by LEIBY BURNHAM | March 20, 2026 4:53 pm
If a man told you in 1968 that within a decade hundreds of millions of people would starve to death every single year, that by 1985 the earth’s population would be beaten down to a more “acceptable” 1.5 billion, and that by 1980 the average American life expectancy would plunge to 42 because of pesticide-related cancers, what would you expect to happen to him when all of that turned out to be false?
You would probably assume he would be remembered as a cautionary tale.
You would expect him to be brought up in classrooms with a chuckle. “Children, this is why we don’t confuse scientific anxiety with prophecy.” You would think his books would be shelved somewhere between Flat Earth for Beginners and How to Lose a Fight with Reality in Ten Easy Steps. You would imagine that after a few failed predictions, the microphones would be taken away, the prestige would dry up, and the world would say, “Perhaps we should stop building public policy around the apocalyptic fantasies of a man who cannot seem to predict next Thursday, let alone the next decade.”
But the world does not work that way.
Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, died this month at 93. That age alone stands there like a silent rebuke to his own warnings of human life expectancy being cut to 42 by 1980. In the late 60s and early 70s, Ehrlich forecast mass starvation on a colossal scale, resource collapse, and drastic reductions in human longevity. Instead, the global population just kept marching upwards; global life expectancy rose to just over 70 by 2021; and the death rate from major famines fell to fractions of what it was when he wrote his book. Today, no one dies because there is not enough food, people only die of starvation when access to food is limited due to war, corruption, and other evil human behavior.
Even more remarkable is that some of the forces that disproved him were already emerging while he was writing. Norman Borlaug’s agricultural work helped drive the Green Revolution, dramatically increasing crop yields. India, which Ehrlich held up as a showcase of inevitable disaster, moved from food dependence and shortage to self-sufficiency and later grain exports! Over the past six decades, food supplies grew faster than population on every continent, because humanity devised brilliant methods to produce significantly more food while using less land.
And yet Ehrlich did not merely survive his failed prophecies. He was elevated.
He was Stanford’s Bing Professor of Population Studies, Emeritus, and founder-president of its Center for Conservation Biology. He was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1990. He received the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, a prize Stanford itself describes as filling areas where no Nobel is given. He later received the Volvo Environment Prize, the United Nations Sasakawa Environment Prize, the Tyler Prize, the Heineken Prize, and the Blue Planet Prize, among others. He frequently testified before U.S. congressional committees and advised policymakers on population, environment, and resource issues, becoming a major public intellectual shaping debates and policy around the world. In other words, while reality kept refusing to cooperate with his predictions, the scientific and political institutions of the age kept pinning medals on his chest.
Evidently, a man can be spectacularly wrong in the area for which the public knew him best, and yet remain a sage to the very world that he misled. Apparently, if you are wrong loudly enough, pessimistically enough, and academically enough, the modern world may not punish you. It may just hand you another fellowship, another award, and a bigger microphone.
One of the clearest illustrations of this came in his famous wager with economist Julian Simon. Ehrlich believed growing population would make important raw materials scarcer and therefore more expensive to the point of unaffordability. Simon offered him a bet in 1980: choose a basket of any five commodities, buy $200 of each and let the market judge. At the end of 10 years, if that exact basket of commodities cost more than $1000, Simon would send Ehrlich a check for the overage. If they were below $1000, Ehrlich would have to send Simon a check for the difference.
Ehrlich chose chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. By 1990, every one of the five commodities had fallen, and the inflation-adjusted price of the basket was just $424.93, Ehrlich had to publicly mail Simon a check for $576.07. He was not just wrong, he was so deeply and publicly wrong. But the accolades kept coming, the awards kept being bestowed, and his influence only grew.
There was one fundamental flaw in Ehrlich’s thinking, one that caused him to be so deeply wrong. He didn’t see humanity as a spiritual being, all he saw was biology.
