6. METAPHORICAL ECO-THEOLOGY II: THE PILGRIMAGE FESTIVALS

Chapter Summary

Continued from Chapter 5, here is an extended analysis of those images and understandings of God which can have a real impact in the congregation and beyond -- those to which today’s religious practitioners are (intentionally or not) likely to be exposed, from the pulpit and elsewhere. Again, what is seen, despite a marginal preference for relational and immanental theologies, is that all theological constructs can be seen ‘environmentally,’ and that each contributes an important element. In this, the theological endeavor itself mirrors ecology, which teaches us that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Where Chapter 5 introduced this concept of metaphorical theology and traced it through the “high attendance holidays” – Shabbat and the High (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) Holidays themselves – Chapter 6 turns to the biblical pilgrimage festival cycle. Though these holy days are ill-attended in most American synagogues today, they do offer rhythm to a Jewish year, with clear ecological relevance due to their being nature/agriculture festivals. Along the way we focus on a series of attributes of Divinity and metaphors for God, and a number of specific theological constructs and constructs as well, in search of that religious language which will best serve Creation.

Sukkot: God as Cooperation / Oneness / Unity

Not surprisingly, Kaplan the religious (trans)naturalist1 has more to say to about God as the

underlying Unity of the universe than about any other facet of divinity. To him, the “effort of life to

achieve and express unity, harmony and integrity is what makes life holy; this is the evidence of the

divine; whatever thwarts this tendency is sin.” Associating this belief with the Fall harvest festival of

Sukkot is perhaps a bit of a stretch; his own typology sees this first of three annual pilgrimage

festivals highlighting cooperation and solidarity among the Israelites. But Sukkot is traditionally the

future date for all peoples to ascend the Mountain to pray together, a prophecy in Zechariah 14 that

1 Rebecca Alpert and Jacob Staub explain that Kaplan “neither identified God with things in the world (natural) nor did he consider God to be beyond or detached from the world (supernatural). Therefore, Kaplan’s theology came to be called ‘transnatural.’ In this view, there is more to the universe than the sum of its parts” (28). Charlene Spretnak agrees: “Revelation may be extraordinary, but it is not supernatural. It would more accurately be labeled ultranatural, a journey into the cosmic nature that lies within the world…” (“Earthbody and Personal Body as Sacred”, in Adams, 264).

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becomes the haftarah reading for the festival’s first day; it is also the holiday most associated with

water, a universal gift. Thus the association of Sukkot and unity. Rooted in the rabbinic rules that

we should utter blessings as a way to stay in right relationship with the world, Kaplan returns to the

unity theme: “to be grateful to God is to experience the sense of being in rapport with all the forces

and relationships of life that make for the realization of its worth.”2 Or as Wendell Berry puts it:

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…3

Unity, of course, lies at the heart of traditional Jewish theology. Our central God-statement

taken from Deut. 6:4, the Sh’ma, affirms: “Hear O Israel, YHVH is our God, YHVH is one.” God’s

oneness (echad) is the most obvious theme here,4 but vitally present too is the unity between the

classically immanent-God-of-Israel-and-of-history known as YHVH, and the transcendent-God-of-

2 Kaplan, Meaning of God, pp. 167 and 226-27; see Talmud Berakhot 35a-b for more on blessings. Heschel echoes Kaplan and Berry in Man is Not Alone, 120: “evil is divergence, confusion, that which alienates man from man, man from God, while good is convergence, togetherness, union.” Unfortunately, however, Kaplan (233) sees modernity threatening the realization of this unity: “Though civilization has made for the emergence of the individual and the increase of wealth and of opportunities for enjoyment, it has deprived man of the capacity for thankfulness.” In pointing a way out of this dilemma, Kaplan attacks the “so-called ideal of ‘the strenuous life,’” saying that “a far wholesomer philosophy is that of ‘the simple life’, in which success is measured by the extent to which one fulfills one’s latent possibilities for good” (239). In the pages that follow, Kaplan makes a strong case for what is known today as “voluntary simplicity”, a good-for-you-and-others-and-the-Earth movement – again, supported by Heschel on pp. 183-89 and 262, and in his magisterial The Sabbath (especially p. 28). Yet Rasmussen (90) quotes Frederic Morton’s description of the Western “’Workaholic Supernal’ who ‘assembled the world in Factory terms.’ ‘Before the Hebrews, no other people had a Sabbath,’ he writes. ‘No other people needed one.’”

3 Wendell Berry, Another Turn, 75. A 19th century German Orthodox rabbi, Samson Raphael Hirsch, said something strikingly 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.”

4 Gillman, however, argues (90) that “’Hear O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone’ (not ‘the Lord is One’), is probably the most accurate translation… What is being rejected here is not polytheism but idolatry.” Here he follows Heschel (Man is Not Alone, 116) who writes: “Monotheism was not attained by means of numerical reduction, by bringing down the multitude of deities to the smallest possible number. One means unique.” Heschel in turn follows Maimonides, who says that God is not one “in the sense that a simple body is, numerically one but still infinitely divisible. God, rather, is uniquely one” (from Mishnah Commentary at Helek, Sanhedrin 10, in Twersky, 418). To all of this Plaskow (Standing Again at Sinai, 151) offers an important observation on God’s yet-incomplete oneness: “Only when our metaphors for God are sufficiently inclusive that they reflect the multiplicity both of a pluralistic Israel and of a cosmic community will God truly be one – which is to say, all in all.”

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nature-and-of-the-universe known as Elohim.5 Medieval scholar Bahya ibn Pakuda devotes the

opening of his Duties of the Heart to the theme of unity, which is itself related to the concept of

infinity; the preferred Kabbalistic moniker for God’s essence is Ein Sof, ‘without end.’ And as Yosef

Albo said many centuries ago in his Sefer Ha-Ikkarim (2:30), “If I knew God, I would be God.”

Beyond Sallie McFague’s three personal and anthropomorphic metaphors of God as Mother,

Lover, and Friend, her typology does include a parallel to our notion of God as Cosmic Unity. It is

something that she introduces as a “shocking idea,” a “bit of nonsense” that nonetheless might “make

a claim to truth:” the idea of the world, in toto, as God’s body. She rushes to reiterate that “a

metaphor or model is not a description;” the hope is that some elements of this loose analogy hit

home for us, pointing us toward truths deeper than any metaphor can capture. This model’s clearest

drawback is its apparent pantheism (a presumed no-no in normative Judaism at least), though upon

observation, it manifests panentheism instead: “it does not totally identify God with the world any

more than we totally identify ourselves with our bodies.” Most shocking is the power of humanity,

in a sense, over this God (though Kabbalah, particularly Isaac Luria’s influential twist on the creation

story from around 1572, already locates such power in our hands) -- “The incarnate God is the God at

risk: we have been given central responsibility to care for God’s body, our world.” Thus, Imitatio

Dei is written all over this model: “the basic necessities of bodily existence – adequate food and

shelter, for example – are central aspects of God’s love for all bodily creatures and therefore should

be central concerns of us, God’s co-workers.” 6 It’s not traditional, but it works:

The monarchical model encourages attitudes of militarism, dualism, and escapism; it condones control through violence and oppression; it has nothing to say about the nonhuman world. [Against this,] The model of the world as God’s body encourages holistic attitudes of responsibility for and care of the vulnerable and oppressed; it is nonhierarchical and acts through persuasion and attraction; it has a great deal to say about the body and nature. Both are pictures: which distortion is more true to the world in which we live and to the good news of Christianity [or the halakhah and aggadah of Judaism, for that matter]?7

5 Arthur Green locates the unifying of false dichotomies not within the Sh’ma, but between its six words and the six of its response, Barukh Shem K’vod Malkhuto L’olam Va’ed – blessed be God’s glorious dominion, forever and ever. The Sh’ma represents “the higher unity, the inner gate of oneness,” and points us toward the transcendent “God of endless cosmic space-time;” its response speaks to “the one within the many…the unity of God’s kingdom,” within which “we encounter God’s oneness in and through the world, not despite it.” Green concludes, “our religious task is to see through to the oneness of these two truths” (Seek My Face, 6-7).

6 McFague, Models of God, pp. 69, 70, 73, 74.7 McFague 78.

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On such cosmic unity, many faiths ought to weigh in. McFague quotes Teilhard: “There is

communion with God, and a communion with the earth, and a communion with God through earth.”8

In ancient Chinese tradition, humanity in its all-embracing fullness ‘forms one body with Heaven,

Earth, and the myriad things’ and enables us to embody the cosmos in our sensibility.”9 A thousand

years ago, Confucian philosopher Chang Tsai wrote: “That which fills the universe I regard as my

body and that which directs the universe I regard as my nature. All people are my brothers and

sisters, and all things are my companions.”10 In Taoism, “People should avoid being strident and

aggressive not only toward other people but also toward nature,”11 and the Tao itself shines in this

regard: “Those who would take over the earth / and shape it to their will / never, I notice, succeed. /

The earth is like a vessel so sacred / that at the mere approach of the profane / it is marred / and

when they reach out their fingers it is gone.”12 Hinduism may go further still: arguably, ultimate

unity comes when we are literally one, through trans-species reincarnation across the generations. 13

And, the Unitarian-Universalist platform’s seventh (and last) principle is “Respect for the

interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part” – source of the “Seventh Principle

Project,” a movement-wide effort to green UU churches and members as far as possible.14

Modern Hebrew poet Shaul Tchernikovsky stretches Judaism in this direction by writing of

the One “God-in-Creation,” suggesting that God’s image is found not just in people (see Gen. 1:26)

8 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Writings in Time of War (tr. Rene Hague, London: William Collins Sons, 1968), p. 14; in McFague 61.

9 Huston Smith, The World’s Religions, p. 187, quoting Tu Wei-ming.10 Steven C Rockefeller, “Faith and Community in an Ecological Age”, in Rockefeller-Elder, p. 157.11 Huston Smith, The World’s Religions, p. 212.12 Tao de-Ching, 29, in Huston Smith, The World’s Religions, p. 212. Would not Confucius say, “conserve?!”13 “Among the various incarnations of God (numbering from ten to twenty-four depending on the source of the

text), He first incarnated Himself in the form of a fish, then a tortoise, a boar, and a dwarf. His fifth incarnation was as a manlion. As Rama he was closely associated with monkeys, and as Krishna he was always surrounded by the cows. Thus, other species are accorded reverence. Further, the Hindu belief in the cycle of birth and rebirth where a person may come back as an animal or a bird gives these species not only respect, but also reverence ... Also, for Hindus, the planting of a tree is still a religious duty … The cutting of trees and destruction of flora were considered a sinful act … Hindu ancestors considered it their duty to save trees; and in order to do that they attached to every tree a religious sanctity.” (O. P. Dwivedi, “Satyagraha for Conservation,” in Gottleib 155-157). Regarding the sanctity of trees, the Matsya Puranam has the goddess Parvati proclaiming that a tree is “comparable to ten sons” (Vasudha Narayanan, “Ecological Perspectives from the Hindu Traditions,” in Tucker and Grim 187).

14 As one Unitarian minister has written, “To the extent that we can possess resources, they should be held in trust for the community of humankind, both in a contemporary and in a futuristic sense… The earth should be thought of less like a mine, which is to be exploited until devoid of resources, and more like a garden, which we tend and renew. In short, the earth has a moral claim on us” (Gilbert, 94).

