Jewish Thecology: Theological Resources and Reflections ...



3. LITERATURE REVIEW: JEWISH- AND CHRISTIAN- ECOLOGICAL THOUGHT

Chapter Summary

Chapter Three, the literature review, is necessarily quite partial, striving to fill a useful niche nonetheless. It offers short but substantive summaries and evaluations of a series of works at the intersection of religion and ecology – first and foremost, all major works currently on the Jewish-environmental bookshelf (about a dozen), plus reference to other eco-Jewish materials. Second, the same goes for a few selected key works in the Christian-ecological world, with a special eye toward the Jewish relevance and applicability of their thought; but for limits of available time and project scope, it is this section which could have been developed the furthest, the contents of which in turn would shed more light on each other aspect of the project thesis. Finally, we turn toward a handful of important multi-faith ecological compendia. These descriptions, averaging 300-500 words each, take the form of an extended annotation. As it has been my privilege to explore this mostly Jewish and Christian literature, so I hope that others will bridge their inter-religious divides as well. And while “Judeo-Christian” is not an entirely apt grouping, these two broad faith groups are in fact both ‘religious civilizations descended in large part from the Hebrew Biblical tradition’; two millennia on, much remains to be gained through comparison and contrast around timely issues like ecology.

Eco-Jewish “Greatest Hits”

1991: A Garden of Choice Fruit: 200 Classic Jewish Quotes on Human Beings and the Environment, edited by David Stein (for Shomrei Adamah)

In the beginning (of the modern Jewish environmental movement), there was Shomrei Adamah.[1] Three major publications came out of it, including a 1993 collaboration with Hadassah called simply Judaism and Ecology, and Let the Earth Teach You Torah, a 1992 collection of lesson-plans and curricula for all ages edited by founder Ellen Bernstein and Dan Fink. Its first serious publication is of greatest interest here – a compendium of quotations from Jewish tradition regarding ecology and humanity, edited by Reconstructionist Rabbi David Stein (with input from Bernstein and others). Its editorial choices are interesting, and important inasmuch as this staple-bound booklet has become a major entry-point for Jews wanting to encounter the relevant texts.

It is again an early entrant in the literature of this still-young field, and there has been some buzz about updating it at some point,[2] which might be passé by now since so many on-line compendia already exist.[3] Some directions for a new edition would be include (a) brief commentary to elucidate some of the ecological implications of some of the less-obvious texts; (b) inclusion of more texts from the halachic/legal tradition; and (c) above all, the inclusion of Hebrew/Aramaic alongside the English. That said, it remains an excellent resource still today – with well-chosen texts easily arranged, helpful footnotes, a wide range of sources, and a useful graphic way of including an original text while maintaining the focus on a later comment upon it.

1994: To Till and to Tend: A Guide to Jewish Environmental Study and Action, edited by Daniel Swartz, et al (for COEJL)

Once the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL)[4] was established, its first major undertaking was this volume – mailed to every rabbi, synagogue, and Jewish agency in America – which put environmentalism firmly on the Jewish institutional map, and served as “one-stop-shopping” for Jewish professionals and leaders exploring environmentalism. The book tries to cover an impossible amount of ground, but succeeds on many fronts, as if its contributors knew that each section or entry in this founding document of a broad-based movement would eventually require and receive separate book-length (or shelf-length!) treatment. An overview by noted activist Leonard Fein precedes “fact sheets on different aspects of the environmental crisis” (now quite dated), and “four explorations on Jews and the natural world”[5] (still quite useful), the first of which is Rabbi Daniel Swartz’s[6] “Jews, Jewish Texts, and Nature: A Brief History” – still among the most comprehensive and insightful survey articles available.[7] The longest section by far is “Environmental Programs and Activities,” with nineteen such offerings grouped by age and format (ranging from institutional environmental audits to urban gardening, from nature treasure hunts to a simulation game “Working for Environmental Justice,” from tree-planting to sunrise services). Those copies distributed to rabbis also included a dozen sermon-starter ideas plus an environmental text study on the opening chapters of Genesis; every copy ended with an extensive set of resources including secular and Jewish organizations, articles, and books.

1998: Ecology and the Jewish Spirit, edited by Ellen Bernstein

Ecology and the Jewish Spirit (EJS), the first anthology in the field, is Bernstein’s crowning achievement; her words introduce not only the book and its three sections, but each one of its 37 entries. The first section, Sacred Space, begins in Israel with the Bible and then moves toward a Jewish land ethic for the Grand Canyon and Jersey City. The second section, Sacred Time, presents agricultural / environmental implications of the Jewish calendar and its holidays. The third section primarily expounds on Jewish law and philosophy, yet its very title, Sacred Community, itself suggests a valuable approach to Jewish environmentalism. In my estimation EJS remains a useful and accessible volume, though it suffers above all from staying ‘too light’ – it surprisingly avoids programmatic suggestions, and lacks a keen sense of urgency. Still it offers much of value, such as:

{1} Brad Artson illuminates the Biblical and Rabbinic evolution away from seeing Israeli soil as solely holy, and helps us develop deeper relationships with the diaspora lands of our modern existence. {2} Eliezer Diamond takes an ecological look at classical Jewish teachings on moderation, bidding us to re-appropriate the medieval model of “sumptuary laws” against conspicuous consumption. {3} Debra Robbins, in showing that ever since Sinai Jews have lived according to the rhythms of nature, complements Larry solid overview of the environmental themes we often take for granted in our fixed liturgy. {4} We learn from Marc Sirinsky that Shabbat is to time as wilderness is to space. {5} Everett Gendler, the spiritual godfather of Jewish environmentalism, shares a sweet reminiscence (page 154) about “the marvelous adaptability of the Jewish ritual tradition.” {6} Various new approaches to Jewish holiday observance, such as growing your own springtime barley to give new meaning to counting the Omer between Passover and Shavuot, have Ellen Cohn conclude (page 132) that “the cycle of rain maps the Jewish year, determining our crops and our holidays and defining our lives.”

Finally, some nuggets of environmental insight from EJS’ final section: David Ehrenfeld gleans interdependence from the Sh’ma (Deut. 11)’s dance between singular and plural language; Victor Raboy turns the agricultural law peah into a paradigm for social justice and environmental sustainability; Philip Bentley articulates how halacha (Jewish law) balances economics with ecology; Dan Fink lets Maimonides resolve the contemporary tension between proponents of “stewardship” and “deep ecology;” and Barry Freundel adds useful parallels between Talmudic and modern regulations to the existing literature on Jewish environmental law – for example, the notion that for an industry to pollute at all, it must fairly compensate everyone whom it affects.

1999: Trees Earth and Torah: A Tu B’Shvat Anthology, edited by Arthur Waskow, Naomi Mara Hyman, and Ari Elon

“Tu B’Shvat Anthology” is appropriately only the subtitle for Trees Earth and Torah (TET), which traces trees and Judaism from biblical roots, through their rabbinic ‘trunk,’ into three younger ‘branches’ of kabbalah, Zionism, and our contemporary Jewish environmental movement[8]. Only the final hundred pages (Part 7) deal with “Tu B’Shvat Itself,” offering useful holiday resources. The balance represents cutting-edge Jewish-ecological studies; though a few entries feel unnecessarily technical or off-point, far more shine with brilliance and insight.[9]

TET’s trunk includes, after Joyce Galaski’s translation of a rare medieval piyut (pietistic poem), Eilon Schwartz’s in-depth study of key ‘eco-mitzvah’ Bal Tashchit (do not waste/destroy), a welcome and original contribution. Noteworthy on the kabbalistic ‘branch’ is Miles Krassen’s full translation and annotation of the first Tu B’Shvat seder, the three-centuries-old Pri Etz Hadar – in which (page 138) the “structure of different kinds of fruit, the growing patterns of trees, the habits of birds, indeed all natural phenomena are, in essence, aspects of a divine epiphany that proclaims the truth of God’s existence.” In its second branch are Jeremy Schwartz’s masterful translation of labor-Zionist thinker A. D. Gordon; Tsili Doleve-Gandelman on the Jewish National Fund’s ambivalent role in inculcating Zionist identity; Yael Zerubavel comparing short stories to see how political, social, and ecological themes have matured in Israeli literature; and Shaul Cohen on “The Aggressive Nature of [Tree-] Planting” and its implications for land use, ecology, and the peace process.

TET’s final branch, modern “eco-Judaism,” includes classic midrashim applied to today’s environmental problems; a strident neo-mystical eco-feminist re-reading of Genesis and Psalms; and Rami Shapiro’s midrash on a midrash which locates the Messiah in the very act of tree-planting. In one powerful passage Naomi Hyman (at a civilly-disobedient Tu B’Shvat seder among imperiled redwoods) notes that if the giant trees had Torah parchment between them, the people would each be letter-sized; she and Waskow conclude (241), “that is what we are, of course: each one of us a letter in God’s great Torah Scroll of all life on the planet.” This section ends with Ari Elon’s exhaustive, exhausting, exhilarating ride “Through Tu B’Shvat to Yah B’Shvat”: covering four types of tikkun / repair (297), two types of commandments (300), 20th century Israel’s infantilization of Tu B’Shvat, and 2nd century Israel’s proto-mystical Talmudist Shimon Bar Yochai, en route to “a vital and relevant…kind of Tu B’Shvat that moves between kabbalist believers who plant trees in the sky and Zionist believers who plant letters in the ground” (341). It’s a one-of-a-kind article, in a key volume.

Co-editor Waskow concludes TET in powerful, prophetic style (417): “Tu B’Shvat approaches once again. The trees of the world are in danger; the poor of the world are in need; the teachers and celebrants of the world are at risk. Give! Or the flow of abundance will choke on the friction of its own outpouring, and God’s Own Self will choke on our refusal of compassion.”

2000: Torah of the Earth, Volumes I & II, edited by Arthur Waskow

It is hard to summarize two such rich volumes in just a few words. Waskow covers many bases in this work, which builds on and goes into greater depth than the two previous titles on the Jewish-environmental bookshelf (referred to above) which had come out in the two previous years. The entries are nicely laid out according to a historical timeline (borrowed presumably from his years on the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College’s faculty, whose founder Mordecai Kaplan had created the “civilizational” curriculum which locates material within its appropriate historical context), and thus realize the ambitious subtitle: “Exploring 4,000 Years of Ecology in Jewish Thought.”

Volume I starts us off with contemporary evaluations of antiquity’s gifts. Evan Eisenberg appropriately gets the longest entry with the most germane section of his brilliant Ecology of Eden reprinted here, a thought-provoking reflection on Genesis narrowly, and on our relation to both Bible and nature more broadly. Tikva Frymer-Kensky[10] and Arthur Waskow add thoughtful contributions on biblical resources toward a modern ecological orientation. My own chapter in Volume I[11] is mostly a catalogue of some of the rabbis’ “greatest hits” texts, organized according to modern environmental categories; it follows more nuanced pieces, reprinted from earlier disparate sources, by Norman Lamm, Jonathan Helfand, and David Ehrenfeld and Philip Bentley (their “Judaism and the Practice of Stewardship” has long been one of my first recommendations for folks wanting a brief, comprehensive, thought-provoking overview of the eco-Jewish synthesis). Then comes Jeremy Benstein’s delicious extended explication of a particularly problematic Mishnah (Avot 3:7), which looks directly at a seemingly “anti-environmental” bit of rabbinic teaching, and turns it around.

