c. 1998 Religion news Service
KIBBUTZ LOTAN, Israel _ It is near sunset and a group of Jews have gathered on the top of a huge sand dune in Israel’s southern desert region to celebrate the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath.
But while most of their counterparts across Israel are uttering the traditional Friday evening prayers within the four walls of a synagogue, visiting American rabbi and author Arthur Waskow tells this group to study the images of trees, sunset and mountains, digging their fingers into the fine-ground sand, and touching”Adam,”their human selfs, to”Adamah,”the Hebrew word for”land.” In a country whose ancient biblical vistas of desert, olive terraced mountainsides, and coastal cliffs are being sold off at a dizzying pace to developers for new highways, superstores, and suburbs, a handful of religious Jews are forging a fledgling environmental movement, re-examining what their tradition has to say about their relationship to the soil they revere as the Land of Israel.
The stirring of religious conscience are like a small, still voice in a wilderness landscape in comparison to the countervailing forces _ unchecked development accompanied by industrial and agricultural pollution, and massive, mundane household waste.
Still, they represent a first attempt by religious groups here to rethink the ancient spiritual bond to the Holy Land not only in terms of political boundaries and ethnic affiliations, but also in terms of sustaining basic resources for future generations. “My feeling is that God’s covenant with Abraham (granting him the Land of Israel) still binds us, but every generation has to find their own way of meeting the deal. To me, keeping the bargain today means preservation,”said Alon Tal, one of the leaders of Israel’s modern-day environmental movement and the founder of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies in the southern Israeli desert, and himself a traditionally observant Jew.
The use of biblical terminology is relatively new for Israel’s tiny environmental movement, which until recently was dominated by secular Israelis who framed their ecological concerns in the terms of Western humanistic culture.
That secular image of Israel’s”greens”has made dialogue difficult with Orthodox leaders and thinkers who make up the majority of Israel’s religious world. “On an unconscious level a lot of traditional Orthodox people saw ecology as meaning feminism, as meaning left-wing, as being connected with Gaia, or primitive, pre-Judeo-Christian cultures _ and thus as something that even aspired to erase the Jewish-Christian influence on western culture,”said Rabbi Dov Berkovits, an Orthodox rabbi who recently became involved in efforts to create an environmental forum of Orthodox thinkers and scholars.
American Orthodox immigrants, who might have been exposed to environmental trends in their homeland, tended to come from urbanized yeshiva communities in which intellectual pursuits like the study of science, philosophy and mathematics might be embraced, but the more material realms of body and land were perceived, at least subconciously, as”virtual idolatry,”Berkovits said.
And mainstream American Jews active in Israeli issues have only recently begun to discover that their guided tours of the country usually skipped over pollution hot spots, and that some of their tree-plantings financed through donations to the Jewish National Fund are now being uprooted for development.”It’s only been in the last three or four years that American Jews have begun to realize that the romantic vision of Zionism restoring the land was a lot more complicated than they thought,”said Waskow, director of the New York-based Shalom Center.
Waskow has been writing about eco-Judaism in the United States ever since the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s. He was invited to Israel recently by Kibbutz Lotan, a young community near the Red Sea town of Eilat, to raise the issue with Israelis unfamiliar with looking for environmental meanings in religious texts, or vice versa.
Kibbutz Lotan, whose members are affiliated with the Reform Movement, aspires to become Israel’s first eco-minded kibbutz and has embarked on projects to promote organic farming, desert construction from natural materials, and recycling.
Lotan’s projects are just one symbol of the new”eco-Jewish”consciousness developing in Israel today, particularly among liberal Reform and Conservative Jewish circles, where the relevance of Jewish law and practice to modern-day concerns is a top priority.
Another brand-new initiative by Ron Kronish, a Reform rabbi who heads the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel, is seeking to create an environmental coalition of Jewish, Christian and Muslim institutions which would develop an interfaith religious-environmental”covenant.””We want to raise consciousness within the Israeli public as to the need to care for our shared environment as Jews, Christians and Muslims living in the same land,”Kronish said.
Still, the major challenge here in Israel is how to introduce environmental values into the dominant Orthodox Jewish world where rabbis and religious figures wield powerful influence in key government institutions concerned with transportation, development, pollution, and education.”There is a tremendous compartmentalization in Israeli culture between the discourse on Jewish values and the discourse on environment _ kind of like the split between science and the humanities,”said Jeremy Benstein. Benstein is co-founder of the new Tel Aviv-based Heschel Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership, which has become one of the first institutions in Israel to frame environmental issues in the language of Jewish thought and broad Israeli cultural values.
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Within both the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox communities, Jewish commandments carrying an environmental message _ such as the prohibitions against waste _ have been subsumed to the strict observance of other religious laws, such as kashrut.
For instance, many religious institutions use only disposable plastic dishes and silverware in order to avoid problems with dietary laws requiring strict separation of dishes used for meat and milk, he said.”Given those religious tendencies, and the secular Israeli adoption of the `throwaway culture,’ it’s no wonder that Israel has one of the lowest rates of recycling in the developed world _ and there is as yet no law mandating any reuse of glass bottles or drinking cans,”Benstein said.
On the fundamental question of population growth, Jewish law and ecological concerns also seem to be on a collision course. Religious Jews perceive the biblical commandment to”be fruitful and multiply”as an absolute even though tiny Israel is one of the most crowded countries in the western world and its population of 6 million people is growing at three times the rate of the United States.
Benstein contends that many such dilemmas lie in the narrow interpretation of Jewish religious commandments. “If you look at the commandment to `be fruitful and multiply,’ that commandment also says you are supposed to fill up the land. But if the land is really full, then you have to ask to what extent the commandment still applies,”Benstein said.
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Still, Benstein said Judaism has much potential as a”holistic”spiritual connection between humans and their environment.”When you look at certain components of Judaism, you will find that we are much less like the great globalizing religions of history, and much more like the small, tribal, land-based religions that are viewed as living in harmony with their environment,”Benstein said.”Many dimensions of Judaism, for instance, may have more in common with Amazonian Indian culture than with Christianity.” Judaism’s calendar, for instance, is partly based on the cyclical monthly lunar movements that are more in tune with an”ecological”understanding of time and history in which nature’s rhythms are given priority over conventional notions of historic”progress.” And seemingly archaic Jewish religious practices reflect strands of faith underlying the basic ecological awareness at the root of many traditions, Benstein said. He cites the ceremonies of the fall harvest festival of Succot, in which Jews march around the synagogue with trees and fruit native to the Land of Israel, waving the branches in the air and banging them on the ground.”Our Western lives have been sanitized to be rational in the cognitive sense,”Benstein said.”So in searching for the spiritual, you get to things that speak more to the heart and the soul.” Tal said the fostering of greater awareness of Judaism’s ecological dimensions could give not only the religious community, but Israel’s secular Jewish majority an avenue for rediscovering their links to Jewish practice and tradition.”As environmentalists, we have to offer spiritual meaning in the place of more cars, more larger television screens, more videos and more floor space in your house. We have to show Israelis that there are ways to connect to their past and heritage and yet not give up their identity as modern, westernized persons,”he said.
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