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but throughout the world.: “…A striking fir, a rich furrow, in them you will find God’s likeness,

God’s image incarnate on every high mountain…”15 And consider the following Zoharic image of

unity in the world, about which kabbalah scholar Isaiah Tishby notes that "even the combination of

the four elements of matter is effected by the divinity that dwells within them." This sense of God as

the exclusive animating force in the universe leads to a remarkable kabbalistic flourish:16

God encompasses all worlds, and none but God surrounds them on every side, above and below and in the four corners of the globe, and none may go beyond God's domain. God fills all worlds, and no other fills them... God binds and joins the species with one another, above and below, and there is no juncture of the four elements except [by] the Holy One, blessed be God, existing among them.

Even at the pshat (surface) level, this is a powerful notion: God conjoins all the species,

guarantees the unity of this world, and unifies the animal realms above and below. But note that

Tishby inserts the word 'by' in brackets – an act of interpretation as much as of translation. Undoing

Tishby’s change, we are left with God as the juncture of the four elements, rather than as the more

general creator of that juncture. This is an especially helpful opening for those of us who, following

Arthur Green’s lead,17 wish to pursue neo-kabbalistic panentheism for a contemporary theology that

squares naturalism with the best of the theistic tradition. And further back still, Rav Kook sounds

positively radical (and Darwinian) in saying that “we cannot make any absolute distinction between

various levels of being… were it not for the lower beings, the uncouth and the unseemly, the higher

beings could not have emerged in their splendor, their esteem and their luminous quality. We

continually become more conscious of the integration and unity of existence.”18

15 Shaul Tchernikovsky radically relocates the image of God beyond our one mere species, and in so doing introduces pantheistic tendencies to modern Jewish identity; his choice of ‘fir and furrow’ is an intentional response to a problematic Mishnah (Avot 3:7; see Jeremy Benstein in Waskow , Vol. 1). Translated by Robert Cover, Everett Gendler, and A. Porat, in James Sleeper and Alan Mintz’s The New Jews, p. 243. His neo-pagan poem/polemic ends thus: “No God disembodied, mere spirit – He is God-In-Creation! That is His name and His fame forever!”

16 Zohar III:225a, in Tishby, 250.17 Green, in Raayonot, seeks to unify Kaplan and Heschel (who were both his teachers at the Jewish

Theological Seminary; I had the honor to learn with Green at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College) through neo-hassidic panentheism; I find his case, elaborated in “A Kabbalah for the Environmental Age (Tirosh-Samuelson, 3-15), quite compelling. McFague (72) also addresses panentheism as a description of “the world as God’s body.” And Norman Lamm (in Waskow, Vol. 1, 117) attributes the ‘felicitous term’ to Charles Hartshorne, and defines it as “God includes the world within Himself, but is not limited to or by it. He is immanent, but also remains transcendent to it. ‘He is the place of the world, but the world is not His place’.” Here Lamm, a leader within modern Orthodoxy, quotes Genesis Rabbah 68:9: “Hu m’komo shel olam, v’ein olamo m’komo.”

18 Rav A.I. Kook (1865-1935), Orot HaKodesh II:431, cited in Dobb, “Four Modern Teachers,” Waskow I:28.

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Environmentalists, on hearing that “God binds and joins the species with one another,” might

detect shades of atmospheric chemist James Lovelock’s quarter-century-old Gaia Hypothesis.19

Lovelock, with Lynn Margulies and others, came to understand that the geosphere, atmosphere, and

biosphere co-evolved, and remain interwoven many billions of years later. Thus "Lovelock's central

idea is that 'the living matter, air, oceans, and land surface form a complex system which can be seen

as a single organism and which has the capacity to keep our planet a fit place for life.'"20 The Gaia

Hypothesis, then, has both ecological and spiritual significance.

Scientifically, it means that we can only tinker with natural systems so far until we exhaust

their potential to regenerate. It also means that ecology -- and economy, and politics, and society,

and religion, and so on -- require a systems approach, since all are part of one unified whole (perhaps

that is what Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew meant by “ecological sin”21 – a category not

only for that which desecrates Creation, but for that which denies its underlying unity).22 Spiritually,

the Gaia notion counters any anthropocentric approach, and offers a humble view of ourselves within

the divine cosmos. It also implies that just as God is radically one, so is God's creation. Heschel,

earlier, held similarly: “Neither stars nor stones, neither atoms nor waves, but their belonging

together, their interaction, the relation of all things to one another constitutes the universe. No cell

could exist alone, all bodies are interdependent, affect and serve one another.” 23 And Kaplan, with

other early Reconstructionists, came to the same conclusion, thirty years before Lovelock:

Each of us should learn to think of [sic] himself as though he were a cell in some living organism – which, in a sense, he actually is – in his relation to the universe or cosmos. What we think of as a coherent universe or cosmos is more than nature; it is nature with a soul. That soul is God. As

19 Or shades of A Sand County Almanac (pp. 203-04), as cited by J. Baird Callicott (88): “In [Aldo] Leopold’s compact and elegant prose, ‘All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts’ … ecology ‘simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.’ From that realization there follows a ‘land ethic’…”

20 Merchant, Radical Ecology, 98. 21 Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, “The Emerging Alliance of World Religions and Ecology,” in their co-

edited issue of Daedalus, p. 12; Bartholomew’s context was the environmental destruction along the Danube River and in the Black Sea, highlighted at a series of seminars that he himself sponsored.

22 Likewise the Lutheran (ELCA) “Caring for Creation,” while addressing themes of creation, vocation, and hope, does not hesitate to name the implications of our actions which deny such unity: “Sinners all, we threaten the creation… We wreak social injustice and environmental degradation upon the earth. Sloth or cowardice then prevent us from rising to defend a creation that includes ourselves from the prospect of destruction… Churches have often mistaken domination for dominion, and acquiesced to life-styles and structures of exploitation.” Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, n.d. (circa 1990), in Roger Gottleib, ed., This Sacred Earth, p. 249.

23 Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man is Not Alone, 121.

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each cell in the body depends for its health and proper functioning upon the whole body, so each of us depends on God.24

Were we moderns to truly believe and internalize that we are ‘just’ cells within a larger

organism that is nature with a soul-named-God, the implications for our practices would be

staggering. Justice and sustainability would be the self-evident norm. And the world as God’s body

would be in much better hands. For Jews, there is in fact no better time than Sukkot in which to

deliver this message – the one week when we are to be outside, in flimsy temporary huts rather than

the deceptive ‘permanence’ and ‘security’ of our homes, open to the elements, uniquely aware of our

interdependence with the rest of Creation.

Shemini Atzeret: God as Presence / Science / Evolution

Kaplan didn’t precisely link the last autumn festival, the “Eighth Day of Assembly” which

concludes Sukkot, with his zealous passion for science and rationalism. The focus of his “God Felt

as a Presence” chapter is instead on public worship, on “that sense of being in God’s presence which

[the Israelite] experienced in azeret, the assembly of the congregation for religious worship”, which

he associates with Shemini Atzeret. Still, in the Kaplanian-McFagueian typology being developed

here, “God Felt as a Presence Through the Natural Universe” deserves its own entry. Locating God

within the natural world – true pantheism, rather than panentheism – is another “partially true”

metaphor worth exploring, even if it turns out to be more partial than most.25 After all, Kaplan

argues that “faith must justify itself pragmatically,” that Judaism requires “the most rigorous

24 Mordecai Kaplan, et al, “Introduction,” Reconstructionist Prayer Book, 1945. Perhaps Kaplan had read Eberhard Arnold (Why We Live in Community), who had written two decades earlier still, that “a life of community” constitutes “one organism” (Farmington PA: Plough edition, 1995 [orig. 1925], pp. 18, 21).

25 “…a Jewish environmental philosophy and ethics cannot be based on a simplistic version of pantheism that acknowledges only the world and nothing beyond the world. From a Jewish perspective, ‘biocentrism’ is just another form of paganism that must result in idolatrous worship of nature. An environmental philosophy that merely reveres what is, while ignoring what should be, is not viably Jewish … It is precisely because humans are created with the capacity to transcend nature that they are commanded by God to protect nature. Therefore, a Jewish environmental philosophy and ethics cannot give up the primacy of the human species in the created order.” (Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, “Nature in the Sources of Judaism,” in Tucker and Grim 116-117)

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intellectual honesty,” and (in its strongest formulation) that “to fail to reconstruct Jewish religion in

harmony with the fundamental postulates of modern science is to sin against the light.”26

Traditional Judaism provides a surprising amount of support, if equivocal, for such a view.

Throughout the Bible there is a sense that destructive energy, once unleashed, has its own will – the

all-powerful God cannot bend the natural order to recall it, but must provide Moses or another human

with the tools to counter its influence. Many elements of the cultic rites at the Temple bear similar

marks. The Talmud sees processes like produce rotting as so natural that had God not ordained them,

they would still obtain. Maimonides, in a sense the first great Jewish naturalist theologian, is too

Aristotelian to believe in a changing God, so he sees prophecy as built into the eternal Divine

transmission: a prophet is one who is ethically, intellectually, and spiritually great enough to know

how to tap into the Divine message. In 19th century Germany, Samson Raphael Hirsch inaugurated

‘modern orthodoxy’ with the slogan Torah u’Maddah – Torah and Science.

In other great faiths as well, holiness can be seen everywhere, which should lead us humans

to act to uphold that holiness. Consider Hinduism: “Every created object is wakan, holy, and has a

power according to the loftiness of the spiritual reality that it reflects. The Indian humbles himself

before the whole of creation because all visible things were created before him and, being older than

he, deserve respect.”27 Besides parallels to this view in mystical and other Western religious strands

of thought,28 the modern West is slowly learning to respect this animistic outlook as “a sophisticated

system of relational knowing.”29 Islamic mysticism or Sufism, likewise, helps us recognize “the

world’s objects as garments that God dons to create a world… to the eye of the heart, the world is

God-in-disguise, God veiled.”30

Closer to our time, again Heschel dances with the Kaplanian / naturalist position, but retreats:

“Reason is a necessary coefficient of faith, lending form to what often becomes violent, blind and

26 Kaplan, Meaning of God, p. 243.27 Huston Smith, The World’s Religions, p. 379.28 Kabbalah, particularly the Lurianic system whereby the entire physical world contains sparks of divinity,

emphasizes the spiritual power of each created object; a classic midrash (Talmud Sanhedrin 38a) says that humans were created last so that if they become haughty, “tell them that even the gnat preceded you in the order of creation.”

29 Lloyd Burton, Worship and Wilderness, p. 184, citing the work of ethnographer Nurit Bird-David.30 Huston Smith, The World’s Religions, pp. 246, 261. Compare to Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, who

famously likened the entire known world to God’s outer-garments.

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exaggerated by imagination. Faith without reason is mute; reason without faith is deaf.”31 Against

Kaplan’s distinctly modern faith in science and Heschel’s hesitancy, however, consider Soelle’s post-

modern feminist, humanist, and ecological concerns:

Today we might identify science as the universally acknowledged belief system in our world that demands and rewards our acceptance of its premises and goals at the price of our hope. Science, seemingly a neutral and value-free system of cognition, has become a law as restrictive and repressive for dissenters as the Jewish law was in Paul’s time.32 The ideology of science is a belief system that binds us and rewards its priests and makes hope into a prescientific, unnecessary relic, because there is no space for hope and unpredictability inside its rationally controlled system.

