Karen Armstrong’s recent book, Sacred Nature, seems like it should appeal to Jews who care about the environment. But Sacred Nature surprisingly spends a good deal of ink disparaging the Hebrew Bible and later Judaism.  As a rabbi who made a career of taking Jews into wilderness, I generally agree with both the main argument (divinity manifests as the vital force animating the universe, a core assertion of Jewish mysticism) and the goal (motivate people to treat the planet better) of Sacred Nature, which makes the anti-Judaism bias even more upsetting.  So much so that I have written a detailed rebuttal.

Please reprint or republish this article, or parts thereof, wherever you like (with proper attribution).  My fear is that Jewish readers of Sacred Nature will think that in order to connect to the natural world, they must leave Judaism behind.  It's important to respond to Armstrong's fallacious account of Jewish theology.  Please help spread the word.

©Rabbi Mike Comins, Summer, 2023
 
In her recent book, Sacred Nature, Karen Armstrong makes an argument that I find pertinent and compelling.  Across many cultures throughout human history, divinity has been understood as a vital force that permeates and animates the universe.  This is important because if people today were to perceive the divine presence in nature—or to put it in Western theological terms, if God’s immanence was the key to perceiving God’s transcendence—they would relate to the natural world with love and reverence.  People would support solutions and accept the sacrifices necessary to solve the climate crisis.
 
I don’t make these remarks as a detached observer.  I am a career teacher of wilderness spirituality, taking Jews and their friends into wilderness to forge their relationship with God through spiritual practice in, with and through the natural world.  As for environmental activism, I was a follower rather than a leader, but I believed that my role in the movement was crucial.  If prudential thinking were enough, we would have stopped destroying the very eco-system our lives depend on long ago.  Rather, I argued, if people developed a loving relationship with the natural world, their activism would follow.  Armstrong and I are peas in a pod.
 
I was a freshly ordained rabbi when I attended a training in the Colorado Rockies that culminated in a four-day solo, wilderness retreat.   The teacher explained the Daoist understanding of qi (pronounced chee, like cheese), the vital force that flows through the universe and animates life.  I had practiced Tai Chi to counter the long hours of Yeshiva learning in Jerusalem, and benefited from acupuncture treatments, so I was not new to the theory.  But there was never any theology involved in my Tai Chi practice.  Now, I was asked to meditate in such a way as to the receive qi through the rocks and rivers and the stars, even to exchange qi with trees.  I thought of leaving the retreat, wondering if I was violating the prohibitions against idolatry. 
 
But then I remembered the central claim of Jewish mysticism, from the first major work of the Kabbalah, Sefer Yitzerah, all the way through Hasidism.  The infinite, unknowable God (the eyn sof) emanates a divine energy or force (the sephirot), that created and animates the universe.  The Hasidim popularized the name of this force as chiut (khee-oot), “life-force,” from the word for life, chaim.
 
Qi, chiut; chiut, qi?  Coincidence?
 
I wasn’t asked to worship qi, so I gave it a try.  It is rare that one can pinpoint a week in which one’s life radically changed.  As I performed the Qi Quong exercises and meditated in relation to nature, I immediately felt the chiut as a tingling vibration on my skin.  An internal awakening followed.
 
I spent four days obsessively repeating the exercises.  I had to be sure that I wasn’t making this up.  I hated how New Agers spoke of “energy”.  But there was no denying the qi/chiut.  After avoiding Kabbalah throughout rabbinical school, Daoist practice had turned me into a Jewish mystic.  Armstrong’s portrayal of a vitalist metaphysics/theology resonates strongly with me.

So, how did it feel to read Sacred Nature?  Validated and happy?  One would think.  Unfortunately, the opposite: I am bewildered, sad and fearful of the damage it will cause to Jews who might well surmise that a genuine, spiritual connection to the natural world requires one to abandon Judaism. 
 
Armstrong treats Judaism (and Christianity) with a different set of glasses than the many other spiritual traditions she engages in Sacred Nature.  She is an academic historian who freely picks and chooses her favorite voices among the complicated, polyphonic traditions she presents to make a (laudable!) non-academic argument for environmental responsibility.   As she puts it:

…I believe that we can learn a great deal from the insights and practices that developed during the Axial Age (c 900 to 200 BCE)…at that time, the great religions and philosophical traditions arouse that have nourished humanity ever since…It is not a question of believing religious doctrines; it is about incorporating into our lives insights and practices that will not only help us to meet today’s serious challenges but change our hearts and minds. (Sacred Nature, p. 19.)

However, this mixture misleads the reader, as she rarely places her choices in larger historical or theological context.  Apart from Judaism and Christianity, she seldom reports the counter-trends to her examples.  This would not be problematic, if she were to slip in a sentence or two alerting the reader to her method when describing the religious/spiritual traditions.  Instead, she presents them in the same way she writes academic history.  The result, as we will see, is a knack for sweeping, unwarranted generalizations with the authority of academic expertise.
 
