Chemical Education Today

JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 75 No. 9 September 1998 • Journal of Chemical Education 1097

Old Wine, New Flasks: Reflections on Scienceand Jewish Tradition

Roald Hoffmann and Shira Leibowitz Schmidt. Freeman: New York, 1997. xii + 362 pp. Figs., diagrams, photographs, 20 colorplates. 19.0 × 24.2 cm. ISBN 0-7167-2899-0. $28.95.

For several millennia science and religion seem to have been at odds. Cases in point are the persecution of Galileo by theRoman Catholic Church for his defense of Copernicus’ heliocentric theory, the expulsion of Spinoza by the Amsterdam Jew-ish community, the Thoms H. Huxley–Bishop Wilberforce confrontation over evolution, and the Scopes “monkey trial”.Recently, however, a rapprochement seems to be in progress. A spate of books, symposia, college courses, societies, and jour-nals aim at establishing a dialogue between the two previously adversarial fields of human activity. In December 1997, TheScience Channel, a Web site (http://channels.reed-elsevier.com), even featured an “editorial debate” on “Science and Religion”, inwhich seven internationally renowned authorities, including Roald Hoffmann—Nobel laureate, Cornell University chemistryprofessor, author, and poet—participated and discussed the book under review here.

Together with Shira Leibowitz Schmidt, engineer, translator, essayist, mother of six, and teacher of English as a foreignlanguage at Netanya Academic College in Israel, Hoffmann joined forces to create “our modest effort to look at issues of scienceand Jewish religious tradition”. Their thesis is that “science and religion are both ways of trying to understand the world, tofind meaning in that world’s beauty and terror.” They argue that science and Jewish religious tradition, although admittedlydifferent in many ways, nevertheless share the belief that the actions of human beings matter and that there is an underlyingorder to the universe.

This book has much in common with Hoffmann’s earlier collaboration with another female coauthor, artist Vivian Torrence.Chemistry Imagined: Reflections on Science (1993) (1) is an amalgam of art, science, and literature that sought to establish similari-ties between art and science. Like the earlier volume, the present book is a collage of disparate media—correspondence, essays,sometimes heated e-mail and Internet exchanges, a trial transcript, a debate, autobiography, even a three-act play with twointermezzi. The authors’ unique and provocative search for parallels, interactions, and relationships between science (par-ticularly chemistry) and religion (Judaism) is liberally laced with wit and humor and accompanied by hundreds of variedand striking illustrations. Through consideration of a series of seemingly innocuous questions from everyday experience, theyexplore the contemporary values and underlying unity of all knowledge as science and religion both strive for ultimate under-standing. These questions lead to deeper philosophical and societal issues concerning science, religion, and art. The authorsclaim that religion and science are parallel not only in subject matter but in the logic applied.

Among the issues dealt with in the eight chapters are the dichotomy between natural and synthetic; the psychodynamicsof wigs (married Orthodox women must cover their hair); religion and environmentalism; permissible materials (specificallyan elephant!) for a sukkah (the booth in which Jews dwell during Sukkot, the autumn festival of Tabernacles, on whichThanksgiving is based); the difference between right and left, leading to discussions of optical isomerism, nonconservation ofparity, and “the same and not the same” (the title and subject of Hoffmann’s 1995 book [2]); purity and impurity with excur-sions on alloys, pheromones, the Delaney clause, and the chemical composition of Coca-Cola (yes! it’s now kosher);authoritarianism in science and religion; conjectures on how Moses sweetened the bitter waters of Marah (a monograph onion exchange cites this as the first use of the technique); three reasons why God would be denied tenure at a major Ivy Leagueuniversity; the nature and chemistry of the biblical blue dye tekhelet, obtained from Mediterranean snails and used in thetzitzit (fringes) on the tallit (prayer shawl) and the Israeli flag; the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin; a fictionalized version of anactual case tried in an Israeli court and appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court, in which the appellant (later disclosed to beauthor Schmidt) appealed a parking ticket citing medieval Rabbi Nachmanides’ commentary on the rainbow; the making of atorah scroll and the question of the point at which it becomes sanctified (which molecule has the sanctity?). A number of thesethemes have been explored by Hoffmann and Schmidt in previous articles. A detailed (45 pp) list of notes and references, someas recent as 1997, and a glossary of Hebrew and Yiddish terms make the volume user-friendly to Jewish and non-Jewishreaders alike.

Hoffmann and Schmidt playfully tell stories, “inherently digressive the way real life is”, of how science and religion (andoccasionally art) look at pieces of the world. Hoffmann is “an atheist who is moved by religion” for whom “the Jewish tradition isimportant…because I’m a survivor of wartime Europe”. Schmidt is a ritually observant Orthodox Jew. Because their religiousconvictions and expertise differ, much of their book is in the form of dialogues, debates, and exchanges, often in contrapuntalform, resulting in an underlying tension and polarity. In an unusual concluding chapter, which might better be read before themain text, they each provide their own version of how the book came into being.

Such contention is a time-honored method of Jewish debate by which rabbis and scholars in the yeshivot (religious acad-emies) arrived at their interpretations of scripture, which were expressed in the Talmud, commentaries, codes, and responsa.The authors claim that this is the same procedure whereby consensus is achieved in science. However, persons who applyKipling’s dictum about East and West to religion and science and believe that “never the twain shall meet” will probably notbe convinced and will be apt to consider the purported parallels sometimes forced and strained. Whereas in science nothing isexempt from question or scrutiny (e.g., Ostwald and other chemists questioned the actual existence of atoms as late as thefirst decade of the 20th century), in fundamentalist religion the existence of God or the sanctity of scripture is never questioned.

Chemical Education Today

1098 Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 75 No. 9 September 1998 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu

Schmidt expresses the hope that “we can get started on a se-quel”. Perhaps these discrepancies and contradictions can beconsidered in a future volume.

Literature Cited

1. Kauffman, G. B.; Kauffman, L. M. J. Chem. Educ. 1994, 71, A240.2. Kauffman, G. B.; Kauffman, L. M. J. Chem. Educ. 1996, 73, A47.

George B. Kauffman and Laurie M. KauffmanCalifornia State UniversityFresno, Fresno, CA 93740-0070george_kauffman@csufresno.edu

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