If you study deer, rabbits, algae, or fruit flies, overpopulation works in a fairly grim and predictable way. Too many mouths, too little food, resource exhaustion, collapse. In the natural world, organisms expand to the limits of their environment and then smash into those limits and decline violently. If you think man is just one more animal with a slightly better vocabulary, then you expect human beings to do the same thing. More people means less for everyone. More children means more disaster. More life means more burden.
And that was Ehrlich’s great mistake.
He looked at man and saw a consuming organism. The Torah looks at man and sees a creator.
He saw growing appetite and needs. The Torah sees tzelem Elokim.
He saw mouths. The Torah sees souls.
A human being is not merely a biological unit competing for calories. A human being is created b’tzelem Elokim, in the image of G-d. Just like G-d is a Creator, so to human are imbued with the ability to create. There is within man a chelek Eloka mima’al, a G-dly spark. G-d is infinite, and the spark of G-d that animates us, gives us almost limitless abilities. The capacity to think beyond instinct, to innovate beyond limitation, to build beyond present scarcity, to envision what does not yet exist, and then bring it into the world.
A sheep eats grass. A man invents drip irrigation.
A cow grazes in a field. A man crossbreeds wheat, maps genomes, designs fertilizer systems, builds refrigeration chains, desalinates water, and turns a dusty desert into productive farmland.
An animal is trapped inside the boundaries of nature. A human being has been gifted by G-d with the ability to push those boundaries outward again and again and again.
That is why Ehrlich kept being embarrassed by reality. He kept trying to apply the logic of mice in a cage to mankind. But mankind is not mice in a cage. Human beings are capable of discovering new resources, using old resources more efficiently, replacing scarce materials with better ones, healing diseases that once killed millions, and coaxing more abundance out of less space. The world now feeds more than eight billion people, and by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ long-standing estimate, roughly one-third of the food produced for human consumption is still lost or wasted. We are not only feeding 8.5 billion people, we are producing enough food to feed almost 3 billion more!
When you factor G-d’s gift inside the human being into the equation, the equation changes. A world with more human beings is not just a world with more consumers. It is a world with more minds, more hands, more ingenuity, more invention, more capacity to heal, more capacity to organize, and more capacity to improve the lot of others.
But now we come to the darker side of this.
Once you stop seeing the Divine image in man, once you strip away the soul and reduce a person to a stomach attached to a carbon footprint, it becomes much easier to say ugly things in the language of public policy.
And here Ehrlich’s recommendations become chilling.
He did not merely say, “I’m worried.” He endorsed forced population control. He argued that food aid to India should be conditioned on mass sterilization of men with larger families, and indeed during India’s Emergency period, sterilization campaigns expanded massively, with millions of men sterilized because they were given a choice of sterilize or starve. He also recommended American cultural and governmental pressure against large families, including tax penalties and even legislation limiting family size. He pressed for Hollywood to always depict large families as backward, dangerous, and parasitic.
Once the human being is no longer a bearer of infinite value but a problem to be managed, such recommendations begin to sound reasonable to people who have made peace with moral blindness. And that is how it always works.
The moment we forget the soul of man, cruelty puts on a lab coat. The moment we forget the tzelem Elokim, the G-dly soul in every human being barbarism starts speaking in statistics.The moment we forget that each child is a world, people begin speaking of fertility as though it were pollution, of babies as though they were emissions, and of families as though they were acts of ecological vandalism. It is no wonder that atheistic Communist regimes in the last 100 years caused more than double the amount of deaths than all the religious wars in human history!
This is why the Torah’s vision of man matters so much. It is not just a sweet religious idea, it is civilization’s guardrail.
If man is only matter, then whoever controls the metrics controls morality. But if man is stamped with the image of G-d, then no committee, no professor, no bureaucrat, and no frightened ideologue gets to look at a human being and say, “There are too many of you.”
And that brings us to Pesach.
On the eve of our redemption from Egypt, the Jewish people were commanded to take the Egyptian god, the sheep, slaughter it, and place its blood on their doorposts. This was not just a dramatic act of courage. It was a declaration of identity.