To Rule and to Conquer
Armstrong writes in the introduction:

At the very beginning of the Hebrew Bible, in the first chapter of Genesis, God issues a command to the first human beings, giving them total dominion over the natural world: “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and conquer it. Be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven and all living animals on earth” (1:28).  Unlike the other scriptures we shall consider the Hebrew Bible does not focus on the sanctity of nature, because the people of Israel experienced the divine in human events rather than in the natural world (p. 12).

For Jews, God is found in history, not nature, and as long as we are on the subject, Judaism is about dominating nature.
 
To assess the claim that humans are meant to rule nature, we need to ask: How should this verse be evaluated within the historical situation in which it was spoken?  Is this the only view expressed in the Hebrew Bible?  (It is not.)  In later Jewish civilization, did this view win out?
 
While we don’t know exactly, it is generally estimated that for most of human history, a third or more of children died in utero or within three years of birth.  Lacking a Nile or Euphrates river for irrigation, people in ancient Canaan starved when the rains failed.  No Israelite of average life-span was likely spared the trauma of hunger and starvation.  The very idea of dominion in this context is more pep-talk than reality, more aspiration than representation.  Nevertheless, it is in one strand of biblical theology, the school of P, that is, the priestly writers.
 
The very next chapter of Genesis, attributed to the J writers, tells a different story.  The first human, adam, is created from adamah, arable soil—earthling from earth.  The animals are also created from the earth, and both are given the same name, nefesh chaya, “living being.”  After the flood, humans and the animals enter into the same covenant with God.
 
Adam’s problem in Genesis 2 is loneliness, and the solution for all of creation is relationship.  First animals, and then Eve, are created to end Adam’s longing.  The land lays barren until earthlings and animals appear in order to eat the food produced by it.  Adam is placed in Eden and commanded l’ovdah u’l’shomrah, often translated as “to till and to tend,” more literally, “to work and to protect.”  Avodah, “work,” is a multi-layered term in Hebrew.  The word for a slave or servant derives from the same root, and the term is used in Leviticus to describe the sacrificial service in the Temple.  In the psalms and later rabbinic times, it is one of the words for prayer. 
 
Adam is to farm as a child and partner of the soil, and to protect it as a servant.  This human is not about domination, but communion.
 
Other verses support the J writers’ understanding.  The Temple altar can only be made of adamah.  The touch of human-made metal invalidates it as a vehicle to serve God (Exodus 20:22).  Sabbatical and Jubilee years prevent the destruction of the life-giving properties of the adamah (Leviticus 25).  I could go on, but you get the point.
           
Which narrative wins out?  Is Genesis 1 used to endorse environmental destruction in rabbinic literature and later, medieval Jewish thought?  It is not, though the question is largely rhetorical since it was never a significant possibility in the Diaspora world of small, scattered communities lacking political power.  Medieval rabbis did debate whether or not Genesis 1 establishes humanity as the purpose and crown of creation.  Some agree, some don’t.  But nowhere are humans given carte blanche to trash the planet.  Even the great rationalist, Maimonides, whose thought assumes and argues for the primacy of the intellect in spiritual life, writes:

…the Universe does not exist for man’s sake, but that each being exists for its own sake, and not because of some other thing…we assume that God created all parts of the Universe by His will; some for their own sake, and some for the sake of other beings, that include their purpose in themselves.[1]

At the very least, generalizations of the kind Armstrong makes are unwarranted.  As in any living civilization, many views compete for wider acceptance.  But for most Jewish thinkers most of the time, partnership with and stewardship of nature is the dominant trend. 
 
God is in History, not Nature
A second claim, repeated several times in Sacred Nature, is that Jews find God in historical events rather than nature, starting in the Hebrew Bible.  The leading scholarly work on this topic, Theodore Hiebert’s The Yahwist Landscape, Nature and Religion in Early Israel, explains that it was actually the Christian scholars who introduced critical studies of the Bible (Julius Wellhausen and company) that popularized this interpretation of Jewish, theological history.  The basic idea goes like this.  Pagans locate divinity in nature, and focus on the recurring cycles of the agricultural year to insure a successful harvest.  Mature spirituality, i.e., 19th century European Protestant Christianity, prioritizes morality and the individual’s afterlife as judged by the purely immaterial God.  The Jews were the bridge between the two.  The ancient Israelites “discovered” God as the source of ethics and as an active agent in history.  The Hebrew Bible thus “desacralized” nature in its battle with paganism.  Armstrong writes, “So instead of finding the sacred in the phenomena of nature, the Hebrew scriptures focus on the victories and disasters, battles and plagues, that befell the Israelites: their god Yahweh was not immanent in the wondrously repetitive rhythms of nature; he revealed himself in the convulsions of history” (p. 55).
 
