While some thinkers have seen inherent tension between faith and science and others have seen them as separate but complementary perspectives on the world, Rabbi Moshe Tendler—who died last month at the age of ninety-five—saw the two as working together, in a quintessentially Jewish fashion. He was best known for applying new medical knowledge to the thorniest questions of Jewish law, and applying Jewish law to new medical technologies. David M. Weinberg writes:

Tendler was a professor of microbiology and Jewish medical ethics at Yeshiva University, a distinguished clinical cancer researcher, one of America’s leading bioethicists, and a president of the Association of Orthodox Jewish Scientists. . . . Simultaneously, he was a yeshiva dean, a community rabbi in Monsey, New York for over five decades, and an unassailable expert in halakhah (Jewish law).

Tendler also was the essential, accessible “rabbi-doctor” pastoral guide for thousands of Jews in times of medical crisis. Every day, he fielded dozens of calls from around the world about complicated issues of Jewish law and medicine, especially issues relating to abortion, artificial insemination, contraception, end-of-life issues, organ transplantation, and the definition of death.

As Weinberg notes, there are many learned Jews today who are also accomplished scientists, and some are even Nobel-prize winners, but

none was as uniquely positioned to move the needle of the appreciation for science in the religious world and of the respect for religion among his fellow scientists as was Tendler. He empowered Jews everywhere to value the wonderful and complex interface between science and religion, and he demonstrated the value of this fusion for the non-Jewish world too.

Torah-educated students, [Tendler believed], should derive an important conclusion from viewing a human cell under a microscope, . . . the palpable sensation of encountering God as the creator of life. Just as, [a midrash teaches that] the patriarch Abraham recognized God when he viewed the stars in the sky, we also should recognize that He created this world through our observation of the microscopic human cell.

In 2001, in the immediate wake of al-Qaeda’s attacks on America, Jonathan Rosen was asked to write something about anti-Semitism. So many of the points he raised in the resulting essay, reproduced in full at the link below, ring true today, and make clear just how predictable so much of the global reaction to October 7 has been. Rosen reflects on what he wrote then from the standpoint of 2024:

It is worth remembering that the Nazis saw the Holocaust as self-defense, though Jews were a minuscule fragment of a giant militarized nation. This was irrational, of course, even as they spoke the language of science, redefining Jews as a biological menace, like a virus, making the murder of babies and the elderly necessary, too, because like a microbe only extermination was the cure. It was the existence of Jews that made them a provocation, just as the existence of Israel, in any borders, inspired the Hamas massacre, as its 1988 covenant, never revoked, makes abundantly clear. The towers were a similar provocation.

It was back in 2001 that Rosen found himself “awakened to anti-Semitism,” as he wrote at the time:

I am not being chased down alleyways and called a Christ-killer. . . . But in recent weeks I have been reminded, in ways too plentiful to ignore, about the role Jews play in the fantasy life of the world. Jews were not the cause of World War II, but they were at the metaphysical center of that conflict nonetheless, since the Holocaust was part of Hitler’s agenda and a key motivation of his campaign. Jews are not the cause of World War III, if that’s what we are facing, but they have been placed at the center of it in mysterious and disturbing ways.

I felt this in a different form reading coverage of Israel in European papers. Though public expressions of anti-Semitism are taboo in a post-Holocaust world, many Europeans, in writing about Israel, have felt free to conjure images of determined child killers and mass murderers. Earlier this year, the Spanish daily La Vanguardia published a cartoon depicting a large building labeled “Museum of the Jewish Holocaust” and behind it a building under construction labeled “Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust.”