Today the situation is the same. In the hands of the world, science, for all its success is darkness—it conceals the Almighty, it can be used as a tool to advance atheism. But when a Jew delves into science for the sake of extracting the “wisdom of the nations” and using it to serve God, even the paralyzing darkness of science can be illuminated. The Alter Rebbe writes in the Tanya that we must learn how to use the wisdom of the nations “like a pickaxe to cut with them, that is, to earn a livelihood from them so that we may comfortably serve God, or to know how to use them for the service of God or His Torah.” This was, he writes, the intent of Maimonides and Nachmanides in their pursuit of the sciences of their time and this should be our intent when pursuing modern science.