This interpretation was also adopted by more recent Jewish thinkers, particularly Enlightenment rationalists seeking common ground with their Christian counterparts.  Unfortunately, the leading proponent of this view in our day was Armstrong’s fellow Londoner, the revered, late Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, Jonathan Sacks, whose work Armstrong likely knows.
 
It is an errant view, nonetheless.
 
The ancient Israelites did indeed find God in morality and history, but they did not do so at the expense of God’s presence in nature.  On the contrary, God in nature was primary.  Hiebert explains the obvious.  The chief concern in Canaan was drought and famine, just as devastating as invading armies.  While the priests were busy all year, the central Temple rites were performed during the three pilgrimage holidays, when Jerusalem filled with Israelites.  Each celebrated a harvest: Pesach (Passover) for barley, Shavuot (Pentacost, Feast of Weeks) for wheat, and Succot (Tabernacles) for fruits.  Farmers also brought their first fruits to the altar.  Hiebert concludes, “The realm of agriculture was a sacred sphere full of divine presence and power” (p. 77).
 
Much of Hiebert’s scholarship shows how historical events in the Hebrew Bible, particularly the early stories, were chosen and narrated to validate Israelite farming.
 
To claim that God was only found in history wildly distorts the record.  Yes, the Israelites found God in ethics and history, but they had no need to choose God’s presence in history over nature, or vice versa.  We give the last word to Theodore Hiebert. “Such a religious consciousness cannot be labeled as narrowly historical but must be recognized as possessing a profound sense of the intimate and defining relationship between people and land. It is a consciousness that considers space, as well as time, as a sacred category” (p. 112).


 
Holiness
As the title implies, Sacred Nature is concerned with holiness as it applies to the natural world.  Indeed, divinity in nature is central to Armstrong’s argument for an environmental ethic.  Unsurprisingly, chapter 3 is titled, “The Holiness of Nature.”  Armstrong begins:

We tend to use words “holy” and “holiness” rather lightly to describe something or someone who is spiritually perfect, morally excellent and dedicated to God. But the Hebrew word qaddosh, which we translate as holiness, means otherness, implying a radical separation from everyday reality (p. 54).

Let us notice that Armstrong acknowledges the connection between holiness and morality in the contemporary, popular mind, but separates this from the biblical understanding.  More on that in a moment.
 
Armstrong specifically mentions that for the Hebrew Bible, the holy is the extraordinary Other, radically removed from the ordinary.  She follows with examples: the “nimbus of glory that surrounded him [Moses] like a devouring fire” during the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai and Isaiah’s celestial vision of the seraphs proclaiming “Holy, Holy, Holy” to God.  She concludes by citing Rudolph Otto’s famous naming of the “fearful experience of transcendent reality as the mysterious tremendum et fascinans: “tremendum” because it comes as a profound shock that tears us away from the consolations of everyday life; and “fascinans” because, at the same time, it exerts an irresistible attraction.  The emotions it arouses cannot adequately be expressed in words or concepts” (p. 55).
 
Armstrong never loses this awesome and transcendent feature of Hebrew holiness, even when discussing the divine as inherent in the ordinary, material world.

…people in early civilizations did not experience the power that governed the cosmos as a supernatural, distant and distinct “God”. It was rather an intrinsic presence…a force imbuing all things, a transcendent mystery that could never be defined (p. 11).
 
We must also recognize the essential “holiness” or “otherness” in nature that makes it more than a resource; we should recall what sages have said about its mystery and inscrutability (p. 159).

Her problem with the Hebrew Bible is not that divinity is radically Other, but that the biblical God is far away in the heavens and confined to history.  As argued above, that is just not true.
 
To my mind, there are two additional aspects of holiness in the Hebrew Bible that demand consideration: dynamic relationship and morality.
 
Even the holiness of static objects in the Hebrew Bible stems from the objects’ relationship to God, and that relationship is dynamic.  There are several explicit expressions in the Torah of this basic norm.  Here is the most extreme:

You shall not profane My holy name, that I may be sanctified in the midst of the Israelite people—I the LORD who sanctify you (Lev 22:32).

Just as God sanctifies people, God (who can never be unholy, nevertheless) requires sanctification from people!
 
Armstrong captures this insight throughout Sacred Nature.  She repeatedly speaks about holiness in nature as a potency, some aspect of divinity or qi or Buddha nature that must be at least recognized, and sometimes actualized, by human beings.  The Hebrew Bible supports her thesis; unfortunately, she never mentions it.
 
Lastly, one simply cannot speak fairly about holiness in the Hebrew Bible without mentioning morality.
 
“You shall be holy, for I, the Lord you God, am holy,” begins chapter 19 of Leviticus, and the details of what that means follow.  A sampling: Give a portion of your harvest to the poor, do not commit fraud, do not withhold the wages of a laborer until the next morning, do not insult the deaf, do not place a stumbling block before the blind, render justice equally to rich and poor, do not stand idly by your brother’s blood, do not hold a grudge, love your neighbor as yourself.
 
