is programmed and what is that program? It’s like you create a program for a computer, nature has its program, it’s computer programmed, like you buy a program for fifty dollars or something and put it into your computer. So all of nature has its program. That program is called Adam Kadmon. And that is put into the computer but you don’t see it there at all but it is there and by being there it is giving every facet of nature a definite direction where we are headed to. So, right now, this thought comes out over and over in chazal and in the midrash and later in Chassidic seforim and there is one very important sefer that we are going to quote, it’s called Mei Hashiloach the Rebbe of Izhbitze and he is one of the people who in a very few words and very few lines he presents a thought, a most basic thought in converting evolutionary theory into kedushah into the perspective of the Torah. The fact that all of nature is programmed towards man means that every part of nature has a desire to reach the pinnacle, which is man. What is so great about man? The Torah says that betzelem Elokim bara et ha’adam, God created man in His image. What is in His image? So, as we said yesterday, the most important commentary for our purposes here is the Malbim and the Malbim says that when God creates man in His image, the word tzelem, image is a derivative of the word tzel which means a shadow so to create man in the image of God is to create a “shadow” God, betzelem Elokim. A shadow is not just a shadow of some source of light but a shadow also represents or symbolizes in a certain sense, returning light or at least, the desire to return to the source of the light, a reflective projector upwards. From below, from here down you just see a shadow but at the top of the shadow, where it’s coming from, there’s light going back to its source – that’s what a shadow means, he explains – that a shadow is really or chozer, it’s returning light. As we said from the Maggid and from other sources, man is the epitome of returning to God – that’s the meaning of being created betzelem Elokim. That’s why he descends for the sake of ascent, because he, more than any other being, is intended to aspire to return. That’s what is the greatest service of this world. Everyone, even a tzadik in this world, relative to how his soul was before it descended into a body, is a ba’al teshuvah, we’re all ba’alei teshuvah, we’re all returning.

The Mei Hashiloach explains, based upon Chazal (he says it in a very clear way) that nature is always looking towards man. The more nature progresses, it’s getting closer and closer to man - the more evolution progresses. So the closer you are to something, the more impetus and incentive you have to reach the end. It says that when a person comes closer and closer to his goal, the incentive becomes more and more. One thing that the textbooks tell you about evolution is that there is more mutational activity in higher forms than in lower forms. There are two-hundred times more mutations in homosapians than in bacteria. It’s not so much, but as forms ascend there is more activity – more mutational activity is going on, meaning that there is more excitement. There is more excitement because we’re coming closer to home. There is a famous parable of the Ba’al Shem Tov, that when a child is sent far away from his father, he settles in that foreign environment and he can become sunk and drown in that foreign environment until at some point he awakens and he becomes aroused – what is the feeling of teshuvah? First of all he becomes aroused to leave that foreign environment livroach, to run away from the beit sefer, then the closer he comes to home he gets a new energy of coming closer and closer until he reaches home and meets again after so long, after so many years – after so many billions of years – his father who he was sent away from. Mutation is an excited state – an unnatural, even miraculous event, as we are going to go on to explain – every mutation is a little miracle. This is also alluded to in the Malbim and the higher the form is at any point in the history of the universe, which is the history of evolution, the highest form has the most mutational energy in it. So once more, this is even now testified to in the textbook and it is the “spearhead” (because all of evolution is like a spear and the spear has a head to it) and the spearhead is being thrust at its objective towards its aspiration which is man and not man to be just stam a human being, but man to be a tzelem Elokim, to reflect – to be perfectly in line with the Creator and to reflect the Creator, to return to the Creator, thereby uplifting all of creation. It says (we’re going to go on to explain this), when man was created (only with man) it says na’aseh adam, let Us make man, in the first story of creation. It is not clear who God is talking to when He says, “Let Us make man”, but one of the interpretations in Chazal is that He is talking to all of creation. What the Mei Hashiloach is mechadesh, his vort, his novelty is that reason that God turns to all of creation and says “Let Us –now, all together – make man” is because creation has innately, or inherently in the very grain of creation, it has the aspiration also to... we have to have a shaliach. All of creation knows that we want to return to God, we want to be connected to God and we have to have somebody who is our emissary, like the Gemarra says that a Kohen, a priest who serves in the Temple. Who is he an emissary for? Is he a shilucha de’Rachmana, is he God’s emissary to us, or is he shilucha didan, is he our emissary to bring us to God? So the same thing with man in a certain way. When God says “Let Us make man” he is responding to a desire that is inherent and ingrained in nature that nature also came to the point that we now are ready to reach the pinnacle, everything has been created except for man and we are now ready for man to be created and man will lift us. We see in the story of the flood that if man suffers or man is punished then the whole world is punished – everything depends upon man - and nature itself “knows” that.

