A battle rages in our culture between fundamentalists and atheists, who pit religion and the Bible against science and evolution. Contemporary theologian and scholar of Jewish mysticism, Rabbi Arthur Green, PhD, explores a third way: understanding evolution as divine revelation—a sacred story capable of grounding a vibrant, eco-friendly Judaism for the 21st century.

Rabbi Arthur Green, PhD, a nationally recognized historian of Jewish religion and a theologian, is the founding dean of the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College and now serves as its rector. He has lectured widely and taught Jewish mysticism, Hasidism and theology to several generations of students at the University of Pennsylvania; the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, where he served as both dean and president; Brandeis University; and Hebrew College. Green is the founder of Havurat Shalom, an egalitarian Jewish community in Somerville, Mass., and remains a leading independent figure in the Jewish renewal movement. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books; his most recent is Speaking Torah: Spiritual Teachings From Around the Maggid's Table (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2013).  For a full treatment of the ideas expressed in this video, see his Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition (Yale University Press, 2010).

​Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition
by Arthur Green
Yale University Press, pp. 16-27

​Y-H-W-H: GOD AND BEING

​In the Beginning
I open with a theological assertion. As a religious person I believe that the evolution of species is the greatest sacred drama of all time. It is a tale — perhaps even the tale — in which the divine waits to be discovered. It dwarfs all the other narratives, memories, and images that so preoccupy the mind of religious traditions, including our own. We Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all overinvolved with proclaiming — or questioning — the truth of our own particular stories. Did Moses really receive the Torah from God at Mount Sinai? Did Jesus truly rise from the tomb? Was Muhammad indeed God’s chosen messenger? We refine our debates about these forever, each group certain that its own narrative is at the center of universal history. In the modern world, where all these tales are challenged, we work out sophisticated and nonliteralist ways of proclaiming our faith in them. But there is a bigger story, infinitely bigger, and one that we all share. How did we get here, we humans, and where are we going? For more than a century and a half, educated Westerners have understood that this is the tale of evolution. But we religious folk, the great tale-tellers of our respective traditions, have been guarded and cool toward this story and have hesitated to make it our own. The time has come to embrace it and to uncover its sacred dimensions.

I believe that “Creation,” or perhaps more neutrally stated, “origins,” a topic almost entirely neglected in both Jewish and liberal Christian theology of the past century, must return as a central preoccupation in our own day. This indeed has much to do with the ecological agenda and the key role that religion needs to play in changing our attitudes toward the world within which we humans live.1 But it also emerges from our society’s growing acceptance of scientific explanations — those of the nuclear physicist, the geologist, the evolutionary biologist, and others — for the origins of the world we have inherited. The finality of this acceptance, which I share, seemingly means the end of a long struggle between so-called scientific and religious worldviews. This leaves those of us who speak the language of faith in a peculiar situation. Is there then no connection between the God we know and encounter daily within all existence and the emergence and history of our universe? Does the presence of eternity we feel (whether we call ourselves “believers” or not) when we stand atop great mountains or at the ocean water’s edge exist only within our minds? Is our faith nothing more than one of those big mollusk shells we used to put up against our ears, convinced we could hear in them the ocean’s roar? Is our certainty of divine presence, so palpable to the religious soul, merely a poetic affirmation, corresponding to nothing in the reality described by science? We accept the scientific account of how we got here, or at least understand that the conversation about that process and its stages lies within the domain of science. Yet we cannot absent God from it entirely. Even if we have left behind the God of childhood, the One who assures and guarantees “fairness” in life, the presence of divinity within nature remains essential to our perception of reality. A God who has no place in the process of “how we got here” is a God who begins in the human mind, a mere idea of God, a post-Kantian construct created to guarantee morality, to assure us of the potential for human goodness, or for some other noble purpose. But that is not God. The One of which I speak here indeed goes back to origins and stands prior to them, though perhaps not in a clearly temporal sense.2 A God who underlies all being, who is and dwells within (rather than “who controls” or “oversees”) the evolutionary process is the One about which — or about “Whom” — we tell the great sacred tale, the story of existence.