The sheep was worshipped by Egypt, because sheep have a particular quality: they follow. They drift. They move with the herd. They do not stop and ask where they are going, why they are going there, or whether their shepherd is a fool. They simply follow.
Egypt was the great civilization of power, nature, and fixed order. In Egypt, things were what they were. A slave was a slave. Nature was god. The sun was god. The Nile was god. The sheep was god. And the message was consistent: Go with the current. Bow to the system. Accept the categories. Stay in line.
Then Hashem says to the Jewish people: If you want to be redeemed, you must first reject that worldview. Do not worship the sheep. Do not think like the sheep. Do not follow the herd off of the moral cliff.
Take the very symbol of blind following, slaughter it, and mark your doors with its blood. Your exit from Egypt, must be a demonstration that you belong not to the natural order as Egypt understands it, but to the G-d Who stands above nature, directs nature, and places within you a soul that is meant to rise above base instincts and herd-thinking.
That is the beginning of freedom.
Freedom is not merely leaving Egypt geographically. Freedom is refusing to see yourself as a domesticated organism whose purpose is to eat, sleep, breed, and die according to material pressures. Freedom is knowing that you are of immeasurable value because G-d invested a piece of Him in you. Freedom is recognizing that a human being, is not reducible to biology, economics, or environmental math.
When we know our value, we stop panicking like animals and start creating like G-dly image-bearers. When we know our value, we stop speaking about children as burdens and begin seeing them as blessings. When we know our value, we stop surrendering to the fashionable despairs of the age and begin trusting that Hashem placed in mankind the ability to build, heal, grow, and elevate the world.
Paul Ehrlich looked at the swelling population of humanity and saw catastrophe. The Torah looks at humanity and says: there is tremendous danger when man forgets G-d, but there is also tremendous greatness when man remembers who he is, and in Whose image he was created.
Pesach is almost here. It is the season in which we reject the sheep mentality, reject the gods of Egypt, reject the reduction of man to matter, and proclaim that we are a people chosen by Hashem for something infinitely higher. He didn’t only take us out of Egypt, He did it so that He could elevate us to be the Chose People, people who are chosen to be the Light unto Nations, as the prophet Isaiah told us (42:6), “I am the Lord; I called you with righteousness and I will strengthen your hand; and I formed you, and I made you for a people’s covenant, for a light to nations.” Hashem took us out of Egypt to entrust us with the mission of reminding all humanity who they truly are, what they are made of, and the divine purpose for which we were created.”
The nations still seem to worship the sheep today, 3,300 years after the Exodus. They still follow every fashionable scientific panic, every elite consensus, every polished fear packaged as wisdom.
But as for us, we place blood on the doorposts and walk out of Egypt.
We know that man is more than an animal who simply follows his instincts. We know that a child is more than a mouth to feed. We know that the human being carries within him a spark from Above. And once you know that, once you walk through that door, you are already on the road to freedom.
Have a Kosher and Liberating Pesach!
Parsha Dvar Torah
Being that humans are such complex creatures, there are many ways to describe us. The Torah uses a number of different words to describe humans, each one describing a distinct aspect of our reality. Today we will focus on two of those names and how they are used in our parsha.
In this week’s parsha the Torah teaches us about the different offerings brought in the Temple. The loftiest of the offerings was the olah, an offering that was brought when one simply wanted to give a gift to G-d. The entire animal was burnt on the altar. On the other end of the spectrum was the chatas, brought to obtain atonement for committing a grave sin. When the Torah describes the person bringing the olah it uses the term adam (Leviticus 1:2), while when describing the sinner who must bring the chatas it refers to man as nefesh (Ibid. 4:2). What do those two terms mean, and what can they teach us?