So once more, the bottom line right now is that the secular scientist will say all kinds of imaginary ideas (as we said last night), but what stops him is from saying that there is any soul/motivation in the components of nature, in the organisms of nature that’s his mental block. If we can break through that mental block we have the whole problem solved and we have the way paved to achdut, to unity, between Torah and science. Because it’s so very close, there is so much “pleasant” imagery going on in the theories, that it’s not so far to say (and this is what we are going to explain tomorrow in relation to a specific theory) that there is some emotional force within nature, some soul that is working in some direction.

Yesterday we said that there is a theory of how the giraffe got his long neck. The first theory is Lamarck’s theory (Lamarck was a famous biologist who lived just a few years before Darwin and we quoted his name because a very important principle that is accepted to this day it just had to go through Darwin and Mendel in order to come to its present formulation. Lamarck was the first one to say, before Darwin, that acquired characters are inherited. The first chidush which is called the heart of evolutionary biology is called Lamarkian Inheritance and if one believes in Lamarkian Inheritance then Darwin and Mendel are just a way to figure out – to give it a certain amount of formulation of how it works but the idea that acquired attributes – it’s called acquired characters – is inherited to the next generation – that’s Lamarck. His most famous example was the giraffe example. The giraffe example is that the giraffe wanted to reach higher up the tree so he stretched his neck but he stretched it so much that his neck became a little bit longer. That’s an acquired character that wasn’t there before so Lamarck says that acquired characters are inherited – so he inherited that to the next generation, so a part of the next generation was born with longer necks and so it went on and on until nature liked these long-necked giraffes until it became real. So after that, Darwin and Mendel said something else altogether, Lamarck explicitly said that the change of character depends on a certain emotive power in the organism, he even called it “wishing”.

It’s also very important to mention that living contemporary Lamarck was Rabbi Isaac of Homil and he also speaks of yichul, wishing, it’s one of the big, very deep topics of Chassidut, what happens when a person wishes for something for long enough. To understand what we said before that nature wished for man to be there in order to elevate all of nature to represent and to be an emissary for all of nature. This is exactly the principle that the Jewish people wishes for Mashiach bechol yom sheyavo. That itself if you understand evolution is a sign that those people who are most wishing for Mashiach – that itself is the pinnacle of the evolutionary ladder and it’s going to become true. Like we are taught about before the Exodus from Egypt, that the mothers (we’ll talk more about the women later) would sing the lullabies to the children that soon the redeemer is going to come and we’re going to be redeemed from Egypt and because of the energy put into the mind of the young children, that’s gave fruit and that sprouts and came true.

After Lamarck, Darwin and Mendel – the wishing principle became negated it became apikorsut, that became heresy – they said that a chance mutation happened in a giraffe (we’ll call him Jim). Jim had his chance mutation, not because he wished that he have a longer neck and he was really trying to reach a higher leaf on a tree, just by chance he came out with a longer neck and it was good, it was an advantageous mutation – even though it has its disadvantages to it – Mother Nature liked it, liked Jim and chose him over his other brothers and sisters and that is the way it proceeded. So what’s the difference? The difference is just taking out the emotion.

