Do you agree with my answer to this question?

Here's a question that was fielded to me this week that I thought you might find thought provoking. It came up as part of our Journey of the Soul JLI course which we concluded this week with a record attendance of almost 100 students! Please let me know what you think of this. I would love to hear your thoughts.

When Science and Torah conflict:

Question

Is it true that Jews believe in Resurrection; that, when the Messiah comes, the dead will come back to life?

Answer:

Whilst many Jews shy away from Resurrection, assuming it to be a non-Jewish belief, you’ll be quite surprised to know that it's actually one of the Thirteen Principles of the Jewish Faith!

Practically speaking, it’s a little challenging to actually believe that the dead will rise and live once more. But Torah teaches us to always challenge the status quo, so let's try.

Roman Emperor Hadrian once asked a Talmudic Rabbi how the Jews believe the dead will be resurrected if the entire body is disintegrated. The rabbi pointed out that there is a certain bone in the human body which never disintegrates. It is from this bone that the rest of the body will be rebuilt in its original image when the Moshiach arrives.

Whilst no such bone has ever been proven to exist, a deeper analysis makes it crystal clear. You see, the word in Hebrew for bone, etzem, can also mean ‘essence’. The rabbi's response to the Emperor was that there is an essence, a code within the human body, from which the rest of the body can be rebuilt.

For thousands of years, this piece of Talmud could easily have been dismissed as foolish fantasy and positively primitive. But today, almost 1900 years after this conversation, science has discovered DNA, the brilliant sequencing code within living beings. And indeed, animals have already been cloned. It’s only a matter of time, before healthy human organs will be cloned and perhaps even entire humans.

Without getting into the politics of stem cell research and cloning, we, in our times, are witness to science finally catching up with the wisdom of Torah after nearly two thousand years!

Fifty years ago it would be hard to believe in resurrection. But today, it’s a scientific reality! Just because a Torah concept might be incredible, don’t dismiss it too quickly. Most likely, science hasn’t yet caught up with its profundity. And why should it? After all, the Torah’s G-dly authorship gives it an unfair advantage over other books!