At the Crossroads

B Y A . W E S S O N
o know God, study His creations.
Those words, simple yet profound, landed
on the desk of Sam (Shmuel) Safran ’73Y at YU 34
years ago. They have stayed with him ever since, an
invisible thread connecting two strands in his life:
Torah study and science.
The words came from a handout in his freshman physics
course, courtesy of his professor, Dr. Herman Presby YH,
’62Y,BG. They were from the first chapter of Maimonides’
“Mishna Torah” on the topic of “leidah,” knowing the Creator
—in part by probing the wonders of what He had wrought.
“This is more than just ‘science appreciation’ of the won-
ders of creation,” says the 51-year-old Dr. Safran. “It requires
probing the depths of the experimental and theoretical
underpinnings that show the beauty and universality of the
laws governing the physical universe.”
Probing is what Dr. Safran, now a theoretical physicist,
has done since his days at YU. His search took him to Massa-
chusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a doctor-
ate in physics in 1978, and then to Bell Labs, where his post-
doctoral work focused on the theory of crystalline materials.
Then it was on to a 10-year stint at Exxon, where he
worked with chemists, applied mathematicians, and chemi-
cal engineers to study the fundamental properties of materi-
als important to the petrochemical industry, including oil,
water, and soap. At Exxon his team applied these “soft-mat-
ter” materials to practical applications, such as fuel stabiliza-
tion and oil-spill clean-ups.
In 1990, he joined the Weizmann Insti tute of Science
in Rehovot, Israel, in the department of Materials and
Interfaces. There Dr. Safran’s work on “softmaterials” may 
someday enable medical researchers to deliver therapeutic
drugs to infected areas of the body with pinpoint accuracy.
He served as dean of the Institute’s Feinberg Graduate
School; and in December 2001, he was named vice president
of the Institute, responsible for its academic and research
components.
Through it all, Dr. Safran has managed to find a balance
between “the two different planes” of his life, as he calls his
scientific work and his Torah study. In so doing, he tries to  
live by the YU ethos of Torah Umadda. “As the Rav explained
many times, the quest for scientific knowledge and for Torah
knowledge and practice are mandated by the same Creator.
It’s up to us to pursue both,” Dr. Safran says.
His Talmud studies with the Rav, Rabbi Joseph B. Solo-
veitchik, in his senior year at YU and as a graduate student
over five years at MIT, helped him locate common ground
between the physical and spiritual worlds. Those studies ulti-
mately led to his 1999 article, “Methodologies Common to
Science and Halakhah,” published in Bar-Ilan University’s
Journal of Torah and Scholarship
. The article surveyed com-
mon themes put forth by the Rav and Nobel Laureate physi-
cist Richard Feynman.
“The Rav compared the mathematical description of the
physical world to the halakhic attempt to quantify the spiri-
tual world. A true appreciation of this, I feel, can only be
gained by ‘jumping in’and studying both science and Talmud
in depth. You must get involved and ‘do science’ to under-
stand how it works, just as you must get involved in learning
—at the
lomdut
[scholarly] level, if possible—to fully appre-
ciate its philosophical beauty.”
The son of a mother who survived Auschwitz and a father
who spent the war years in the Shanghai ghetto of China, Dr.
Safran began his foray into science as a boy in Brooklyn
where his dream at age 8 was to design amusement park 
rides, and later at Yeshiva University High School for Boys.
But it is his longtime playing of the accordion that provides a
handy metaphor for his life, unfolding as he has done in his
work the beauties of creation, and coming back home, so to
speak, to Torah