Let’s talk about what this means for us in our service of Hashem. What is an acquired character? An acquired character is called teva sheini [second nature], a person is born with teva rishon [first nature]. Now, according to after Darwin and Mendel, you don’t get acquired characters in the middle of a lifetime they don’t believe in ibur they just believe in gilgul. Once more, Lamarck believed in ibur but Darwin only believed in gilgul, it means that mutation takes place usually at birth – before birth – from conception and you just happened to have been born with a little bit longer neck and that’s an advantage and nature likes that, it chooses that. But definitely it’s inherited but it began with a mutation. Lamarck didn’t have this chochmah of mutations and genes at all, once again it’s all imagination – it’s all just using your maximal power of imagination, so the way he saw the giraffe getting a longer neck was because he wanted to have a longer neck. That fits in beautifully with Chassidut, because Chassidut first of all says that it’s very important to wish – positive wishing is a very good thing, it’s just like the idea of tracht gut ve’zein gut that has a definite impact on reality. What does this mean? Let’s say that a person was born and raised in a not good environment and not only was his environment bad, but even the attributes he was born with, meaning his genes were not so good, his spiritual genes, maybe also his physical genes were not so good. He was born with a lot of bad attributes like kaas, gaavah, all kinds of bad things in his character. That was his teva rishon. Now he works on himself, he has free choice (we believe in free choice), he becomes a ba’al teshuvah, he works on himself very hard and he succeeds in uprooting some of his bad characters and replacing bad characters with good characters. So now the question is a very simple question: what is inherited to his children? So Lamarck would say that he changed – teva sheini – at least to a certain percentage of his children he is going to inherit his second nature, not his first nature. That is a tremendous chiddush. That’s why we say that teva sheini, second nature, begimatria is emet, that is your true nature more than your given nature, but second nature is like a mutation in one’s lifetime – that you yourself wished it and made it happen. Because you have power, you have generative evolutionary power in yourself, and once more, the higher you are up on the ladder of evolution, the more such power you possess. So this is giving tremendous encouragement for a ba’al teshuvah – this very thought, because a ba’al teshuvah can think, “well, I’m a bad guy, I was born with all of these bad characters, and, o.k. if I’ll be good and do teshuvah in this lifetime, but it’s not going to change my very essence”. This is a deep sugiyah in Chassidut, can a person make a shinui mahut or can he not make a shinui mahut, can he change his essence or not? Even the greatest teshuvah in the world. We say, that the real teshuvah we call teshuvah me’ahavah, because it says that teshuvah me’ahavah works retroactively (also this is one of the differences between a Jew and a non-Jew, because a non-Jew can do teshuvah but it’s not retroactive – we were talking about this last night about retroactive extrapolation, about going back into the past – so if we can do teshuvah like that then definitely your second nature is your true nature that is what you are through and through and that is what you are going to inherit to your progeny, whereas if not if your teshuvah is just mikan ulehaba, from now on, but you’re not changing your essence, then you’re not necessarily going to inherit that change, that’s just going to stay by you in this lifetime and that’s it.

We are trying to give a sense of if you could go back to Lamarck (Lamarck was a goy) and bring him back in a rectified way into evolutionary theory of today, that would already be a tremendously big tikkun in the way of reconciling and being able to be mevarer the Darwin-Mendel syndrome of the modern version of evolutionary theory. Once more, it goes back to our fact that there is a program and that program is called Adam Kadmon and Adam Kadmon is the reappearance of Hashem’s primordial plan which is called the primordial Torah which appears within the vacuum of the universe, meaning inside all of reality and it is the motivating source within reality. Meaning that – we’re repeating it over and over because we’re trying to make a point – that every organism has a little man some-place inside of him that that is where it would like to get. Every little amoeba bacteria would like to be a full-fledged human being, but he’s just on his way, he’s not there yet, but he would like to be there and he has that picture some-place deep, deep, deep down in his sub-sub-sub-conscious.

