Torah of the Earth Vol 1

Description

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Torá
• Jewish thought
• Rabbinic Judaism
• Jewish philosophy
• Torah study
• Judaism
• Religion
• Torah

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 12 juillet 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781580236553
• Langue: English

Extrait

For our children
Shoshana and Michael, David and Ketura, Morissa, Joshua;
For their children
and the children of their children;
For all children:

May you live to see your world fulfilled, your planet healed .
May you be our link to future worlds, and may your hope encompass all the generations of all life yet to be .
May your heart conceive with understanding, may your mouth speak wisdom, and your tongue be stirred with songs of joy .
May your gaze be straight and sure, your eyes be lit with Torah s lamp, your face aglow with heaven s radiance, your lips speak words of knowledge .
May your innards rejoice in foods whose seeds are righteousness .
And may you always rush with eagerness to hear the truths of the Unity who is more ancient than all time and ever present in all beings .
Talmud Bavli: B rachot 17a
(adapted from translation by Joel Rosenberg in the Reconstructionist prayerbook, Kol Haneshamah )
C ONTENTS

Introduction :
Earth and Earthling, Adam and Adamah
PART 1: Biblical Israel: One Land, One People
Biblical Texts
A. Aggadah : Joy in Creation-Two Psalms
B. Halakhah : Rest for the Earth-The Sabbatical/Jubilee Tradition
Evan Eisenberg
The Mountain and the Tower: Wilderness and City in the Symbols of Babylon and Israel
Tikva Frymer-Kensky
Ecology in a Biblical Perspective
Arthur Waskow
Earth, Social Justice, and Social Transformation: The Spirals of Sabbatical Release
PART 2: Rabbinic Judaism: One People, Many Lands
Rabbinic Texts
A. Aggadah : Celebration and Avoidance
B. Halakhah : The Law of Bal Tashchit (Do Not Destroy)
Norman Lamm
Ecology in Jewish Law and Theology
Jonathan Helfand
The Earth Is the Lord s: Judaism and Environmental Ethics
David Ehrenfeld and Philip J. Bentley
Judaism and the Practice of Stewardship
Fred Dobb
The Rabbis and Expanding Environmental Consciousness
Jeremy Benstein
Nature vs. Torah
Spiraling into the Future: Sources for Learning and Doing
Eco-Jewish Organizations
Suggestions for Further Reading
Notes
About the Contributors
About the Editor
Copyright
Also Available
About Jewish Lights
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I NTRODUCTION
E ARTH AND E ARTHLING , A DAM AND A DAMAH
P erhaps the most profound Jewish statement about the relationship between human beings and the earth is bound up in two words of Hebrew-two words that do not even need a sentence to connect them: Adam. Adamah .
The first means human being ; the second, earth. The two words are connected to teach us that human beings and the earth are intertwined. In English, this connection would be obvious only if the everyday word for human being were earthling, or perhaps if the ordinary word for earth were humus. With either of these configurations, no one could say the name of earth or of human without hearing an echo of the other. Intertwined. Not identical, but intertwined.
What differences make us not identical? Genesis 2:5-7 explains:
There was no adam to serve/work the adamah , but a flow would well up upon the ground and water all the face of the adamah . And YHWH [by some understood as Breath of the World, from the sound of the letters pronounced with no vowels, producing only an outbreath] shaped the adam out of dust from the adamah , and blew into its nostrils the breath of life, and the adam became a living being, a breathing being.
The human being lost the breathing -ah sound at the end of adamah .
At the level of individual life-history, the human being loses the unconscious placental breathing that connects the enwombed human with the all-enfolding earth-and gains a new, more conscious, more deliberate breath.
At the level of the evolutionary history of humankind, adam lost the unconscious breathing that connected the earliest human beings with the earth from which they had just emerged-little different, to begin with, from the other primates round about them. And that -ah was replaced with a new kind of breath-a conscious breath from the Breath of the World. In separating from the earth, in being born, the adam becomes more conscious.
The earth-human relationship takes on a complex, ironic tone. Small wonder that humans eat what the earth grows in a way that bespeaks their alienation and brings upon them and the earth a still deeper alienation: Damned be adamah on your account; with painful labor shall you eat from it.
If this is a myth of births and beginnings, it is also a myth of every new beginning. Not once only has the human race separated itself from the earth, but over and over.
On each occasion, as our sacred stories and our secular histories teach us, we have had to learn a new depth of connection and community with the earth from which we have separated. When we did not, we shattered the localities and regions of our earth and birth-and were shattered in return. For none can eat unscathed from the food into which they have poured out poison.
