Torah of the Earth Vol 2: Exploring 4,000 Years of Ecology in Jewish Thought: Zionism & Eco-Judaism

By Rabbi Arthur O. Waskow

Can we re-imagine our relationship to the earth—using the
viewpoints and texts of the last four millennia?

Human responses to the natural world stretching back through the last 4,000 years come to life in this major new resource providing a diverse group of ecological and religious voices. It gives us an invaluable key to understanding the intersection of ecology and Judaism, and offers the wisdom of Judaism in dealing with the present environmental crisis.

Both intelligent and accessible, Torah of the Earth is an essential resource and a reminder to us that humans and the earth are intertwined.

More than 30 leading scholars and experts enlighten, provoke, and provide a guided tour of ecological thought from four major Jewish viewpoints:

Vol. 1:
Biblical Israel: One Land, One People
Rabbinic Judaism: One People, Many Lands

Vol. 2:
Zionism: One Land, Two Peoples
Eco-Judaism: One Earth, Many Peoples

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Jul 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781580236560

Book preview

   INTRODUCTION

EARTH AND EARTHLING, ADAM AND ADAMAH

Perhaps the most profound Jewish statement about the relationship between human beings and the earth is bound up in two words of Hebrew—two words that do not even need a sentence to connect them: Adam. Adamah.

The first means human being; the second, earth. The two words are connected to teach us that human beings and the earth are intertwined. In English, this connection would be obvious only if the everyday word for human being were earthling, or perhaps if the ordinary word for earth were humus. With either of these configurations, no one could say the name of earth or of human without hearing an echo of the other. Intertwined. Not identical, but intertwined.

What differences make us not identical? Genesis 2:5–7 explains:

There was no adam to serve/work the adamah, but a flow would well up upon the ground and water all the face of the adamah. And YHWH [by some understood as Breath of the World, from the sound of the letters pronounced with no vowels, producing only an outbreath] shaped the adam out of dust from the adamah, and blew into its nostrils the breath of life, and the adam became a living being, a breathing being.

The human being lost the breathing -ah sound at the end of adamah.

At the level of individual life-history, the human being loses the unconscious placental breathing that connects the enwombed human with the all-enfolding earth—and gains a new, more conscious, more deliberate breath.

At the level of the evolutionary history of humankind, adam lost the unconscious breathing that connected the earliest human beings with the earth from which they had just emerged—little different, to begin with, from the other primates round about them. And that -ah was replaced with a new kind of breath—a conscious breath from the Breath of the World. In separating from the earth, in being born, the adam becomes more conscious.

The earth-human relationship takes on a complex, ironic tone. Small wonder that humans eat what the earth grows in a way that bespeaks their alienation and brings upon them and the earth a still deeper alienation: "Damned be adamah on your account; with painful labor shall you eat from it."

If this is a myth of births and beginnings, it is also a myth of every new beginning. Not once only has the human race separated itself from the earth, but over and over.

On each occasion, as our sacred stories and our secular histories teach us, we have had to learn a new depth of connection and community with the earth from which we have separated. When we did not, we shattered the localities and regions of our earth and birth—and were shattered in return. For none can eat unscathed from the food into which they have poured out poison.

Today we are living in a crisis of this spiral. Epoch after epoch, the more and more knowledgeable human race has alienated itself more deeply, then realized more deeply its need for connection and built some new sense of community with the earth. Once this meant learning to raise fewer goats in fragile local ecosystems. Now it means learning not to destroy the global ozone layer. The upward turning of the spiral of human power to Make and to Do has faced every community and tradition on the planet with the task of learning better how to Be and how to Love.

In some ways it is in our own generation that we have most vehemently gobbled up that fruit of plenty that grew from the Tree of Knowing, and in our own generation that we face most sharply the danger that the earth will war against us.

So during this past generation Jews have been looking back, with much more urgency, into our own teachings about adam and adamah. We who were once a down-to-earth people, an indigenous people—what can we learn and teach to heal ourselves and our neighbors and the neighborhood itself—adam and adamah?

This Jewish conversation has only begun. Much of it has been carried out in a muttered undertone, mostly among a few people who were especially knowledgeable and concerned. This book brings together some of the most important explorations, to make the conversation more public and to make it more possible for the Jewish people as a whole to assess its own part in addressing a planetary crisis.