Volume II, a good bit longer, starts with Zionist environmentalism, including early Zionist thought that pertains to ecology,[12] and a series of contemporary takes that cast a critical if loving eye on Israel’s environmental (by key activist and chronicler Alon Tal) and social (with articles like “The Environment: A Shared Interest for Palestinians and Israelis”) challenges. The longest section is loosely modern, under the catch-all title “Eco-Judaism: One Earth, Many Peoples.” Along with more from Eisenberg it includes entries from numerous leaders in the progressive world: Judith Plaskow, Arthur Green, Michael Lerner, Ellen Bernstein, Waskow himself, and many others. I place special emphasis on Eilon Schwartz’s brilliant, brief “Judaism and Nature: Theological and Moral Views,” which surveyed the literature extant a decade ago and summarized it in key ways – a sample of his pithy wisdom is that “"In answering Disraeli's question whether the human being is ape or angel, emphasizing our affinity to the world of the ape need not by definition distance us from the spiritual.  It might even bring us closer” (II:172). I also single out Everett Gendler’s “On the Judaism of Nature”; Gendler is a key early thinker in this field, a teacher of Waskow and Green and the rest of us, who has long bade us to reaffirm (if reconstruct) the pagan impulses in our tradition. Here he speaks of his “pained perception of [Judaism’s] present plight: sea-sited synagogues with sea-views bricked over! Tree-filled lots with windowless sanctuaries! Hill-placed chapels opaque to sunsets! The astonishing indifference to natural surroundings! Was Judaism always this way? I very much doubt it…” (II:175).

Jeremy Benstein’s The Way Into Judaism and the Environment was written, much more recently, specifically as an introduction to this body of work for the uninitiated, and it now on balance probably edges out this work as a best place to begin. Yet Waskow’s work had served that function for some time; this remains among the best places to turn for Jewish eco-wisdom in print.

2001: Jewish Environmental Ethics: A Reader, edited and introduced by Martin Yaffe (also 1990’s Judaism and Ecology: 1970-1986, A Sourcebook of Readings, edited by Marc Swetliz)

In 1990, Marc Swetlitz secured some permissions and ran off some spiral-bound copies of “Judaism and Ecology: 1970-1986 Sourcebook of Readings” for Shomrei Adamah – a scantily-introduced set of reprints of the best articles on the subject to date (mostly representing Jewish refutations of Lynn White Jr.’s famous 1967 condemnation of the Biblical tradition). Swetlitz’s ‘anthology’ was helpful to a few us of through the 1990’s; I pored over it during my rabbinic school years and beyond (many of the texts found on the handouts in Appendix I were suggested by the authors therein). But a more enduring version was needed. Opening Martin Yaffe’s excellent survey was like greeting old friends – there is Brad Artson’s “Our Covenant With Stones,” Jeanne Kay’s “Concepts of Nature in the Hebrew Bible,” David Ehrenfeld and Phil Bentley’s “Judaism and the Practice of Stewardship” (my other most oft-recommended introductory article alongside Daniel Swartz’s entry cited above, reprinted previously as well in Waskow’s Torah of the Earth, Volume II), even Steven Schwartzchild’s curmudgeonly “The Unnatural Jew.” There are Jeremy Benstein, Eilon Schwartz, Larry Troster, and other creative voices of esteemed colleagues (in the small Jewish-environmental world, we often know each other personally as well as by reputation), all in one place. Together they document a vital record of expanding Jewish eco-thought. For folks serious abut this field – the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College students who took a mini-course on Judaism and ecology with me in January 2009 for instance – this is the first (though not only) title I recommend.

Few of these entries are new; the most important exception for me was the excerpt from Hans Jonas, a Holocaust survivor and philosopher who is most concerned with what technology may do to us. My own ‘aha’ moment came many years ago, hearing Rabbi David Saperstein explain that “we are the first generation in human history that cannot afford the consequences of its mistakes;”[13] he might have been channeling Albert Einstein who in 1946 said that “the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Or he might have been channeling Jonas (256-57) for whom, in light of these dire consequences, Judaism must affirm some moral absolutes over its adherents’ relativistic tendencies. Jonas also offers this dire warning: “the face or image of creation itself, including the image of man, is involved in the explosion of technological might. The older and comforting belief that human nature remains the same and that the image of God in it will assert itself against all defacements by man-made conditions, becomes untrue if we ‘engineer’ this nature genetically and be the sorcerers (or sorcerer’s apprentices) that make the future race of Golems.”[14]

Aside from the ‘good deed’ Yaffe has done by making these perspectives readily available, his own introduction is itself quite a contribution to the field. From his musings on how Aldo Leopold’s references to Abraham might weaken his argument[15] (and set the stage for the dreadful misreadings of the biblical tradition foisted upon us by Lynn White Jr. and Arnold Toynbee), through a deft dialogue with the articles he has included by way of introducing them, Yaffe – by simply choosing essays well, and collectively criticizing, analyzing, and deepening what they contain – has written the first and only substantive “ethical” treatment of eco-Judaism, and it is eye-opening.

2002: Judaism and Ecology: Created World and Revealed Word, edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

Years went by between the Harvard conference at which these papers were presented, and their appearance in print in this volume; I had waited eagerly for a long time to see this, and expected it to revolutionize the field. While there is much of value here, some of it among the best available, I cannot say that the volume as a whole lived up to that potential. Its major weakness, I believe, is also its half-strength: the editor’s (and the Harvard series’) attempt to fill in the philosophical and academic background ‘missing’ from the haphazard development of the field and the literature to date, and to bring mainstream Jewish scholars to speak from their particular sub-fields on issues relevant to ecology, often for the first time. Sometimes the outcome is truly helpful, as it is for instance with Moshe Sokol’s “Ethical Implications of Jewish Conceptions of the Natural World” which backs us up to ask what we mean by nature, and to remind us that “The content of discourse about the natural world is itself not ‘natural,’ but is rather an artifact of human intervention and culture” (263, among other insights). More often, however, the effort falls flat, with dry theory and borderline expertise being melded into an eco-Jewish framework, usually with resistance. Were one symbol needed of the ‘old-school’ approach taken here, consider the gender breakdown of the contributors: out of 21 writers in the volume, the editor herself was the only woman.

Despite these obvious shortcomings, I will name some highlights,[16] starting with Eliezer Diamond’s important contribution focused on sumptuary laws, “How Much Is Too Much? Conventional versus Personal Definitions of Pollutions in Rabbinic Sources.” Another is Eilon Schwartz helpfully problematizing the idea of ‘wilderness,’ citing Tikva Frymer-Kensky to suggest that “the postmodern attack on the wilderness idea from within environmental ethics suggests the possibility of a more sympathetic appraisal of Jewish environmental intuitions by a post-wilderness environmentalism” (95). Tzvi Blanchard is always eloquent, original, and provocative; his suggestion that we should utilize a “model of discourse in which secular and religious/spiritual languages may both be employed and even sometimes linked, so long as they are not merged” (427) is no exception.[17] And Mark Jacobs’ “Jewish Environmentalism,” the final chapter, is the clearest history and analysis of the movement available, even years later; he reminds us of why this project thesis (with its disproportionate focus in a community that comprises only 2% of America and an order of magnitude less of the global population) matters: “Jewish environmentalism has the potential to mobilize a small, though disproportionately influential, constituency in the public and private sectors of American life… As the [a?] historic source of Christianity, Judaism has considerable moral authority in the American imagination, providing recognizable Jewish leaders an opportunity to make a moral case for environmental protection before the nation at large.”

2006: The Way Into Judaism and the Environment, by Jeremy Benstein

Finally comes the clear, cogent, comprehensive, cohesive introduction that this field has long needed. Benstein covers all the bases with just the right tone, mostly objective but unafraid to interject his own original and strong voice. [18] Consider his comments (33-34) on Genesis 1: “A central thesis underlying this work is that religious values and worldviews meet up with environmental critiques of modern society in many more places than we might think, and the broad human-world nexus of the beginning of the Beginning, with all its problematic commandments, ambivalent blessings, and mythic pronouncements, is the first and perhaps foremost such encounter.”

To gain a sense of Benstein’s careful choice of traditional texts, and thoughtful value-added commentary, we begin where the Talmud (Sanhedrin 38a) explains that God created the human on the eve of Shabbat for four reasons – the last of which was “so that [the human] could enter into a banquet immediately. This is similar to a flesh-and-blood king who built a palace, furnished it, laid a banquet, and then invited in the honored guests.” Benstein first offers this (52) as “the standard reading of the Creation story, with the humans at the very top and everything else created to serve human need.” Then he delivers his twist in the next paragraph:

Or is it? If I could choose one text from all of Jewish tradition to represent the essence of environmental value, this would be a strong contender. Guests, even honored ones, are not the lords of the manor; indeed, most of environmental ethics and sustainable development policy could be based precisely on the viewpoint of the guest. Just think of what you would and wouldn’t do as a guest in someone else’s home. How much would you eat from another’s table—even if you felt it were a banquet laid for you? Would you chop up the furniture for kindling? Kill the pets? Deny other guests their share of the host’s bounty? Whether we base this sensibility on belief in God as the ultimate landlord or not, we are indeed guests, here for a twinkling in the cosmic long haul…

Benstein uses a complex yet elegant structure of six major parts to cover all but the most obscure relevant material, with the sub-units (outlined nicely in the three-page table of contents pointing to each particular issue or value addressed. Thus bal tashchit (the law of not wasting) gets sub-divided into two sections (“From Battlefield Forestry to Environmental Values” and “Negotiating Needs and Wants”) within Part III, “Traditional Sources and Resources. And many additional bal tashchit texts appear within Part IV, “Contemporary Topics and Issues, in a section called “Eat and be Satisfied: How Much is Enough?” There we also find four well-written pages planning and sprawl (135-38) adjoining a section on economic and environmental justice as another piece slyly titled “Tzedek and the City: Justice, Land Use, and Urban Life.”

I have quibbles, but very few; [19] they are more than offset by his thoroughness, readability, and occasional pithy ‘aha’ phrase (e.g., “perhaps the best translation of the biblical phrase leovda uleshomra is ‘sustainable development’ [67]). In many ways this book is an extension of the deeply original thought Benstein had articulated earlier, looking at the traditional bifurcation of Jewish laws into mitzvot bein adam l’Makom and bein adam l’chavoro, between-self-and-God and between-self-and-others – “What is needed today is a new, third category: mitzvot bein adam le-olamo, the mitzvot, and the concomitant sense of commandedness, which can inform and define our piece of the World, and our responsibility towards it.”[20] The beginning of that new category is on the bookshelf, and it is now the first title on that shelf that I recommend to most interested parties.

