An animal-loving rabbi seeks to reconcile science and Torah

by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

Rabbi Natan Slifkin uncoiled the python wrapped around his arm, and placed it carefully on a countertop far away from the audience — but close enough so that he had their attention.

The snake, he explained, is associated in the Torah with black magic, in part for the zig-zagging way it moves. “Moving in sideways manner, according to [Samson Raphael] Hirsch, is sorcery, which is not a Jewish idea. God wants a person to accomplish certain things in life to have gifts bestowed on them. Magic is a roundabout way of getting to a goal. God has a map charted out for you. Magic is sidestepping the stages God has set out for you.”

And so Slifkin pursued his own goal, combining zoology and Jewish learning, in a day of Zoo Torah at the Turtle Back Zoo in West Orange on Sunday, June 26.

Slifkin, 30, an ordained rabbi and self-taught zoologist, regaled adults and children 10 and over with lessons on owls, alligators, snakes, and even a skunk that soiled his white oxford shirtsleeve.

At its best, Zoo Torah is Slifkin’s way of using the biology of animals to illuminate the Torah and vice versa. Live animals from the zoo collection offered powerful visual aids to religious texts. When animals were unavailable, he substituted slides.

His presentations have a whiff of Jekyll and Hyde — rabbi and scientist — woven through them. And although he is an Orthodox rabbi, his embrace of science has transformed him into a controversial figure among some fervently Orthodox rabbis who have banned his books.

Born in Manchester, England, Slifkin can’t remember a time that he wasn’t passionate about animals. “As long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by animals. I was always reading animal books and I had every pet I could get away with.” He also had a few he couldn’t: in addition to birds, parrots, and reptiles, he had snakes and tarantulas, which his mother had forbidden. “I kept them hidden away so she wouldn’t find them.” And she didn’t, he said, until she actually attended one of his lectures and found out.

He does sometimes worry about what his mother thinks. “She came on a zoo tour and watched me with an eight-foot boa constrictor wrapped around my neck. Ever since, I’ve been debating — is that Jewish naches?”

As a child, he told NJ Jewish News, he wanted to turn his love for animals into a career. “As a teenager, I could not see how it would be feasible.” So he followed a more traditional path from yeshiva bucher to rabbi; he made aliya 13 years ago. Although he had continued learning about animals, and 10 years ago even began researching their appearances in Torah, he was planning on going into computer science; that is, until he noticed a training course being offered at the Tisch Family Zoological Gardens in Jerusalem — the Biblical Zoo. It would ultimately change his life.

The course, he said, wasn’t much. But it did get him into the zoo, and he’s never left. “I had this crazy idea about combining my love for animals and Torah and turning it into something. I told a few people and they laughed. But at the end of the class at the zoo, I suggested it to the zoo’s curator and director, and they were very into it.”

He explained, “Once I started my research and saw what the Torah has to say about animals, I knew I was onto something. I thought the zoo would be a great place to teach what I was learning.” He started with tours. They turned into a year long course. And eventually, it turned into a career.

Today he gives tours of the zoo about once a month and continues to teach there. He also offers courses at two yeshivot, Midreshet Moriah, a women’s school in Jerusalem, and Lev HaTorah in Ramat Beit Shemesh, where he lives. And he travels to zoos around the world giving talks on zoo Torah.

At his home in Israel, which he shares with his wife and two children, Slifkin has enclosed half of his garden and filled it with birds and small animals including parakeets, cockatiels, quail, iguana, rabbits, and guinea pigs. He considers this a small collection, and doesn’t feel the need to share his home with the once forbidden snakes and tarantulas. “I have the zoos to satisfy that need to hold animals now,” he said.

Science or heresy?

He has published five books on his work and spends most of his time writing. He is currently working on an encyclopedia of animals in the Torah, which he expects to finish in five to 10 years. He has already had offers for the book from several publishers, he said, although he declined to name them.

Embracing science and the natural world can be risky business for an Orthodox rabbi, however, and Slifkin goes too far for some of his more traditionalist colleagues. Not that Slifkin, who declined to shake a woman’s hand, is exactly progressive. But rejecting a fundamentalist and literal understanding of Torah and embracing scientific explanations of the world is considered heresy by some people.

In January 2005, 23 fervently Orthodox, or haredi, rabbis issued a herem, or ban, on Slifkin’s books, written under the Ashkenazi version of his name, Nosson Slifkin, calling his work “complete heresy.”

“He believes the world is millions of years old — all nonsense! — and many other things that should not be heard and certainly not believed,” the ban read. “In short, these books cannot be brought into the home of one who believes in Hashem and His Torah.”

The ban took Slifkin by surprise. He discusses it reluctantly, but he does not back down from his views. “Science proves itself a powerful and effective means of finding out about the world. It occasionally requires us to readjust our understanding of Torah from what might be a popular understanding. The earth is 14 billion years old and was not created in six days. We need a more sophisticated understanding of Bereshis (Genesis). The ‘days’ of Bereshis are not days but concepts, or forces in world.”

Wary of his critics, he is quick to point out that all of the views he espouses, even the most unpopular, have been held by respected rabbis in the past and present from Maimonides to Gersonides to the late Eliahu Dessler of Bnai Brak, who embraced the same view of creation as Slifkin.

Slifkin, in any case, believes he has won the battle, noting that in the yeshiva world he comes from, most people accept his work, understanding that it helps them grapple with the conflicts between science and Torah.

After one of his lectures at the Turtle Back Zoo, 12-year-old Eli Marks of West Orange, who wears flowing peyot, was quick to have Slifkin autograph his copy of Mysterious Creatures. His father, Akiva Marks, in black hat, acknowledged the herem and joked, “Yes, we’ll have to burn the book as soon as we get home.”

He compared the herem to a time when books by Maimonides, the great medieval codifier of Jewish law, were burned by fellow Jews in France. “The Gedolim [great rabbis] then thought the Guide to the Perplexed was inappropriate for people, that it would be confusing, not strengthening.”

Slifkin concedes that some communities are so insular that students would not come across scientific theories, and there his books might cause some difficulty.

“I totally agree that the kind of stuff I do is not suitable for everyone.” Therefore, he said, he won’t be going to Lakewood or Meah Shearim, both haredi strongholds, to give lectures on evolution and dinosaurs anytime soon. Still, he said, “The way I see it, God works through nature. My goal is to see God in nature and not look for miracles. If you see the beauty of nature, science itself becomes a demonstration of the creative wisdom of God.”

Johanna Ginsberg can be reached at jginsberg@njjewishnews.com.