There have been four basic life-stances from which the Jewish people has addressed these questions: Biblical Israel, Rabbinic Judaism, Zionism, and most recently, Eco-Judaism. These four stances are not merely chronological periods (indeed, the last two of them overlap in time); they embody four different ways of connecting with the earth. For that reason, they have seemed to offer an organic pattern for organizing this book.

CONNECTIONS OF LAND AND PEOPLE

Four millennia ago, among Western Semitic nomads in the land of Canaan, there were stirrings of response and resistance to the new imperial agriculture of Babylonia. At some point in the next five hundred years, one of the communities that emerged from this simmering stew began to tell stories of a clan that became the seedbed of the people that came to call itself the Children of Israel—the Godwrestlers—and Ivrim, Hebrews in rough transliteration but, more important, in translation boundary-crossers.

For they wrestled with the deepest questions of the universe, and they crossed the boundaries not only of territorial fiefdoms but of cultures and proprieties and social structures.

As they crossed over and wrestled, wrestled and crossed over, they drew from their hearing of the universe words they told and retold and wove into new patterns and turned into stories, poetry, drama, law, daily life-practice, philosophical musings.

These words became what we call the Bible, and one of its great themes was how to make a sacred relationship with the earth. In the Biblical Era that ensued, these Israelites/Hebrews/Jews not only lived intimately with a particular piece of earth but lived in a way that made them—collectively, as a people—responsible for how human beings acted toward the earth and how the earth responded.

This Biblical Era finally was shattered. There followed almost two thousand years in which one of the defining characteristics of Jewish life was that the people Israel no longer had a direct physical connection with the land of Israel. During these centuries of what we call Rabbinic Judaism, Jews shaped the adam/adamah relationship much more as scattered households or communities than as a united people.

The Rabbinic community developed some loose guidelines for a sacred relationship to the earth. Since the lands of the Diaspora were so distant and so different from each other as ecosystems, and since interhuman relationships seemed of higher priority during this period, Rabbinic thought sketched a broad concern for protecting the earth, but with few definitive specifics. The Rabbis were often less concerned with protecting the earth than with explaining how to use its resources to meet the urgent needs of their scattered, often impoverished, people.

In the nineteenth century, the Zionist movement focused on renewing the Jewish connection with the land in a way that would allow and require the making of a Jewish policy toward the piece of earth called Eretz Yisrael. As the State of Israel emerged, so did a set of policies. Over the years, the numbers, the technology, the religious and philosophical perspectives, and the political arrangements of Israelis—in short, the Land, the People, and the State—have all changed in relationship to one another. So, therefore, have policies toward the land.

Meanwhile, the Jewish community in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century found itself politically empowered in unprecedented ways at just the same moment that Jews, Americans, and human beings in general were realizing that the troubled relationship between adam and adamah had reached the point of planetary crisis. This confluence seemed to a growing number of American Jews to invite—even demand—a collective Jewish response to this planetary crisis.

From many seeds and roots—the Bible reexamined, the Rabbis renewed, secular Jewish poetry and other nature-focused literature, feminist theologies of relationship, Kabbalah and Hasidism—came a gathering of thought that might be called Eco-Judaism, a Judaism that had close to its very center a concern for the healing of the earth.

Although this book treats Eco-Judaism as one of four different expressions of the Jewish relationship with the earth, the book itself, of course, is also an outgrowth of that collective energy. Indeed, it is very likely that almost none of the essays gathered in this book—not even those that examine Biblical, Rabbinic, and Zionist thought, Jewish worldviews that emerged long before a sense of planetary crisis—would have been written had that sense of crisis not emerged in the last generation.

For Jews of this past generation, facing a growing sense of worldwide ecological transformation, have returned to older Jewish writings to understand what Jewish wisdom might have to say. What guidance could it give, what mistakes could it warn against? Guidance and warning not only for our own behavior but for the approaches of other spiritual communities, of the broader societies of which we are a part, of the human race as a whole.

What makes us think that looking back at ancient teachings might be of any help, as we try to dance in the midst of a planetary earthquake?

The Jewish people has faced such earthquakes before, when both political and technological/ecological transformations shook the seemingly solid ground on which we were walking. Indeed, the emergence of the people Israel and the Hebrew Bible in the form in which we know about them may have been themselves the result of such an upheaval, as imperial agriculture made its way from Babylonia into the region of the Western Semites. And the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism, with the Talmud and all its codes and commentaries, was clearly the result of such an upheaval—the triumph of Roman-Hellenistic civilization in the Mediterranean basin.

