LEARN: JUDAISM AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Tending to Our Cosmic Oasis

by Rabbi Ismar Schorsch
Rabbi Ismar Schorsch is the Chancellor Emeritus of The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City.

We must dare to reexamine our longstanding preference for history over nature. The celebration of "historical monotheism" (Baron) is a legacy of nineteenth-century Christian-Jewish polemics, a fierce attempt by Jewish thinkers to distance Judaism from the world of paganism. But the disclaimer has its downside by casting Judaism into an adversarial relationship with the natural world. Nature is faulted for the primitiveness and decadence of pagan religion, and the modern Jew is saddled with a reading of his tradition that is one-dimensional. Judaism has been made to dull our sensitivity to the awe-inspiring power of nature. Preoccupied with the ghosts of paganism, it appears indifferent and unresponsive to the supreme challenge of our age: humanity's degradation of the environment. Our planet is under siege and we as Jews are transfixed in silence.

What a monumental disservice to Judaism and human kind! For, properly understood, Judaism pulsates with reverence for God's handiwork. The human species may embody the highest form of consciousness in the universe, but hardly merits the limitless power of an absolute monarch. Humanity's unique ability to unravel the secrets of nature does not make us the equal of its creator. In the tart words of William Blake, the unrepentant critic of Newton and the Enlightenment: "He who sees the infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only." Judaism is a religious tapestry designed to sharpen our eye for the divine, in nature as well as in history, and thus is laced with universal motifs relevant to our contemporary crisis.

Let me cite but three suggestive examples. First, the three pilgrimage festivals, despite the historicizing overlay and the long exilic experience, never lost their agricultural roots. No matter how urban Jewish life became, these ancient harvest festivals have echoed liturgically and ritually with an undertone of anxiety. The fertility of nature is the most basic condition of human survival. Graphically, the Mishnah conveys this sense of collective dependence:

Four times a year the world is judged: at Passover on the grain, at the Festival of Weeks on the fruit of the trees...and on the Festival of Huts humankind is judged in terms of water. (Rosh HaShanah 1)

What has become so shockingly clear of late is that our own reckless assault on the environment -- whether stemming from indescribable poverty or ever more industrialization -- is part of the sentence. The rhythm of the natural year undulates through the Jewish calendar, which in turn yields an annual rendition of Judaism's utopian vision of balance and harmony -- "In that day, will I make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the creeping things of the ground. I will banish bow, sword, and war from the land and let them lie down in safety" (Hosea 2:20).

My second example is less obvious but more potent. The weekly message of Shabbat rings with environmental import, if we but dare to understand it on its own terms. Instead, our wont is to render it in the liberating, anthropocentric spirit of Jesus: "The Sabbath was made for the sake of man and not man for the Sabbath." But to my mind, this profound and uniquely biblical institution is not intended to ennoble the human race but to humble it. With its incessant strictures against work, Shabbat reminds us of our earthly status as tenant and not overlord. To rest is to acknowledge our limitations. One day out of seven we cease to exercise our power to tinker and transform. Willful inactivity is a statement of subservience to a power greater than our own. On the meaning of Shabbat, Hirsch, the hardliner, spoke more tellingly than his liberal counterparts:

On each Sabbath day, the world, so to speak, is restored to God, and thus man proclaims, both to himself and to his surroundings, that he enjoys only a borrowed authority... Even the smallest work done on the Sabbath is a denial of the fact that God is the Creator and Master of the World (Horeb, 56).

The design of Shabbat to rein in our lust for grandeur and gratification, then, addresses the environmental issue head on. For the first time, a species has the power to render this planet uninhabitable, either cataclysmically or incrementally. Precisely at this juncture, the archaic texts of the Hebrew Bible confront us with a vision of responsibility. We are not free to act indifferently or selfishly. Our mission is to tend to this cosmic oasis, to perpetuate an islet of consciousness in a seemingly mindless universe. More immediately, how salutary for the environment if one day a week we turned off the engines to walk rather than drive, to cultivate our inner lives, to relate to family and friends. How much cleaner the air is in Jerusalem on Shabbat!

Underlying Shabbat, and for that matter much of Judaism, is the insistence on divine kingship, my third and final example. The concept is one of the root ideas of Judaism, enunciated in the quotidian berakhah as in the exalted liturgy of the High Holy Days. Judaism is a religion of constraints, with an unvarnished view of human nature. It rests squarely on the portrait of mortal human as sketched in chapter two of Genesis rather than on that of the superhuman in chapter one. Whereas Adam I is a paragon without want or weakness, commissioned to conquer the Earth and free of all restraints, Adam II is frail and flawed. Incapable of abiding by the single stricture imposed upon him, he is lonely, weak, and passive. To till and tend his garden, no more. That is his assignment. For the Bible, the tumultuous course of human events is driven by the errant nature of Adam II, and not by the perfection of Adam I, which lingers on as an ever elusive vision beyond human grasp.

Errant and powerful, like the awesome potential of a gifted natural athlete, human nature needs to be focused, disciplined, and trained. The awareness of God's dominion, a proprietorship anchored in creation, is the ultimate constraint erected by Judaism to stay the hand of self destruction. The ecological nightmare of our own making cries out for the reinculcation of this reverential mindset. In the words of Rainer Maria Rilke: "Who speaks of victory? To endure is all."