The Lubavitcher Rebbe on Evolution
How the Lubavitcher Rebbe approached the perceived conflict between Torah and evolutionary science.
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Dr. Tali Loewenthal is Lecturer in Jewish Spirituality at University College London, director of the Chabad Research Unit, author of Communicating the Infinite: The Emergence of the Habad School and of Hasidism Beyond Modernity: Studies in Habad Thought and History (Littmann Library, 2020), and a frequent contributor to the Chabad.org weekly Torah reading section.
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Its also poignant to mention that the creation of man corresponds to the dante Alleghari and the humanist rennaisance in Florence, just at the turn of the Hebrew calendar to the year 6000. The understanding of the human being is apart of this process. Evolution is a very real process, and as someone well educated in the neurosciences, origin of life research, biophysics, ecology, cosmology and physics, I can't dismiss the evidence for it as one big coincidence. I don't think the Torah is wrong either, but people need to consider the deep feelings of threat to their sense of coherence when the world challenges how we know something. The Torah is an archetypal reality. Its clear that it's evolutionary picture of reality - as one long developmental process, historical and physical, describes reality accurately. Its relationality touches the core of things. Its wisdom needs to be continuously reassessed with new understandingz, and evolution is the biggest one there is.
Anyways, to continue, the Hebrew calendar can be thought of as the expression of the same dynamic as the 6 days of creation, but from the historical beginnings of human civilization. I think it is quite clear that human civilization is something of a fractal, or emergent property, which resembles the same sort of emergent properties of previous epochs. So the Torah isn't wrong, and this isn't an apologetics. Characterizing days as literal human days makes no sense given without humans there are no days and no time to begin with. This means days should probably be literally interpreted as semiotic archetypes, with the idea of a human day, in fact, being what we would call the metaphor. We and are practical constructs are the metaphors: not the spiritual realities of the Torah.
The Hebrew calendar seems to be marking a sefirotic dynamic whereby each thousand year period constitutes a period of creation which has correlates in the 6 days of creation. So phase transitions are occurring..