ANCIENT TEXTS, FUTURE LIFE-PATHS

In all these situations, Jews have valued the wisdom of the past, without letting it straitjacket them. The practice of midrash, in which an old text was turned in a new direction to afford new meaning, was not just a verbal trick but a deep assertion that the wisdom of previous generations was still important, even when changes needed to be made.

Why did Jewish culture and spirituality feel so strongly this need to affirm, and transcend, the past? The past represented an achieved sense of community and identity, which was being jarred by new technologies, new economics, new politics. Riding the wave of the new might be necessary, but to lose the past entirely was to lose communal—and ecological—health. The adam who is born again and again and again from the adamah dares not lose touch with it.

That need continues in our present crisis, as it has before. So we encounter in this book materials from, and about, the most ancient of Jewish sources as well as the most recent.

Indeed, not only from ancient Israel to now, but also within each era and worldview, we affirm this pattern of reconnecting with a text while taking it in new directions. So each section of this book begins with texts that spring from the worldview of that era and then continues with writings that analyze, study, respond to, and elaborate upon those texts.

What about the sources that we do not find? Yemenite Jewish women cooks, Ethiopian Jewish farmers, Polish dairymen, all dealt with the earth. As the need and desire grows for a revitalized and earth-conscious Judaism to draw on these myriad experiences of Jews around the earth, let us hope that scholars will begin to unearth these materials as many have struggled to unearth the silenced voices of Jewish women.

Meanwhile, for what we already have we sing Dayenu!—It is enough for us!—even as we know that after this chorus, this pause to celebrate what we have learned so far, we will sing another verse of further learning.

We can all hope that now the scattered comments of the many who in this past generation have tuned their minds to eco-Jewish teaching can become a fuller conversation, within and beyond the Jewish people.

May the One Who sends the Rainbow to renew the covenant with all of life remind us of our share in giving life to all the many-colored cultures and species of this planet.

Arthur Ocean Waskow

On the 27th Yohrzeit of Rabbenu

Abraham Joshua Heschel

18 Tevet 5760

December 27, 1999

PART 1

Zionism: One Land, Two Peoples

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, some Jews (in Eastern Europe especially) began to work toward settling large numbers of Jews in the Land of Israel, with the intention to shape and govern their own lives. The Zionist movement flowered in 1948 with the creation of the State of Israel.

From early on, this movement raised some important questions about the nature of the relationship between the Jewish people and the land—the earthy soil itself. Indeed, these questions became central to the Zionist vision in a way they had never been for Jews since the end of the Biblical Era.

Four basic currents of thought lay beneath the Zionist relationship with the Land of Israel, which for most Zionists or Israeli Jews entered the mix of Jewish policy toward the Land:

•   At the heart of the original Zionist vision, the passionate hope of reconnecting the Jewish people with the soil of its ancient homeland, through agricultural labor on the land and nature-focused recreation.

•   Emerging as Zionism grew, an intense desire to bring (and to birth) as many Jews as possible to live in the Yishuv—the organized and semi-autonomous Jewish community in Palestine—and then in the State of Israel.

•   An intense desire to settle the land—as much land as possible—with people, trees, and crops, to mark out national Jewish turf that could be distinguished from Arab-held land.

•   A drive for modernity, economic development, and industrialism that could support a large and prosperous Jewish population and a strong military force.

But this program faced two problems.

First, this program bore internal contradictions, so that the first of these four values sometimes was at odds with the others. The hope of empathy with the land was often overwhelmed by the desire for economic development of the land.

Second, the whole Zionist program faced the presence of another community living in the same land. That Palestinian Arab community had for many years shaped its own relationship with the land. From the beginning of the influx of large numbers of Jews in the twentieth century, most of the Jews and most of the Arabs saw themselves as culturally and economically distinct from each other, and they had different visions for the biological/geological future of the land itself, as well as for its politics.

As the struggle between the two communities intensified, the Palestinian national identity became clearer and clearer, more and more connected to national political institutions of its own. Its public and its leadership felt a strong need to shape its own future policy toward the soil, the air, and the water.

It may be that similar differences were at the heart of ancient distinctions and conflicts between the Israelites and the Hittites, Jebusites, and other peoples of Canaan. As we live with the realities of the national-ecological struggles of today, we may find ourselves looking with new eyes at the biblical history examined in Volume 1 of this anthology.