Soelle doubts the appropriateness of the scientific model for theology; Orthodox thinker and

Holocaust theologian Yitz Greenberg goes further still: “for the past two centuries an allegiance has

been transferred from the ‘Lord of History and Revelation’ to the ‘Lord of Science and Humanism,’

but the experience of the death camps asks whether this new Lord is worthy of ultimate loyalty.”33

The American Baptist Churches, USA, issued a remarkable environmental statement which warns us

that “Technology holds the possibility of both good and evil, life and death… It is our responsibility

as stewards to require that technology be used for the good and that the harmful effects of its use (or

misuse) be mitigated or prevented...”34 Wendell Berry – himself proudly a Luddite for prioritizing

31 Kaplan, Meaning of God, 356; Heschel, Man is Not Alone, 173.32 This passage is from Soelle, 160; on the previous page she had contextualized Paul’s critique of Judaism:

“Paul’s polemic against the Jewish law seems to be a productive misunderstanding of the authentic meaning of torah [sic]. What Paul calls faith as opposed to law correlates with the authentic Jewish understanding that lies at the heart of the torah. What he calls law we would call in modern terms an ideology with strict rules of conduct.”

33 Greenberg, summarized by Ellis, 20.34 A fuller excerpt: “Technology holds the possibility of both good and evil, life and death. We are given the

responsibility to choose: “I set before you life or death, blessing or curse. Choose life, then so that you and your descendants may live…” (Deuteronomy 30:19). It is our responsibility as stewards to require that technology be used for the good and that the harmful effects of its use (or misuse) be mitigated or prevented … In the ability God has given us to make choices also lies inherent danger. We can choose to disobey, to be irresponsible, to disrupt and disturb the peaceable relationship of creature and creation. We can choose to use nature’s resources only for what we perceive is in our own immediate interest. Such action is sin. It is a violation of the basic covenant wherein we are called to stewardship … All God’s people must be guided by the balance of reverence, the acknowledgement of our interdependence, the integrity of divine wholeness and the need for empowerment for by the Holy Spirit to image God by our dominion over creation (Mark 10:43-45). If we image God we will reflect in our dominion the love and the care that God has for the whole creation, “for God so loved the world…” (John 3:16, Romans 8:21-22, Matthew 5:43-48).” American Baptist Churches, USA, 1989 resolution, “Creation and the Covenant of Caring;” in Roger Gottleib, ed., This Sacred Earth, pp. 238-240.

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community over technology35 -- delivers a more positive strike against what we might call ‘empirical

theology,’ by celebrating God’s inherent unpredictability, unknowability, wildness.

Since Werner Heisenberg’s 1927 discovery of the Uncertainty Principle,36 science has

increasingly embraced the unknowable. But theologians remain the Ineffable’s best spokespeople, at

least in the sense that we turn to the Created order itself for much of our own inspiration and

knowledge. It was the religious domain that suggested we “ask the birds of the sky, and they shall

teach you; the birds of the sky, and they shall tell you” (Job 12:7). Later, Augustine exuberantly

proclaimed, “Ask the loveliness of the earth, ask the loveliness of the sea, ask the loveliness of the

wide airy spaces, ask the loveliness of the sky…ask the living things which move in the waters,

which tarry on the land, which fly in the air… and they will all answer you, Yes, see we are lovely.

Their loveliness is their confession…”37

An interesting question pertains here to Buddhism, which arguably “cannot uphold an

environmentalist ethic. The reason for this is straightforward. There is nothing within the sphere of

nature which can be said to possess any meaning or purpose. There can be no Buddhist justification

for the fight to preserve habitats and environments. Everything, without exception, is subject to

decay.” This position is scientifically dubious, too, unless one takes the long view of entropy. Yet

practically speaking, “the situation is a little different,” due to importations of external (often Hindu)

values such as ahimsa or non-injury, through which plants and animals deserve our protection and

our respect, arising naturally “from the insight, provided by Buddhist cosmology, that all sentient

35 “To this day, if you say you would be willing to forbid, restrict, or reduce the use of technological devices in order to protect the community – or to protect the good health of nature on which the community depends – you will be called a Luddite, and it will not be a compliment. To say that the community is more important than machines is certainly Christian and certainly democratic, but it is also Luddism and therefore not to be tolerated.” (Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy 131).

36 Levenson, 342-43. Einstein disliked, and tried to amass evidence against, Heisenberg’s discoveries and the cutting-edge quantum physics they helped prove. It was in this context that Einstein famously said, “God does not play dice” – to which Niels Bohr “finally shot back, ‘Who are you to tell God what to do?’” Much has been written in the last decade linking “the new physics” with religion, a nuance notably absent from Soelle’s critique. The latest in physics takes us back full circle to theology and Gaia, interestingly. String theory has a potentially vast number of solutions, each representing varying universes with somewhat different laws of physics, set by chance. Thus “string theorists and cosmologists are confronted with what Dr. Leonard Susskind of Stanford has called ‘the cosmic landscape,’ a sort of metarealm of space-times. Contrary to Einstein's hopes, it may be that neither God nor physics chooses among these possibilities, Dr. Susskind contends. Rather it could be life” (Dennis Overbye, “One Cosmic Question, Too Many Answers,” in Dava Sobel, ed., Best Science Writing of 2004, NY:Ecco/HarperCollins).

37 David Kinsley, “Christianity as Ecologically Responsible,” in Roger Gottleib, ed., This Sacred Earth; pp. 122-23 -- citing H. Paul Santmire’s The Travail of Nature, pp. 66-67.

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beings are intimately interrelated.”38 Indeed, Buddhism’s laser-like focus on transcending the gunas

(attachments) of this world, and its (especially Theravadan Buddhism’s) preference for doing so on

one’s own, often seems to imply a lessened concern for community, be it social or ecological.39 In

fact, Buddhism’s central tenet of acceptance, of non-attachment, runs counter to core Jewish and

Christian teachings.40 Yet Buddhism also bids us to take what we need from nature, and perhaps

learn from it or even enjoy it, but leave it natural, and essentially the same: “Even as a bee, having

taken up nectar / From a flower, flies away, / Not harming its colour and fragrance, / So may a sage

wander through a village.”41 Likewise “do not kill,” a central step in the noble eight-fold path, often

means “be vegetarian” – part of a well-developed ecological sensibility, and a profound application

of the doctrine of ahimsa. Perhaps most poignantly, Smith relates the story of a Westerner who,

responded to an apparent skeptic about his seven years of Zen practice: “No paranormal experiences

that I can detect. But you wake up in the morning and the world seems so beautiful you can hardly

stand it”42 – an awareness that might lead naturally to strenuous measures to protect that beauty

(though as with Tibetan sand mandalas, Buddhist non-attachment clearly extends to beautiful things).

To return this discussion squarely back into the theological realm: after citing Shlomo’s

prayer from the First Temple’s dedication (“Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot

contain thee: how much less this house that I have built?”) and Paul’s preaching at Athens (“God

made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is lord of heaven and earth, dwelling not in

temples made with hands”), Wendell Berry asserts:

38 Ian Harris, “Buddhism,” in Holm-Bowker, Attitudes to Nature, pp. 25-26.39 Those like me, schooled in relational theologies, may disagree with the Buddha that “Sitting alone, resting

alone, / walking alone, unwearied, / The one alone, who controls oneself, / would be delighted in the forest” (Dhammapada, 305). That same detachment from the world can have more pro- or proto-environmental applications, however, as at Dhammapada, 62: “A childish person becomes anxious, / Thinking, ‘Sons are mine! Wealth is mine!’ / Not even a self is there [to call] one’s own. / Whence sons? Whence wealth?” (cf. Psalm 24:1).

40 According to Huston Smith (68), Buddhist and Hindu cosmology considers our middle world to be a middling one, “and this is the way things will remain. All talk of social progress, of cleaning up the world, of creating the kingdom of heaven on earth – in short, all dreams of utopia – are not just doomed to disappointment; they misjudge the world’s purpose, which is not to rival paradise but to provide a training ground for the human spirit.” This stands in direct contrast to the social gospel of a Walter Rauschenbusch, or the gradual millennialism of a Rabbi A. I. Kook who addressed crowds as “chalutzim/pioneers of the messiah.” In much of the Judeo-Christian world, at least, fixing the world (tikkun olam) is a real, if asymptotic, goal.

41 Dhammapada, 49.42 Huston Smith, The World’s Religions, pp. 107, 137.

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Solomon and Saint Paul both insisted on the largeness and the at-large-ness of God, setting Him 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…43

Does ‘empirical theology,’ a search for God in science, truly “subdue the things of nature to

human purposes?” Or is it perhaps a more modest attempt merely to substantiate claims of the

Universe? Even traditionalists like Rav Kook lend qualified support to this latter position, looking to

biology and physics not to rebut but to corroborate their spiritual beliefs about reality: “When we

contemplate the physical creation as a whole, we realize that it is all as one organism … We see this

in every plant, in every living being.... The realization dawns on us that were it not for the lower

beings, the uncouth and the unseemly, the higher beings could not have emerged in their splendor,

their esteem and their luminous quality. We continually become more conscious of the integration

and unity of existence.” Later Kook offers yet more specific Orthodox endorsement of Darwin:44

The doctrine of evolution that is presently gaining acceptance in the world has a greater

affinity with the secret teachings of the Cabbalah than all other philosophies. Evolution, which proceeds on a course of improvement, offers us the basis of optimism in the world. How can we despair when we realize that everything evolves and improves?...

Evolution sheds light on all the ways of God. All existence evolves and ascends, as this may be discerned in some of its parts ... This is its general ascent: No particularity will remain outside, not a spark will be lost from the ensemble. All will share in the climactic culmination.

Prefiguring Kook by half a millennium, Rabbi Levi ben Gerson wrote: “in this marvelous

story the creation of everything whose generation in nature is possible, according to the nature given

to it by the Lord, may He be blessed, is not attributed to the Lord, may He be blessed, for He

produces this by means of nature.”45 Nature is an entity in and of itself, with creative and sacred

power, even though God is still a reality beyond nature. Though Gersonides, a well-regarded

astronomer and Jewish philosopher, stayed inside panentheistic boundaries, two centuries earlier a

Muslim counterpart of his went even further:

In the 12th century an Islamic astronomer named Al-Biruni looked at the model of Ptolemy and observed that it would be simpler if the universe was pictured in first a heliocentric way and then

43 Wendell Berry, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation”, in Sex, Economy, 101.44 Rav Kook, Orot Hakodesh / Lights of Holiness II:431, and I:220-21.45 Levi ben Gerson (a.k.a. Gersonides, or Ralbag, 14th century Spain), Wars of the Lord 6:2:8, in Staub, 260.

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finally in a centerless way. However, Al-Biruni refrained from public expression of this view because he felt that if people thought that the earth was but a clod of dust winging its way through the heavens, they would destroy it. Therefore he coded his understanding in esoteric Sufi text. In the 18th and 19th centuries, just such a picture of the universe entered the public mind. Al-Biruni’s prophecy seems to have come along with it. The past century has seen unprecedented pollution of our environment, and an almost total loss of the ability to see the earth as sacred.46

Al-Biruni sets up the key question for this tentative image of God as located within the laws

of nature: would the universe feel more or less sacred, more or less worthy of our love and

protection, if we assigned to it all that previous generations had understood as God?47 I want to

suggest a ‘novel’ way by which this view might actually make a positive difference for our treatment

of Earth: Imitatio Dei. What might it mean to emulate God’s limitedness,48 God’s rootedness in

place? Perhaps walking in God’s ways would then help limit our own voracity, as a species and as

individuals, and cultivate an ethic of celebrating that which is rather than pining for that which isn’t.

In Al-Biruni’s time, or that of Copernicus or Luria a few centuries later, such radical new

perspectives did indeed help break down traditional religious patterns of thought and action,

including those that held Creation sacred. But in our secular society, where vestiges of traditional

religious thought strive valiantly but usually unsuccessfully to smash the idols of today’s economy

and society, perhaps McFague’s previous suggestion of “the world as God’s body” does not go quite

far enough. Even ‘world’ is too limiting a concept relative to ‘universe,’ now that Earth’s alpha

species seeks to extend its dominion over the rest of the solar system, and perhaps beyond. Science

and technology drive much of our collective hubris today. Perhaps locating Divinity within their

very processes would help check their excesses49 – or, it might let us see ourselves as God, now free

of the wisdom and strictures of the ancients, who encountered the One beyond human constructs.

