Remembering revolutionary Rabbi Dr. Moshe Tendler - opinion

• Published date: 07 October 2021
• Author: DAVID M. WEINBERG
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Sacks: "They are as unlike as poetry and prose, or song and speech, or a portrait of a person and an MRI scan... Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. And we need them both, the way we need the two hemispheres of the brain.

"Science is about explanation, religion is about interpretation. Science analyzes, religion integrates. Science breaks things down to their component parts; religion binds people together in relationships of trust. Science tells us what is, religion tells us what ought to be. Science describes; religion inspires, beckons, calls.

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"Science sees the underlying order of the physical world. Religion hears the music beneath the noise. Science is the conquest of ignorance. Religion is the redemption of solitude."

So according to Sacks, we need both religion and science, although they are worlds completely apart.

But there is another view: That science and religious faith converge. That they can be synthesized into a comprehensive worldview that teaches humility and awe. That harmonized, they provide a guide to ethical behavior in a world that has lost almost all moral anchors and where science is galloping forward into the unknown at breakneck speed.

In traditional Jewish circles, this synthesis is called the "Torah Umadda" approach (combining Jewish law and theology with science), and in this generation there was no better exemplar of that approach than Rabbi Dr. Moshe David Tendler, who passed away last week in New York at age 95. Every molecule and fiber of his being reflected an unbreakable bond between the religious and scientific realms.

Tendler was a professor of microbiology and Jewish medical ethics at Yeshiva University in New York, a distinguished clinical cancer researcher, one of America's leading bioethicists, and a president of the Association of Orthodox Jewish Scientists. He chaired the bioethical commission of the Rabbinical Council of America and the Medical Ethics Task Force of UJA-Federation of Greater New York.

He published dozens of peer-reviewed papers in professional scientific journals on brain death, cloning, CRISPR and gene editing, experimental treatments on human beings, the human genome, neonatal salvage, organ donation, population control, stem cell research, surrogate motherhood, synthetic biology, the use of...