Regrettably, Armstrong ignores this moral aspect of holiness (courtesy, by the way, of the same P writers she previously admonished).  Why?  One can only speculate.  What is clear is that holiness—the actualization of the connection to God through the moral aspect in human relations—is entirely about the ordinary.  It does not jive with Armstrong’s characterization of the biblical God as removed from everyday life.
 
Unfortunately, this blind spot has repercussions.  For starters, it undercuts her central argument: she assumes that if one recognizes the vital, divine force operating in the world, one will relate to nature with the reverence it deserves.  But the emotion and awe evoked by the mysterious tremendum, in and of itself, is not enough.  When I lived in Wyoming, I found that oil executives were awed by the Grand Teton like everyone else.  The majority of people in Wyoming have a close relationship with the natural world, and vote for politicians who often favor extraction over conservation.  The spiritual-not-religious crowd that floods the mountains from urban areas tends to vote the other way, but the majority haven’t joined the Sierra Club, 350.org or any environmental action group.  Divinity/holiness as awe is not the same as a divinely-generated, moral responsibility.
 
Once, I waxed poetic to a Qi Quong teacher about the similarities between the Jewish mystical chiut and qi.  He replied, “Mike, it’s just qi.”  For him, qi was like blood or air, basic elements of the world that one can learn to work with in order to promote human health.  “Divinity” in Sacred Nature more and more becomes “sacrality” as the book progresses through the Eastern religions, in order to recognize, I presume, that the Eastern conception of the sacred is qualitatively different. 
 
I’m no expert on Buddhism, but I have sat over a hundred days of Theravada (“Insight”) meditation retreats, which means that I have heard over a hundred dharma talks.  I have read tens of books authored by contemporary, Buddhist teachers of all stripes.  Relating to nature for spiritual development or edification rarely came up.  On retreat, roughly half the time is spent in walking meditation, which many do outdoors.  The instruction: if you see something beautiful in nature that draws your attention, stop, refocus on your body and mind, and proceed when you are no longer distracted.  (As I am easily distracted by the natural world, I walked in the basement.)
 
None of which is to say that Buddhism is somehow against a reverential, loving and morally responsible relationship with the natural world.  Many today are drawing on the same thinkers and ideas mentioned by Armstrong to influence Buddhist practice and encourage environmental activism.  But Armstrong generalizes in a way that assumes a universal, deep spiritual connection to nature on the part of Easterners due to a vitalist world-view.  It’s much more complicated than that.  We have not witnessed exemplary environmental policy in China and India.
 
My main point is that when Westerners think of divinity, there is a moral aspect to holiness.  In Sacred Nature, a Western author writes to Western readers with an argument that assumes it, namely, that if we recognize the divinity in the natural world, we will behave better towards nature.  But in reducing sacrality or holiness to the mysterious and the awesome that draws a strong emotional reaction rather than an ethical response, Armstrong explicitly fails to recognize the moral aspect of divinity that she implicitly uses to make her case. 
 
Interpreting the Hebrew Bible
Armstrong’s life and books do not lead me to think that she is anti-Jewish or an anti-semite.  The opposite.  Judaism has had a positive effect on her religious development, and she has had a positive effect on Jews.  She taught at the Leo Baeck rabbinical college in London!  Nonetheless, she is biased against Judaism in Sacred Nature.  I can only theorize that the cause is the role that the Hebrew Bible plays in the type of Christianity she rejected in her own religious journey.  Whatever the reason, this bias plays out in inconsistent and unfair treatment of biblical stories and later Jewish religion in Sacred Nature.
 
For example: Genesis’ description of God blowing spirit into clay, the physical earth, in order to animate living beings (Genesis 2) is congenial to the vitalist world-view.  It is ignored.
 
Armstrong interprets the Burning Bush episode as a repudiation of divinity in the earth.  Her reasoning: the bush itself is not enough; God must appear as fire.  Yet vitalism says the same.  The physical world of elements and living organisms is not enough.  A transcendent, sacred force permeates, animates and connects every entity in the universe.  This is not a pagan view; qi or the Indian Rta is not identical to the entities it inhabits.  In the far East, Armstrong shows us, the world is described as a triad: heaven, qi, earth. Heaven is mentioned for a reason.  (And fire, let us not forget, is part of the natural world.)
 
Armstrong next turns to I Kings 18-19, where the prophet Elijah travels to Mt. Sinai and hears God through the “still, small voice.”  The text states that Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal to a contest on Mt. Carmel.  King Ahab and the people attend.  When Elijah wins, the people respond, “Yahweh is our God,” and kill the prophets of Baal.  Ahab’s wife Queen Jezebel, the patron of Baal worship in the Israelite kingdom, vows to kill Elijah in return.  Elijah flees to the south, and from there, God rescues him and brings him to the mountain of Horeb (another name for Mt. Sinai).
 