Now let us return to what we were speaking about last night that we were talking about the concept of a common ancestor. One of the basic tenets of evolution is that we all come from one common ancestor. The common ancestor, we said, is the dust, hakol hayah min ha’afar vehakol shav el ha’afar, we’ll call that at the level of “worlds”. According to the Ba’al Shem Tov every phenomenon has to be understood at three levels: the level of worlds, the level of souls and the level of Divinity. At the level of Divinity it is clear that the common ancestor and the place that we are all trying to return to is Elokim. Elokim created us and we all are trying to get back to Elokim, at least that’s what we should have in our conscious minds, meaning that hakol hayah min ha’Elokim vehakol shav el ha’Elokim. What about at the level of souls? That should be the most important level for biologists, because it’s living beings. Afar, dust is not living beings, it’s not organic matter, even though we said last night that the power of growth is in the dust. But at the level of souls, what is the common ancestor? Everything in the world has these three levels to it – it has worlds, souls, Divinity. That is one of the most fundamental teachings of the Ba’al Shem Tov. So at the level of worlds it is dust, hakol hayah min ha’afar vehakol shav el ha’afar, everything came from dust and everything will return to dust – once more, it’s not necessarily physical dust. At the level of Divinity, it’s what the Torah says, bereishit bara Elokim et hashamayim ve’et ha’aretz, God created the world, Elokim begimatriya hateva, and everything begins from teva and everything returns to teva. At the level of souls we could just say just from what we have spoken until now, that all of the souls were contained in Adam Harishon, that’s what it says, and if Adam Harishon, Adam Kadmon is also the program of creation so we could say that hakol hayah min ha’adam vehakol shav el ha’adam, everything was from man and everything returns to adam. Everything began with the vision of man and then it descended and then it began to ascend and the ascent is the fifteen billion years that the scientist talk about of the universe. This is only a hava amina [supposition], it’s true that everything begins from man, Adam Kadmon and everything returns to adam betzelem Elokim, but we’ll now say that even more than Adam, Adam is still just a picture, a program, I want something even more tangible than that, that is not just a program that everything comes from, that everything is programmed with this picture of man, but I want something else. When I say that something came from dust I mean that it came from the essence of dust, from the matter of dust; when I say that something comes from Elokim I also mean from the po’al of Elokim from the mamashut of Elokim, ki mimchah hakol umiyadecha natannu lach, everything is from You, is a part of You, it’s coming out of you. If I translate that to souls, then the essence that everything is born from and that everything returns to is not Adam but is Chavah, Eve. If I translate that into souls, so the essence of what everything is born of and what everything returns to is not Adam but is Chavah. Yesterday we saw that all of the theoretical, philosophical concepts that have to do with evolution are at the level of Imma, of Mother. The last one we saw is the concept of precedence in nature, which is the fact that a simple organism precedes a complex organism and that is the precedence which corresponds in Kabbalah to Imma, to Mother. It’s not by chance, because nothing is by chance as we said before, that nature is referred to (probably in all languages – we know it in English but I imagine that it is true in every language) as Mother Nature. It’s not by chance that nature is thought of as Mother. Tomorrow iy”H we are going to explain a very important problem (probably the most important problem) that the evolutionary biologist, the non-believer, the “Darwins” still would say that there is a very great problem that has to be solved and is yet unsolved, it’s called the “Riddle of Evolutionary Biology” and that’s why nature needs males, because nature could do better, a hundred percent better, without men. This is the basic riddle of evolutionary biology for the evolutionary biologist. There are species which are asexual meaning that there is no coupling of male and female, so you could think that they are all male, but no – the biologists say they are all females. In an asexual species, one female gives birth, reproduces or replicates the next generation of females and so it continues on and on. The most important question is that by nature choosing, preferring male-female reproduction there is a loss of fifty percent of population meaning that there is a tremendous expense for nature to need male-female. It would be much better just to have women with no men whatsoever. This is called the unsolved riddle of evolutionary biology. Everything else can be explained, it’s just like Shlomo Hamelech said, echkama vehi rechoka mimeni, I understand everything except parah adumah, so the same thing goes for a biologist, he understands everything except the reason for sex. This iy”H