AboutEli Hadar Expertise If you are a Jewish person who has been approached by missionaries and who is considering leaving the Jewish faith, please let me know and I will help you see how beautiful and moreover how right the Jewish religion is. Don't leave the truth of your fathers before you resolve the facts for yourself, and I can help you on that journey.
Experience I have been involved in counter-missionary activity for several years, counseling many Jews who have left or have considered leaving Judaism having been attracted by other religions. I have been able to show the truth to these people through the correct reading of the texts (vs. deliberately wrong translations used by missionaries), through showing how missionaries manipulate the Jewish scriptures to achieve their goals, and through helping you rediscover the beauty and truth of authentic Judaism.
Organizations Chabad synagogue in Atlanta
Education/Credentials Largely self-taught, I still am and will be learning for a long, long time. I have educated myself through a wealth of resources, including Nachmanides' Disputation, Hyam Maccoby's writings on Christianity and Judaism, as well as such vast resources as Outreach Judaism, Torah Atlanta, and a great number of others.
I am Christian, and I am in a conversation with a young man who believes the God created the earth using Evolution. He further attestst that death is really a metaphore for humans "death of innocence" as we gained the knowledge of good and evil.
I have pointed to the several points throughout Genesis 2 and 3 with regard to a physical change. However, now he is trying to take the "lost in translation" route. I wanted to know from your perspective, and from an understanding of the original language, Can Genesis 1-3 be interpreted as a metaphore that is lost in translation?
Answer Hello Josh,
sorry it's taken me a long time to respond as I was traveling overseas.
While the rest of the Torah may be used metaphorically as well as literally, Genesis 1-3, our sages tell us, is not a metaphore. I am not quite sure how death is a metaphore of any kind, since death is in fact reality. But death IS, in fact, significant in a way that the only way we can know life is because it has boundaries; otherwise, we wouldn't know it (much like the only way we know we need air is when we are lacking it). From that standpoint, life and death are somewhat metaphorically related to the way G-d created the world.
I doubt your friend is going to these depths with you (unless he is an Orthodox Jew, in which case "lost in translation" would not be something he would bring up). The beginning of the Torah describes how the world was created, and since man wasn't created until almost the completion of creation, time didn't take hold until then. Thus, there could be billions of years between day one and the second day, the second day and the third day, and so on. During those billions of years, whatever He created may have taken a development course that would resemble survival of the fittest. But the categorical jumps from one type of species to the next is not something accounted for or explainable by modern science.
Perhaps I am not sure what you mean by "lost in translation". Can you elaborate?
Meanwhile, i would recommend Dr. Gerald Schroeder - a professor of physics and an Orthodox Jew - as a source of reading that leads to reconciliation of Creation with what modern science knows today. Google him when you can, and let me know if his detailed articles (extremely interesting and enlightening) help you on your journey.