Armstrong omits all this in favor of the interpretation of a prominent school of recent and contemporary Bible scholars.  Most Israelites, writes Armstrong, were Baal worshippers, as Baal specialized in agriculture.  “After a deadly skirmish with Baal’s priests (on Mt. Carmel), Elijah had to flee the wrath of the people and took refuge on Mount Horeb to await Yahweh’s arrival.”  There, God speaks to him. 
 
The revelation to Moses on Mt. Sinai was accompanied by thunder and smoke; Elijah gets wind, an earthquake and fire, but the text specifically states that God was not in them.  Rather, Elijah hears God in a “still, small voice” (King James translation) or a “soft, murmuring sound” (Jewish Publication Society).  Armstrong’s interpretation: “For him, Yahweh had become so distant from the natural world that he was scarcely perceptible—expressed only in the timbre of a light breeze.” 
 
First things first: At the Burning Bush, Armstrong complains that God is in the fire; here she complains that God is not. 
 
That one would see alienation from nature in this story is astounding to me.  One of Armstrong’s criticisms in Sacred Nature is that the Hebrew Bible locates God in super-natural miracles rather than the ordinary, everyday rhythms of the natural world.  For Elijah, the perception of prophecy shifts from watching dramatic pyrotechnics to listening for the voice of an invisible divinity, or in her prefered lexicon, a "sacrality," arising from desert silence.  And instead of welcoming the change, she absurdly writes in the next sentence, “Throughout the Hebrew scriptures, the sacred is usually celebrated not as an immanent presence but as a distant reality.”
 
My main problem, however, is that Armstrong bases her understanding on a particular school of biblical scholarship.  I don’t object to her choosing a side in scholarly debates.  Rather, she not only fails to inform the reader that the facts are contested, she omits the most basic assumption of the school: Aside from the insistence on monotheism, there was little difference between Israelite and Canaanite beliefs and practices.  K. L. Noll writes in a summary article:

Archaeological data reveal that the peoples of ancient Canaan shared material culture and patterns of daily behavior, including religious behavior. Although a few scholars still claim otherwise, we cannot, from the dirt of Syria-Palestine, distinguish Israelite from other Canaanite religious practices. This is not surprising; identical environment and culture results in very similar religious experiences and behaviors. One should not expect archaeological data to betray an Israelite religion that is significantly distinctive from its Canaanite context.[2]

Yet Armstrong writes, “In the cult of Baal, they [the Israelites] felt that they encountered the sacred energies that made the earth productive”(p. 55) while for Israelite religion, God is “confined to the distant heavens.”
 
This scholarship may or may not be correct.  The point is that Armstrong relies on it when it supports her dubious, anti-nature narrative about the Hebrew Bible in the case of Elijah.  (The Israelites woshiped the god of agriculture, Baal, as opposed to the distant Yahweh).  And then ignores it when it contradicts her argument about God’s absence from agriculture.  (The same biblical scholars claim that the Israelite sacrificial cult was part and parcel of the same religious outlook as the followers of Baal).  She owes the reader more consistency about her sources or more transparency about her pick-and-choose method, preferably both.
 
After reading the cherry-picked, unsympathetic, distorted treatment of her next target, the Psalms, this reader cannot help but think of Armstrong’s portrayal of Islam.  She omits that Muslims pride themselves in their “pure” monotheism as opposed to the trinitarian theology and human incarnation of God in Christianity, which paved the way for an early, medieval renaissance of the kind of philosophic, rationalist theology Armstrong finds problematic in Judaism and Christianity.  If the God of the Hebrew Bible is distant, all the more so for Muslims.  There is no vitalist theology in the Qur’an. 
 
Nature does play a theological role in the Qur’an, a fact Armstrong rightly praises.  Muslims are asked to observe nature closely as a source of divine revelation.  However, the theology is nearly identical to the Hebrew Bible.  Nature’s “inherent sanctity” in the Qur’an comes from the fact that God created it.  Nature testifies to God’s wisdom as the Creator.  Nature submits to its Creator and joins with humanity in praising and thanking the Creator.
 
If you have read Sacred Nature, you know why I emphasize God as creator.  Armstrong repeatedly criticizes the Hebrew notion of God as Creator, linking it to the command to rule nature while praising the Eastern understanding of the universe as uncreated.[3]  Islam gets a pass, even though a cursory read of the scholarly literature on Islam and the natural world reveals that just as in Judaism, humans are commissioned by God to steward nature for reasons that include human flourishing.
 
Armstrong’s quotes of the Qur’an have nearly exact parallels in the Psalms.  I won’t go into detail here, but her reading of Psalms is forced and manipulative in order to fit into her (false) narrative regarding nature in the Hebrew Bible.
 
Jewish Mysticism
Of particular concern to this writer is Armstrong’s treatment of Jewish mysticism.  As an exception to the rule in Judaism, she notes that the Kabbalah is a classic example of vitalism.  However, it is too “mysterious and elusive” to be of much use.  I must admit, there is truth in that.
 