I thus insist on the centrality of “Creation,” but I do so from the position of one who is not quite a theist, as understood in the classical Western sense. I do not affirm a Being or a Mind that exists separate from the universe and acts upon it intelligently and willfully. This puts me quite far from the contemporary “creationists” or from what is usually understood as “intelligent design” (but see more on this below). My theological position is that of a mystical panentheist, one who believes that God is present throughout all of existence, that Being or Y-H-W-H underlies and unifies all that is.3 At the same time (and this is panentheism as distinct from pantheism), this whole is mysteriously and infinitely greater than the sum of its parts, and cannot be fully known or reduced to its constituent beings.4 “Transcendence” in the context of such a faith does not refer to a God “out there” or “over there” somewhere beyond the universe, since I do not know the existence of such a “there.” Transcendence means rather that God — or Being — is so fully present in the here and now of each moment that we could not possibly grasp the depth of that presence. Transcendence thus dwells within immanence. There is no ultimate duality here, no “God and world,” no “God, world, and self,” only one Being and its many faces. Those who seek consciousness of it come to know that it is indeed eyn sof, without end. There is no end to its unimaginable depth, but so too there is no border, no limit, separating that unfathomable One from anything that is. Infinite Being in every instant flows through all finite beings. “Know this day and set it upon your heart that Y-H-W-H is elohim” (Deut. 4:39) —that God within you is the transcendent.5 And the verse concludes: “There is nothing else.”

By mystical panentheism I mean that this underlying oneness of being is accessible to human experience and reveals itself to humans — indeed, it reveals itself everywhere, always — as the deeper levels of the human mind become open to it. Access to it requires a lifting of veils, a shifting of attention to those inner realms of human consciousness where mystics, and not a few poets, have always chosen to abide. The “radical otherness” of God, so insisted upon by Western theology, is not an ontological otherness but an otherness of perspective. To open one’s eyes to God is to see Being — the only Being there is — in a radically different way. Such a unitive view of reality is entirely other (ganz andere, in theological German) from the way we usually see things, yet it is the same reality that is being viewed. I am also one who knows that religious truth belongs to the language of poetry, not discursive prose. I recognize fully and without regret that theology is an art, not a science. We people of faith have nothing we can prove; attempts to do so only diminish what we have to offer. We can only testify, never prove. Our strength lies in grandeur of vision, in an ability to transport the conversation about existence and origins to a deeper plane of thinking. My faith, but also my human experience, tells me that this shift profoundly enhances our understanding of our own lives and of the world in which we live. Opening our minds, and ultimately the mind of our society, to the truth accessible from that inner “place” constitutes our best hope for inspiring change in the way we live on this earth. There is nothing mere about poetic vision.

This point in the discussion calls for a greater clarification of the terms “One,” “Being,” and “God,” which I now appear to be using quite interchangeably. Am I speaking of a “what” or a “who,” the reader has a right to ask. Let me answer clearly. When I refer to “God,” I mean the inner force of existence itself, that of which one might say: “Being is.” I refer to it as the “One” because it is the single unifying substratum of all that is. To speak of Being as a religious person, however, is to speak of it not detachedly, in scientific “objectivity,” but rather with full engagement of the self, in love and awe.6 These two great emotions together characterize the religious mind and, when carried to their fullest, make for our sense of the holy. A religious person is one who perceives or experiences holiness in the encounter with existence; the forms of religious life are intended to evoke this sense of the holy. In a mental state that cannot be fully described in words, such a person hears Being say: “I am.” All of our personifications of the One are in response to that inner “hearing.”

In biblical language, the “I am” of Sinai is already there behind the first “Let there be” of Genesis.7 Creation is revelation, as the Kabbalists understood so well. To say it in more neutral terms, we religious types personify Being because we see ourselves as living in relationship to the underlying One. I seek to respond to the “I am” that I have been privileged to hear, to place myself at its service in carrying forth this great mission of the evolving life process. To do so, I choose to personify, to call Being by this ancient name “God.”8 In doing this, I am proclaiming my love and devotion to Being, my readiness to live a life of seeking and responding to its truth. But implied here is also a faith that in some mysterious way Being loves me, that it rejoices for a fleeting instant in dwelling within me, delighting in this unique form that constitutes my existence, as it delights in each of its endlessly diverse manifestations.

Creation: Reframing the Tale
With regard to “Creation,” I understand the task of the theologian to be one of reframing, accepting the accounts of origins and natural history offered by the scientific consensus, but helping us to view them in a different way, one that may guide us toward a more profound appreciation of that same reality. The tale of life’s origins and development, including its essential building block of natural selection, is well known to us as moderns. But what would it mean to recount that tale with our eyes truly open?