2007: Jewish Environmental Ethics: Theory vs. Practice, Thesis by Sarah Franco

One unpublished work deserves mention here as well, an extensive thesis for Middlebury College written by Sarah Franco. Much of her work focused on nearly 200 surveys and numerous interviews within five synagogues in Vermont and Maryland (mine included), conducted in 2007 and 2008; I make extensive reference to her data in Chapter 8 on “Greening Synagogues.” She also offers a sweeping survey of much of the literature cited above, and of the theological and sociological basis for eco-Judaism. Some of her conclusions are quite original, such as the important role of “non-actions” in a Jewish environmental ethic – a notion that emerges out of the paucity of her survey and interview references to Shabbat or Jubilee – which is worth citing at length, below.[21]

Other Important Jewish-Environmental Works

While the aforementioned titles loom largest in my understanding, a host of other volumes bear mention here as well. One set of them concerns “biblical ecology,” with a focus on the flora and fauna of the Land of Israel, a literature too voluminous to catalogue here. One new entry worth noting in this category is Daniel Hillel’s impressive The Natural History of the Bible: An Environmental Exploration of the Hebrew Scriptures – a detailed, thoughtful, thorough explanation (by a trained ecologist who is a sensitive reader of both ancient text and of contemporary landscapes) of how ecological realities not only play out in the Bible, but presumably shaped the very character of our received text. Hillel’s predecessor in this field was Nogah Hareuveini, the founder of the (must-see!) Biblical nature preserve Neot Kedumim in the Judean Foothills east of Tel Aviv, whose tireless research brought biblical and rabbinic teachings to life, quite literally. Stretching back to his 1974 Ecology in the Bible,[22] Hareuveni’s many works[23] still have much to offer.

Other discrete categories include childrens’ books;[24] individual volumes of periodicals devoted to the topic (most recently Hadassah Magazine’s February 2009 “The Green Issue,” in which Leah Koenig on page 15 singles out only two synagogues by name for their greening efforts – the same two Reconstructionist synagogues, mine in Maryland and JRC in Illinois, which are profiled here in Chapter 8);[25] and volumes devoted to the topic which simply offered little that was new, and seem not to have appreciably affected the field (there are works in Hebrew such as those by Nachum Rackower, and literature in both languages regarding the environment in Israel such as Pollution in a Promised Land by Alon Tal, but both of these categories lie outside the scope of this study).[26] There are also some important works of more limited scope that unquestionably deserve mention here: Ellen Bernstein’s thoughtful extended meditation on the opening chapter of Genesis, The Splendor of Creation (2005);[27] Rabbi Mike Comins’ anecdotal, serious, useful manual and study guide A Wild Faith: Jewish Ways into Wilderness, Wilderness Ways into Judaism (2007);[28] the late Rabbi Balfour Brickner’s Finding God in the Garden: Backyard Reflections on Life, Love and Compost (2002);[29] and the useful and eye-opening but too-short Spirit in Nature: Teaching Judaism and Ecology on the Trail (2000),[30] culled from the experience of leading Jewish educators Matt Biers-Ariel, Deborah Newbrun, and Michal Fox Smart. Ellen Bernstein’s first foray, The Trees’ Birthday: A Celebration of Nature: A Tu B’Shvat Haggadah (1987),[31] is also worthy of mention.

Beyond those are a host of titles which inform the Jewish-ecological synthesis, but are not ‘about’ it per se. These include two by Richard Schwartz: Judaism and Global Survival,[32] whose tremendous utility has made it among the most dog-eared books on my own shelf; and Judaism and Vegetarianism,[33] the most thorough treatment of a vital subject (about which more, below). They also include numerous titles by Arthur Green, including Seek My Face, Speak My Name and Ehyeh: A Kabbalah of Tomorrow, which place ecological concerns near the center of contemporary Jewish spirituality and of erudite neo-kabbalistic meaning-making, respectively. Evan Eisenberg’s creative and wide-ranging The Ecology of Eden (1998)[34] makes much of the author’s Jewish knowledge, and is a thought-provoking exploration of vital themes that defies categorization. Lynn Gottleib’s She Who Dwells Within (1995) was the first Jewish-feminist work to prominently feature ecological themes. Abraham Joshua Heschel’s classic The Sabbath (1951), though not written as an environmental tract, has become perhaps the best-known 20th century Jewish ‘eco’-teaching (the runner-up for that distinction is probably Martin Buber’s 1923 I and Thou).

And finally, there is everything that Arthur Waskow has ever written – Tales of Tikkun (with Phyllis Berman), Godwrestling (the original and Round 2), The Bush is Burning!, The Freedom Seder, and much more – of which two deserve special mention here. Seasons of Our Joy: A Modern Guide to the Jewish Holidays (1982) brought a new ecological sensitivity to the year cycle; Waskow’s once-daring focus on the lunar, solar, agricultural, meteorological, and natural basis for the Jewish festivals has since become accepted wisdom. And Down-to-Earth Judaism: Food, Money, Sex, and the Rest of Life is an exploration of Jewish values applied to daily life – a Jewish Renewal ‘halacha’ of sorts – with ecological concerns at the fore, especially in the areas of sustainable agriculture and moderate consumption.

Other Media

We have covered only books so far; numerous journal entries speak to our topic as well, but with few exceptions this study considers only those which have been made more readily available by appearing in published anthologies. Yet how last-century of me to focus only on the printed word at all! A growing number of video productions and songs by leading Jewish musicians do address Jewish-environmental themes, but for the most part, those too lie beyond the present scope. However, the resources of the world-wide web must be mentioned here, if not in detail. A few key websites for further exploration, as of early 2009, include:

– the COEJL website covers green synagogue resources (see Chapters 6 and 8), holiday celebrations, background learning materials, sermon-starters, lesson plans, action items, useful links, and much much more. The many resources I assembled there in 2004 are for the most part still up at greensyn, under the “Greening Synagogues Resources” tab. (direct link: ).

– especially strong on Jewish sustainable agriculture (see Hazon’s influential blog “The Jew and the Carrot”), on bike-riding and sustainable transit, and on using ecology to connect Israel with the diaspora.

– the central site for Jewish environmental education, outlining the Teva Learning Center’s excellent initiatives, and with a fabulous (very lightly pass-protected!) resource bank of curricula and lesson plans.

– Arthur Waskow’s email postings are as voluminous and wide-ranging as his published works;[35] they are collected, along with information on activist campaigns like the Green Menorah, at the Shalom Center’s site.

green -- the brand-new (as of 2/09) “Greening Reform Judaism” site, which seems to have a wealth of resources, ideas, and links for folks of all denominations.

– the leading location for (mostly modern) Orthodox ecological thought and action; their Torah commentaries and text resources are alone worth the visit.

.il/eng – Israel’s Heschel Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership is the most COEJL-esque group in Israel; more Jewish- (and Israel-) environmental resources can be found at , , , and .il.

Selected Key Eco-Christian Works

1985: God In Creation, by Jürgen Moltmann

How grateful I am to Dr. Sondra Wheeler for recommending this to me. I now see its, and Moltmann’s, central role in the development of eco-theology over this past quarter-century, yet I had no awareness of him or of this work until a few years ago. And most of even my well-educated and interfaith-savvy Jewish colleagues are in the same position. If all I do with the rest of my religious-environmental career is introduce the Jewish world to Moltmann, dayeinu, it’ll be enough.[36]

Though Moltmann never cites Emmanuel Levinas, I hear echoes of his contemporary to the West,[37] as well as of Buber,[38] in his statement on the Sh’ma (257) that “Hebrew thinking does not enquire into the essence and individual components of a thing. The Hebrew asks about its becoming and its effects.” That leads into a discussion of death and dying 268-69) which I might just use in a eulogy someday; the same goes for many of his teachings which I expect to revisit: p. 103 and elsewhere for insights on panentheism; pp. 138-39 on the questions of afterlife in our Gvurot prayer; pp. 186-190 & 224 on Genesis 1:28; p. 226 when Ex. 32 comes up in our lectionary in parashat Ki Tisa; p. 209 on creation continua to explain our liturgical affirmations Barukh Sh’amar and Yotzeir Or; and more).[39]

His Sabbath musings appear prominently in Chapter 9; though it’s repeated there, I offer here as well his perceptive ode to a traditional Shabbat (277): “In the sabbath stillness men and women no longer intervene in the environment through their labour. They let it be entirely God’s creation. They recognize that as God’s property, creation is inviolable; and they sanctify the day through their joy in existence as God’s creatures within the fellowship of creation.” There he makes good on his brilliantly philo-semitic prefatory comment (xv): “Christianity took over the doctrine of creation from Israel’s Scripture, and will therefore do well to listen attentively to what Jewish interpretations of these common traditions have to tell us. The best creation wisdom is to be found in the Jewish theology and practice of the Sabbath. In abandoning the Sabbath, the Gentile Christian churches have lost this means of access, and we generally overlook it altogether.”

It is here, in his assumptions and loyalties as much as in his specific intellectual contributions, where I most appreciate Moltmann – one who can (5) define his emergent “Christian doctrine of creation” as “directed towards the liberation of men and women, peace with nature, and the redemption of the community of human beings and nature” – one who feels the need to actively deny supersession early on. “Jewish existence runs parallel to the Christian life, as a way and witness to the same hope for a humanity that will be finally liberated, glorified and united in righteousness. Christian existence does not displace or supersede Jewish existence. It is dependent on that existence, and is its companion along the same road” (8).

1987: Models of God, by Sallie McFague

Little need be said here, since so much is said in Chapters 5 and 6, where I quote and reflect on this work quite extensively. I was hooked on McFague’s metaphorical theology from the opening pages, and saw in this volume a voice that was cutting-edge when published over twenty years ago, and that remains fresh to this day. In short, she walks us through a range of metaphors that we often do or might use for the One, and considers each as “Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age” (her subtitle). Half her work is introductory, and the other half is extended analysis of her three key images of God as Mother, as Lover, and as Friend. The sense of urgency which drives her is already evident on page 5, after citing Jonathan Schell’s wake-up call End of the Earth, when she notes: “We have never before been in the position of potential ‘uncreators’ of life, of being able to prohibit birth, but it is precisely imagining the extent of this power and feeling deeply what it means to live in a world where this is possible that is part of the new sensibility required for Christian theology” (5). I agree with the American Academy of Religion which gave this work their 1988 Award for Excellence. It should be required reading for all people of faith who wish to reimagine the possibilities of Divinity in our imperiled era.