Nevertheless, the Kabbalah deserves our attention.  Any serious, vitalist theology must account for how the divine manifests itself and becomes knowable in our world, animates life, grounds the good, creates yet tolerates evil, and connected, why holiness/sacrality oscillates between potency and actuality.  Unlike most of the Eastern traditions presented by Armstrong, the Kabbalah covers all this ground.  The Kabbalah explains how the God of Being can also be a personal God that answers prayer.  The Kabbalah’s vitalism is a moral vitalism, and in various ways, accounts for evil and suffering.  Whether or not you agree with it, the Kabbalah offers a comprehensive and eloquent set of profound, spiritual insights.
 
Unfortunately, the story of Jewish mysticism in Sacred Nature omits later developments as well.  The last, major school, the Lurianic Kabbalah, gave us the story of creation as God’s divine energy “shattering the vessels,” creating a world filled with divine sparks trapped in every physical entity that await redemption.  In other words, everything has divine potential awaiting human actualization.
 
The later spiritual movement, Hasidism, simplified Kabbalistic theology and emphasized the Jewish mission of “raising the sparks,” which are found everywhere, in order to redeem the world through prayer, joy and observance of the commandments.  The founder, the Baal Shem Tov (1698 – 1760), was famous for praying in the forests of his native Ukraine.  A prominent successor, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (1772 – 1810), prayed:

Master of the Universe, grant me the ability to be alone;
may it be my custom to go outdoors each day
among the trees and grass – among all growing things--
and there may I be alone, and enter into prayer
to talk with the One to whom I belong.
May I express there everything in my heart,
and may all the foliage of the field--
all grasses, trees, and plants--
awake at my coming,
to send the powers of their life into the words of my prayer
so that my prayer and speech are made whole
through the life and spirit of all growing things,
which are made as one by their transcendent Source.
May I then pour out the words of my heart
before your Presence like water, O Lord,
and lift up my hands to You in worship,..

That Armstrong would ignore Jewish, vitalist theology is egregious for at least three reasons.  The first is the obvious.  Jewish mysticism lends support to her principle argument in Sacred Nature, but she is not interested.
 
Second, Jewish mysticism was not the exception.  By the eighteenth century, it had won the day.  Not only was it integral to Hasidism, their book-first, philosophically inclined opponents, the Litvaks, also adopted vitalist mysticism into their theology.  Only the Enlightenment enabled a non-mystical Judaism’s return to center-stage in Western, Jewish culture.
 
Third, and this is what really hurts, Armstrong actually mentions Lurianic Kabbalah in her chapter on brokenness.  She describes the “shattering of the vessels” because it fits the needs of that chapter.  Yet, she ignores the “raising of the sparks,” because,… well, I truly wish I knew why.
 
The Book of Job
Lastly, we come to Armstrong’s extended discussion of the Book of Job, which is pertinent because God’s answer to Job out of the whirlwind is a tour of the natural world, specifically, the Judaean desert.
 
The Book of Job is part of the Wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible, designated by scholars as exceptions to the dominant, theological norms in other books.  This is what interests Armstrong.  Considered too important by redactors to leave out of the Bible, Wisdom books such as Ecclesiastes, in particular, implicitly oppose other biblical voices.
 
In the non-historical, mythic story of Job, the criticism is explicit.  Job challenges the human-centered, reward-and-punishment theology of Deuteronomy: good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people and the rain falls when humans act well.  (This is another school of biblical authors: "D" for the last and latest book of the Torah.)  If Job suffers, he must deserve it.  Job rejects this outright.  He insists, correctly says the book's narrator, on his innocence.

The absurdity of Job is that God acts like a human, abrogating fairness to win a bet, and Job acts like God, upright and trustworthy throughout.  But the reason in this mythic tale is clear.  For Job’s opposition to stand, there can be no loopholes.  The arbitrariness of Job’s losses and the unjust behavior of God must be beyond question.

How, then, does Armstrong interpret the description of nature as an answer to Job’s protest?

In Sacred Nature, Armstrong usually praises Eastern traditions for their understanding of nature’s harmony while criticizing the biblical account as Darwinian. In yet another inconsistency, she recognizes the obvious when discussing Job. Sickness, injury, destruction and death are always present in nature and sentient beings inevitably suffer pain.  But humans think that following God's commandments grants them an exception.

Entrenched in his all too human egotism, he [Job] turns his back on the entire cosmos. Why, he demands to know, should a virtuous man suffer? It is a typically anthropocentric question and when God finally responds to Job, he pointedly ignores it (p. 60).    

Armstrong approves of the Book of Job's opposition to the human-centric theology of Deuteronomy.  (As do I.)  Armstrong then takes her praise of nature to another level.