46 Quoted by Michael Paley, “Tradition and Religious Practice: A Response”, in Teutsch, 47. To avoid Al-Biruni’s prophecy, we must never forget that “the aim of knowledge is communion, not possession” (Soelle, 148).

47 Moltmann sheds only dim light here, but deepens the question nonetheless, with his explorations (53 ff): “Every natural theology proceeds from the self-evidence of nature as God’s creation. On the other hand, every theology of nature interprets nature in the light of the self-revelation of the creative God. So what is the relation between natural theology and the theology of nature? By asking this question we are turning the traditional interest in natural theology upside down: the aim of our investigation is not what nature can contribute to our knowledge of God, but what the concept of God contributes to our knowledge of nature.”

48 See Isaac Luria’s Kabbalistic notion of tzimtzum, God’s primordial act of self-contraction, so that the world could come into existence; Eugene Borowitz is commonly credited with applying this to human relations.

49 A similar notion appears in John Polkinghorne’s Science & Theology: An Introduction (NY: Routeledge, 1998, p. 132): “Human beings are the stewards of terrestrial creation, not its owners. A most significant aspect of the interaction between science and theology is the latter’s provision of a ground for the ethical guidelines within which the great andeavor of science and technology can only rightly be pursued.”

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That frightening latter possibility itself furnishes a strong argument against defending this

model of God-within-natural-laws. Furthermore, doing so theologically means adopting pantheism

over panentheism – something quite hard to do, even within the most liberal religious thought.

Heschel seems like one resource worth pursuing – the prophet of “radical amazement” before the

Ineffable, he saw basic awe and wonder as the only faithful stance when confronting the mystery and

miracle of our own existence. In his words, humankind “will not perish for want of information; but

only for want of appreciation … life without wonder is not worth living;” and again, “awe rather than

faith is the cardinal attitude of the religious Jew.” McFague powerfully echoes this approach: “If

one can say that the basic religious apprehension is the wonder at being, wonder that there is

something rather than nothing, then the ecological evolutionary sensibility is… religious.”50

Yet even Heschel is no pantheist.51 Despite the centrality of awe in his system, Heschel

remains solidly panentheistic: God “includes the universe, but, to quote Solomon’s prayer in

dedicating the Temple: ‘Behold, the heaven, and the heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee’ (I

Kings 8:27). The awareness of God as the dwelling-place of the universe must have been very

poignant in post-Biblical times, if Makom (‘place’) was a synonym for God.” Though here Heschel

bolsters McFague’s case for seeing the world at least in part as God’s body, Heschel stops far short

of Kaplan’s position which nearly conflates God with nature. Heschel continues: “God is one, but

50 Heschel, Man is Not Alone, pp. 22 and 37, and in Rothschild, 53; McFague, Models of God, p. 186. Eilon Schwartz (Tirosh Samuelson 100) argues that “the theme of radical amazement,” developed thoroughly by Heschel but present since the Wisdom Literature, “is the closest that classical Jewish texts come to a wilderness tradition.” Consider too McFague’s lead-up (185-86) to the quotation above: “What does it mean to call divine transcendence worldly? It means that we look to the universe as God’s body for images of transcendence, and not to the political realm with its models of lord, king, and patriarch, as the tradition has done. And in fact, does not the universe provide us with far more awesome images of transcendence than the political arena? An ecological, evolutionary sensibility is aware of what one sees through telescope and microscope: the vast, unending space that is beyond all human comprehension, as well as the intricate pattern on an insect’s wing that is likewise beyond our grasp…. ”

51 His penchant for ‘radical amazement’ notwithstanding, Heschel warned that “the beauty of nature may become a menace to our spiritual understanding … To Judaism, the adoration of nature is as absurd as the alienation from nature is unnecessary” (in Rothschild, 91-92). For Heschel, nature was important but secondary as a means of reaching God, who he says “can be encountered in three ways: through nature, through God’s word in the Bible, and , most importantly, through sacred deeds. While Kaplan also encountered God in nature, Heschel’s use of nature and his concept of God are radically different. While Kaplan concentrated on the creative forces of nature to find and identify God, Heschel instead focuses on the sublime, the mystery, and the glory of nature and the reactions that those aspects of nature engender in us – namely, wonder, awe, and faith” (Dorff and Jacobs, 36). Maguire (48), like Heschel and McFague, eschews science as a theological resource: “Cleverness will not save us. Cleverness has brought us to our knees. Wisdom is our need and the heart of wisdom is awe. Ethics is awe’s strategy.”

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one is not God… to refer to the supreme law of nature as God or to say that the world came into

being by virtue of its own energy is to beg the question.”52

To the extent that Heschel here implicitly criticizes Kaplan -- the two Jewish Theological

Seminary colleagues did have a bizarre, ‘love-hate’ relationship -- the attack is misplaced. Kaplan’s

position is far more nuanced, and closer to panentheism,53 as Art Green has made clear. This can

also be seen in my favorite of Kaplan’s voluminous appellations for God: “the Life, the Love and the

Intelligence of the Universe.”54 Kaplan here bequeaths us a brilliant metaphor for God which is both

spiritual and ethical, and even a shade personal, while grounded solidly within nature. Here Kaplan,

usually a panentheist, may have shown us a way to relate meaningfully to a pantheistic God: God

may not exist beyond the universe, but all that is good and life-affirming in the universe comprises

God. Empiricists and mystics alike should be able to address their prayers to this Kaplanian divinity.

We each can accept more or less of this ‘empirical theology’ – but even if rejecting a

scientific and naturalistic view of God, we can still consider the liturgical and metaphorical value of

natural images of God, as do both McFague and Plaskow. Ecology plays a meaningful theological

role in both their works, with McFague generally emphasizing it far more. However, her focus on

personal and anthropomorphic metaphors precludes her from going where Plaskow does in citing the

range of Kaplanian (Tillichian - Kabbalistic - Marcia Falkian) images for God drawn from Creation:

Use of natural imagery for God is enormously important in a culture that has trampled on and violated the natural world and that threatens the whole biosphere with ecological and nuclear destruction. The affirmation that the earth is holy and that all parts of creation have intrinsic value provides a powerful corrective to the view that human beings are the measure of all things … Images of God as fountain, source, wellspring, or ground of life and being remind us that God loves and befriends us as one who brings forth all being and sustains it in existence. As cocreators with God for the brief span of our lives, we are responsible not just to the community of our fellow persons with whom we especially share the sense of God’s presence, but to the larger community of creation that God also loves and befriends... Images of God as rock, tree of life, light, darkness, and myriad other metaphors drawn from nature, teach us the intrinsic value

52 Heschel, Man is Not Alone, pp. 150 and 107.53 Kaplan might or might not appreciate this partial endorsement from John Polkinghorne (115): “I do not

accept panentheism (the idea that the creation is in God, though God exceeds creation) as a theological reality for the present world, but I do believe in it as the form of eschatological destiny for the world to come.”

54 Green, in Raayonot; Kaplan, in Scult, 300. This appellation for God comes at the end of a lengthy journal entry about Jewish demographics in the Midwestern communities through which he was touring on January 3, 1929: “It is now 11:20 P.M. I want to note that with the help of God, the Life, the Love and the Intelligence of the Universe, I have been able to turn to good account the hours I am spending on this train. I thank thee, O God for the blessings which I enjoy. Amen.” Scult identifies Kaplan’s 26-volume journal as the most prolific diary extant in English, besting Pepys, Johnson, and other well-known diarists by a wide margin.

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of this wider web of being in which we dwell. The God who is the ground of being is present and imaged forth in all beings, so that every aspect of creation shows us another face of God.55

Reducing God to the laws of science and nature seems to stray too far from tradition, and

even from needs of the moment, to ultimately be “good theology” for us. Retreating one step from

there to panentheism, and the notion of the world as part of God’s body as outlined in the previous

section, yields a fuller and truer picture. Still, the religious encounter with science and the natural

world remains a valid resource in our quest to ground a Jewish eco-theology – from it we can learn to

ascribe greater holiness to evolution and to quantum physics alike; we can refine the theological basis

for preservation of Creation; and we can adopt a host of helpful metaphors for the One, from rock

and tree and web to “the Life, Love, and Intelligence of the Universe.”

Pesach: God as Freedom / Lover / Liberator

Liberation theology is not altogether a new concept in the Jewish community. Though

explicit work in this area is less than two decades old, the story of the Exodus has been a mantra in

every age of the Jewish people, pointing us toward liberation for ourselves and for others:

During the last two thousand years Jews have never wearied of referring to the Exodus… Jews are still the victims of oppression. But they have entered into such intimate relationship with the life of the world about them that they can no longer envisage their own deliverance except as a phase of general human deliverance… The new redemption to which Jews look forward involves the redemption of society in general from present ills. It implies the transformation of human nature and social institutions through the divine power of intelligence and good-will… There can be no question that in the Torah the story of the Exodus has the connotation that to help the oppressed is an essential attribute of godhood.56

Passover, our annual recollection and ritual reenactment of the going-forth from Egypt, has

long served as the Jewish festival of freedom and liberation. Only more recently, however, has its

truly radical potential been tapped. My teacher and friend Arthur Waskow deserves much of the

55 Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, pp. 155, 165. Marcia Falk has since popularized the use of Ein Ha-Hayyim / Wellspring of Life in contemporary liberal liturgies, including the Reconstructionist prayer book series.

56 Kaplan, Meaning of God, 266-67. Remember that he writes this in 1937, the year before Kristallnacht.

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credit for this transformation, which in his case began in Northwest DC in April, 1968. Then a

‘secular Jew,’ he was walking to a Seder past the Army tanks and National Guardsmen ‘occupying’

the city during the riots following Dr. King’s murder. Seeing this, he had an epiphany: “Pharaoh’s

army” was not a vague historical reference but a constant reality and threat, even from within one’s

own society. By the following Pesach he had produced the first “Freedom Seder.”

Sallie McFague, who like Kaplan strongly believes that liberation and freedom must be core

theological concepts, connects the God of Liberty with the model of God as Lover. This loving God

wishes to simultaneously love and liberate that which God as Mother has created:

The response that God as lover needs is from us not as individuals but as parts of the beloved world; God as lover is interested not in rescuing certain individuals from the world but in saving, making whole, the entire beloved cosmos that has become estranged and fragmented, sickened by unhealthy practices, and threatened by death and extinction. God as lover finds all species of flora and fauna valuable and attractive, she finds the entire, intricate evolutionary complex infinitely precious and wondrous; God as lover finds himself needing the help of those very ones among the beloved – of us human beings – who have been largely responsible for much of the estrangement that has occurred.”57

Here, responsibility devolves upon the one species doing the most damage yet also bearing

the greatest potential for good, namely us. Nearly two millennia ago Abba Shaul commented on

“This is my God whom I will glorify,” from Exodus’ Song at the Sea, saying, “be like God – just as

God is gracious and merciful, so should you be gracious and merciful.”58 We are God’s agents in the

earthly work of love and liberation. And as Dorothee Soelle suggests, “We become better lovers of

the earth when we tell the earth how beautiful it is.”59 An unnamed Nicaraguan peasant woman best

sums up the Imitatio Dei element at play here, describing human love in light of this Divine love:

To make something holy then doesn’t mean to chant, to say prayers, to have processions, to read the Bible. Making the name of God holy means to love others, to do something for others. If we set to glorifying God just with prayers and processions as we used to, we’re not making God holy

57 McFague, Models of God, 135 – with obvious affinities to Dr. King’s “beloved community” concept. Soelle ends her book with a similar linkage “between faith in creation and our becoming resisters,” between “creation and liberation,” which “becomes visible when we rid ourselves of an exclusively past-oriented understanding of creation and fully accept that creation is unfinished, that it continues,” and that it needs our help to be liberated so it may unfold as it should. The created Earth’s fate lies with us, “and only a community of resisters may prevent the extermination of humankind and the rest of creation.” Soelle, To Work and to Love, pp. 162, 165.