1991: Loving Nature: Ecological Integrity and Christian Responsibility, by James A. Nash

Among the first Christian eco-theology works I read, Nash’s volume remains among my favorites. I appreciate his insightful thoughts on numerous topics: how Puritanism might be deemed pro-environmental (76-77); an eloquent summary of the eco-consciousness of early monks and saints (81-86); his Bill of Biotic Rights (186ff); his reminder that “Global solidarity is no longer only an ultimate vision; it is fast becoming an ecological and political necessity” (217). And in the realm of politics and public policy (196), he helps us walk the tightrope – “The translation of Christian faith in moral norms and then into prudential laws and regulations is a complex and ambiguous process, and that translation becomes more tenuous with each step toward specificity… Nevertheless, Christians and their churches must still take the risks of specificity in order to avoid political ineffectiveness and irrelevance. Specificity is ‘where the action is’ politically…”

Another brilliant formulation is “We are not a special creation, a species segregated from nature. That is bad biology which leads to bad theology and ethics. Humans are totally immersed in and totally dependent on the biophysical world for our being. We cannot talk about humans and nature, but only humans in nature” (146; this reminds me too of an article by Phyllis Trible in which she describes the human of Genesis 1 as both “apart from” and “a part of” the rest of Creation). And my favorite Nashism (157) is simply, “The meek or humble may not inherit the earth, but they will dramatically increase the odds that a healthy earth will be there to inherit.” His perspectives on population (44-50) are brave and ahead of their time; in the midst of them (48) he writes, “From a Christian perspective, the nations are in fact and value an international and interdependent community of moral equals. The relevant whole for moral responsibility is not the family or the nation, but the global community.” His musings on universality (142ff) are most impressive, and join his population thoughts when he writes (152), “Even human population control is implied by beneficence, since it is necessary, among other reasons, to insure [sic] that all species have sufficient living space. Love expressed in the compassionate caring of beneficence is an indispensable element of a Christian ecological ethic.”

One more of Nash’s reflections (beyond the many quoted elsewhere throughout this project thesis) concerns sin; though not narrowly germane to the greening of congregations, this (from p. 119) was too good not to include:

Sin is turning inward, and, thus, turning away from ‘God, neighbor, and nature’… Ecologically, sin is the refusal to act in the image of God, as responsible representatives who value and love the host of interdependent creatures in their ecosystems, which the Creator values and loves. It is injustice, the self-centered human inclination to defy God’s covenant of justice by grasping more than our due (as individuals, corporate bodies, nations, and a species) and thereby depriving other individuals, corporate bodies, nations, and species of their due. It is breaking the bonds with God and our comrades in Creation. It is acting like the owner of creation with absolute property rights. Ecological sin is expressed as the arrogant denial of the creaturely limitations imposed on human ingenuity and technology, a defiant disrespect or a deficient respect for the interdependent relationships of all creatures and their environments established in the covenant of creation, and anthropocentric abuse of what God has made for frugal use.[40]

1994: The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation, by Bill McKibben

I’m a huge Bill McKibben fan; both his style and his content never fail to move me. But I was thrilled beyond measure to discover this hidden gem that establishes him as not just a spiritual environmentalist, but truly a religious one. Long before the ‘punch line’ of the speech from the whirlwind,[41] McKibben makes great ecological hay out of the full text of this challenging bit of wisdom literature, e.g. (10): “The intuitive ‘logic’ of growth, in other words, has begun to run into counterexamples, just as the theological orthodoxy of Job's day imploded on contact with his story” (elsewhere he equates the error of Job’s friends with our own, tracing both to anthropocentrism).

Parts of this work are as much a midrash on Genesis 1 as it is on Job, appropriately enough. After taking us day-by-day through our own undoing of the first week, he returns (16) to his “invented word ‘decreation.’ Forget for a moment the devastating effects on human beings – the toll on agriculture, the costs of protecting ports and infrastructure, the fate of Third World peasants already stressed to the breaking point. Consider just the Genesis account. The work of the first days nullified – not entirely, since we haven’t found a way to affect the alternation of day and night. But the daylight will shine on a world stripped of much of its glory.” He likewise elucidates the ecological warnings inherent in Isaiah and Jeremiah (20-21).

But the real highlight of this slim volume is McKibben’s exegesis of Job 38-42, the speech from the whirlwind – “a shatteringly radical answer, one that undercuts every bit of the orthodoxies that entwine us” (35); “the first great piece of modern nature writing” (57). He notes that in it (37), “God seems untroubled by the notion of a place where no man lives – in fact, God says he makes it rain there even though it has no human benefit at all.” He also celebrates that (as with the best of, but not all of, McKibben’s own writing!), “The voice also calls us, overwhelmingly, to joy. To immersion in the fantastic beauty and drama all around us” (54). And when the conversation turns to global warming as it must, he elucidates the bitter irony – Job stood mute in response to God’s “Where were you when I… set [the sea’s] boundaries, saying, ‘Here you may come but no farther; here shall your proud waves break’?” We in contrast are changing those boundaries, changing its break-points, as we hubristically melt the polar ice caps, and thermally expand the oceans.

“Why are we here?” he asks (87): “At least in part, or so God implies in his answer to Job, to be a part of the great play of life, but only a part. We are not bigger than everything else – we are like everything else, meant to be exuberant and wild and limited…” What makes us unique, then? “Witnessing the glory around us – that is a role no other creature can play. When God tells us we are created in his [sic] image, the only thing we know about God is that he finds creation beautiful – “Good. Very Good.” Perhaps that is a clue as to how we should see ourselves. Humans – the animal that appreciates.[42] Appreciates each other, loves each other, protects each other from harm. Appreciates the rest of creation, loves the rest of creation, protects the rest of creation. These activities are deeply linked, of course…” (88). Finally, McKibben’s conclusion bears sharing:

If [these reflections] draw from the book of Job any one lesson for our time, it is this:

We need to stop thinking in terms of our “environment.” An environment is a human creation: the home environment, the office environment. It counts – we need clean air and clean water, of course. But our environment is only a small part of something much larger. A planet, filled with the vast order of creation. It is a buzzing, weird, stoic, abundant, reckless, haunting, painful, perfect planet. All of it matters, all of it is glorious. And all of it can speak to us in the deepest and most satisfying ways, if only we will let it. (95)

1996: Earth Community Earth Ethics, by Larry Rasmussen

I have already singled this work out for praise, in his subtle and sophisticated weaving of the ‘secular’ (politics, economics, society, history, etc) with the ‘sacred’ (Christian and otherwise). His breadth is astonishing; his depth remarkable as well. As with McFague, my liberal application of Rasmussen’s work and sprinkling of his quotes speaks for itself. In such a thoughtful and extended work as his – credit to him for using a small font in single space, too, as a paper-saver! – it’s hard to ferret out a key theme or two. Writing this in the week of Tu B’Shvat (the “Jewish Arbor Day”) I am drawn to take “Trees of Life,” a dozen-page chapter, as an example. Here he opens with Heschel (one of my favorite quotes, that humanity “will not die for lack of information; it may perish for lack of appreciation”), returns to Maya Angelou (a trope here), spins through Genesis and Revelations, East and West Africa, Greece and New Mexico and the Iroquois people, the Bodhi Tree, the Apocrypha, Martin Luther, Avot d’Rebbe Natan (the very text I explicate in the next chapter), Hildegard of Bingen, Proverbs, the Menorah, the Burning Bush, Psalms, Hosea, e. e. Cummings (as cited by Sallie McFague), Rabindranath Tagore, Los Alamos and Hiroshima, Indian (sub-continent) women’s resistance, Indian (native American) suffering alongside that of their trees, Guatemalan poetry, Alice Walker (including the classic line “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it”), war, Nelson Mandela, Brooklyn (describing an effort to grow more trees there, how iconic), Hosea and Jeremiah, Tikva Frymer-Kensky (z”l), Avot, Israel’s iconoclasm, Asherah as a “lactating tree,” and ending with a lesson (207): “When nature is lost to the senses, God is as well. So is people’s sense of identity and direction as well as moral-spiritual energy for the journey… No heaven without earth. It’s that simple.” All in a dozen pages!

There is so much of interest here. I appreciate the humility he brings about the religious endeavor in general (178): “Religion is not ipso facto ‘a good thing.’ Religions and other faiths (chauvinist nationalisms, for example) have been, can be, and are demonic as well as redemptive. The holy destroys as well as saves.” Rasmussen’s moral “norms of and for sustainability” (172) prefigure those in the Earth Charter, as do those of James Nash[43] which he also cites (108). He combines his and Herman Daly’s insights into three key concepts inside two pithy sentences (116), noting that “we don’t have a Plimsoll line for ‘our biospheric ark.’ The Good Ship Oikoumene is without one.”[44] Without him I would not have known “Hans Jonas’s rendition of Kant’s categorical imperative: ‘Behave in such a way that the effects of your actions are always compatible with the permanence of nature and of human life on the earth’” (109). Because of him I learn that successful business initiatives mirroring natural processes practice “’renewability, reversibility, equity, resilience, proximity, and precision.’ It takes only a moment’s reflection to recognize these as traits of sustainable community itself” (342).

Much more from Rasmussen is scattered throughout this project thesis; I close this annotation with one particularly brilliant reflection of his: “Any God-talk in the particular cosmologies and ethical systems of different traditions and locales that does not include the entire fifteen-billion-year history of the cosmos and does not relate to all its entities, living and nonliving, ancient forms and very recent ones (such as humans), speaks of a God too small” (266).

2001: How Much Do We Deserve? – An Inquiry Into Distributive Justice, by Richard S. Gilbert

I include this here liberally, because it’s neither strictly Christian (Gilbert is a Unitarian Universalist minister), nor particularly environmental (only pages 90-95 are explicitly so). But the question in the title looms large throughout all eco-theology, and this was a fine treatment of the subject. As he says near the end in an obvious New Testament reference (with a lovely pun included), “Perhaps if enough people are willing to relinquish enough of their affluence, the proverbial ‘eye of the needle’ will become larger or ‘the camel’ will become smaller. If enough people have the courage to commit acts of class betrayal, perhaps we can be needled into the kingdom of heaven” (196). He points to the very dayeinu/enough concept which is developed elsewhere in this project thesis in speaking of “Thorsten Velben’s theory of conspicuous consumption and the corrupting potential of excessive income and wealth [which] is based on an ethic of enough; that is, beyond a certain level, income is not only superfluous but can be morally and spiritually corrupting” (157). I also appreciate his theological framework (26), which could be Tillich or Kaplan’s, but for the pithiness of its statement: it is “founded in the idea that there is a power beyond ourselves, one that functions in the cosmos as creation, in nature as creative evolution, and in humanity as history. Moreover, we, as humans, live with and strike bargains with this power. A purely utilitarian ethos does not do justice to the power that gives us life and being.”