We may find ourselves asking, What may have been the ecological content of the ancient struggles that the Bible described as battles against idolatry? We read biblical stories of struggles over wells of water. What else was at stake? Did those other peoples of Canaan observe the seventh year as one of rest for the land? Did they deal the same way with tithes of grain and fruit? Were differences in sacrificial practices crystallizations of different worldviews about the relationship between human beings, the earth, and the Divine? We do not know; these possible ancient disagreements over environmental policy are now hazy for us.

We do know that in the century of Jewish resettlement and self-government in the Land, collisions between the two peoples have had deep environmental effects, and environmental issues have exacerbated the national conflicts. From the Jewish standpoint, the drive toward population increase, expansion of Jewish turf, and economic modernization have usually overridden concerns about the health of the various species, ecosystems, and habitats of the Land of Israel.

Only in the 1990s did support grow for a holistic reassessment of the relationships between human numbers, human technology, political/national configurations, and the climate, water, soil, air, plants, and animals of the Land. And only then did efforts begin to join the two peoples in discussions of protecting their common piece of earth, and of shaping their economies and polities toward that protection.

These discussions have rarely made a conscious or explicit connection between ecological planning and the Biblical or Rabbinic outlooks on the relationship between humanity and earth. Expressions of spiritual connectedness with the earth today have rarely invoked the religious symbols or practices of the past. Human communities, in the very process of wrestling with their ongoing lives, do generate thoughts, feelings, and practices that look toward larger wholes and unities, which are religious and spiritual. As ecological consciousness emerges in Israel over the next generations, we can expect both some new religious languages and some efforts to unfold the old Jewish languages to express contemporary realities.

This part begins with two texts. The first, aggadic (that is, philosophical and spiritual) in tone, is a classic statement of the early Zionist hope for a rapprochement between the Jewish people and the earth—a text by A. D. Gordon from the early twentieth century. The second was spoken (in an interview) almost a century later by Yossi Sarid, then the leader of an opposition party in the Knesset who had been Minister of the Environment in a previous Israeli government. His words have a quasi-halakhic tone, outlining specifically what needs to be done in order for the two peoples living in one land to heal the wounds they each and together inflicted on its earth, air, and water.

Using the labels aggadah and halakhah for these texts is metaphoric, since neither is grounded directly in the Rabbinic tradition in which these terms emerged. But the analogy in tone is unmistakable.

Then we move on to an article by Fred Dobb on the environmental approaches of four Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century: the same A. D. Gordon whose text begins this part, and Martin Buber, Avraham Yitzhak Kook, and Samson Raphael Hirsch. The first three were Zionists who spent large parts of their lives living in the Land of Israel. All of them held a strong vision of rapprochement with the earth as one of the goals of Zionism. Hirsch was included in Dobb’s paper because he, like the others, was responding to dark sides of Modernity. But his life and thought were focused on Torah-connected Jews in the Diaspora, and he represents an effort to bring the Rabbinic tradition (see Volume 1) into a more fully self-aware sense of resistance to Modernity.

The next two articles—by Alon Tal and David Brooks—show that in the crucible of history, the vision of an eco-Zionism was overwhelmed by the goals of increasing Jewish population, marking national territory, and succeeding as an industrial power. They also describe the tentative beginnings of frail movements to apply the early eco-Zionist vision to the realities of Israeli life.

Tal’s article, written earlier, was also written with a darker, more pessimistic pen than Brooks’. Tal voices deep concern that basic policies of the State, rooted in profound Zionist assumptions about population increase and economic development, may endanger the Land in ways that will be hard to reverse. Over the several years between the writing of his article and the one by Brooks, public environmental awareness in Israel rose. Whether that will be enough to change the direction of public policy and social behavior to heal the Land, or whether Tal’s earlier concerns prove prophetic, is yet to be seen.

From focusing on the issues within Israeli society, we turn to the relationships of two peoples striving to live in the same land. The difficulties and possibilities are set forth in two articles that appeared together in 1998 in Palestine-Israel Journal, a quarterly not only jointly named but jointly sponsored and edited by Palestinians and Israelis. Indeed, one of the articles is co-authored by a Palestinian and an Israeli. Both articles address the question of how two peoples, evolving toward two nation-states, can cooperate on environmental questions so as to heal the land both peoples love.