58 Mekhilta, Shirah 3, to Exodus 15:2.59 Soelle, 49.

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at all. In other words, to make love real is to make the name of God holy or to make his person known here on earth, even though maybe the name of God won’t even be mentioned.60

So God as lover would have us “make love real” in the human dimension. But as theology,

this model is surprisingly heavy on desire and eros. McFague responds prophylactically to the

critique that this model over-sexualizes the relationship between people and God, writing, “On the

contrary, the response of the beloved, the need we fill in God, is directed toward God’s body, the

world” (note similarities with Heschel’s famous concept of the real yet non-sexual ‘Divine pathos’).61

Wendell Berry, the poet-theologian-farmer, employs the same image: “As husbandman, a man is

both the steward and likeness of God, the greater husbandman. God is the lover of the world and its

faithful husband.”62 For Judaic precedent, we need look no further than Shir Hashirim / the Song of

Songs;63 if we did, we’d find heavily erotic (often homoerotic) Kabbalistic images of the knesset

Yisrael / community of Israel consorting with the Shekhinah, and the graphically depicted union of

the Shekhinah with the Holy Blessed One (two different, respectively feminine and masculine,

sefirot, among the ten Divine emanations), the overflow from whose copulation drips down from the

higher to the lower worlds as the shefa upon which our spiritual lives depend.

The downside of imaging God as lover, of course, is the exclusivity that usually attends eros.

This concern manifests theologically as God’s potential to inflict unique or even dangerous hurt, as

womanist theologian Renita Weems argues in Battered Love regarding Hosea and Jeremiah (whose

flawed analogies of human-divine marriage are themselves a problematic but un-addressed precedent

60 Unnamed Nicaraguan peasant woman, recorded by Ernesto Cardenal, in Soelle, 43.61 Personally, I like to consider the lover / life-partner analogy not just regarding the fire element of eros, but

also with the water element, that slow meaningful progress of daily life spent with one’s beloved. Sanchez notes something similar within the Apache tradition (in Adams, 225): “If we believe that everything is sacred, then the most mundane tasks take on a deeper meaning. One approach is to constantly ritualize ordinary actions such as awakening to each new day, the preparation of foods, or the accomplishment of daily tasks.” Thus with God as our beloved, even when we are ‘alone,’ the ins and outs of daily life acquire new significance.

62 Sallie McFague, Models of God, 134-35; Wendell Berry, “Discipline and Hope”, 1977, in Recollected Essays, 213. Berry’s quarter-century-old image seems limited given today’s female images of God, and feminist critiques of “husbandry” altogether. That said, as he continues (214-15), Berry further identifies our imitatio dei responsibilities: “in order to care properly for his land he will see that he must emulate the Creator: to learn to use and preserve the fields, as Sir Albert Howard said, he must look into the woods; he must study and follow natural process; he must understand the husbanding that, in nature, always accompanies providing.”

63 The Song of Songs, particularly 7:12 (where the speaker suggests going down early to the vineyards to see what’s in bloom, and give the other his/her love), grounds Soelle’s larger theology of ecology and work. The image which “stands for erotic pleasure and lovemaking” also “functions in the Bible as a symbol of peace…and as a symbol of economic justice;” it offers three dimensions of a “humanizing, liberating theology of work… self-expression, contribution to or relatedness to society, and reconciliation with nature through work” (81).

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for McFague’s image). And where loving / covenantal relationships touch on ‘chosenness’ or

‘election,’ we get into all kinds of trouble if God ‘hooks up’ with one group rather than another.64 As

with national concerns, so it is with land issues as well – if God ordained inherent sanctity to the land

of Israel, then the people of Israel will be constrained in developing a meaningful land ethic for

whatever piece of diaspora Earth they might inhabit65 (to say nothing of the Peace Process!).

How we can know God as lover becomes an interesting question. I appreciate Ernesto

Cardenal’s line, “All creatures are love letters from God to us.”66 For most of McFague’s readers,

Jesus “is our historical choice as the premier paradigm of God’s love. But all creation and all human

beings have potential as the beloved of God to reflect or respond to their lover.”67 For Jews, of

course, the paradigm is instead yetziat Mitzrayim, the going forth from Egypt.68 Again, this is the

departure point for Jewish liberation theology, such as it is. Aside from Jewish feminist theologians,

and a few Jewish renewal thinkers (including Waskow, and Michael Lerner), Marc Ellis stands out

for addressing these themes in a Jewish vein, though in an early and partial effort.

In Ellis’ Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation, the Holocaust looms large: its major

theme is the possibility that Jews, while still dealing with their own victimhood, increasingly can

becoming victimizers (in a military sense in Israel / Palestine, and to a lesser extent, economically

64 Where Kaplan made a mainstay of Reconstructionist belief out of a denial of Israel’s chosenness, defending that ultimately ethnocentric (not to mention anthropocentric) notion is precisely the thesis of Michael Wyschogrod’s work. See pp. 64-65 for his most problematic passages regarding chosenness, and pp. 105 and 115 for his most poignantly anthropocentric-to-the-point-of-anti-environmental thoughts (“the creation of the world is but the prelude to the creation of man… the purpose of the creation as a whole is the appearance of man,” 105).

65 See Brad Artson, “Our Covenant With Stones” (in Yaffe) for an insightful critique of much of Jewish-environmental thought as “a contextless collage of Kabbalistic and Biblical sayings, plugged into contemporary ecological categories;” he calls for a “second stage” based on contextual understandings of Judaism’s relation with the Earth, especially regarding land, agriculture, and Israel-diaspora relations. Aurora Levins Morales, a Puerto Rican Jew, addresses the same issues quite eloquently in “Nadie la Tiene: Land, Ecology, and Nationalism” (in Waskow’s Torah of the Earth, Vol. 1, p. 195). Writing from a Native American standpoint, Carol Lee Sanchez similarly laments Euro-American people who “waste the resources and destroy the environment in the Americas because they are not spiritually connected to this land-base, because they have no ancient mythos or legendary origins rooted to this land…” (“Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral,” in Adams, 208).

66 In Moltmann 63-64. 67 McFague, Models of God, 136.68 Others might identify messianism as paradigmatic for liberation – a gradual ‘millennial’ transformation of

our world into the World-to-Come, habitable by us and the messiah alike. This view is reflected in Jewish thinkers as diverse as Hermann Cohen and Rav Kook, and captured nicely by Carter Heyward’s idea (in Soelle, 40) that “any creative relation is ‘mutually-messianic.’” Neil Gillman argues for the ultimate messianic-era victory of God over even death itself (The Death of Death), though Ruether (139) makes a strong case for the “(pre-apocalyptic) Hebrew view that mortality is our natural condition, which we share with all other earth beings, and that redemption is the fullness of life within these finite limits,” as a “more authentic ethic for ecological living.”

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within diaspora communities).69 I most appreciated his citing Chilean biblist and sociologist Pablo

Richard who said, “In Exodus 32, God reveals his transcendence as God the liberator, and not a God

who consoles the oppressed so that they will accept their condition as an oppressed people. The

veneration of God as consoler is idolatry.” Ellis rightly notes that “tradition always has a tendency to

become, in the words of Walter Benjamin, a Jewish philosopher, ‘a tool of the ruling classes’; that is,

it begins to lose its power as a motivator toward solidarity” (though I believe that Emmanuel

Levinas’ fresh reading of that tradition can provide a useful corrective here).70 I agree with Ellis

wholeheartedly that “ultimately, a Jewish theology of liberation must engage the Christian

community and admit the possibility of a Christian witness that, mindful of its anti-Jewish past and

its complicity in many forms of domination, seeks to renew and even transform itself.”71 Yet besides

being heavy on anthropology but short on Judaic content, Ellis falls into the same trap as many other

liberation theologians – the natural world somehow lies entirely outside of his ken. He makes not

one reference to the fragile, necessary world around us, nor to extending liberation beyond the Jewish

and human families to all of Creation. This is work that still desperately needs to be done.

At least the category of “Jewish liberation theology” already exists, however imperfectly,

with a certain plausibility for its environmental applications; the same cannot yet be said for Jewish

eco-eschatology. Yet the two are closely linked: at the seder table we break the middle matzah,

holding up the smaller piece (they never divide evenly!) as the symbolic “bread of our afflication,”

but wrapping and hiding the larger ‘half’ as the afikomen to be found after dinner. Why the larger

69 “A Jewish theology of liberation asks that the liberal analysis that supports our [relative] affluence be deepened with a liberationist economic and political critique that paradoxically has often been pioneered, nurtured, and expanded by secular Jews on the left” (Ellis, 117). In a liberation context, practices and beliefs must parallel one another. Gustavo Gutierrez wrote, “Liberation theology, which seeks its point of departure in the commitment to abolish the present situation of injustice and to construct a new society, must be verified by the practice of that commitment, by its active and efficacious participation in the struggle that exploited social classes have taken on against their oppressors” (in Nancy Bedford, “Little Moves Against Destructiveness,” Volf and Bass 160).

70 For instance, in Levinas’ Nine Talmudic Readings (tr. Annette Aronowicz, Bloomington IN: IU Press, 1990), 97, commenting on Bava Metzia 83a on workers’ rights: “It is clear from the start that the Mishna affirms the rights of the other person, even if this person finds himself in the inferior position, which is dangerous to his freedom, of a worker for hire. This position is dangerous to his freedom because he runs the risk of losing his liberty without undergoing any violence; to be sure, the person is still acting willingly since he engages himself and stays within the interpersonal commerce of an exchange; but commerce is at the border line of alienation, and freedom easily turns into non-freedom. Our text teaches that not everything can be bought and not everything can be sold. The freedom to negotiate has limits which impose themselves in the name of freedom itself.”

71 Ellis, pp. 89, 95, and 115.

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piece? To symbolize that the great and permanent redemption of all, yet to come, will be bigger still

than the partial and passing liberation enjoyed one time by one group around 1250 BCE.

Even if most Jews couldn’t define ‘eschatology,’ Judaism as a traditional value-system “takes

eschatology very seriously.”72 Recent Jewish historical experience, on the other hand, may point in

the other direction; Moltmann acknowledges that “Consciously or unconsciously, the eschatological

thinking of the present day is determined by the messianic visions of the nineteenth century and the

apocalyptic terrors experienced in the history of the twentieth century. What hope can be justified,

once we wake up out of the messianic dreams and resist the apocalyptic anxieties?”73

Still, this strikes me as the most fruitful area of Christian environmental thought that the

Jewish world has hardly begun to tap. And though the reasons for that are many – a more this-

worldly orientation, a lack of clarity on messianism, etc. – the benefits of such an exploration would

be greater still. To start with, the mere act of considering the eschaton itself pushes us beyond

anthropocentrism, and instills in us perspective: “if we are concerned with questions of ultimate

significance, we cannot restrict ourselves to the domesticated horizon of simple human recollection

and human expectation. The importance of the fact of cosmic collapse or decay is not diminished by

its being so many billions of years in the future… the whole of carbon-based life… eventually…will

prove only to have been a transient episode in cosmic history.”74 It can be part of our larger move

toward Aldo Leopold’s “thinking like a mountain,” seeing both the big- and the long-range picture.