is a preview of tomorrow. There are five different theories in evolutionary biology all of which has its weaknesses to them, meaning that none of them satisfactorily explain this problem. We mention this now because this is another very simple example of nature being feminine. That is that if nature were asexual then it would just be purely female. Nature is Mother Nature; the earth is also called Mother Earth. Evolution comes from the earth, the evolution that we’re talking about of biological organisms – it all sprouts from the earth – we explained this yesterday – its all from Mother Earth. The whole energy of evolution is once more, is mother/female energy and this is one hundred percent true (this is actually what we began last night and now we are continuing), is that this whole topic is a female/mother concept, and that’s why  - Darwin wrote his book “the Origin of the Species” but before the origin of the species the basic question before the origin of the species is the origin of life, that is a term that is commonly used, what is the origin of life? So the Torah says, in three simple two letter [Hebrew] words who is the origin of life, it says that Adam called his wife Chavah, ki hi haytah em kol chai, she is the mother of all life, the word “mother” in Hebrew means origin. Once more, the Torah defines the name of the first woman Chavah that Chavah is the origin of life. So that is an amazing thing, say that she is the origin of mankind or the mother of mankind, but why is she the origin of all life? Life implies every living organism, it says it very frankly, kol chai it doesn’t say chai it says em kol chai, “the origin of all life”, so what is that saying? It is saying that all of life begins with Chavah and all of life returns to Chavah, it all comes out of the womb, all of life is born from the womb of Chavah – once more, the word em either means mother or origin or womb it’s all the same word in Hebrew – meaning that all of life is born from the mother’s origin, the womb of Chavah. As the verse says with regard to afar thereby we can imply that it all returns to the womb of Chavah [the word kever, grave is also used as a synonym for womb. R.G]. Once more, Chavah is the tangible origin, we’ll call it the “actual” origin of life, the “actual” common ancestor. Adam is there but he transcends a little bit, he’s more abstract, as we said that he is the program. The male here, (Adam is the male and Chavah is female), Adam is the program, but the actual origin is Chavah, she is nature. All of this will show something in Hebrew, a very simple phenomenon. Obviously there is such a thing as male energy, not just female energy, even though all of nature and all of evolution is female energy. Male energy is pure super-temporal creativity, it is Father. Yesterday we said that one of the things that links evolution especially as the believers envision evolution - with Imma is that it is called Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design is the power of the womb, also the hash’ara of the specific design, which we will now call “actual” design, yetzirat ha’velad. The male sperm is just pure power of creativity something from nothing, but in essence it is above time. If it is above time, so as a state of consciousness, it is not evolutionary, because evolution is a process that takes place within time. The female energy of reality is within the cycles of time, for instance the most important phenomenon is that a woman has a cycle. A woman is sensitive to time and she changes together with time. A man, relative to a woman, is constant and is not affected by and is not meant to be affected by time as a woman lives with time, experiences time. The very word Chavah we now know is used to mean “experience”, chavayah, which also means that everything begins with experience and everything returns to experience, which is exactly what our biologist does not want to accept, that experience and emotion is a functioning force in nature, that nature has emotion to it. Like a botanist will tell you that I empirically know that plants respond to emotion. These are things that have been tried to be proven or not proven. A gardener is called a ganan because it also comes from the word nagan, musician. If you play music to your plants then they grow (if you play good music, chassidisher music) then your plants will grow better because they like it. If that point could just be put across, once more, that would be the beginning of tikkun. Unfortunately, this last point is a point that even avodah zarah believes in. It’s another problem, when you talk about the spirituality within physicality, it can also go the wrong way – it can go to the direction of avodah zarah, it can go to the direction of non-Jewish Pantheism, but Jewish Pantheism, Chassidic Pantheism, even the Malbim as we said before, for him it’s obvious that all of nature is God. All of nature has a soul which is tzelem Elokim. He has no problem with that at all. It doesn’t mean, chas veshalom that he is going to worship any physical part of nature, chas veshalom. But as a Jew he has no problem at all in saying that nature is Elokim begimatriya hateva. These things are very fine lines.