Today we are living in a crisis of this spiral. Epoch after epoch, the more and more knowledgeable human race has alienated itself more deeply, then realized more deeply its need for connection and built some new sense of community with the earth. Once this meant learning to raise fewer goats in fragile local ecosystems. Now it means learning not to destroy the global ozone layer. The upward turning of the spiral of human power to Make and to Do has faced every community and tradition on the planet with the task of learning better how to Be and how to Love.
In some ways it is in our own generation that we have most vehemently gobbled up that fruit of plenty that grew from the Tree of Knowing, and in our own generation that we face most sharply the danger that the earth will war against us.
So during this past generation Jews have been looking back, with much more urgency, into our own teachings about adam and adamah . We who were once a down-to-earth people, an indigenous people-what can we learn and teach to heal ourselves and our neighbors and the neighborhood itself- adam and adamah?
This Jewish conversation has only begun. Much of it has been carried out in a muttered undertone, mostly among a few people who were especially knowledgeable and concerned. This book brings together some of the most important explorations, to make the conversation more public and to make it more possible for the Jewish people as a whole to assess its own part in addressing a planetary crisis.
There have been four basic life-stances from which the Jewish people has addressed these questions: Biblical Israel, Rabbinic Judaism, Zionism, and most recently, Eco-Judaism. These four stances are not merely chronological periods (indeed, the last two of them overlap in time); they embody four different ways of connecting with the earth. For that reason, they have seemed to offer an organic pattern for organizing this book.
C ONNECTIONS OF L AND AND P EOPLE
Four millennia ago, among Western Semitic nomads in the land of Canaan, there were stirrings of response and resistance to the new imperial agriculture of Babylonia. At some point in the next five hundred years, one of the communities that emerged from this simmering stew began to tell stories of a clan that became the seedbed of the people that came to call itself the Children of Israel-the Godwrestlers-and Ivrim , Hebrews in rough transliteration but, more important, in translation boundary-crossers.
For they wrestled with the deepest questions of the universe, and they crossed the boundaries not only of territorial fiefdoms but of cultures and proprieties and social structures.
As they crossed over and wrestled, wrestled and crossed over, they drew from their hearing of the universe words they told and retold and wove into new patterns and turned into stories, poetry, drama, law, daily life-practice, philosophical musings.
These words became what we call the Bible, and one of its great themes was how to make a sacred relationship with the earth. In the Biblical Era that ensued, these Israelites/Hebrews/Jews not only lived intimately with a particular piece of earth but lived in a way that made them-collectively, as a people-responsible for how human beings acted toward the earth and how the earth responded.
This Biblical Era finally was shattered. There followed almost two thousand years in which one of the defining characteristics of Jewish life was that the people Israel no longer had a direct physical connection with the land of Israel. During these centuries of what we call Rabbinic Judaism, Jews shaped the adam/adamah relationship much more as scattered households or communities than as a united people.
The Rabbinic community developed some loose guidelines for a sacred relationship to the earth. Since the lands of the Diaspora were so distant and so different from each other as ecosystems, and since interhuman relationships seemed of higher priority during this period, Rabbinic thought sketched a broad concern for protecting the earth, but with few definitive specifics. The Rabbis were often less concerned with protecting the earth than with explaining how to use its resources to meet the urgent needs of their scattered, often impoverished, people.
In the nineteenth century, the Zionist movement focused on renewing the Jewish connection with the land in a way that would allow and require the making of a Jewish policy toward the piece of earth called Eretz Yisrael. As the State of Israel emerged, so did a set of policies. Over the years, the numbers, the technology, the religious and philosophical perspectives, and the political arrangements of Israelis-in short, the Land, the People, and the State-have all changed in relationship to one another. So, therefore, have policies toward the land.
Meanwhile, the Jewish community in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century found itself politically empowered in unprecedented ways at just the same moment that Jews, Americans, and human beings in g