Significantly, another name for such eco-eschatology is “hope,” something which presumes

our own investment in the outcome: “Hope is essentially moral in its character, for it is a good future

for which we may dare to hope. If that is the case, we should be prepared to work for what we hope

for”75 – which I take as grounds for a budding religious-environmental praxis:

72 Neil Gillman, Sacred Fragments, 1990, p 248. He adumbrates: “Every liturgy, every rite of passage, every significant statement of Jewish belief, and every important movement in Jewish history contains an explicit eschatological reference. Traditionally every sermon delivered before a congregation of Jews concluded with the words: ‘He shall come as a redeemer to Zion’ (Isaiah 59:20)… Every Sabbath was experienced as a ‘foretaste’ of the world to come… every service of worship concludes with the Alenu prayer, which reaches its climax with…: “And the Lord shall be king over all the earth; in that day there shall be one Lord with one name” (Zech 14:9). Even when Jews formally abandoned their religion in favor of a more national or cultural form of identification, they could not abandon Jewish eschatology. The most obvious example is political Zionism, which is simply Jewish eschatology in a modern, secular garb…”

73 Jurgen Moltmann, The Coming of God (SCM Press, 1996), p.5; cited in Polkinghorne, 38. 74 Polkinghorne, 11. We face this eventuality of our transience with open defiance (21): “while human society

lasts it represents a small island of self-created meaning, around which laps the ocean of cosmic meaninglessness.”75 Polkinghorne, 30.

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“Hope based on an inaugurated eschatology is the foundation of a moral view that supports and enables the costly demands of fidelity and duty… Hope can sustain the acceptance of [real] limitation by delivering us from the tyranny of the present, the feeling of need to grab as much as we can before all opportunity passes away forever. We are enabled to live our lives not in the spirit of carpe diem, but sub specia aeternitatis (in the light of eternity).”76

Polkinghorne is not explicit about this approach’s implications for sustainability, but ‘living

in the light of eternity’ should be a key theological goad toward curbing our consumption and our

carbon. Our era of ecological fragility is conditioned in no small measure by the short-term nature of

politics and industry, where meaning is constructed between quarterly earnings reports and two-year

election cycles. Religion’s unique environmental contribution may be just this ability to take the

long view, that that “we are responsible for seven generations”77 – the Divine view, not of our short-

term prospects but rather of responsibility “to the third and fourth and thousandth generation (Ex.

34:7),78 and of Eternity itself. If so then hope, itself, becomes an ecological virtue.

Such considerations are also simply a new, potentially deeper way to unite traditional

religious resources with today’s ecological needs and realities – “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.”79

These approaches may also offer new vantage points for old ideas, such that “mutually-messianic

relation” becomes a powerful frame for our ongoing commitment to tikkun olam in community.80

And indeed, as a 1782 John Wesley sermon makes clear, the focus should be on what we do, and on

our own development of moral consciousness on behalf of the rest of Creation.81

76 Polkinghorne, 48-49.77 Audrey Shenendoah, “A Tradition of Thanksgiving,” in Rockefeller and Elder, 19. 78 The context here is, of course, Moses on the mountain for the second time, asking to see God’s face, and

being granted a view of the Divine goodness (and ‘backside’). How to understand this? I’d long appreciated the notion that by seeing God’s backside, it means that Moses and God’s eyes are in roughly the same position, i.e. Moses is seeing the world from a divine viewpoint. My adviser Dr. Bruce Birch adds another implication of this passage: God has always gone off ahead of us; all we can see is the dust that She leaves, i.e. His backside.

79 John F Haught, “Christianity and Ecology,” in Rober Gottleib, ed., This Sacred Earth, p. 283.80 Dorothee Soelle (40), following Isaiah 58, invokes Carter Heyward’s The Redemption of God in summoning

divine energies toward real-world tasks – the “doing of good and undoing of evil is a human act, a human responsibility. God is our power to do this.” She adds: “Power-in-relation works through us. Arguing that ‘any creative relation is mutually-messianic,’ Heyward shifts our expectations for a divine messiah who would be our God but not our friend, to a God-human relation characterized by the mutuality of friendship and empowerment.”

81 James Nash, whose eco-eschatology often echoes Moltmann’s, brings John Wesley to bear on the subject. He calls our attention to a Wesleyan sermon of 1782, the point of which “seems to be that God has biocentric and

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As we begin to wrap up the Passover / Liberation section of this theological exploration, we

turn to the “unswervingly Orthodox” 19th century Rabbi Yosef Hayyim Caro, who believed with

reference to the Exodus story that “the insightful sage will say, aren’t these great waters which have

been flowing for thousands of years a greater testament [than the Red Sea miracle] to the might of

their Maker? As King David wrote (Ps. 93:4): ‘from the crash of great waters, the mighty breakers

of the sea, The Lord on high is awesome.’ What could the miracle of those waters drying up for a

few hours at God’s command possibly add to that?”82 Indeed, our truest and most immediate

‘liberation’ may just be from a religious impulse to hang our hopes on a miracle, and instead to open

our eyes to the miraculousness of the everyday.

In its most literal sense, as practiced in Jewish homes and communities, Passover preparation

involves giving things up: hametz, our inappropriately risen edibles that should not be around for the

duration of the holiday -- the ‘puffed-up stuff’ that seemed fine when we acquired it but now is toxic,

unholy, a contaminant. Many have made the link between pre-Pesach ‘spring cleaning’ and

rethinking the basics (or at least curbing the excesses) of our consumer lifestyle; a popular synagogue

program at this time of year is a drive to help members get rid of either useful things they no longer

need which have become the excess leaven in their lives, or of true toxins (solvents, paints, old

batteries and electronics, etc). Such programs are not only ecological in their orientation, but

practically theological as well, in both extending liberation to others and in limiting one’s own

footprint. No less a theologian than Sallie McFague agrees: “We enjoy the consumer lifestyle; in

fact, most of us are addicted to it, and, like addicts, we cheerfully live in a state of denial. But we

need to overcome our denial. The prospect of global warming should disturb our complacency.”83

cosmocentric values and intentions that Christians must honor” (129). In this sermon, Wesley hopes that his arguments “may encourage us to imitate him whose mercy is over all his works. They may soften our hearts toward the meaner creatures, knowing that the Lord careth for them. It may enlarge our hearts toward these poor creatures to reflect that, as vile as they appear in our eyes, not one of them is forgotten in the sight of our Father which is in Heaven.” Nash summarizes the value of this statement, which “draws an ethical conclusion from an eschatological expectation. This conclusion seems to be a forerunner of theologies of hope and liberation: anticipating the final future now. For Wesley, the cosmic redemption should result in beneficence toward other creatures.”

82 Yosef Hayyim Caro (1800-1895), comment to Mishnah Avot 3:7, quoted by Jeremy Benstein in Waskow, I:195.

83 Sallie McFague, “Christianity, Economics, and Planetary Living,” in Tucker-Grim, Daedalus, p. 132. Arthur Waskow has recently picked up on this theme in “Oiloholics and the Burning World” in the March/April 2003 Tikkun and elsewhere. McFague continues on p. 136: “If this is the case, then for middle-class North American Christians 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 are concerned with human and planetary well-being for all.

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And one religiously-informed scientist, directly addressing the reasons advanced by some to ‘justify’

the United States being late to cut greenhouse gas emissions, puts the matter bluntly:

With approximately 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States is responsible for more than 20 percent of global emissions of CO2. Is there not an ethical imperative for the rich to take the first step? The New Testament extols the responsibility of the rich to help the poor. The Gospel of Mark teaches that “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” and indicates as the Second Great Commandment that “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Is it not appropriate, and indeed ethical, for we who have enjoyed for so long the benefits of unsustainable energy consumption to take the first steps? For me at least, the answer is yes.84

Our final reference to God as lover/liberator belongs to Michael Walzer, the conclusion of

whose Exodus and Revolution now serves as Reconstructionist ‘liturgy.’ Though still operating

primarily in a socio-economic context, Walzer’s analysis not only utilizes natural imagery, but it

applies easily to those of us looking to join together and march for the liberation of Earth:

So pharaonic oppression, deliverance, Sinai, and Canaan are still with us, powerful memories shaping our perceptions of the political world. The “door of hope” is still open; things are not what they might be – even when what they might be isn’t totally different from what they are … We still believe, or many of us do, what the Exodus first taught, or what it has commonly been taken to teach, about the meaning and possibility of politics and about its proper form:

-- first, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt;-- second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land;-- and third, that “the way to the land is through the wilderness.” There is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching.85

Shavuot: God as Righteousness / Revelation / Sovereign

We have now touched on most every conception of God that Kaplan and McFague can offer;

along the way we have also touched on nearly every Biblically ordained festival through which a

given aspect of Divinity might be most clearly grasped. The one remaining exception is a theology

This, I suggest, is the responsible interpretation of the Parable of the Feast for North American Christians today.84 Michael B. McElroy, “Perspectives on Environmental Change,” in in Tucker-Grim, Daedalus, pp. 52-53.85 Walzer, 149, in Reconstructionist Prayer Book, 768.

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so ‘traditional’ that Kaplan has to transvalue, and McFague reject outright: God as Sovereign. This

conception of divinity, central too at Rosh Hashanah and other points on the holiday cycle, is seen

most clearly through the festival of Shavuot, the time of the giving of Torah. Is this most traditional

of theologies reconstructable, as Kaplan holds? Or is it so fatally andocentric, anthropocentric, and

otherworldly that we must join McFague in denying it a place in our own theology?

First let us see how Kaplan transvalues the concept. To locate God’s sovereignty at Shavuot

is to bend Kaplan’s system somewhat; after all, it’s the High Holy Days which put greatest

“emphasis on the kingship of God.” Kaplan, exploring divine sovereignty through the lens of Rosh

Hashanah, finds in it both activist and naturalist overtones:86 “What is needed in modern life is a

conception of God’s sovereignty that can function as an aid to the regeneration of society by direct

human agency, without reliance on an illusory hope of miraculous intervention.” Invoking such

naturalistic concepts as ‘God has no hands but ours’ or ‘pray as if everything depends on God but act

as if everything depends on you’, Kaplan insists that God as King is just one more inaccurate

metaphor which nonetheless has its mythic place – namely, to compel us to do what must be done.

And for Kaplan, as for most contemporary environmental and social justice activists, what must be

done includes a radical social, economic,87 political, and spiritual overhaul.

God’s sovereignty thus links directly to God’s revelation of Torah and halakhah (law / ‘the

way’), i.e. to divine authority made manifest in human terms. That Sinai moment, when Torah was

86 Kaplan, Meaning of God, pp. 106, 109. Alpert and Staub describe Kaplan’s ‘transvaluation’ as “claiming ancient authority for new insights” (40); sometimes, however, ancient insights / content must be re-poured into new flasks, as well. Also important in understanding Kaplan’s linkage of theologies with holidays is that throughout the Jewish festival cycle, “both nature and history are given their due share of recognition. Both the creative powers in the physical world and the spiritual forces in the human world that make for personal and social redemption are treated as manifestations of the divine” (194). Later he asserts that tradition retained these festivals’ natural roots “to awaken in us a sense of gratitude for the material benefits which we enjoy through the bounty of nature,” which should in turn “translate itself into a realization of the responsibility as to the manner in which we employ that bounty” (200-01; fittingly, he concludes this reference to enlightened stewardship by quoting Psalm 24:1, “The Earth is God’s” – just as does John Polkinghorne [Science & Theology: An Introduction (NY: Routeledge, 1998, p. 133)], years later). Though here I will argue for the partial utility of the traditional image of God-in-history, this only supplements, rather than supplants, the centrality of Creation theology for our day, as argued above.

