CONTEMPORARY JUDAISM AND CREATION THEOLOGY
Arthur Green
Creation has been the neglected question in modern Jewish theology. Partly because the
issue did not fit well with the particularist agenda (“How are we different from our
Christian neighbors?”), but also because we feared taking a clear position either
supporting or opposing evolutionary theory, Jewish thinkers have remained mostly silent
on the subject of life’s origins. In contrast to prior ages, when theologies of Creation
served as the great font of life’s meaning, moderns seek to separate the search for
meaning from the question of origins. Since we can no longer say that the world was
created “for the sake of the righteous,” or “for Israel,” or “for Torah,” we find meaning in
a Jewish life that has all too little to say about the big questions of how and why we all
got here.
I believe that the urgent ecological agenda of the current century will change that
situation quite radically. One the most important roles of religion in the coming
generations will be to affect our behavior with regard to the natural world and its
resources. Humanity’s very survival demands a re-education regarding consumption,
population control, and a host of other issues all having to do with our place in the fast-
changing balances of the biosphere within which we exist. This conversation will
perforce return us to the question of our place in the natural order and the process that led
us to our now inescapable responsibility of stewardship over the existence of much more
than our own species.
The current debates in some Christian circles about Creationism and Intelligent Design
leaves most Jews cold. We are not fundamentalists or apologists for untenable theories
of origin. Jews have embraced science since the beginning of the modern age; we accept
Darwin and the developments of evolutionary biology since his time. It is to physicists
rather than Kabbalists (though they sometimes sound similar!) we turn to try to
understand being’s origins in the first emanations