the spirit of community. What do you do when your people has just made a golden calf, run

riot and lost its sense of ethical and spiritual direction? How do you restore moral order? Not just

then in the days of Moses, but even now? The answer lies in the first word of today's parasha,

Vayaquil. But to understand it, we have to retrace two journeys that were

among the most fateful in the modern world. The story begins in the year 1831, when two young men,

both in their 20s, one from England, the other from France, set out on voyages of discovery that

would change them and eventually

our understanding of the world.

The Englishman was Charles Darwin.

The Frenchman was Alexis de Tocqueville.

Darwin's journey aboard the Beagle took him eventually to the Galapagos Islands, where

he began to think about the origin and evolution of species.

Topfield's journey was to investigate a phenomenon that became the title of his book, Democracy,

in America. Although the two men were studying completely different things, the one zoology

and biology, the other politics and sociology, as we'll see they came to strikingly similar conclusions.

Actually the same conclusion God taught Moses after the episode of the Golden Calf.

Darwin, as we know, made a series of discoveries that led him to the theory known as natural selection.

Species compete for scarce resources and only the best adapted survive.

The same he believed was true of humans also.

But this left him with a serious problem.

If evolution is the struggle to survive, if the strong win and the weak go to the war, then everywhere

ruthlessness should prevail. But it doesn't. All societies value altruism. People esteem those

...