87 Kaplan, in Meaning of God 268 and elsewhere, goes on numerous anti-capitalist diatribes. Catherine Keller roots a parallel critique in eschatology, in “the ever hovering Christian (if minimally biblical) expectation that history will end soon,” such that “late modern capitalism…uses the creation as means to its own ends and brings about the very futurelessness it denies. Its currently climaxing passion for short term gain seems subliminally to presuppose the imminent end of the world. And through the ‘conquest of nature’ involved in the endless stress of development and exploitation, it is bringing that end about” (“Talk About the Weather,” in Adams, 45).

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received and the tree of life implanted in our midst, was traditionally associated with Shavuot.88 Yet

popular skepticism about the whole Sinai myth forces us to apply “the process of revaluation,” i.e.,

“emphasizing whatever implications the concept of Torah as divinely revealed may prove to have

validity and relevance for our day.” In Kaplan’s empiricist ethics, God as sovereign fuses with God

as righteous, per Psalm 33:5: "God loves righteousness and justice; the Earth is full of God's loving-

kindness.” Emphasizing moral law and prophetic faith, Kaplan notes that “Torah seeks to translate

righteousness into law. All modern efforts at social reconstruction prove Paul to have been wrong in

maintaining the primacy of faith-righteousness, and are a vindication of the Jewish religion which

insists on the primacy of law-righteousness.”89 God’s sovereignty thus represents justice.

Though the Lawgiver-Sovereign God is pictured in transcendent terms, the distinctly earthly

theophany at Sinai points also to revelation’s strong immanental element. Louis Jacobs calls God’s

sovereignty “the key theological idea in the Bible,” proving that God “is both transcendent and

immanent, unconstrained by the highest heavens and yet ‘tabernacling’ in the midst of the children of

Israel.” McFague, on the other hand, sees sovereignty as fully neither: “The king/realm model is

neither genuinely transcendent (God is king over one species recently arrived on a minor planet in an

ordinary galaxy) nor genuinely immanent (God as king is an external super person, not the source,

power, and goal of the entire universe).”90

This immanence-transcendence question deserves further inquiry, since so often our (at least

the ministerial or pulpit “our”) choices around God-language and God-imagery bounce back and

forth between these theological poles. Can we make any useful generalizations about the ecological

consciousness that might flow from various understands of God along this continuum? Martin Buber

88 The Tree of Life image, of course, joins nature with Torah, a point elaborated throughout Waskow, et al’s Trees, Earth, and Torah. The Kabbalists further the image: “Another symbol of perfect unity on Shavuot is the rule of Tiferet [beauty / sefirah #6], the written Torah, in the shape of the Tree of Life. ‘It is written “It is a Tree of Life for those who take hold of it” (Proverbs 3:18): it is the tree called “one,” because everything is bound to it, and its day (Shavuot) is certainly “one,” the bond of all and the intermediary of all’” (Tishby 1257, from Zohar III:96a).

89 Kaplan, Meaning of God, pp. 299, 315-16. Heschel (in Rothschild, 77) interestingly shares Kaplan’s unease with a literal reading of Exodus 19 and 20: “We must not try to read chapters in the Bible dealing with the event at Sinai as if they were texts in systematic theology. Its intention is to celebrate the mystery, to introduce us to it rather than to penetrate or to explain it. As a report about revelation the Bible itself is a midrash.”

90 Louis Jacobs, 15:1104; Sallie McFague, “An Earthly Theological Agenda,” in Adams, 95. McFague goes on to contrast this with the universe as God’s body, “an immensely attractive, powerful model” in which “God is immanent in all the processes of reality, expressing the divine intentions and purposes through those processes, and at the same time God, as the agent of the process, is transcendent over it, though as its internal source, power, and goal rather than as an external controller.”

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makes a strong and strikingly modern ecological case for immanence: “We must choose in this

tradition the elements that constitute closeness to the soil, hallowed worldliness, and absorption of

the Divine in nature; and reject in this tradition the elements that constitute remoteness from the soil,

detached rationality, and nature’s banishment from the presence of God.”91 Yet Thomas Berry holds

that “even our sense of divine immanence tends to draw us away from the sacred dimension of the

earth in itself. This is not exactly the divine presence. We go too quickly from the merely physical

order of things to the divine presence in things.”92 Moreover, divine sovereignty seems, both

intuitively and traditionally, to celebrate the transcendent. So how can we reconcile a mostly

immanental ecological creation theology with the theophany of a transcendent commanding God?

Neil Gillman employs Paul Ricoeur’s notion of “second naiveté” to embrace a “myth as

‘broken’ – and as ‘living.’”93 Gillman maintains his worldly empiricist awareness, while choosing to

‘re-enter’ the traditional myth for various compelling reasons. Kaplan too always maintains the

primacy of human agency, but within that contemporary position he re-introduces the problematic

yet useful metaphor of a commanding, sovereign God. Here is the beginning of our answer: while

knowing the dangers of monarchical metaphors, and still being aware of the damage to which

unfettered humanism can lead, we can selectively reclaim the sovereign law-giving God as the source

of our exhortations to sanity, sustainability, and spirituality.

Arthur Waskow suggests another way to reconstruct this tradition: reclaiming the full range

of those names and metaphors already in use. Though the following excerpt deals with the

Tetragrammaton (the unpronounceable Name we vocalize as Adonai or ‘Lord’, itself a miniature of

the monarchical metaphor), the same can easily be done with ‘King’ or ‘Sovereign’:

Sounded out with no vowels at all (thus not ‘Jehovah’ or ‘Yahweh’), this Name is simply a breathing. And so one way to translate it is ‘Breath of Life’ or ‘Breath of the World.’ Using YHWH in this way points toward a certain understanding of the Divine: that It is not only transcendent, beyond the world, but also immanent in the world, including the world of earth, rain, wind, sun. The Breath is both beyond us and within us. It connects all life forms with each other. As a metaphor for the Divine, ‘Breath of Life’ has the virtue of speaking in all languages

91 Martin Buber, “The Holy Way,” On Judaism, 145;92 Thomas Berry, 81.93 Gillman, The Death of Death, 30. Gillman too was a student of Kaplan’s at the Seminary, and though a

leader in the Conservative movement, still identifies himself as something of a Kaplanian. Indeed, Gillman and Ricouer’s position here is already implicit in Kaplan’s previously-cited desire to maintain the stories and liturgies which enthrone God as sovereign, insofar as they aid “the regeneration of society by direct human agency.”

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and in all species, reminding us that what we breathe in is what the trees breathe out; what the trees breathe out, we breathe in: We breathe each other into life.94

As we seek to lift up the sacred sparks embedded in this problematic if not wholly inaccurate

metaphor of God as sovereign lawgiver, we must review the record of revelation to see how that

sovereignty plays out in ecological terms. To hear Lynn White, Jr. and other belittlers of the biblical

tradition tell it, the root of humanity’s rapaciousness lies in Genesis.95 While the last forty years of

religious-environmental writing exists in surprisingly large measure to rebut White’s thesis, I am

content to turn back to the late rabbinic period when Midrash Rabbah was assembled. Commenting

on Gen. 1:26, Rabbi Chaninah (8:12) utilizes the lack of vowels in Biblical Hebrew for “have

dominion” (yod-resh-dalet-vav) to say simply that “if humanity merits, it will have dominion [yirdu];

if humanity does not merit, it will stumble/fall [yeradu].”96 Rashi, an 11th Century vintner from

Troyes in central France who wrote the premier commentaries to the Bible and Talmud, expounds on

this in his comment to Gen. 1:26: “There is in this linguistic matter the meaning of domination /

ridui and the meaning of descent / yeridah. [If humanity] merits, it will dominate / rodeh over the

animals and beasts; [but if humanity] does not merit, it will be made subservient / na'aseh yarud

before them, and the animal rules over it.” In other words, contrary to White and others, humanity’s

dominion is already conditional upon our right relation with Creation.97 (The same, interestingly, is

seen in Islamic views of humanity’s place in the cosmos, such as this from the Holy Quran – at Surah

94 Waskow, Torah of the Earth, Vol. 1, p. 4. Elizabeth Dodson Gray offers a similarly eloquent account in her “Critique of Dominion Theology” in Hessel, pp. 73-74. Marcia Prager is among those Jewish feminist thinkers who have been articulating ways to reclaim, albeit partially, the metaphor of God as King.

95 White, in Barbour, 25: “God planned all of this explicitly for man’s benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes.”

96 Moltmann offers an interesting take on humanity’s place in this cosmic scheme (190): “Understood as imago mundi, human beings are priestly creations and Eucharistic beings. They intercede before God for the community of creation. Understood as imago Dei, human beings are at the same time God’s proxy in the community of creation… They intercede for God before the community of creation…. in a Christian [and Jewish!] doctrine of creation human beings must neither disappear into the community of creation, nor must they be detached from that community. Human beings are at once imago mundi and imago Dei. In this double role they stand before the sabbath of creation in terms of time. They prepare the feast of creation.”

97 Another 13th century commentator, troubled like many by this phrase na'aseh adam b'tzalmeinu kid'muteinu (“let us make humanity in our image after our likeness”) in Gen. 1:26, offers a brilliant insight: "The plurals in the verse, 'And God said, “Let us make man in our image,”' are explained by R. Joseph Kimhi as addressed by God to the earth, or nature. Man remains inextricably tied to nature even while he is urged to transcend it" (Lamm 179). As Bereshit Rabbah and Rashi did with the Creation cycle, the Zohar does with the Noah story. It asks why the animals have "fear and dread" of us (Gen. 9:2), answering, because we possess God's likeness (diyokna). “But if humanity does not follow the ways of the Torah, the holy likeness vanishes from it, and the beasts of the field and the birds in the air can then rule over us” (in Scholem, 268).

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10:24, in a fashion similar to Deuteronomy 11’s ecological warning – “the earth adorns itself when

watered by the rain We send down from the sky. Crops, sustaining man and beast, grow luxuriantly:

but as the earth’s tenants begin to think themselves its masters, down comes Our scourge upon it.”)

And so in the revealed system given to us by a sovereign God, the concept of sin – ‘missing

the mark,’ which we do whenever we violate the specifics of that system – must apply against the

Earth, against future generations, and against each other.98

Though we may transvalue the concept as much as we like, inevitably a defense of

sovereignty as a metaphor for God constitutes a conservative move on our part. And that must be

acceptable, even for liberal and liberationist theologians, who of course remain in dialogue with and

answerable to ancient traditions. Even Kaplan steps back from complete naturalism, noting that

those who have “abandoned altogether the conception of a personal God, and prefer to think of

ultimate reality in terms of force, energy and similar concepts,” are wrong – their attitude “violates

completely our sense of the sacredness of life. It is irrelevant to human ideals and the quest for

salvation.” McFague too – who argues that today’s theology “needs to be self-consciously

constructive in order to free itself from traditional notions of divine sovereignty sufficiently to be

able to experiment with other and more appropriate metaphors and models that may help us cope

with the ‘question now before the human species…whether life or death will prevail on earth’” –

ultimately concedes the power of traditional images. So do Plaskow and most other advocates of

change and experimentation, including Art Green who cautions,99 “while experimentation is certainly

called for, a sense of authenticity and deep-rootedness in tradition will remain the greatest bearer of

that power and should not be sacrificed.”

