<HTML>Please note the following:
1. What you teach kids at a very early age sinks in. Not all of them have the opportunity to deepen their thinking later on, so what they absorb early is liable to be their permanent concept of religion.
2. If you communicate the notion that it's good to believe certain things because they make people feel secure and warm all over, what happens when questions arise about some of the things you are teaching?
3. Do we really want people to think that believing in the infallibility
of Hazal in matters of science is on a par with believing in Torah
mi-Sinai? Most people who grow up this way end up religious tragedies, unable to take religion seriously, and often it's too late to explain that what you were taught before isn't necessarily so-- your teachers just wanted to make you feel good and they were afraid that telling you about R. Avraham ben haRambam would overwork your brains. If a teacher really believes that emunat hakhamim requires commitment to scientific infallibility and that any other view is simply and totally false, then that teacher should by all means take that position, even if it means
alienating students who later reject that view. (But such a teacher
probably doesn't care for my approval.)
At the same time, those of us who do not take pleasure in multiplying artificial and unnecessary (in my opinion) conflicts between Torah and science should be willing to acknowledge that gedolim ve-tovim did not look at things as we do. Apart from intellectual honesty, one must also consider that the students may sooner or later discover these sources.
Shalom Carmy</HTML>
