Frameworks - Genesis - Hardcover

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Matis Weinberg is now "Exploring, learning, writing-and still teaching" following a distinguished career spanning Silicon Valley and Old Jerusalem, inspiring generations of students, from Beit Midrash halls to Technion corridors. His tenure as Dean at the Hebrew Institute of California and Rosh Yeshiva of Kerem Yeshiva infused innovations that continue to stir Jewish education. Author of the critically acclaimed "Patterns in Time" series, his articles and lectures have long been insider favorites; this is his first series conceived and written for a general audience.

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A true intellectual adventure; controversial to some, disquieting to many, stimulating to all. From one of the world's foremost Jewish thinkers, here is the first volume of a genre-shattering series that opens to the public the startling sophistication of Torah thought. Matis Weinberg does for Torah what Stephen Gould does for evolutionary biology, what Martin Gardner does for mathematics; each sharing his passion and wonder, involving the reader in the inner workings of a different way of looking at the universe. True to the Torah's rigorous methodology, drawing deeply on the physical sciences and biology, on psychology, philosophy, literature and arts, Weinberg weaves a gradually a emerging blueprint of reality that reveals Torah's elegant, exciting, and profoundly authentic framework for perceiving the world.

Prepare yourself for a roller coaster ride through the parashot, moving deftly from the dawn of history to the very frontiers of contemporary thought, in a journey that will challenge, surprise, and move you. Entertaining, insightful, provocative and evocative, "Frame Works" is that rare book with the potential to open new doors to understanding the world in which we live.

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Torah is my life. That implies the same sort of relationship to Torah as saying "Science is my life" implies to science, and is entirely different from saying "I am a Talmudist" or "I am a scientist." It projects a concern not just of mind-set or career or interest or skills, but of identity, of passion for an entire vision of reality, of membership to a vast ongoing enterprise of relentless exploration and discovery. As in any affair of love, there is an intense desire to share beauty's vision and power, especially to those who misconstrue her as beast (theology, or technology, as the case may be). As in any affair of love, adulteration is an act of war, dilution is demeaning, and charlatanism is beneath contempt. The uses often made of Torah (and sometimes of science) can be all of these....

Torah is not about religion, doctrine and tradition any more then science is about snails. And about nearly everything else in the physical world: quarks and hormones, probability and gases, and the evolution of galaxies and brains. Torah provides a framework for the systematic and fundamental description of reality, and in doing so has much to say about nearly everything we find altogether relevant: history and identity, law and love, raising children and making choices, and the evolution of existence and consciousness. Both science and Torah provide complex and integrated maps of the universe; both are uncompromisingly rigorous; both forcefully and properly reject loose speculation, system building, and untestable claims about universal harmonies. You would never confuse science with alchemy, and you should never confuse Torah with doctrine....

Every system functions along a set of principles and consistent postulates around which it is constructed, every system follows internal rules of logic, and every system communicates in a "language" with clear conventions. The more sophisticated and foolproof (by this I mean only and literally "proof-against-fools", offering ad-hoc conjecture as fact) the system, the more correspondingly subtle, exacting, and complex are the principles, rules of logic, and conventions of language-and the more demanding is the peer review. Again, consider modern science-a system hundreds of years old, developing still through the combined genius of many thousands of humanity's best mind, who not only have made the discoveries of science, but also have explicated the principles of the scientific approach, its logic, and its language of mathematics. Not to mention the millions who have toiled at collecting and interpreting data, at experimentation and application, and at publication and review, adding her and there their pertinent insight into a noble and ceaseless endeavor. You may have personal objections to some postulates or propositions of science because of religious beliefs or psychological needs, but such objections have no significance within the scientific framework-and you would be ill advised to hold them until you have fully examined them within that framework. Notwithstanding the trendy postmodernist belief that all paradigms are created equal, most knowledgeable readers will have no difficulty appreciating all this as it applies to science-but not as it applies to Torah, which they take to be a mixed-bag of promiscuous conjectures that can mean anything you wish them to mean. Nothing can be further from the truth.

Torah is a system thousands of years old, explicated through the combined genius of thousand of people, among them individuals universally recognized as possessing some of the finest minds in history. It's principles, logic, and language are formally and exactingly defined in a literature encompassing tens of thousands of volumes. Its propositions and discoveries are the subject to a peer review that has never been equaled, with intense and sometimes brutal debate that reverberates across the years. Millions of enthusiast have toiled at proposing and testing new theories, at collecting data, at publications and review, and have added from time to time another piece to the magnificent and boundless enterprise. You are certainly entitled to hold personal objections to some postulates and conclusions of Torah, but such objections are irrelevant within the Torah framework. You may even wish to gut the existing system, but it is awfully easy to throw out the baby with the bath water out of sheer illiteracy and egregious ignorance (and rabbinic appellation, unfortunately, offers no guarantees in this respect). Bracket yourself for a few hours and take this opportunity to survey the system from within....

I want to share with you in this series a taste of genuine and thematic parasha-style "learning," exploring together texts, questions, patterns and frameworks so that you can get some sense of what it is like from the inside. Though mere vignettes, these essays cover a fair spectrum of appealing issues and I have tries to make them accessible on a wide variety of levels, at times presenting a single and basic idea in a personal voice, at times raging far and perhaps provocatively afield. Even in the more difficult pieces I will avoid technicalities that would be unappealing to the reader with little background, but I will not avoid complexity or controversy (I expect to have as much fun here as you, and most certainly not to address this book exclusively to beginners). And I will attempt to convey the interwoven congruence and interrelated nesting of the diverse texts and approaches within the various fields of Torah: halacha, aggadic, kabbalistic, talmudic, philosophic, and more. Along the way I hope you will discover some of the relevance and excitement of "this view of life."