Ultimately it’s Ruether who helps us overcome the dichotomy between the “thunderous

masculine tones of ‘thou shalt’ and ‘thou shalt not’ from Sinai,” and the still small voice “that speaks

98 Judaism isn’t big on original sin – but the Emek ha-Melekh (“Valley of the King”), an esoteric medieval kabbalistic text, offers a striking ecological context for the first act of human disobedience. In this interpretation, Adam's sin “kindled the fire of Judgment everywhere and corrupted all the worlds with it, so that even the air of the lands of the nations was corrupted by the host of the princes of impurity... And we have an absolute obligation to repair the external air... And particularly because we are learned in Torah, we are obligated to repair the air of the lands of the seventy nations with the breath of Torah that emerges from our mouths” (in Scholem, 82). If we can leave aside its anthropocentrism and read this text through a modern prism, the Emek ha-Melekh compels us not only to cut our sulfur dioxide emissions and to eliminate the use of CFC's, but also to perform "tikkun olam" on behalf of developing nations with inadequate air pollution controls!

99 Kaplan, Meaning of God, 88; McFague, Models of God, 21; Green, in Teutsch, 17.

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from the intimate heart of matter… the voice of Gaia [that] beckons us into communion. Both of

these voices, of God and of Gaia, are our own voices.”100 We must learn to hear, honor, and answer

both of these voices – of God and Gaia, transcendence and immanence; of sovereign and mother,

lawgiver and friend, unity and nature; of the Power that makes for cooperation and the power that

makes for freedom.

A final thought for this final holiday-specific theology: with Shavuot comes “revelation

theology,” rounding out the liturgical and historical triad that included creation theology (at Shabbat)

and liberation theology (at Pesach). And as we have seen before, the lines dividing these are not at

all hard and fast; some of the best theological constructions are precisely those which unify these

aspects of divinity. For instance, Kabbalah’s ten sfirot (divine emanations) intentionally line up with

the ten utterances / commandments of Exodus 20 – “another way of expressing the unity between the

revelation that lies within creation and that which is manifest in the Torah,”101 and an image for

unifying these theologies of Shabbat and Shavuot. It is also worth noting that Exodus 19, the lead-up

to the revelation of the Ten Utterances we commemorate each Shavuot, refers us to creation itself:

The pretext of revelation is also revelation—not of words or wisdom but of the vastness and power of God in nature. [Michael] Fishbane [in Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology] describes the effect of this physical turbulence upon the soul of Moses as the "violent vastness passing through the self as an awesome divine truth." Once Moses and the people have experienced the fire, the smoke, the shofar blasts, the bright light, and the ionized air of revelation-only then can they discern the Voice. "The great vastness of world-being is shaped into a sphere of religious instruction and duty for communal life."...

It is common in Jewish life to proceed from awe in nature to meditation on the Torah. This is the format of Psalm 19, and it is also our liturgical model every morning and evening in the blessings before Shema'. First we find God in the universal rhythms of nature, and then we discern God's guidance in the particular path of Torah and mitzvot. But in Yitro, the order is reversed. First we prepare through education, and then we prepare through awe-inspiring exposure to God's power over nature. Perhaps the discrete ideas of education—the judiciary system designed by Yitro, for example—are fused together by the electricity of awe, and it is at this point that the prophet can discern the Word.102

100 Ruether, 254. 101 Arthur Green, “A Kabbalah for the Environmental Age,” in Tirosh-Samuelson 13. 102 Rabbi Danny Nevins, February 2009, accessed 2/14/09, at

http://www.jtsa.edu/Conservative_Judaism/JTS_Torah_Commentary/Yitro_5769.xml.

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Conclusion (to Chapters 5 & 6)

Kaplan warns us not to settle. Regarding social and human regeneration – and, we might

add, ecological preservation and restoration – “nothing less than the maximum attainable is enough.”

Kaplan gives us permission to innovate as necessary, in order to meet the challenges of our day:

“Whenever our appreciation of spiritual insights contained in our cultural heritage from the past

blinds us to new insights based on broader experience, and our loyalty to tradition leads us to reject

new truth, we are faithful to an idol, not to God.”103 Already warned by the Divine voice that idolatry

leads to eviction from the good land (Deut. 11:13-17), we should heed Kaplan’s (and McFague’s,

and Plaskow’s) call to continue our experimentation in this sacred name of “new truth.”

One promising such new truth, latent within ancient wisdom and worth returning to the

forefront of our consciousness, is the already-discussed notion of Makom/Place, as both a given

location on Earth and an appellation for the divine. This name of God connects with a fairly recent

subset of environmental thought, bioregionalism, whose adherents "are local caretakers. Dedicated

to the concept of living-in-place, they espouse 'watershed consciousness' ... Bioregionalism advocates

a new ecological politics of place." We become aware as creatures by developing ‘a sense of place,’

and simultaneously (via makom) become aware as creations by developing a sense of God.104 The

more we know about our corner of Creation, the better we know the Creator.

Another promising ‘truth,’ if far from new, is that we must look beyond our own tradition/s

in order to best develop a response to today’s challenges. Noting how environmental problems

“cross boundaries of religion and culture” as well as political borders, eco-philosopher J. Baird

Callicott raises some very important questions in his “Multicultural Environmental Ethics;” he uses

the migratory routes of an endangered bird, the Siberian crane, to illustrate. These routes “extend

from shamanic Siberia through Eastern Orthodox Russia, cross Buddhist Tibet, Confucian China, and

103 Kaplan, Meaning of God, 147.104 Carolyn Merchant, 217ff.; Fred Dobb, “The Rabbis and Expanding Environmental Consciousness,” in

Arthur Waskow’s Torah of the Earth, Vol. 1, p. 163. Judith Plaskow also adds makom to her list of natural images for God, in Standing Again at Sinai, 165: “The traditional image of God as place (makom) evokes both the presence of the world in God and the extraordinary presence of God in particular places. As Rabbi Jose b. Halafta said, ‘we do not know whether God is the place of His world, or the world is His place.’” (Plaskow seems to cite a different version of the quote that I know as the definitive Jewish statement on panentheism, from midrash Genesis Rabbah 68:9: Hu m’komo shel olam, v’ein olamo mkomo – “God is the world’s place, but the world is not God’s place.”)

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Islamic Afghanistan, and end in Hindu India.”105 Callicott summarizes three ways in which these

many thought-systems can come together to protect a natural inheritance common to all their lands.

First, in the ecological approach, “each cultural-national entity retain[s] its autonomous authority to

make conservation policy within its jurisdiction, in the hope that over time a \unity, balance, and

harmony among them will emerge naturally;” of course, such a balance may never come, at least not

in time to save the Siberian crane. In the very problematic second “hegemonic” approach, one

culture simply “dominates all others” – foreign to Reconstructionist Judaism and to other progressive

religious approaches, but a model still too much in vogue elsewhere. The ideal, third way,

“orchestral approach” takes its inspiration from “the unity-in-multiplicity that is the human condition

at the advent of the third millennium;” here each cultural-national entity is like an instrument in an

orchestra, playing notes which harmonize or overlap with one another without sacrificing each

instrument’s unique tone.106 Callicott concludes:

while we inhabit many cultural worlds – the Confucian world, the Hindu world, the Christian world – we also inhabit one ecologically seamless biosphere, one planet, washed by one ocean, enveloped in one atmosphere. 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? … [This global ethic draws on science and philosophy along with] the rich fund of image, simile, and metaphor in indigenous and religious worldviews. Thus, the one globally intelligible and acceptable ecological ethic and many culture-specific ecological ethics may mutually reflect, validate, and correct one another – so they may exist in a reciprocal, fair, equal, and mutually sustaining partnership.107

True enough, “among the religious traditions, the record is mixed with regard to their

ecologically friendly resources, both historically and at present. Moreover, ecologically relevant

texts do not necessarily result in ecologically appropriate actions.”108 Yet religion gives us a sense of

values – including some held commonly, within and across faiths – which can meaningfully ground

our efforts to defend Creation. It may be precisely today’s sense of crisis which makes it possible for

various faiths to gather in defense of our shared home -- “in many cases it’s extremely difficult for

different religions to cooperate, and a bit of pressure from the outside is very salutary. I think that’s

105 J. Baird Callicott, “Multicultural Environmental Ethics,” in Tucker and Grim, Daedalus, p. 78.106 Callicott, pp. 79, 82, and 84.107 J. Baird Callicott, “Multicultural Environmental Ethics,” in Tucker and Grim, Daedalus, p. 95.108 Mary Evelyn Tucker, Worldly Wonder, p. 24.

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exactly what the ecological crisis offers.”109 As Huston Smith muses, “Twenty-five hundred years

ago it took an exceptional man like Diogenes to exclaim, ‘I am not an Athenian or a Greek but a

citizen of the world.’ Today we must all be struggling to make these words our own.”110 How true,

in light of today’s dire environmental realities.

Today – amid war and terror and vulnerability, epidemics and economic and ecological

crises, dubious leadership and soaring debt and searing doubt – it is imperative that our actions catch

up with our beliefs. Buber is as on the mark today as he was eighty years ago in berating those who

divide life "between a real relation with God and an unreal relation...with the world -- you cannot

both truly pray to God and profit by the world. He who knows the world as something by which he

is to profit knows God also in the same way."111 Miroslav Volf summarizes the thought as “practices

are essentially belief-shaped, and beliefs are essentially practice-shaping.”112 We must radically

reshape our lives if we are to bridge the enormous chasm between what is and what should be.

Moshe Sokol suggests that we “aim the theoretical arrow not from theology to ethics…but (at least at

first) from ethics to theology.”113 Such stress on behavior and practice makes sense, given our

current predicament. Concrete actions must be taken to protect God’s good creation, for future

generations of humans and others – in order to “choose life, that you and your children may live”

(Deut. 30:19). And, when outmoded beliefs encourage complacency despite the urgency of this

moment, it may be the metaphors and theologies that need radical reshaping. We close with Eilon

Schwartz, who eloquently sums up the urgency, scope, excitement, and importance of our

enterprise:114

109 Ismar Schorsch, in Rockefeller-Elder, Spirit and Nature, p. 185.110 Huston Smith, The World’s Religions, p. 7.111 Martin Buber, I and Thou, 107.112 Miroslav Volf, “Theology for a Way of Life,” in Volf and Bass, 254. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim

(“Series Forward”, Tirosh-Samuelson p. xx) explain, quite compassionately, that a “disjunction of theory and practice” will be found in all traditions; nonetheless this “should not automatically invalidate the complex worldviews and rich cosmologies embedded in traditional religions,” but rather spur us to expand our perspectives.

113 Moshe Sokol, “Ethical Implications of Jewish Conceptions of the Natural World,” in Tirosh-Samuelson 280. He further suggests, “the theologian would do well to examine what the applied Jewish normative tradition – its body of case law – has to say about environmental issues and, using that as data, attempt to construct a theology.”

114 Eilon Schwartz, “Judaism and Nature: Theological and Moral Issues,” in Waskow, Vol. 1, 173.

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The environmental crisis offers both a challenge and an opportunity to modern Judaism. A challenge, because all cultures will be judged in future generations by the depth of their response to modernity’s rape of the planet. A Judaism which refuses to respond through its unique langu-age to modernity’s spiritually bankrupt relationship to God’s world will be judged for its silence. An opportunity, because far too often Judaism has been forced to speak within the narrow con-fines which modernity offered. The environmental crisis challenges modern culture, and offers the opportunity for other voices, long delegitimized, to reassert themselves within the larger culture. Speaking from within the tradition, and confronting the manifold challenges which a reappraisal of Judaism and nature demands, means a renewal of our relationship with our world.

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