2002: The God of Hope and the End of the World, by John Polkinghorne

Like Moltmann, Polkinghorne raises difficult eschatological questions. At the intersection of science and religion, he seeks to reconcile Biblical messianism with the predicted physical entropic eschaton (still tens or hundreds of billions of years off); such questions are absent from the eco-Jewish literature. It is not always easy to transpose such Christian notions[45] into a Jewish key, though (again like Moltmann) Polkinghorne is no stranger to Jewish concepts – in addressing “what could be the ground of a true hope beyond history,” he notes that “Christianity relies heavily upon its Jewish roots. It is only God who can bring new life and raise the dead, whose Spirit breathes life into dry bones and makes them live (Ezekiel 37:9-10). Hope lies in divine chesed, God’s steadfast love, and not in some Hellenistic belief in an unchanging realm of ideas or an intrinsic immortality of the human soul.”[46]

Among Polkinghorne’s provocative and useful concepts: {1} The mere act of considering the eschaton itself pushes us beyond anthropocentrism (page 11): “if we are concerned with questions of ultimate significance, we cannot restrict ourselves to the domesticated horizon of simple human recollection and human expectation;” all carbon-based life as we know it will eventually “prove only to have been a transient episode in cosmic history.” {2} While he says surprisingly little about judgment, Polkinghorne does offer the intriguing notion (130) that judgment might be “not simply a retrospective assessment of what we have been but it includes the prospective offer of what we might become. Perhaps judgement [sic] is a process rather than a verdict.” {3} One unique ecological contribution of religion (page 49, treated below in chapter 5) is having its adherents “live in the light of eternity.” {4} Another is the Shabbat ideal of rest, of limits to production and consumption and rat-racing -- the spiritual primacy of being over doing, and of inwardness (time) over ‘stuff’ (space). Polkinghorne, citing Moltmann on the eschatological significance of Sabbath, elaborates on the latter’s view of Shabbat as “breaking the relentless flow of present time, imposing a rhythmic return upon its linearity, recalling the divine rest after the acts of creation (Genesis 2:1-3), and pointing towards the endless Sabbath (sometimes called ‘the eighth day’), which will be creation’s consummation. ‘Every sabbath celebration is a messianic intermezzo in time, and when the messiah comes, he [sic] will bring the final messianic Sabbath for all God’s created beings.’”[47]

Finally: there is a “deep relationality of creation” (105). While I do not agree with Polkinghorne that DNA itself must be that which outlasts us (nor that creatures besides humans have no “individual eschatological future”[48]), I do agree (109) that the “’pattern that is me’ cannot adequately be expressed without its having a collective dimension. In this connection, it is significant that a powerful way of articulating Christian eschatological destiny is through the incorporation of believers into the one ‘body of Christ’ (I Corinthians 12:27; Ephesians 4:12-13).”[49]

He later deepens this point (136):

“Any parish priest or pastor is asked many times by bereaved persons, ‘Will I see my loved one again?’ Since human relationships are constitutive of our humanity, and central sources of human good, one can reply unhesitatingly, ‘Yes—nothing of good will be lost in the Lord’. In fact, what can at best be only a partial good in this world will be redeemed to become a total good in the world to come. Human hope is a community hope; human destiny is a collective destiny. Fulfilment lies in our incorporation into the one body of Christ [or perhaps into the Oneness of the Echad of ‘Shema Yisrael’?!].”

A Body of Work Deserving Special Mention: The Writings of Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry, a farmer-poet-professor-philosopher whose spiritual-cultural roots wend through American and human and biblical soil (and are anchored in Christian thought), writes in a profoundly and intimately human way. For a Wesley class some years ago, I wrote on how his ground-breaking thought might be applied toward an emerging Jewish environmental ethic, as viewed by this particular Jewish environmentalist[50] who is a great fan. Yet such fanfare is not automatic: I share with Berry a love of land and culture and religion, and find myself frequently in awe of and agreement with his analyses of all three. But he is a sixth-generation farmer of 75 acres in rural Kentucky[51], and I a first-generation city-dweller on one-tenth of an acre inside Washington, D.C. (where even the few plantings in our tiny yard wither from neglect). He is a pluralistic[52] evangelical Christian with an often rather literal theology; I am a pluralistic Reconstructionist Jew and something of a religious naturalist. Besides religion, I seem to (if gently) disagree with him on vegetarianism, abortion, tobacco, the ecological value of rural living, and much else. Yet despite such differences, I find remarkable resonance in Berry’s views – far more congruence with, than challenge to, my own, though both should serve as sources of learning and inspiration.

His classic “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” religiously exhorts us to “every day do something / that won’t compute. Love the Lord. / Love the world. Work for nothing…”. And it ends, “Practice resurrection”[53]. This gets to his theology:

Thus, Solomon and Saint Paul both insisted on the largeness and the at-large-ness of God, setting Him [sic] free, so to speak, from ideas about Him. He is not to be fenced in, under human control, like some domestic creature; He is the wildest being in existence. The presence of His spirit in us is our wildness, our oneness with the wilderness of Creation. That is why subduing the things of nature to human purposes is so dangerous and why it so often results in evil, in separation and destruction…[54]

Berry makes much of the conflict between the “boomer” and the “sticker” in each of us[55]. The boomer tendency is to always expand and grow and conquer; that of the sticker is to settle, till, and tend. It is, significantly, the same conflict that Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik described between Genesis’ Adam I and Adam II in his classic The Lonely Man of Faith[56]. Berry seems to intuit that mil’u et ha-aretz v’kivshu’ha, “fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28), is a very real desire in the human heart – even as it may conflict with humanity’s initial instruction l’ovdah ul’shomrah, “to till and to tend” or “to serve and to protect” the Garden (Gen. 2:15), which remains in effect. A few chapters later, in the Noah cycle, clear wickedness leads to the destruction of the Earth (Gen. 6-9). But a more subtle form of iniquity – the desire to create our own Garden and thus to become like God – crops up in Gen. 11. Though Berry does not make the analogy himself, I hear shades of the Tower of Babel in his description of humanity’s attempts to displace God and enthrone the self and the machine.[57] Among his many other Scriptural references, Berry takes particular delight in Revelation 4:11 (“Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created” – a New Testament line which seems to betray its posited Hebrew origins, in its complete consonance with Jewish thought); he notes that the “implications of this verse are relentlessly practical”.[58] Consonant with that:

… There is simply nothing in Creation that does not matter. Our tradition instructs us that this is so, and it is being proved to be so, every day, by our experience. We cannot be improved – in fact, we cannot help but be damaged – by our useless or greedy or merely ignorant destruction of anything.[59] / Once we have understood that we cannot exempt from our care anything at all that we have the power to damage – which now means everything in the world – then we face yet another startling realization: we have reclaimed and revalidated the ground of our moral and religious tradition. We now can see that what we have traditionally called ‘sins’ are wrong not because they are forbidden but because they divide us from our neighbors, from the world, and ultimately from God. They deny care…[60]

Finally (for our present purposes, that is; I could go on far longer about him!), Berry goads us to get outside, back into the life of nature, in order to truly appreciate the Bible and its teachings. The Hoda’ah prayer in the daily Amidah reminds us of “Your miracles that are with us daily, and Your wonders and goodnesses which are at every moment, evening and morning and afternoon” – likewise, Berry beautifully returns our Biblical spirituality to the commonplace[61]:

I don’t think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is… It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. This is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine – which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.

Other Eco-Christian Titles

I am aware of a recent explosion of scholarship and perspective in this arena, which as someone who now gets to dabble in this field only intermittently, I have not yet read. All project theses become dated at some point, and sadly this one is in some ways dated even before it is submitted. But mention should be made at least of these recent titles, which I hope to read at some point, and which clearly would inform this work: First and foremost is Sallie McFague’s A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming (Fortress, 2008); add to that Michael S. Northcott’s A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming (Orbis, 2007), and Anne Primavesi’s Theology in a Time of Climate Change: Participating in the Wisdom of Gaia (Routledge, 2008).[62] Some key older works are also not included in this survey, including Mary Evelen Tucker and John Grim (editors), Christianity and Ecology, 2002 [though pages 183-196, 205-219, and 107-08, among others, are certainly worthy of consideration].

Likewise, in the interfaith arena, Sally Bingham has just collected short and accessible pieces from twenty leaders in this field (including GWIPL friends Beth Norcross and Mohamad Chakaki among other treasured colleagues) in Love God, Heal Earth: 21 Leading Religious Voices Speak Out on Our Sacred Duty to Protect the Environment (St. Lynn’s Press, 2009) – an important contribution.

Selected Interfaith Environmental Explorations and Anthologies

1992: Spirit and Nature: Why the Environment is a Religious Issue – An Interfaith Dialogue. Edited by Steven C. Rockefeller and John C. Elder.[63]

Not the first anthology is this field – Eugene Hargrove’s Religion and Environmental Crisis (1986) is one of those that preceded it – still Rockefeller and Elder did a great service by convening a 1991 gathering at Middlebury College to put a wide range of fresh interfaith environmental voices into dialogue with each other, and then to edit and assemble their pieces into this accessible volume. Ismar Schorsch offers that though modernity “has made of extravagance a commonplace and of distraction a fiendish art, Judaism at its best holds out one model—often dismissed or abused in reality—for reining in the appetites of human consciousness—a strain of asceticism blended with a love of learning” (36-37). Sallie McFague suggests that “the planetary agenda cannot be an avocation, something one does in addition to one’s everyday work—a pastime or a hobby, as it were—but needs to be one’s vocation, one’s central calling” (47). Seyyed Hossein Nasr summarizes, “Divine Law (al-Shari’ah) is explicit in extending the religious duties of humans to the natural order and the environment. One must not only feed the poor but also avoid polluting running water. It is pleasing in the eyes of God not only to be kind to one’s parents, but also to plant trees and treat animals gently and with kindness…” (93-94). The Dalai Lama explains that “the meditation manuals place great emphasis on finding an ideal environment for the practice of training the mind because a cleaner environment does have a tremendous impact on one’s spiritual progress” (116). John Elder proposes that pictures of the Earth taken from space ‘prove’ viscerally “what we have long known but have still to realize adequately in our social choices: that our planet is round, beautiful, small (from a vantage point not so very far away), and fragile. It offers itself as a new icon for spiritual practice in an age of environmental crisis” (199). And Steven Rockefeller lays the groundwork for some of my arguments in Chapter 8 when he writes (165), “The ecological worldview encourages a certain egalitarian appreciation of the intrinsic value and contribution of all things, and it deepens the democratic understanding of community, clarifying the way in which all individuals are reciprocally interconnected and dependent on development of the common good.”