The last thing is to show – this is a technical thing now. So far last night and today, we haven’t done any gimatriyas yet, now we have to start a little bit with a certain, basic mathematical forms because this will bring across very strongly this last point that we are making in our first words today.

When a word is related to as it appears, a sudden appearance of a new word, of a new root in the Torah, if the word adam when it appears for the first time, so that first appearance and the way it is written is called the “panim” the face of the word one of the forms of gematriya is a form that is called “the evolution of the word” which obviously must relate very strongly to the theory of evolution. The evolution of a word is when you see the word evolving step by step where each step is another additional character, like another mutation took place and another letter, another “gene” appears. The classic example is Chavah. Because Chavah, as a word is chet-vav-hei which equals 19. But the evolutionary form, which is called the achora’im – this is an abstract concept which has a very clear form in gematria, how to envision it. Any word that you write, you can either write it straight or you can evolve the word, beginning with a letter and adding another letter, step after step, like chavah beginning with a chet, then chet-vav – stage number two – a vav was added (after ten million years...!), then step number three, a hei was added (that took another thirteen million years...!) first you had, for so many million years you had a chet by itself, and then for another billion years you had a chet and a vav, and then finally after five billion years you got to a chet and a vav and a hei. That form and that process is called achorayim, the “back” of the word.

First of all, let’s define these concepts. Every word has a face and a back, adam was created also bisexual, it says. Let’s begin with another very beautiful gematria, the midrash says that adam harishon androgonos nivra that Adam was created bisexually meaning that he was both male and female at the same time, he was the only creation in the world that was created bisexually. How do I know that? Because he was the only creation that it says zachar unekeiva bera’am that he was created male and female. All of the animals were created male and female but it doesn’t say so. It doesn’t say about the animals that they were male and female. It makes a point by using this special word bara, which means creation ex nihilo – zachar unekeiva bara otam – why just by Adam? Again this is already the beginning of tomorrow’s topic. Once more, the unsolved puzzle of evolutionary biology is sex; why sex exists. It would have been better off for nature to avoid sex. That is the basic problem in modern biology. So it is very significant that the Torah in the whole story of creation - everything has sex to it and not only does it have sex to it but God already blessed the fish peru urevu, to be fruitful and multiply, but He didn’t say that there were males and females. The only place that the Torah says that there are males and females, was with man, for some reason, meaning that the essence of zachar unekeiva is a human condition. This in itself tremendously reinforces what we said before that there is a program of man from the very beginning of creation - of life forms - because from the very moment that there is sex in any life form whatsoever, that is a human condition. That is the most actual appearance of the human condition in an organism. All other human conditions are just a “wish” like we said before, “wishing” to be man at some sub-sub-sub level of sub-consciousness, but this is an actual human condition. So, once more, the midrash says that man - and only man - was created male and female, and the midrash says that at the beginning that is referring to only one man by himself, because the first man was bisexual. Even now it is possible to be born with both male genitals and female genitals. That is called “androgynous”. (There’s a whole book called minchas chinuch, whoever learns nigleh, this is one of the deepest books on halachah, almost every mitzvah from the Torah his basic philosophy is “how does this mitzvah apply to androgynous?” all of the 613 mitzvot of the Torah are all – the deepest lomdus is how does this mitzvah apply to a person who is bisexual.)

