For several millennia science and religion seem to have been at odds. Cases in point are the persecution of Galileo by the Roman Catholic Church for his defense of Copernicus' heliocentric theory, the expulsion of Spinoza by the Amsterdam Jewish community, the Thoms H. Huxley-Bishop Wilberforce confrontation over evolution, and the Scopes "monkey trial." Recently, however, a rapprochement seems to be in progress. A spate of books, symposia, college courses, societies, and journals aim at establishing a dialogue between the two previously adversarial fields of human activity. In December 1997, The Science Channel, a Web site (http://channels.reed-elsevier.com), even featured an "editorial debate" on "Science and Religion," in which seven internationally renowned authorities, including Roald Hoffmann-Nobel laureate, Cornell University chemistry professor, author, and poet-participated and discussed the book under review here.

Together with Shira Leibowitz Schmidt, engineer, translator, essayist, mother of six, and teacher of English as a foreign language at Netanya Academic College in Israel, Hoffmann joined forces to create "our modest effort to look at issues of science and Jewish religious tradition." Their thesis is that "science and religion are both ways of trying to understand the world, to find meaning in that world's beauty and terror." They argue that science and Jewish religious tradition, although admittedly different in many ways, nevertheless share the belief that the actions of human beings matter and that there is an underlying order to the universe.

This book has much in common with Hoffmann's earlier collaboration with another female coauthor, artist Vivian Torrence. Chemistry Imagined: Reflections on Science (1993) (1) is an amalgam of art, science, and literature that sought to establish similarities between art and science. Like the earlier volume, the present book is a collage of disparate media-correspondence, essays, sometimes heated e-mail and Internet exchanges, a trial transcript, a debate, autobiography, even a three-act play with two intermezzi. The authors' unique and provocative search for parallels, interactions, and relationships between science (particularly chemistry) and religion (Judaism) is liberally laced with wit and humor and accompanied by hundreds of varied and striking illustrations. Through consideration of a series of seemingly innocuous questions from everyday experience, they explore the contemporary values and underlying unity of all knowledge as science and religion both strive for ultimate understanding. These questions lead to deeper philosophical and societal issues concerning science, religion, and art. The authors claim that religion and science are parallel not only in subject matter but in the logic applied.

Among the issues dealt with in the eight chapters are the dichotomy between natural and synthetic; the psychodynamics of wigs (married Orthodox women must cover their hair); religion and environmentalism; permissible materials (specifically an elephant!) for a sukkah (the booth in which Jews dwell during Sukkot, the autumn festival of Tabernacles, on which Thanksgiving is based); the difference between right and left, leading to discussions of optical isomerism, nonconservation of parity, and "the same and not the same" (the title and subject of Hoffmann's 1995 book [2]); purity and impurity with excursions on alloys, pheromones, the Delaney clause, and the chemical composition of Coca-Cola (yes! it's now kosher); authoritarianism in science and religion; conjectures on how Moses sweetened the bitter waters of Marah (a monograph on ion exchange cites this as the first use of the technique); three reasons why God would be denied tenure at a major Ivy League university; the nature and chemistry of the biblical blue dye tekhelet, obtained from Mediterranean snails and used in the tzitzit (fringes) on the tallit (prayer shawl) and the Israeli flag; the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin; a fictionalized version of an actual case tried in an Israeli court and appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court, in which the appellant (later disclosed to be author Schmidt) appealed a parking ticket citing medieval Rabbi Nachmanides' commentary on the rainbow; the making of a torah scroll and the question of the point at which it becomes sanctified (which molecule has the sanctity?). A number of these themes have been explored by Hoffmann and Schmidt in previous articles. A detailed (45 pp) list of notes and references, some as recent as 1997, and a glossary of Hebrew and Yiddish terms make the volume user-friendly to Jewish and non-Jewish readers alike.

Hoffmann and Schmidt playfully tell stories, "inherently digressive the way real life is," of how science and religion (and occasionally art) look at pieces of the world. Hoffmann is "an atheist who is moved by religion" for whom "the Jewish tradition is important...because I'm a survivor of wartime Europe." Schmidt is a ritually observant Orthodox Jew. Because their religious convictions and expertise differ, much of their book is in the form of dialogues, debates, and exchanges, often in contrapuntal form, resulting in an underlying tension and polarity. In an unusual concluding chapter, which might better be read before the main text, they each provide their own version of how the book came into being.

Such contention is a time-honored method of Jewish debate by which rabbis and scholars in the yeshivot (religious academies) arrived at their interpretations of scripture, which were expressed in the Talmud, commentaries, codes, and responsa. The authors claim that this is the same procedure whereby consensus is achieved in science. However, persons who apply Kipling's dictum about East and West to religion and science and believe that "never the twain shall meet" will probably not be convinced and will be apt to consider the purported parallels sometimes forced and strained. Whereas in science nothing is exempt from question or scrutiny (e.g., Ostwald and other chemists questioned the actual existence of atoms as late as the first decade of the 20th century), in fundamentalist religion the existence of God or the sanctity of scripture is never questioned. Schmidt expresses the hope that "we can get started on a sequel." Perhaps these discrepancies and contradictions can be considered in a future volume.

Literature Cited

1. Kauffman, G. B.; Kauffman, L. M. J. Chem. Educ. 1994, 71, A240.

2. Kauffman, G. B.; Kauffman, L. M. J. Chem. Educ. 1996, 73, A47.