1996: This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment. Edited by Roger S. Gottleib[64]

Dauntingly large, daringly wide-ranging, definitively useful – Gottleib’s anthology defies easy characterization. (It is also unusually heavy, as measured in pounds as well as in complexity – i.e. resource-intensive to produce and transport, and hard work just to lift read!). Many of the expected names are here, with important contributions, usually drawn from elsewhere – but it’s great to have short statements from so many key thinkers in one place. Simply to bring these voices into ‘dialogue’ with each other – Thoreau and Muir and Leopold and Dillard and Lopez, Nash and McFague and Waskow and Green; Ruether and Griffin and Shiva and Tempest Williams, Berry and Macy and Bernstein and Nhat Hanh, Spretnak and Oelschlaeger and Gorman and Hessel – and to compile their and other voices into one convenient volume, is a gift. For those many pieces that exist elsewhere, the value lies in their compilation. But some of these entries are hard to find beyond these pages, making their presence here extra-welcome – among them are Dieter Hessel on biotechnology, Fanetorens’ annotated graphic novel “The Creation,” John Mbiti’s “African Views of the Universe,” Melody Ermachild Chavis’ urban environmental first-person account “Street Trees,” and Gottleib’s own “Spiritual Deep Ecology and the Left: An Attempt at Reconciliation.”

Gottleib has done a tremendous job on inclusiveness – he importantly devotes an entire section to ecofeminist voices, without ghettoizing female voices there (he still preserves a better-than-average ratio of women contributors in the remaining sections). He also admirably brings a global consciousness to his anthology – despite a prefaratory apology for the comparative over-representation of Christian and Jewish voices, this is a wider-ranging anthology than most, with many pieces focused on the Global East and Global South. Ken Jones lives “close to what is perhaps the most polluted sea in Europe. Its once-famed dolphins are now being killed off by a toxic cocktail of nuclear, industrial, and domestic wastes.” In an arresting reminder of the interplay of animal and human suffering, he writes of Mary who “had been deprived and put down in so many ways, and for so often, that her health and her spirit seemed entirely broken. Mary was being slowly killed by a toxic cocktail also. It is a political and economic poison with a long pedigree, currently called Thatcherism. Mary and the dolphins on the shore bear the same witness” (306-07).

I found myself particularly taken with the clarity of John Haught’s three-part typology within “Christianity and Ecology” – the (obviously weak) apologetic approach, the (much better) sacramental approach, and the (unique contribution embedded within the) eschatological approach. There is food for thought here, plainly spoken: “Stewardship, even when it is exegetically purged of the distortions to which the notion has been subjected, is still too managerial a concept to support the kind of ecological ethic we need today. Most ecologists would argue that the earth’s life-systems were a lot better off before we humans came along to manage them” (277). And, “In the sacramental view we condemn environmental abuse because it is a sacrilege. But in the eschatological perspective the sin of environmental abuse is one of despair. To destroy nature is to turn away from a promise” (283). Kudos to Gottleib for assembling all these voices and more. And kudos too for writing the final line of his Preface and Acknowledgments (xii): “Together with grassroots activists, environmental organizations, passionate neighborhood committees, international coalitions and lovers of life everywhere—and with the help of God, Goddess, and the Spirit of Trees, Rocks, and Water—may we find a way to rediscover the sacredness of the earth.” Amen.

2001: Daedalus (Journal of the AAAS), Fall 2001, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim

Conveners of the ten-conference “Religions of the World and Ecology” series at Harvard from 1996-1998, out of which came eight critical anthologies (two of which are highlighted above), Tucker and Grim and their co-collaborators here lay out some of their key insights. They begin with a useful definition (14): “Religion is more than simply a belief in a transcendent deity or a means to an afterlife. It is, rather, an orientation to the cosmos and our role in it… [r]eligion thus situates humans in relation to both the natural and human worlds with regard to meaning and responsibility.” The editors expound on the diversity among global faiths, while identifying universal themes (19): “the common values that most of the world’s religions hold in relation to the natural world might be summarized as reverence, respect, restraint, redistribution, and responsibility.” Following a few introductory essays, separate chapters treat a wide swath of teachings from each of a series of great global faiths – Judaism (by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson[65]), Christianity (by Sallie McFague[66]), Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Indigenous Americans.

Of special interest is J. Baird Callicott’s “Multicultural Environmental Ethics,” who vividly notes that the migration of one (endangered) Siberian sand crane might take it over shamanic, Eastern Orthodox, Buddhist, Confucian, Islamic, and Hindu lands (78): “Precisely because environmental problems cross religious and cultural boundaries, we need to achieve coherence and coordination among the conservation policies inspired and guided by the multicultural environmental ethics now taking shape.” He contrasts an ecological (“radically pluralistic and bottom-up”) with a hegemonic approach, and settles on a compromise (95): “We are many and also one. We are different and also the same. Can we not correspondingly, therefore, have many different culturally specific environmental ethics and one global ecological ethic to unite and orchestrate them?” We will revisit Callicott’s thought-provoking essay further on.

A concluding exhortation by Bill McKibben[67] notes that too often (301), “some of these ancient religions took the natural world for granted, assumed it as a given.” Yet now we pore “over old texts and traditions, seeking to find in them sources for a new environmental ethics… It turns out that buried in plain sight throughout our various traditions are myriad clues and suggestions about how we might live more lightly on the planet.” I appreciate his nuance regarding the role of ancient religious teachings vis-à-vis contemporary ecological challenges – how the old and sacred becomes a resource for something new and necessary (and also sacred). McKibben’s final suggestion bears serious consideration (305):

Imagine gatherings where theologians and scholars and activists came together – and did not leave until they had worked out plans for closing down a polluting power plant, opening up new funding for alternative energy, or any of a hundred other tasks: specific actions, which they would help to carry out in the days and weeks ahead. Dozens of strategies will emerge from such discussions: mindfulness and protest, witness and lament, nonviolence and celebration… Most of all, new actions. A thousand things, all done in the name of the sacredness of Creation, all designed to make a real, visible, luminous difference.

2008: “Generating the Renewable Energy of Hope – The Earth Charter Guide to Religion and Climate Change”, edited by Michael C. Slaby (for Earth Charter International)[68]

This recent (November 2008) overview of religious themes around the Earth Charter (see Chapter 2) is quite useful – surprisingly so for something so short (35 pages) and inherently polemical (it is after all on behalf of a non-profit organization and initiative, however broad-based and worthy). Sometimes its utility lies in its pithy restatement of what we already know – for instance, “The inverse relationship between responsibility for the causes of climate change and vulnerability to its impacts is one of the most urgent ethical challenges posed by global warming.” Often it is helpful in simply amassing facts and data, with clear footnotes, which shed light on the issues we are considering – for example, I have often heard and forwarded the notion that we’d need five earths for everyone today to live an upper-middle-class American lifestyle; Slaby puts a finer point on it with a yet more dire statistic: “If every person in developing countries would adopt the same carbon-intensive lifestyle as most people in Western societies, we would need nine planets to absorb the emitted gases”[69] It is more narrowly helpful in walking people of faith through the Earth Charter itself, addressing items of interest for folks coming at it from a religious point of view – for instance: “several parts and principles in the Preamble and Part I clearly go beyond the anthropo-centrism that dominates most international law treaties and human rights declarations (Preamble: “To live with these aspirations, we must decide to live with a sense of universal responsibility, indentifying ourselves with the whole Earth community as well as our local communities” (24).

And sometimes it’s the short quotation from other thinkers which pops out. Two examples: One from Thomas Berry, who is cited (7) for noting that “we are currently reacting to macro-scale problems with micro-scale ethics. Will we be able to expand our circles of identity and concern and develop an ethic of care that embraces the whole community of life on this planet?” And another from Michael S. Northcott, Professor of Ethics at the University of Edinburgh and Priest of the Scottish Episcopal Church, who offers (21): “At the heart of our ecological crisis is the refusal of modern humans to see themselves as creatures, contingently embedded in networks of relationships with other creatures, and with the Creator. This refusal is the quintessential root of what theologians call sin. And like the sin of Adam, it has moral and spiritual as well as ecological consequences.”

Conclusion

We close this literature review with observations from a few years ago (still largely applicable) from my COEJL colleague, Rabbi Larry Troster:[70]

“Though the literature is expanding, it remains quite limited relative to the work flowing from other religious traditions, particularly Christianity. The Jewish community came late to the cause of environmentalism, perhaps because of preoccupations with the Holocaust, the state of Israel, and the meaning of Jewish identity in a pluralistic society. And Judaism has been slow to catch up. In contrast to Christian institutions, Jewish academic departments and seminaries have yet to provide for scholars working full-time on Jewish environmental theology or ethics. The rabbinical schools have yet to introduce Jewish environmental theology and ethics into their curricula. Christian theologists are engaged in lively dialogue about the relation of science to religion, and a great deal of literature has emerged from the discussion. By contrast, Jewish environmental theology has barely been born. The works of Hans Jonas and Arthur Green are exceptional in their scope and rigor.

Jewish thinkers should not be afraid to admit the radical challenge of environmental issues and to create new theology. We need a fresh, deep, comprehensive approach. Taking inspiration from Hans Jonas, we must try to marry theology with science, from biology to physics to cosmology. We need to explore new territory rather than simply revisit old texts and ideas.[71]”

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[1] Shomrei Adamah was born in 1988, in Ellen Bernstein’s home in a leafy part of Philadelphia (her works often mention the Wissahickon Creek which defines the Mount Airy neighborhood’s western edge), and in the basement of the Reconstructionist Rabbinic College in nearby Wyncote, PA. Shomrei Adamah, “Guardians of the Earth,” held its first national gathering on Memorial Day weekend, 1989 (I was in attendance as a ‘student delegate’); it quickly developed a series of local affiliates across North America, while focusing on Jewish-environmental education and pedagogy. Though largely eclipsed by COEJL’s rise a few years later, Shomrei Adamah did ground-breaking work, and its educational efforts have since been merged into the singular success that is the Teva Learning Center () which continues to reprint and build upon its output.

[2] I had been in conversation with the Teva Learning Center about this at one point myself.

[3] The outline of Garden of Choice Fruit is actually ready-made for the digital age; in 1991 Stein categorized each text by numerous indexed topics, as if just waiting for the hyperlink to be invented.

[4] The National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE), with Carl Sagan and Al Gore among others, pulled together in 1992 a “Consultation on the Environment and Jewish Life.” Within a year it led to the wide buy-in which birthed the NRPE’s Jewish umbrella group, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life – a project of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, with a score of major national participating organizations (the Jewish Theological Seminary and Religious Action Center chief among them). I have served on its advisory board since that body’s inception, save the 2003-04 program year when I became the first-ever rabbi on its national staff.

[5] One is by Saul Berman, who (III:17) notes that while no single traditional mitzvah/commandment will get us through an environmental crisis, collectively the 613 mitzvot are like flowers “to be cultivated and cherished… Our task is to discover within the garden of 613 flowers those few or many which demand of us attention to the problems of the environment. And those flowers certainly exist.” He goes on to differentiate “two stages in our responsibility to environmental issues”: Hatzalah / short-term rescue, and Anavah / ‘humility’ in which lies our long-term rescue.

[6] Swartz was then at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism; soon after, he became the first full-time ‘enviro-rabbi’ in history as the Associate Director of the NRPE. He would later serve as the founding Program Director for Greater Washington Interfaith Power and Light, a project of the Churches’ Center for Theology and Public Policy housed at Wesley Theological Seminary.