This is what the midrash says that adam harishon androgonos nivra shene’emar zachar unekeiva bara otam, אנדרוגינוס (gem: 390) this is one of the most beautiful gematrias from the midrash that there are. 390 is exactly the value of zachar unekeiva! This word is a word converted from Greek this is Chanukah! This is one of the most important, beautiful elevations, called conversions, whenever Chazal use a word in another language - especially Greek, because of Greek it says, yaft Elokim leYefet vayishkon beoholei Shem that the Greek language itself is the most beautiful of all foreign languages except the Holy Tongue and that beauty of Greek can be be converted and brought into the “tents of Shem”. The difference is that his male side was his front side and the female side was the back side. From this we learn that front and back which are also sometimes called conscious and unconscious, but we are going to explain that back is evolution, front is not evolution. Front is continual direct creation, since it is not evolution, if a person is purely in a “front” mode he doesn’t even have free choice, because it is all God. Because evolution is based upon two things: mutation and natural selection. Mutation, as an abstract concept is bechira chofshit, free choice, because, as we said before, the tikun of the common biological definition of mutation – they won’t accept it – is that there is some spiritual motivation within the being itself, it’s not just a chance, random occurrence but there’s some free choice taking place. The giraffe wants to have a longer neck because it wants to reach that leaf up there on the tree. “Er vinshzich,” Lamarke’s concept of wishing, in Reb Isaac of Homil’s writings is one of the deepest concepts of reality, he even relates this concept to Adam Kadmon (this is too deep to get into right now) that wishing is called the psychology of every creature, every organism. That is only on the back that you have that wishing, that you have bechirah chofshit, that there is natural selection. The whole syndrome of evolution does not apply to the front at all, the front is just a pure experience of constant re-creation, and you are so close to God that there is no choice and no natural selection, just God is all and all is God. Once more, the front is a state of God is all and all is God and there is not one split second a separation from God. Evolution is because there is separation from God – God wants and He created the world with a sense of separation.

Let’s say another yesod hayesodot, of all of science, there are two basic forces in the world. The two basic forces (and almost all scientists, especially physicists, will agree now with this statement) are attraction and repulsion. In electricity you have it, and in magnetism you have it. In Hebrew and in the Kabbalah and Chassidut, it’s called richuk and kiruv, distance – smol dochah, the left pushes away, it is a repelling force, yamin mekarevet, the right brings close, is an embracing force. What is evolution? Evolution is trying to climb back to God, from where? From being afar, the universe is expanding, it’s getting farther and farther. The further away you are the faster it’s getting further away. This is only a recent discovery. The farther things are moving the more desire is born in... What is life? We’ll use other scientific terms for this: there is entropy and there is anti-entropy. Richuk, distance and repulsion are entropy because things are falling apart. Just like the universe by parts being farther and farther apart from one another it means it’s falling apart, that things are getting more and more apart from one another so that falling apart process is entropy, it’s richuk, it’s called the Red Shift in Doppler’s Effect. Red is gevurah, it’s smol dochah. If there’s a red shift, then it means that things are moving away – this is one of the most beautiful physical examples of Kabbalah at work because a red shift is gevurah and gevurah dochah, that’s the repulsive force of nature. If there’s a blue shift then things are getting closer, that’s yamin mekarevet. What is the definition of life? The definition of life is anti-entropy. That’s why the very first DNA cell is called irreducible complexity. We’ll say another very important thing. There are three basic concepts in the modern intelligent design people to deny the secular form of evolution. The first is that information is not material – debate no. 1. DNA possesses information. Is information matter? For a secular scientist, everything is matter. The first objection is that information is not matter. The second objection is that there is in the micro-organism, which is the cell and the gene in the DNA, irreducible complexity meaning that it is so complex that even a billion, billion years would not be enough for it to happen by chance as the secular biologist posits/thinks. The third  objection is of course, the simple one on the macro level which is that in paleontology, which is the study of fossils, there is no sign whatsoever  of continuum between the various species. So that disproves, so to speak, evolution at the macro level. But at the micro level, it’s called irreducible complexity. At the philosophical level, even higher than that, is the question is information matter, or not. So actually, these three things are, as we said, beriyah, yetzirah, asiyah. To say that information is not matter is in the world of beriyah. Those people who object, the secular biologists, say that information is also matter, because he believes in chomer hiuli [he’s on a very high level(!)] ethereal matter. At the level of yetzirah  and this is the essence of Intelligent Design, the greatest of Intelligent Design is in the DNA itself, much more than in the large organism. The Missing Link problem is in the world of asiyah, obviously. The Intelligent Design problem is in the world of yetzirah and the question is information matter or not, that’s in the world of beriyah.