The earth-and-human history of Israel and Palestine during the twentieth century maps in microcosm the earth-and-human history of most nations and peoples on the planet in the same century. For Jews of the next century, wherever they may live, the schoolhouse of Zionism demands we consider the following questions for life in a larger sphere:

•   On a planet where ecosystems cross national and cultural boundaries, can different peoples cooperate to heal wounds in the earth, or are different peoples obligated to act on their own to master and control as much of the earth as possible, to whatever degree is necessary, to make their own nations more safe, more prosperous, more successful?

•   Do we need to reexamine and redirect the urge to increase population, whether rooted in ancient teachings or in contemporary national competitions, so as to be in tune with the rhythms of the earth? Or can new approaches to earth-human relationships absorb indefinitely larger numbers of the human race without damaging the earth?

•   Must ancient stories, metaphors, and symbols of the sacred be plowed under as irrelevant—either to an industrial era or to the creation of an eco-sensitive future? Or can new flowers blossom from those old trees, so that older cultures can take part in renewing the sacredness of earth under new conditions?

And, of course, Israel itself and the neighboring peoples still face the same questions.

Through facing the physical degeneration of the earth, air, and water of the Land, suggest Alon Tal and David Brooks, there may yet come—with enough compassion, alertness, and commitment—a new ecological approach to Zionism. Through facing these same questions, suggest Smith, Abu Diab, and Twite, there may yet emerge a new depth of understanding and cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians.

If so, they make clear, each people must be more attuned to the reality that Modernity bears dangers as well as benefits, and to the necessity of sharing efforts with the other people that lives in the same land, breathes the same air, and drinks the same water.

   ZIONIST TEXTS

A. AGGADAH: VARIATIONS ON THE THEME OF THE FUTURE

A. D. Gordon, translated by Jeremy Schwartz

And it shall come to pass,

O child of Adam,

when you return to Nature,

on that day you shall open your eyes,

and you shall peer directly

into Nature’s eyes

and there you shall see

your own image.

You shall know that you have returned to yourself,

for in hiding from Nature,

you hid from yourself.

And furthermore, you shall see,

that from upon you,

from upon your hands and feet,

from upon your body and soul,

fragments are peeling and falling,

crumbling and falling.

Heavy fragments,

hard,

oppressive;

you straighten yourself,

you stand up tall,

you grow.

And you will know that these are the shards of your shell, your kelippah,

in which you had constricted yourself

in your bewilderment,

and out of which you have finally grown.

And you will recognize on that day:

nothing had been according to your measure,

you must renew everything:

your food      and      your drink,

your dress      and      your home,

the character of your work      and      the way that you learn

—everything....

And on that day, with all the power of your heart, you will sense the pressure with which the walls of the houses in the city—and even in the village—press upon your soul, and you will sense the slightest barrier which stands between your Self and the Boundless Space of the World, between your Self and the Boundless Life of the World. And so, when you build a house, you will not set your heart on the multiplication of its rooms and closets but you will set your entire heart on this: that there be nothing in it that separates from Boundless Space, from Boundless Life, for when you sit in your house, when you lie down and when you rise up, at every moment and every hour, your entire being will be in the midst of that Space, in the midst of that Life. And thus also will you build houses of Torah and wisdom, also houses of labor and work, setting a space between one house and another—a large space, so that no house will rob or conceal from another its place in this world. You will learn Torah from the mouth of Nature, the Torah of building and fashioning, and you will learn to do as it does in all that you build and in all that you fashion.

On that day you will know and take to heart, O child of Adam, that you had been wandering aimlessly until you returned to this point. For you didn’t know life. Even after you stopped eating from the pre-made, you still didn’t recognize the Nature of life; you didn’t stop living from the pre-made, whether made by you or by others. A different life, a life not from the pre-made, a life in the midst of the making of life, in the midst of the fashioning of life: this you didn’t know. And so your life was torn into two tatters: one very small tatter of life and one very large tatter of non-life—of labor, of trouble, and of bother. Shabbat—and pre-Shabbat. And you didn’t think, it didn’t occur to you, that there is no life in living from the pre-made, if there is not life in the act of making. Doesn’t Nature also live in the midst of creating life, in the midst of fashioning life? And so, all your days, you were a seeker of life, a pursuer of life—and not alive. Your life was dangling before you: either in the past or in the future; present you didn’t know. When you saw that your own life was small and poor, you craved to annex to yourself the lives of others. So you would rob, plunder, and extort as much as