The MIT physicist Jeremy England, whose research concerns nonliving things that act like living things, is also an Orthodox Jew—and the inspiration for a character in a novel by the bestselling author Dan Brown. In an interview with Rachel Scheinerman, he discusses his reflections on the tensions between science and religion:

There are lots of Jews who are very observant and religious . . . who are also highly technically educated and find modern science very credible. But I think that one has to raise the question of how that level of intellectual comfort is achieved.

One possible way that it can be achieved is by creating a kind of divided mind. . . . And I don’t mean to denigrate that, but . . . I don’t want to have a divided mind. It’s necessary to acknowledge that the Tanakh [tries] to make you uncomfortable with the idea of fixed laws of nature. That’s at least one current within [scripture]. There are [also] countercurrents, [for instance], the Psalmist’s idea of “How many are the things You have made, O Lord; You have made them all with wisdom”—the idea that God made everything in His wisdom and it has a natural order and regularity to it. [T]hese currents are in tension with one another.

Papering over that tension and saying, “It’s easy, we don’t have to worry about it”—that can come at a cost. I think it’s possible to be very committed to the Torah in ways that are very authentic and ancient, and still be fully committed to scientific reasoning. . . . [But] there’s [also] a real, serious danger [of] turning science into not just a way of reasoning about what is predictable about the world, but into a full-blown belief system that has a mystical component to it. . . . [I]t can get very doctrinaire.

Here’s an example. Someone might say, “The rules of the universe are fundamentally mathematical and probabilistic. Furthermore, there is a very parsimonious mathematical theory that is the explanation of everything, and we are just trying to refine our understanding of that model. But the universe is mathematical.” That is, in a sense, a mystical claim. It is beautiful and nourishes the souls of people who devote themselves to it. And it’s very common . . . in my line of work. But I staunchly reject that way of talking, because I think the laws of physics are human contrivances.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.