3868 —השערות המדע על גיל העולם אין בהן הוכחה

B"H, 10 MarCheshvan, 5716.

Brooklyn.

The distinguished Chassid, a G‑d-fearing man, distinguished and honored, etc., Reb Yisrael Tzvi HaLevi [Haber]

Greetings and blessing!

I was pleased with what you wrote in your letter some time ago about your outreach work during your reserve duty. And it is understood that as to what you conclude — that in keeping with my urging you wrote to Eilat and received no reply — this does not at all exempt you from continuing in this. You must write, and write again, and also send there suitable printed material, so long as it arouses in them the point of Judaism and brings it out into revealed expression, in practice and inwardly, as explained in Chassidus.

In your question what to answer when people tell you that science, so to speak, has proofs that the world has existed for more than 5715 years, and whether this can be answered by the well-known saying of our Sages that the Holy One, blessed be He, "would build worlds and destroy them": that is not the meaning of this saying of our Sages, for it refers to spiritual worlds, as the Alter Rebbe wrote, from the writings of the Arizal, in Torah Or, Parshas Shemos (51d). And as for the claim that science has proofs of the above, this is an absolute falsehood, for science has no proof whatsoever of this, only a hypothesis built on shaky foundations. It is difficult to explain this in a letter at the length required; the point is that what is found in the science textbooks on the above, about the world having existed for several thousand million years, etc., they base this hypothesis as follows:

Since (under the conditions existing today — the temperature and pressure of the air, the movement of the winds, the quantity of the various materials found on the face of the earth, etc., etc.) a certain number of years is required for every hundred cubits of height of the sand that gathers on the bank of a river; and since mountains of this very sand are found that are several miles high — then (if you were to say that they too were gathered from grains of sand, by a river such as this, and that the above conditions did not change during all those thousands of years) so-and-so many years are needed for this, and this calculation comes to much more than 5715.

But when they are asked where the grains of sand came from, they cannot answer. And when they are asked: just as, if you will say that grains of sand came into being on the plain, one can equally say that the mountains came into being all at once — to this too they cannot answer. And when they are asked how they know that five thousand years ago all the conditions, of the water and the winds and the river, etc., were exactly as they are now, to this too they have no answer. And when they are asked, in addition: if you were to say that their proof is scientific, how can it be that the results of the inquiry into the length of the world's existence according to astronomy, according to the science of antiquities (archaeology), according to the science of the structure of the earth (geology), and according to the science of radioactivity (radioactive dating), contradict one another, and from one extreme to the other — that is, for example, one conclusion that it cannot be more than half a billion years, and a second conclusion that it cannot be less than two billion years, and the like?

These contradictions are clear proof that all these inquiries are nothing but hypotheses built on air. But this is not the place to elaborate.

Surely you made use of the days of the month of Tishrei — the general month, from which the spiritual arousal and joy are drawn into the whole year — to influence those around you; write about this at the next opportunity.

With blessing.

Publisher's notes

Printed in Likkutei Sichos, vol. 10, p. 177, and completed from the secretariat's copy.

Reb Yisrael Tzvi (מו"ה ישראל צבי שי'): Haber, Tel Aviv.