So once more, to summarize and to conclude this part, to be at the face, which is the male aspect of nature (which is no longer nature) is non-evolutionary, because it is a continual experience of re-creation from the vantage point of atzilut which is actually seeing creation being created from nothing to something. Everything which appears is a chiddush is a sudden appearance but it is stable, it doesn’t break – it doesn’t suddenly disappear because it is above time. The experience is, the Godly service is “Gott is alt, alt is Gott” which virtually means that there is no free choice because there is no need for free choice and there is no natural  selection, obviously. Evolution is time-bound, that’s the back, and it has these two basic principles of bechirah chofshit and hashgachah pratit. The Torah abstraction of mutation is called bechirah chofshit and the Torah abstraction of natural selection is called hashgachah pratit  which is particular providence and that whole cycle, that together is the full feminine energy is bechirah chofshit and hashgachah pratit – that’s what a woman feels and that is Mother Nature at work. How is this shown in gematria? Adam is just written straight, alef-dalet-mem, because it is a panim phenomenon, but Chavah is an achor phenomenon, which is  an evolutionary phenomenon, which as we said before is written  chet, chet-vav, chet-vav-hei that’s the evolution of the word which equals 41, that is eim, that is why Chavah is called eim kol chai. But Adam is 45 so what happens when you put 45 into 41? It equals Elokim [86] because the first letter and the last letter of Elokim are eim they are the extreme letters, the outside, Elokim is a mother, a womb, an origin but the three letters inside Elokim equal 45 which is adam, this is exactly what we mean when we say that Elokim equals hateva.

This gematria summarizes what we have said now, which is that Adam Kadmon is the program, but the reality itself is born from Chavah, Chavah is the origin of life, it all comes from Chavah and it all returns to Chavah. Chavah is experience. One of the basic teachings of the Ba’al Shem Tov is based on the verse az tismach betulah bemachol, then the maiden will rejoice in dance. Once the Ba’al Shem Tov explained what that means: dancing is with one foot in and one foot out, meaning that the whole experience of closer and further both richuk and kiruv is all the dance of the maiden. The dance of the maiden, which is the cycle of the maiden is the experience of getting closer and getting further away. What is good about evolution is that the essence of real evolution is anti-entropy, it’s swimming upstream that’s what is called irreducible complexity. That’s the essence of a Jew. For that very reason a Jew is the epitome and the pinnacle of evolution. The person who is most swimming upstream which is returning to the source like the salmon returns to its source to give birth. What is the definition of life? What is the difference between animate and inanimate. In greatest generality, inanimate is like the stars, like the galaxies moving away from one another. Life is the desire to come closer to one another, to come back, to come close, and as we will explain tomorrow, it has to do with sex because it is attraction. Once more, life, which is programmed by man is basically the attractive force within nature and that is why life begins from the very beginning of the planet earth, virtually at the very beginning there are already life-forms. Life is love and non-life is fear is the opposite it is left. Love of life is the aspiration of the woman el isheich teshukateich. Man is not non-life, he is something else. But life versus non-life is living organism that it all comes from Mother Earth, Mother Nature, Mother Eve, it all comes from Eve and it all goes back to Eve even though there is an inner program which is Adam himself, but they go together and when they are put together then they are Elokim Himself.