By Howard Sachs


Last evening I watched part of Simon Schama’s excellent program, “The History of the Jews.” One image struck me strong as a deeply patriotic American and serious Jew. It was that page of the Talmud, the great compilation of Jewish law and values that Schama kept showing to the viewers. On each page its central moral argument was surrounded by multiple counterarguments and supporting arguments compiled over centuries from various wise and learned men across Europe and the Middle East. Its breadth of debate showed one of the main reasons Judaism has survived for nearly 4,000 years.

It is a world of deep moral thought — an intellectually and morally rich world widely open to rationality, science, faith, change, evolution, and multiple perspectives. But sadly, tragically, despite our great progress over the millennia in many vital areas, the status of the unborn child remains mired in a deeply regressive and immoral perspective, especially for the large proportion of non-orthodox Jews along with their non orthodox Christian, agnostic, and atheist “progressive” brothers and sisters. It’s why this past week’s March for Life in Washington was bereft particularly of these folks who label themselves “liberal” and “progressive.” They are anything but in this vital area.

Their view of the unborn boy or girl as essentially a soulless mass of cells is deeply regressive and an affront to the moral beauty and progress of our great Jewish religion and people and Western culture.


Just take the science alone. We now know the minute that precious and utterly complex sperm and egg unite, a universe of complexity activates. In that divine spark of a moment a world of fantastic information flows forth to begin the life of a human being. Watson and Crick taught us about this information, this glorious string of words — the genetic code. Bill Gates remarked that for such biologic beings the code is exponentially beyond what we can even imagine in the most sophisticated supercomputers. The great Stephen Meyer, PhD (Cambridge) affirms that where there is such great code, there must be great mind. So any person connected with basic logic, common sense, and a normal human mind would understand that such majestic complexity could not come about ex nihilo or from random collisions of molecules even over billions of years. Instead, it directs us, almost self-evidently, to a creator — to God — who created that human in love. In the same way we now have strong evidence He created an entire universe from something smaller than a proton.


Jews, being “a People of the Book,” a people who glorify in code, thought, and sophisticated words, should identify strongly with such a notion. For the Jew, it is such code, such words, such information that created our Bible and Talmud, giving life to a whole people, a fantastic rich and liberal civilization and religion that has flourished for nearly 4,000 years.


So that little being created by such God-given code and words is not a mass of cells or merely “a choice.” It is, in essence, no different than the human boy on the playground at school; the precious human young woman standing under the huppah (marriage canopy) preparing to marry; the middle-aged Rabbi or priest on his lectern giving a sermon; the mom and dad at home caring for each other and their families; the politician pontificating on TV; or the elderly woman sitting in the nursing home near the end of her life. All are profoundly, undoubtedly, scientifically, self-evidently, and logically human. All are made in the image of God — the little embryo in the uterus, and the regular Joe on the street. Each is in biologic, moral, and human essence no different from the other.


None of them is “a choice.” None of them is a badge of honor for a woman’s sense of self empowerment. None of them is simply some abstract representative of women’s health or women’s civil rights. None of them exist at the pure will and pleasure of another human. None of them is brought into being by God to be snuffed out or not by the wag of a finger to the right or left solely by the woman who acts as a temporary sanctuary for their life. Each of them is a unique, infinitely precious human being, loved and created by God. Any decision to rip apart the precious arms, legs, beating hearts, and brains of such boys and girls by the assault weapon of an abortionist is, at its most basic, a gargantuan moral issue in every case. And in each case large numbers of people beside the child or woman temporarily carrying the child have a stake. They are the mom, the dad, grandparents, brothers, sisters, doctors, Rabbis, priests, pastors, and, yes, society at large. Any such decision of death and dismemberment must be accompanied by an almost breathless moral struggle.


But there were none of these “progressives” at the March for Life because they are not progressives. They are, frankly, regressives who reject that progress of Western Judeo-Christian culture — the ever-evolving understanding of God’s world through precious things like the Bible, the Talmud, and our great advances in science. They remain mired in a pagan lack of understanding of the essence of being human. That six- or 16- or 39-week-old being is a human boy or girl. He or she is not a clump of cells to do with what you wish. Tens of thousands marched to let this be known — to support and celebrate and choose life as it commands us to do in our religious texts and as demonstrated to us with unalloyed clarity in our microscopes and our 4D ultrasound machines.