A few years ago, I unintentionally upset someone. It was at a bar mitzva where I had been invited to "address" the young man. As part of my sermon, I had said that you don't have to take the traditional Jewish date of the creation of the world as being literally 5763 (or whatever it was then) any more than you need to believe that the Children of Israel built the pyramids because the pyramids were probably older than 4000 years. I had said this to a young man who had a very good, enquiring mind and was finding some difficulty reconciling what he was being taught in his public school about paleontology with what his occasional "rebbe" was telling him. I argued that the Torah had a lot more to offer than a science textbook and that it was rather devaluing Torah to think that its worldview was circumscribed by technicalities. In the audience was a lay leader who had found religion late in life and had adopted a rather narrow, literalist interpretation as absolute Orthodoxy, which he accused me of undermining.

I confess that there is much in a fundamentalist or literalist approach to Torah that I find quite unsatisfactory and intellectually problematic. But the real issue is whether this defines religious Judaism or not.

Many texts of the Torah allow for different interpretations. "The finger of God" does not necessarily mean that there are Divine fingernails that need clipping, nor does "the voice of God" necessitate His having vocal chords. Indeed, it is one of Maimonides' Principles that God has absolutely no physical representation. But even this has not been everyone's opinion. Rabbi Abraham of Posquieres (1120-1197), the Raavad, seems to have liked the idea, or at least in his comments on Maimonides he said that "many and better men" than he had believed that there was, indeed, a physical manifestation.

The Creation narrative is open to many different types of interpretation. According to the Midrash, God made worlds and destroyed them several times over before coming to this one. The mystical Zohar has Ein Sof (the endless non-physical absolute God) creating The Beginning as a stage in the process of distilling the physical world that Elohim controls and we inhabit.

The very process of the Seven Days is not at all obvious. What was a "day" before the sun was put in position on the fourth day of Creation? The Midrash says that the light from the first day was a special kind of light reserved for the righteous in the next world, something more like enlightenment than like the rays of the sun.

And when God said, "Let us make man in our image and form," what did that mean?

For thousands of years different interpretations, some literal, some rational, some symbolic, and some mystical have coexisted in the Jewish world of religious scholarship without anyone being told that their view was unacceptable.

Of course, nowadays literal Creationism is seriously in favor in many religions. Some Christian fundamentalists in the US would like to have Creationism taught in the public schools as a parallel to evolution. But whereas evolution, for all its faults and gaps, is a scientific theory based on at least some demonstrable examples, Creationism is not scientific and is simply a matter of faith.

There's nothing wrong with two alternative world outlooks. Frankly, I like them both. I'm as much opposed to a doctrinaire scientist who excludes spirit as to a spiritual man who thinks science has nothing to offer. I like science and I like faith. We humans need them both, and I don't think you need to reconcile them. I have nothing against anyone who tries to show that you can, indeed, understand a literal Genesis through relativity and physics to fit into the surface reading of the text. I just don't think it's necessary.

Being Jewish depends essentially on how you live, on whether you bring Torah into your life. It is the practice that counts, not the theory. If one has difficulty believing certain things, it's no big deal. We are not the sort of religion which makes the Credo the condition of membership. Halachically, a Jew's commitment is determined by how he or she behaves. There is no statement in the Torah that is formulated "You Must Believe that". Yes, indeed, encountering God, and the Divine energy that suffuses our world and that reveals to us the way to live, is crucial. But before the Greeks came along it was not thought necessary to formulate these ideas rationally, or to insist that one had to believe them or else! Indeed, the Biblical word that we translate "belief", Emunah, really means "conviction" or "certainty".

You can instruct people to do certain things. But how can you insist on someone believing? Can you check? People can easily mutter a bland phrase, "I believe." But how could you ever determine if they really meant it? That is why it is how you behave that determines your position in the Jewish religious world.

The Book of Genesis is concerned with the evolution of humanity's encounter with God, rather than with scientific evolution.

I'm sorry if some misinterpret this to be anti-Orthodox. On the contrary it IS Orthodox. But, then, labels are the security of the those who don't know what real value is.