Some Words for the Earth

April 15, 2010

by Daniel E. Levenson

There is no question in my mind that whatever someone’s religion or ethnicity happens to be, we all have a stake in keeping our planet healthy. There might be many people who are short-sighted when it comes to these issues, but at the end of the day, they themselves are no less dependent upon the natural world for clean air, water and food. Protecting the natural environment is something I have always felt strongly about, and although for the majority of people living in the West, our connection to the land has been altered dramatically since the industrial revolution, there are still important core ideas about the sanctity of creation and nature that can be found within a wide variety of religious and cultural traditions, and Judaism is no exception.

Given my own keen personal interests in both everything Jewish and everything environmental, it is perhaps no surprise that one of the books that has a prominent place on my bookshelf is a collection of essays on Judaism and the environment, entitled “Judaism and Environmental Ethics, A Reader,” edited by Martin D. Yaffe. There are lots of great essays in this volume, but I thought with Earth Day coming up at the end of April that I would take a closer look at one of the pieces in this collection that really speak to me, which is an essay entitled “Judaism and the Practice of Stewardship,” by David Ehrenfield and Philip J. Bentley. What really stands out for me in this piece is the authors refutation of the notion that we can take explicit permission for environmental destruction from the text of the Tanakh itself. They address the predominant (negative) understanding of the use of the word “dominion” in Breishit, noting that “There is no evidence, that we are aware of, that these verses of genesis were ever interpreted by the rabbis as a license for environmental exploitation. Indeed, such an interpretation runs contrary to their teachings and to the whole spirit of the oral law.”

This is an important point, because if one were to simply pick up a copy of the Hebrew Bible in translation and read through Genesis, they could easily come away with the impression that the whole of creation was put in place simply for the use of mankind. What Ehrenfield and Bentley are doing in this piece is bringing a deeper reading to the text itself, looking back at it through the lens of Rabbinic Judaism, and I believe, providing a proper context for the verses in Genesis. Another thing that I really like about this essay is the way that the authors offer a detailed look into the various conceptions, expressed both explicitly and implicitly, of the relationship between man and nature, to be found within Jewish tradition.

For me, every time I go out into nature, whether I am paddling my kayak on a quiet lake or hiking up a mountain with a group of friends, I am struck again and again by the sheer diversity manifest in the natural world. As Jews, we are reminded in subtle ways on certain holidays, Tu’Bishvat, for example, of an agrarian past that often seems quite distant, but the truth is that all we have to do in order to see how deeply we are connected to the natural world is to read the first chapter of Genesis and then go outside and see for ourselves the wonders of creation. Sadly, we are also likely to encounter the many ways that we, human beings, have also desecrated the natural world. It is a difficult balance we are striving to seek, and at times the tension between our desire to live in a safe and comfortable modern world seems to be in conflict with nature. This Earth Day I plan to get outside and do something for the environment, but I know that Martin Yaffe’s book will also be open on my desk, and as I think about how to approach questions of environmental responsibility from a Jewish perspective, I’ll look to the words of the authors in this collection of essays, and in the traditional texts themselves, for inspiration.