We would understand the entire course of evolution, from the simplest life forms millions of years ago, to the great complexity of the human brain (still now only barely understood), and proceeding onward into the unknown future, to be a meaningful process. There is a One that is ever revealing itself to us within and behind the great diversity of life. That One is Being itself, the constant in the endlessly changing evolutionary parade. Viewed from our end of the process, the search that leads to discovery of that One is our human quest for meaning. But turned around, seen from the perspective of the constantly evolving life energy, evolution can be seen as an ongoing process of revelation or self-manifestation. We discover; it reveals. It reveals; we discover. As the human mind advances (from our point of view), understanding more of the structure, process, and history of the ever-evolving One, we are being given (from its point of view) ever-greater insight into who we are and how we got here.

This ongoing self-disclosure is the result of a deep and mysterious inner drive, the force of Being directed from within, however imperfectly and stumblingly, to manifest itself ever more fully, in ever more diverse, complex, and interesting ways. That has caused it to bring about, in the long and slow course of its evolution, the emergence of a mind that can reflect upon the process, articulate it, and strive toward the life of complete awareness that will fulfill its purpose. Here on this smallish planet in the middle of an otherwise undistinguished galaxy, something so astonishing has taken place that it indeed demands to be called by the biblical term “miracle,” rather than by the Greco-Latin “nature,” even though the two are pointing to the exact same set of facts. The descendants of one-celled creatures grew and developed, emerged onto dry land, learned survival skills, developed language and thought, until a subset of them could reflect on the nature of this entire process and seek to derive meaning from it.

The coming to be of “higher” or more complex forms of life, and eventually of humanity, is not brought about by the specific and conscious planning of what is sometimes called “intelligent design.” But neither is it random and therefore inherently without meaning. It is rather the result of an inbuilt movement within the whole of being, the underlying dynamis of existence striving to be manifest ever more fully in minds that it brings forth and inhabits, through the emergence of increasingly complex and reflective selves. I think of that underlying One in immanent terms, a Being or life force that dwells within the universe and all its forms, rather than a Creator from beyond who forms a world that is “other” and separate from its own Self. This One — the only One that truly is — lies within and behind all the diverse forms of being that have existed since the beginning of time; it is the single Being (as the Hebrew name Y-H-W-H indicates)9 clothed in each individual being and encompassing them all.10

If we could learn to view our biohistory this way, the incredible grandeur of the evolutionary journey would immediately unfold before us. We Jews revere the memory of one Nahshon ben Aminadav, the first person to step into the Sea of Reeds after Israel left Egypt. The sea did not split, the story goes, until he was up to his neck in water. What courage! But what about the courage of the first creature ever to emerge from sea onto dry land? Do we appreciate the magnificence of that moment? Or the first to fly, to take wing into the air? Or the moment (of course each of these is a long, slow process rather than a “moment,” but the drama is no less great) when animals were divided from plants, when one sort of being was able take nourishment directly from the soil while another was able to exist without this form of nourishment, developing the mechanism to “feed” on plant, and then animal, life. How is it possible, with all of them descending from the same single-celled creatures?

The incredibly complex interplay of forces and the thick web of mutual dependency among beings are no less amazing than the distance traversed in this long evolutionary journey. The interrelationships between soil, plants, and insects, or those between climate, foliage, and animal life, all leave us breathless as we begin to contemplate them. It is these very intricacies and complexities that have led the religious fundamentalists to hold fast to the claim that there must be a greater intelligence behind it all, that such complexity can only reflect the planning of a supernatural Mind. But they miss the point of the religious moment here. Our task as religious persons is not to offer counterscientific explanations for the origin of life. Our task is to notice, to pay attention to, the incredible wonder of it all, and to find God in that moment of paying attention.

There is indeed something “supernatural” about existence, something entirely out of the ordinary, beyond any easy expectation. But I understand the “supernatural” to reside wholly within the “natural.”11 The difference between them is one of perception, the degree to which our “inner eye” is open. The whole journey is a supernatural one, not because some outside Being made it happen but because Being itself, residing in those simplest and most ancient of life-forms, pushing ever forward, step after simple step, to reach where we are today, continues to elude our complete understanding. The emergence of both bees and blossoms, and the relationship between them, took place over millions of years, step by evolutionary step. How could that have happened? There is an endless ingenuity to this self-manifesting Being, an endless stream of creativity of which we are only the tiniest part. If we do not destroy or do too much irreversible damage to our planet, it will continue to bring forth ever more diverse and creative manifestations long after we are gone.