God reveals a cosmic order of staggering beauty in which violence and suffering are essential to the life of all species and also paradoxically, to their glory, because the animals rise so magnificently to these challenges. Instead of repining and lamenting the hardships they endure, they become even more courageous and splendid. Human beings will do well to follow their example. Instead of whining self-indulgently like Job, they must learn that they are not the centre of the world. Their parochial vision is not only blinkered but pusillanimous and wholly inappropriate (p. 60-61).

I appreciate much of Armstrong’s interpretation of Job. Most believe that God’s speech out of the whirlwind is a non-answer to the injustice of Job’s plight.  (Armstrong agrees.)  But whereas almost all the commentators claim that God denies the human ability to understand divine action, Armstrong’s largely original reading shows that God’s nature tour yields a substantive answer, and Job is expected to understand it. Kudos to Karen Armstrong.
 
In the end, however, I must disagree with Armstrong’s conclusions.

She might have echoed Rabbi Robert Gordis's insight which relates directly to the environmental crisis, the main theme of Sacred Nature. In the speech out of the whirlwind, God tells Job in chapter 39:

"Do you watch when the doe bears her fawn?"
"Does the eagle soar at your command?"

As opposed to the domesticated donkey, who carries humankind's heaviest burdens, God declares:

“Who let the wild donkey go free? Who untied its ropes?
I gave it the wasteland as its home, the salt flats as its habitat.
It laughs at the commotion in the town; it does not hear a driver’s shout."

These animals live in the wild, completely independent of human concerns and actions. They cannot perform divine commandments. Yet, God loves and cares for them.  Contra Deuteronomy, all of creation is precious to God, and therefore, creation should be precious to us.

But this would involve citing the Hebrew Bible as a source for a contemporary, environmental ethic. Instead, as we saw above, Armstrong veers from the main argument of the book to offer a gloss on suffering. The animals are “far nobler” (p. 62) in their response to life's travails.

Here, I find her understanding problematic.  She writes as if we really know what animals feel (we don’t), and yet seems oblivious to what we do know in our limited way: animals can be depressed and grief-stricken over loss.  Instead of “lamenting the hardships,” they become “more splendid.”  Really? 
 
More important is Armstrong’s view of human grieving.  It is true: in the face of the loss of a loved one, if one can take comfort in the fact that death is a necessary part of the natural cycle, one is well on the way to healing.
 
But will we chastise people who cannot?  Imagine telling the parent of a child lost in an accident caused by a drunk driver: don’t whine, we, too, are part of nature. Do we really feel the same about a teenager who dies of cancer as a person who perishes at 93?  Are we self-indulgent, wholly inappropriate cowards if we find it depressing and unfair?
 
Am I wrong for experiencing both?  My mother died early from cancer, but I (and she!) did take comfort in the fact that a world with life would not be possible without disease.  As my father died from dementia, I was deeply disturbed by the extent of his suffering. In my theological understanding, God does not decide who gets sick and who wins the lottery. That didn’t stop me from screaming in anger at the God I don’t believe in. 
 
The British are famous for their “carry-on” attitude. I think Armstrong carries it too far.
 
Conclusion 

In all of ancient Near Eastern literature, the Bible is one of the few texts that knows wilderness as a place of majesty, a place where God lets himself be known….Far from rejecting nature, the Hebrews embrace her as a whole, thorns and all.
 
[To the ancient Israelites] God is not outside nature so much as unfathomably deep within it: the essence of nature.

I bring these quotes from Evan Eisenberg’s, The Mountain and the Tower (pp. 129, 133), to show that learned, sensitive readers of the Hebrew Bible have reached near opposite conclusions to Armstrong’s reading.
 
Another example is the beloved Abraham Joshua Heschel, who many consider the leading Jewish thinker of the previous generation.  His magnum opus, God in Search of Man, contains chapters on wonder and awe.  The latter concludes:

Awe precedes faith; it is at the root of faith.  We must grow in awe in order to reach faith.  We must be guided by awe to be worthy of faith.  Awe rather than faith is the cardinal attitude of the religious Jew (p. 77, italics in the original).

Though there is some debate, Heschel is not considered a mystic and he is certainly not a vitalist.  Yet, when he reads the Hebrew Bible, the natural world is a critical gateway to God (and the moral nature of holiness).
 
The leading liberal, theological thinker of this generation, Heschel's student Arthur Green, is indeed a mystic.  He frames his mature theology (Radical Judaism) around confronting the environmental crisis.  His presentation of Judaism centers on the human relation to the planet.
 
I could mention many more.  My own theology centers on the thought of Martin Buber, whose first example of I-Thou relationship in his classic, I and Thou, is with a tree.
 
One need not read the Hebrew Bible and later Judaism as anti-nature.
 