The very first word ever used to describe man is adam. We find it in Genesis, where it’s used when discussing the creation of man. There it says, “Let us make adam in our image.” This name refers to man’s earthly nature, as adama is the word for earth in Hebrew. Man was made with earth because just as earth has the power to stimulate growth in a way that sustains the entire world, so too, man has the power to grow and to sustain others. In that sense, man exists in the image of G-d, Who sustains the entire world. (The Sages tell us that another way to read adam would be as a contraction of the word adameh which means to be similar to, as in adameh li’elyon, I will be similar to the Divine One.)
Thus the Torah says about the person who brings the olah, “If an adam among you will bring an offering to G-d,” because it is referring to someone who wants to be better than he currently is. Even though he committed no wrongdoing, he still wants to grow, to develop a closer relationship with his Creator. This is man at his best, ever trying to develop and extend himself. This is adam!
The other verse referred to reads as follows, “If a nefesh (man) will sin…,” using the term nefesh to describe man. Where does this term come from? Strangely, the first five times it is used in the Torah, it is used to describe the life force of animals. Only in its sixth usage does it refer to the life force of man. This teaches us that man has a side of him that is very similar to the life force of an animal – intemperate, and driven by instinct, lust, and desire. The Torah uses this term in reference to a man who sins, as he is in touch with that part of his personality. He responds to the same instincts that animals respond to, without using his G-d given gift of reason to rise above his base desires.
The message the Torah is sending us is clear. We can be adam, compare ourselves to G-d, growing, sustaining, and benefiting the world. We can also be nefesh, animal-like, base, instinctive, and coarse. Clearly, the best way is to follow G-d’s original plan, which was, “Let us make man, let us make Adam!”
There should be no part of our personality that we hate. Some parts of our personality we love because they are naturally good. Then there are the parts that we should love, because when we iron them out, we not only grow immeasurably, but we tap capabilities we never thought we had! Please pass the salt…
Parsha Summary
This week’s Parsha, Vayikra, begins with G-d calling Moses from the Tabernacle for the first time since His Presence rested upon it. Since the purpose of the Tabernacle is to enable the Jewish People to serve G-d in a focused manner and place, G-d’s first discussion with Moses is about the Temple service and the sacrifices.
The Torah describes the laws of the olah, the wholly burnt offering, as they pertain to animals and fowl. (Quick lesson: G-d says both the olah brought from an animal ($$$$) and the olah brought from a bird ($) will bring a satisfying aroma before Him. This teaches us that whether it is an expensive gift or an inexpensive one, they are equally satisfying before G-d as long as the intent is sincere.) The Parsha then elucidates the five types of meal offerings (that is meal as in fine flour, not meal as in bringing a four course dinner with a side of sushi). After describing these basic offerings, the Torah commands us to put salt on everything offered upon the alter (this is one of the reasons we dip our bread in salt after making the Hamotzi blessing – to remind us that our table should be like an altar, and we should eat in an elevated fashion, not out of gluttony).
The Torah then discusses the laws of the peace offering (called that because everyone gets a piece of the action; some of the meat goes on the Altar, some to the Kohanim, and some to the owners who brought the sacrifice) and the sin offerings. This is followed by a description of an offering brought when a group of the Elders of the Assembly make an erroneous judgment, causing a large group to sin. After that, we are told of special sin offerings brought if the king or the Kohain Gadol commits a sin. The message here is that the more elevated your status, the more you must scrutinize your actions since they have a stronger effect. When a sin is committed by a person of higher stature, the atonement process is more elaborate than the process for a commoner.
Finally, we learn of the Asham sacrifice, the guilt offering, brought for a variety of sins such as broken oaths, entering into holy areas while in a state of unknown impurity, stealing and then making an oath denying it, and certain cases of uncertainty as to whether one committed a grave sin or not. And that, my friends, pretty much sums the whole Parsha up!
Quote of the Week: The future belongs to those who live intensely in the present. – Samuel Fremont
Random Fact of the Week: Coffee is the second most traded product in the world after petroleum.
Funny Line of the Week: The older you get, the better you get, unless you’re a banana.
Have a Groovy Shabbos,
R’ Leiby Burnham
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