[7] Since reprinted by Gottleib (1996). Swartz’s summary of key eras and thinkers is cogent, with quotations from the classical sources grouped together in shaded sections which stand out as ready to clip and share (the article expressly states that “any portion of it may be used without attribution”, though the absence of the original Hebrew text limits their utility). His most original contribution is to tease out seven “Guiding Principles for the Present and Future,” which paraphrased are praxis, Divine ownership of Earth, the unity of Creation, environmental and social justice, stewardship, communitarian responsibility, and contentment and anti-consumerism (the Sabbath realm).

[8] Full disclosure: as a Reconstructionist Rabbinical College student of Ari Elon and an acolyte of Arthur Waskow, I was marginally involved in this work; the editors share credit with me for this “roots/trunk/branches” image.

[9] Like EJS a year earlier, TET is wide-ranging, placing previously disparate ideas within one volume. Yet the differences are striking: Where EJS chose breadth, TET also offers remarkable depth; EJS avoids detailed explications of classical concepts while TET revels in them; the latter is frequently strident, against the former’s consistent neutrality; and with over 40% of its contributors female (compared to barely 20% in EJS), TET alone includes a range of eco-feminist voices.

[10] Tikva was my Bible teacher at RRC, and my Wesley Theological Seminary reader Dean Bruce Birch’s classmate and chevruta partner. She is sorely missed. Zichrona livracha, may Tikva’s memory be a blessing. I was also reminded here that she may be the source (I:64) of the notion I had long attributed to Waskow himself, that Genesis 1:28’s procreative command to “fill the earth and subdue it” is “probably the only command of God that we’ve ever fully obeyed” – although James Nash said similarly in 1991, “The biblical injunction to ‘increase and multiply’ may be the only one that humankind has obeyed faithfully!” (Loving Nature 44).

[11] This was a modification of my “Rabbinic Civilization” paper at RRC, written years earlier – my first serious published essay, it was not my greatest effort, but does suggest some useful directions for some key texts.

[12] This is my essay in Volume II, also adapted from coursework done at RRC, also not great, but useful.

[13] David Saperstein, a rabbi and lawyer and respected activist, is the long-time Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism; I heard him say this at Slichot services at Fairmont Temple in Beachwood OH around 1986 (a decade before I would work for him at the RAC one summer, and with him in the leadership of COEJL).

[14] Hans Jonas, in Yaffe 259. This passage finds literary explication in Marge Piercy’s powerful novel He, She, It – which integrates the story of the Golem (supposedly fashioned by Rabbi Judah Loew in Prague circa 1600) with a futuristic negative utopia that includes genetic engineering gone wild.

[15] “The practical lesson I glean from this circumstance is that for anyone who, like Leopold, must venture beyond the limits of his own field in order to consider its implications for today’s environmental crisis, some independent consideration of the appropriate ethical principles seems needed as well” (Yaffe, 4). So true…

[16] Beyond those named here, further highlights can be found on pages 193, 167, 436, and 442, for starters…

[17] As his title (“Can Judaism Make Environmental Policy?”) suggests, his focus is pragmatic; he rightly warns us (436) that ecology “runs a serious risk if it ignores the kind of imaginative utopian language that might uncover a sense of the environment too profound at present to find adequate expression in the language of scientific policy debate. In formulating and implementing environmental policy, we need to leave room for the unexpected blessings and opportunities that as yet only our most compelling dreams can convey.”

[18] Full disclosure: Jeremy was my summer camp counselor growing up in Toledo OH! I’ve long admired him as an individual and as a scholar-activist alike. I have had the opportunity to visit with him on various trips to Israel over the years; since he made aliyah there, he’s been a point of reference for ‘the road not taken’ in my own life.

[19] To wit: Benstein bravely tackles the population question with mostly the right tone, but first he misses the sources that do point to the requirement for having larger families, yet ends (to be fair as do many liberal Jews, especially Israelis) with the understandable but specious exceptionalism that “Like other decimated tribal peoples, world Jewry needs to regroup and replenish, and the meaning of six billion should rightly take a backseat to the six million” (117-18). I also note a paucity of footnotes, including some egregious oversights (e.g. to Bradley Artson’s thoughtful quote on page 8) – though knowing both the author and the publisher, that is certainly the latter’s doing.

[20] Jeremy Benstein, “Nature vs. Torah,” in Arthur Waskow, ed, Torah of the Earth I:204.

[21] Franco, 127-28. “Why? Much of environmentalism is focused on political action—signing petitions, writing letters to elected officials, attending protests—and personal action: installing low-flow showerheads, or even solar panels, recycling materials, or composting organic waste. These actions are imperative to the success of the environmental movement if we expect, on the one hand, to witness and affect change in our legislature and, on the other hand, to reverse some of the earthly destruction. One might expect, then, that observing Shabbat or the Sabbatical and Jubilee years would not be high atop the list of Jewish environmental ethics because these observances encourage non-action. Nevertheless, one should not underestimate the vital role that non-action plays and can further play in environmentalism. By not turning on the lights, by not using the air conditioner, by not spraying a field with pesticides and other chemicals, or by not using virgin paper for a day, for a year, for two years, or forever—these non-actions can have profound, positive implications for the health of the environment. Shabbat and the Sabbatical and Jubilee years do not only serve as sacred acts—or non-acts—however, they also serve as limit setting practices. They can also serve as sacred acts of goal setting. How often do the problems facing the environment seem insurmountable? How often does one break out in a cold sweat at the mere thought of making significant lifestyle changes? Jews especially can begin this Shabbat by finding an alternative means of traveling to shul—walking, biking, or taking public transportation. This once-a-week practice of limiting carbon emissions can quickly turn into a daily routine to span a Sabbatical, to span a Jubilee, to span an eternity!”

[22] See also Yehuda Feliks, Nature and Man in the Bible: Chapters in Biblical Ecology (NY: Soncino, 1981).

[23] Hareuveni’s books, all published by Neot Kedumim, include: Ecology in the Bible, 1974; Nature in Our Biblical Heritage, 1980; Tree and Shrub in Our Biblical Heritage, 1984; The Emblem of the State of Israel, 1988 (arguing that the famous menorah is actually a symbol for a tree); and Desert and Shepherd in Our Biblical Heritage, 1991.

[24] Among popular children’s books in the Jewish-environmental world are Molly Cone’s Listen to the Trees: Jews and the Earth (NY: UAHC Press, 1995); Sandy Eisenberg Sasso’s A Prayer for the Earth: The Story of Naamah, Noah’s Wife (Woodstock VT: Jewish Lights, 1996); and arguably Yaakov Kirschen’s book of short comic strips Trees, The Green Testament (NY: Vital Media Enterprises, 1993).

[25] Jewish periodical ‘green’ issues include Tikkun 5:2 (1990); Reform Judaism, “Focus on the Environment,” Fall 1990; Conservative Judaism 44:1 (1991); The Melton Journal 24 & 25 (1991, “Judaism and Ecology – Our Earth and Our Tradition, Part I”; 1992, “Towards a Jewish Ecological Paradigm: Essays and Explorations, Part II”), edited by Eduardo Rauch; Bridges 5:2, “Jewish Women and Land” (1995), ed. Clare Kinberg.

[26] Among these less impactful works I would include: Aubrey Rose, ed, Judaism and Ecology (NY: Cassell, 1992), a popular work which appeared as part of a World Wildlife Fund series on religions and ecology; Manfred Gerstenfeld, Judaism, Environmentalism and the Environment: Mapping and Analysis (Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies and Rubin Mass Ltd., 1998), which comes from a right-of-center think-tank and contains numerous factual errors as well as some helpful points; and Ronald Isaacs, The Jewish Sourcebook on the Environment and Ecology (Northvale NJ: Jason Aronson, 1998), which is, as its title suggests, mostly a compendium of extant materials.

[27] Ellen Bernstein; The Splendor of Creation: A Biblical Ecology (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2005).

[28] Mike Comins; A Wild Faith (Woodstock VT: Jewish Lights, 2007).

[29] Balfour Brickner; Finding God in the Garden (Boston: Back Bay Books / Harper, Little; 2002).

[30] Matt Biers-Ariel, Deborah Newbrun, and Michal Fox Smart; Spirit in Nature: Teaching Judaism and Ecology on the Trail (NY: Berhman House, 2000).

[31] Ellen Bernstein, The Trees’ Birthday: A Celebration of Nature: A Tu B’Shvat Haggadah (Mt Airy PA: Turtle River Press, 1987).

[32] Richard Schwartz, Judaism and Global Survival, 2nd edition (NY: Lantern Books, 2002). Each chapter tackles a different issue with an excellent compilation of relevant Jewish texts and values and sensitivities, as well as a more quickly dated introduction to the issue itself; even as social justice has environmental overlap as well, fully half of these chapters are directly relevant (Ecology, Environmental Issues in Israel, Energy, Global Climate Change, Population Growth, and ‘Vegetarianism—A Global Imperative?’).

[33] Richard Schwartz, Judaism and Vegetarianism, 2nd edition (NY: Lantern Books, 2001). There exists an entire bookshelf of Jewish vegetarian literature, which was once focused almost exclusively on animal welfare and the attendant mitzvah/commandment of tza’ar ba’alei chayim / preventing cruelty to animals; it has since taken on a more explicitly ecological dimension, as the deep carbon footprint and resource-intensivity of the animal industry have come to light. Other titles in this area include Roberta Kalechofsky’s Judaism and Animal Rights (Marblehead MA: Micah Press, 1992) and Louis Berman’s Vegetarianism and the Jewish Tradition (NY: Ktav, 1982).

[34] Evan Eisenberg; The Ecology of Eden (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).

[35] Some of Waskow’s best scholarship is readily available here. For instance, the clearest description of Eco-Kashrut (defined here as “a broader sense of ‘good practice’ in everyday life that draws on the deep well-springs of Jewish wisdom and tradition about the relationships between human beings and the earth”), in his Down to Earth Judaism, is also at (Arthur Waskow, “What is Eco-Kosher?,” accessed 1/6/09).

[36] Ironically enough I learned a fair bit about Judaism, as well as about Christianity, from this astoundingly erudite and well-read German Protestant theologian. Like most rabbinic students I had made my way through Franz Rosensweig’s dense Star of Redemption (1920), but hardly recognized its brilliance until hearing Moltmann expound thereon (e.g. 278, 288, 290); in that same section about ‘the universal Sabbath,’ I never realized that the Talmud had gone there (Sanh. 97a) until he pointed it out. Likewise, though I make much of the teaching of God as Place/makom, I knew not its origins until reading it here (153-4). Other such examples abound.

[37] I hear consonance with Levinas too in his reflections on “the transition from thinking in terms of one’s own history to a consideration of one’s own history in terms of the necessary community of humanity,” on 136 – “It is the transition from particularist to universal thinking. In the present situation of the world, particularist thinking is merely schismatic thinking, because it refuses the community which is necessary and also possible.”

[38] Moltmann does cite Buber, early on (11), for having taught that “In the beginning was relation.”

