Friday, February 13, 2009

Art, Science and Torah

I was recently reading about a very interesting individual named Allan Lightman. Allen was a rising star in the world of science and a brilliant physicist.
A number of years ago he set out to write a paper on a major discovery of his regarding a cluster of millions of stars and the gravitational pull that was keeping them together. After it was all finished and he was working on the footnotes, he uncovered a paper written by Japanese scientists with the very same equation that he had just toiled on for months. It left him deeply disappointed. He started thinking about science and how all scientists do is uncover laws that already exist. There's nothing new in all the laws of science and anyone with a similar mental capacity delving into the same subject would come up with the same formulas.
Then he thought about how different art is. No one could have written what Shakespeare wrote and the same goes for all artists.
In art a creation is truly a creation.
So he left science and started writing books becoming a best selling novelist in the process.
So we have science which is pure logic and merely uncovers existing laws.
And then we have art which is emotion, where the author/composer/painter truly creates something ex nihilo.

So what happens when someone writes a chiddush in Torah? When someone comes up with a unique Torah thought?
is it like science, uncovering the word of God?
Or is it like art, creating something new?

I think it's a synthesis of the two.
Every new Torah thought is merely uncovering pre-existing divine words yet our souls are so intertwined with the Torah only the person that authored the new thought could have come to that conclusion the way that he did.



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3 Comments:

Blogger the sabra said...

http://www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/2787/jewish/Jethros-Plan.htm

read the end

February 14, 2009 4:39 PM  
Blogger David_on_the_Lake said...

apropos

February 17, 2009 4:55 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

what a beautiful thought!

February 19, 2009 10:54 PM  

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