Let me acknowledge that Armstrong has support for her interpretation of the Hebrew Bible among some scholars.  She footnotes Stephen A. Geller, who concludes his article on Job with the following:

Indeed, there is something heroic, sublime in itself, in the author’s struggle to save Old Wisdom’s fascination with nature by employing his great art, at a time when nature was being ousted from biblical religion…It has kept this lowly position in Western religion to this day…Nature was not restored…to centrality [in European culture] until the revival of the concept of the sublime and the nature worship of the Romantic movement.[4]

I think Geller overstates his case re: the Hebrew Bible, under-appreciates the theological role of nature in Jewish mysticism, and ignores the moral issues involved when nature qua nature is taken as an ethical authority in nature-first theologies.  (Do we want the Romantics as moral role-models?  To be fair, he was not commenting on ethics or the sources of our environmental crises.)  Again, I don’t have an issue with Armstrong choosing a side in a debate.  But I have a lot of trouble with presenting malicious opinions about Judaism in a popular book, relying on contentious, academic scholarship without a whiff of fairness towards the other side.  Apparently based on Geller, perhaps other scholars as well, Armstrong feels justified in writing about the Book of Job, "For the first and only time in the Bible, we see that nature has its own intrinsic value, power, integrity and beauty" (p. 61).
 
Factually, of course, this isn’t true. The Psalms and Song of Songs speak otherwise.  In the Torah, God appears through fire, trees and mountains. The land has agency in the Hebrew Bible.  People are vomited by the land for committing incest.  Later prophetic writing attributes the exile to Babylonia to Israelite abuse of the land by violating the Sabbatical prohibitions.  Armstrong’s habit of making sweeping generalizations is once again unwarranted. 
 
But more disturbing is her need to discredit the religious traditions of her own culture, Christianity and Judaism, mostly by uncritically glorifying all the others.  I agree with Armstrong: there are (usually conservative, fundamentalist) streams of contemporary Jewish and Christian thought that need to be called out for their part in deepening the climate crisis.  But I am confident in saying that to one degree or another, the same is true for every other tradition she presents. 
 
Personally, I find that Armstrong’s pick-and-choose-what-I-like-from-the-past-for-present-day-purposes, presented as historical scholarship, hurts her case.  After seeing the simplicity and inconsistency with which she treats Judaism, I have no reason to trust her presentation of any other tradition. 
 
For her typical reader, however, Armstrong is authoritative.  And for those of us who want to address the climate crisis, her values and her project, Sacred Nature, are praiseworthy.  All of which makes the book extremely frustrating!  I want to be, I should be, on the same team as Karen Armstrong!
 
Perhaps a blurb from the book’s cover offers insight.

In over a dozen books [Armstrong] has delivered something people badly want: a way to acknowledge that faith can be taken seriously as a response to deep human yearning without needing to subscribe to the formality of organized belief. —The Economist

Armstrong writes for spiritual-not-religious people, especially “recovering” Catholics and Evangelicals.  All kinds of Christians from across the theological spectrum are toiling to move Christianity towards a right relationship with the earth.  But the Christianity of her youth is still the object of her enmity.  I can’t blame her.  Conservative fundamentalism, much of it still against confronting the climate crisis, plays a dominant role in today’s Christian community. 
 
As a theological liberal, I agree with most of the anti-fundamentalist critique of Christianity, and I apply it as well to conservative, fundamentalism in Judaism and Islam.  But in Sacred Nature, Armstrong mainly sees the parts of Judaism complicit in the type of religion she disparages, which blinds her to Judaism’s competing voices and prevents her from treating Judaism like the other traditions presented.
 
There is no need to criticize the Jewish take on God (which never existed) in the Hebrew Bible as disconnected from the earth, creating an enemy out of a person like me.  Rather, there is a need to treat every spiritual/religious tradition as multi-voiced, and recognize (as Armstrong usually does in Sacred Nature) that each tradition has resources to contribute to a proper theology or metaphysics for our time (as does, I would add, conservative, Western fundamentalism).  I think the argument from vitalism to environmental responsibility is correct and holds great potential for millions of people.  I also think that we need people with other theologies to come up with their own justifications to ensure the livability of the planet.  Sacred Nature is a challenge for all of us to do so.  For that, I am thankful.
 
Still, Armstrong owes her Jewish friends an apology.
 


[1] Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, translated by M. Friedlander (1956: Dover Publications, NY), p. 274.
 

[2] www.blackwell-synergy.com from Religion Compass 1/1 (2007): 61–92.
 

[3] "…this story [Genesis 1] is very different from the other cosmologies we have discussed, where creation is not attributed to an extrinsic divine power but understood as a dynamic force working tirelessly and subtly within everything.  Elsewhere people contemplated the cosmos in which every being—human, animal, vegetable, mineral—participated harmoniously in a mysterious self-generating process. Instead of a Darwinian nature red in tooth and claw, the result of endless competition for dominance, we encounter a never-ending Kenosis in which everything creatively and spontaneously 'yields' to one another" (p. 90).

[4] Judaism and Ecology, ed. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, p. 130.