[39] I’ve already made a note of passages about land and space, pp. 142-45 – as well as Rasmussen 98, and Benstein 201 ff -- for a simultaneous paper for my final Wesley D. Min. class on “The Land of Israel-Palestine, Qua Land, as a Theological Concern.”

[40] Nash, 119. Compare Sean McDonagh, To Care for the Earth (Santa Fe: Bear & Co, 1986), 126: “If sin destroys the harmony between human beings and the natural world, then redemption, to be complete, must heal and renew the primordial unity and recreate the Earth wherever it has been injured through human greed and vice.”

[41] McKibben is as clear about this as Stephen Geller is murky, who writes (“Nature’s Answer,” in Tirosh-Samuelson, 126) that after the speech, based on different possible translations, “Job may be humbled, defiant, or both;” he goes for the latter, “Job is both silenced and humbled and yet also inwardly exalted by what he has seen.”

[42] How like Moltmann (228): “In glorifying God, the creatures created to be the image of God themselves arrive at the fulfillment of what they are intended to be.”

[43] James Nash, Loving Nature, op cit., 186ff (Rasmussen may have seen a different edition; he quotes Nash’s biotic bill of rights slightly differently than I have in the Abingdon/CCTPP edition, and he has it at p. 183.

[44] I learned of the Plimsoll line at the NRPE conference in North Carolina around 1997 or 1998, and had oft spoken of it, without recalling its source in environmental dialogue (or even exact spelling); I now realize, from his reference to that same NC conference (xv), it must have been from Rasmussen directly! This, from Herman Daly via the World Council of Churches in June 1993, is a nautical term denoting how heavily-laden a ship can get before risking going under in heavy waves – though in port, there appears to plenty more room – and a great eco-metaphor.

[45] For instance, Polkinghorne (xxiv): “it is a rich theological account, Trinitarian and incarnational in its foundations, that alone will furnish the basis of a defensible and intelligible eschatological hope in the twenty-first century.”

[46] Polkinghorne, pages 94-95. Amusingly he credits Luther for a much older rabbinic maxim: “There is an apocryphal saying attributed to Martin Luther, in which he declared that if he knew that tomorrow the world would end, he would plant an apple tree today. Eschatological hope is that nothing of good will ever be lost in the Lord” (102). The actual source is from the first century, found in Avot d’Rebbe Natan 31: “Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai would say: ‘If you should be holding a sapling in your hand, and someone should say to you “look, the Messiah is coming towards you!” – first go and plant the sapling, and after that go and welcome Moshiach.’” It is also ironic that I, as a Kaplanian (i.e. Tillichian, even Aristotelian) Reconstructionist Jew, find comfort and consonance in Polkinghorne’s citation of a more traditional literal Hebrew biblical theology!

[47] Polkinghorne, page 65, citing Moltmann’s The Coming of God, page 138.

[48] Polkinghorne, page 122. He admits his “eschatological dilemma” of anthropocentrism, in assuming that dinosaurs and bacteria and other non-human forms have no individual future, fearing that he accords them significance “more to the type than to the token.” (122). Yet he falls right back to anthropocentrism by saying that perhaps pets, “who could be thought to have acquired enhanced individual status through their interactions with humans… will have a particular role to play in the restored relationships of the world to come” (123). Interestingly, Polkinghorne critiques Moltmann only twice. Once is here, against the latter’s view (Coming of God xiv-xvi) that “resurrection has become the universal ‘law’ of creation not merely for human beings, but for animals, plants, stones and all cosmic systems as well” – to which Polkinghorne responds (123) that the “eschaton is in danger of become a museum collection of all that has ever been.” Yet his other critique is that Moltmann, in speaking of our ‘nuclear and ecological end time,’ is being too anthropocentric! Here Polkinghorne (142) retorts “that there are even greater issues at stake,” like the destruction of the Earth in a few billion years when our sun enters its red giant phase.

[49] Again from The Coming of God (108), in Polkinghorne 109-10: “Moltmann recalls that in the base communities of South America, when the roll is called of the names of those who ‘disappeared’ in the troubles, the congregation all say ‘Presente’. He comments that ‘the community of the living and the dead is the praxis of resurrection hope.’”

[50] A term which itself takes on new meaning when considering Berry, as we will see shortly.

[51] “A Native Hill,” 1969, in Recollected Essays, 74.

[52] Berry hedges this term as well, in the title essay of Sex, Economy (169, 171): Pluralism as commonly discussed “does not foresee or advocate a plurality of settled communities but is only a sort of indifferent charity toward a plurality of aggrieved groups and individuals… Can land and people be preserved anywhere by means of a culture that is in the usual sense pluralistic?… There can, I think, be no national policy of pluralism or multiculturalism but only…pluralities of local cultures… formed in response to local nature and local needs.”

[53] Collected Poems, pages 134, 120, and 151-52. “The Mad Farmer’s Love Song” (162) is itself a delicious reworking of the Song of Songs: “O when the world’s at peace / and every man is free / then will I go down unto my love. / / O and I may go down / several times before that.” His “practice resurrection” line is what inspired Terry Tempest Williams to pen “Redemption” over twenty years later, dedicated “For Wendell Berry,” about “another crucifixion in the West” – this time a coyote, strung up on barbed wire by ranchers. The last lines of her An Unspoken Hunger (144) are these: “My eyes returned to Jesus Coyote, stiff on his cross, savior of our American rangelands. We can try and kill all that is native, string it up by its hind legs for all to see, but spirit howls and wildness endures. / Anticipate resurrection.”

[54] ”Christianity…”, Sex, Economy, 101. Male-as-normative references to God are problematic, if common.

[55] Wallace Stegner’s categories, outlined in Another Turn, 67ff.

[56] Originally in Tradition, the journal of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, 7:2, Summer 1965. Soloveitchik writes that Genesis’ two different creation accounts “deal with two Adams, two men, two fathers of mankind, two types, two representatives of humanity, and it is no wonder that they are not identical… while the cosmos provokes Adam the first to quest for power and control, thus making him ask the functional "how" question, Adam the second responds to the call of the cosmos by engaging in a different kind of cognitive gesture. He does not ask a single functional question. Instead his inquiry is of a metaphysical nature…”

[57] The Unsettling of America, 55.

[58] “God and Country”, What Are People For, 100. Berry names some ‘relentlessly practical implications’ of Rev. 4:11 in numerous places: “That God created all things for His pleasure, and that they continue to exist because they please Him, is formidable doctrine indeed, as far as possible both from the ‘anthropocentric’ utilitarianism that some environmentalist critics claim to find in the Bible and from the grouchy spirituality of many Christians” (“Economy and Pleasure”, What Are, 138)…

[59] Another Turn, 75. Here Berry highlights a classical rabbinic notion, best exemplified in Shmot Rabbah 10:1, some 1500 years ago: “Even those creatures you deem superfluous in the world – like flies, fleas, and gnats – nevertheless have their allotted task in the scheme of Creation.” Berry expounds on this theme: “God made not only the parts of Creation that we humans understand and approve of but all of it: ‘All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.’ And so we must credit God with the making of biting and stinging insects, poisonous serpents, weeds, poisonous weeds, dangerous beasts, and disease-causing micro-organisms. That we may disapprove of these things does not mean God is in error or that he ceded some of the work of Creation to Satan; it means that we are deficient in wholeness, harmony, and understanding – that is, we are ‘fallen.’ (”Christianity…” in Sex, Economy, 97).

[60] The quotation from Another Turn (75) continues here. A 19th century German Orthodox rabbi, Samson Raphael Hirsch, said something similar (Humash on Deut. 20:20, and Horeb 56) regarding bal tashchit, the law of not wasting: “Our text becomes the most comprehensive warning to human beings not to misuse the position which God has given them as masters of the world… Apply [bal tashchit] to your whole life and to every being which is subordinated to you, from the Earth which bears them all up to the garment which you have already transformed into your own cover. Yea, “Do not destroy anything!” is the first and most general call of God.” The Hebrew for ‘sin,’ khet, is an archery term meaning ‘to miss the mark’ – much as Berry suggests here.

[61] Ibid, 103.

[62] These from Whitney Bauman, Forum on Religion and Ecology [of the American Academy of Religion] Newsletter 2.4 (April 2008). The same forum also refers regularly to the annual journal Worldviews, operating since 1996, edited by Christopher Key Chapple; starting with volume 12 (2008) its subtitle has been “Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology.” Its back issues, too, go on my “to read someday” list.

[63] Boston: Beacon Press.

[64] NY: Routledge.

[65] Core Jewish-environmental assumptions are challenged by Tirosh-Samuelson’s important essay here, when she says (116), “the Jewish religious tradition is rich and varied; anyone so inclined will find plenty of support in sacred sources for sound environmental policies… In this regard, Judaism can be part of a solution to the contemporary environmental crisis. However, the primacy of learning in Judaism, the bookish culture it produced, the idealism inherent in the Jewish prescriptive approach to life, and the economic reality of Jewish life in the premodern period have also all combined to give rise to a religious lifestyle that is either indifferent to nature or consciously aspires to transcend it. How one wishes to interpret Judaism in regard to ecology thus becomes a matter of personal choice, resulting in an ideological diversity that is the hallmark of the Jewish condition today.” I think she slightly understates the moral weight of some key “eco”-Jewish values, and so equivocates overmuch – but I am nonetheless reminded to write and teach and preach on “a,” not “the,” Jewish view on these issues.

[66] McFague’s short, provocative essay in this issue of Daedalus targets perhaps the toughest and most necessary question for her comfortable audience: a Christian focus on consumerism (136): “…it may well be that sin is refusing to acknowledge the link between the kingdom and the ecological economic worldview, explaining it away because of the consequences for our privileged lifestyle. Sustainability and the just distribution of resources pare concerned with human and planetary well-being for all. This, I suggest, is the responsible interpretation of the Parable of the Feast for North American Christians today…”

[67] McKibben’s journalist’s turns of phrase are, as always, insightful and memorable: “Those in monks’ habits are joined by scientists in white coats, and they’re saying the same few things: Simplicity. Community. Restraint. That confluence carries enormous potential energy” (304). “Ecology may rescue religion at least as much as the other way around… The poor you may always with you, but the atmosphere you don’t” (305).

[68] Michael C. Slaby, editor: “Generating the Renewable Energy of Hope - The Earth Charter Guide to Religion and Climate Change”; Earth Charter International’s Programme on Religion and Sustainability, 11 November 2008,

[69] The citation given for this is “Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005, Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Biodiversity Synthesis, World Resources Institute, Washington, DC, p. 9.” At Slaby, page 5 and note 19.

[70] “From Apologetics to New Spirituality: Trends in Jewish Environmental Theology.” Rabbi Lawrence Troster, November 2004, page 15. Larry is now (2009) working with Rev Fletcher Harper at GreenFaith.

[71] Tirosh-Samuelson, Judaism and Ecology, lviii.

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