The poetic reframing of our contemporary tale of origins that I am proposing here might be better understood by reference to a prior example, one with which we happen to have an intimate bond. I refer to the opening chapter of the Hebrew Bible. The authors of Genesis 1 effected a remarkable transformation of the creation myth that existed in their day. The common theology of the ancient Near East, reflected in both Canaanite and Mesopotamian sources, featured the rising up of the primal forces of chaos, represented by Yam and Tiamat, gods of the sea, against the order being imposed by the younger but more powerful sky gods. The defeat of that primordial rebellion was the background of Creation; earth was established upon the carcasses of the vanquished. That tale of uprising and its bloody end, now largely forgotten, was well known to the biblical writers and their audiences.12 It is reflected in various passages in the prophets, Psalms, and Job, and is subtly hinted at even within the Genesis narrative. But those who wrote Genesis 1 reframed the story completely. Everything was created in harmony, willfully, by a single God who kept saying: “Good! Good!” in response to His creations, giving His blessing to each.

That reshaped tale helped to form and sustain Western civilization for several thousand years. The faith that God loves and affirms Creation provides the moral undergirding for all of Western religion, manifest differently in each of the three dominant faiths. Some believed it naively and literally; others interpreted it and tried to reconcile it with various other ways of thinking. I am suggesting that we need to undertake a similar effort of transformation for our current “Creation” story. Our civilization has been transformed in the past century and a half in no small part by our acceptance of a new series of tales of origin, an account that begins with the Big Bang (which itself may turn out to be myth) and proceeds through the long saga of the origins of our solar system, the geohistory of our planet, the emergence of life, and biological evolution. Nuclear physicists and cosmologists have become the new Kabbalists of our age, speculating in ever more refined ways on the first few seconds of existence much as our mystical sages meditated on the highest triad of the ten divine emanations. The picture that science offers is one of unimaginably violent explosion, of particles hurtling through indescribably vast reaches of space, and only then of the emergence of an order —solar systems, gravity, orbits, air, and water — that makes for the possibility of life’s existence.13 As living things emerge and develop we are again presented with a tale of violent and bloody struggle, that of each species and creature to eat and not be eaten, to strive for its moment at the top of the evolutionary mound of corpses. This story too, I am suggesting, is in need of reformulation by a new and powerful harmonistic vision, one that will allow even the weakest and most threatened of creatures a legitimate place in this world and will call upon us not to wipe it out by careless whim. This is the role of today’s religion.

How would such a reframed tale read? It would be a narrative of the great reaching out by the inner One that inhabits each of us and binds us all together, a constant stretching forth of Y-H-W-H (“Being”) in the endless adventure of becoming HWYH (Hebrew for “being” or “existence”), or of the One garbing itself in the multicolored garment of diversity and multiplicity. Every creature and each cell within it would be viewed as part of this tale, a mini-adventure within the infinitely complex narrative web that embraces us all. The meaning of this great journey would remain quite mysterious, but with a glimmer of hope that somewhere in the distant future “we” might figure it all out. The evolutionary movement forward would be seen as a striving toward complexity, toward ever-thicker and ever-richer patterns of self-manifestation.

Does this One know where it is going? Here I come trickily close to, yet remain distinct from, the advocates of intelligent design as they are usually understood. On the one hand, I do not attribute humanlike consciousness to the One. There is no “plan” of Creation, no sense that humans are the apex or final goal of the process. I do not believe that the complexity or intricacy of the natural order is evidence of such design. As I said, we religious folk have no evidence, only testimony. Any attempt to claim otherwise only confuses the picture. On the other hand, however, it is fair to say that all mind and all consciousness ever to exist are part of the One. Mystics have always understood that this One transcends time, as the name Y-H-W-H itself indicates. All minds are thus one with Mind, as all beings are contained within Being. In this sense we can say that the fullness of Being’s self-manifestation, including our understanding of it, is there from the start, not in the sense of active or intentional foreknowledge, but as potential that is ever unfolding. The One “knows” all because the One is all, all that ever was, is, and will be, in an undivided Self.

The reader who is aware of Jewish mystical language will understand that I am rereading contemporary evolutionary theory in the light of Kabbalistic thought. Kabbalah understands all of existence as eternally pouring forth from hokhmah, primordial Wisdom or Mind. Hokhmah is the primal point of existence, symbolized by the Hebrew letter yod, which is itself hardly more than a dot. This point, infinitesimally small, is the proverbial “little that contains a lot.” Within it lies the entire unfolding of existence, every stage in the evolutionary journey, every plant and animal as it will live, reproduce (or not), and die, all of humanity and all that lies beyond us in the distant future. All this exists in a literal sense of potential (meaning that its potency, its power, is all fully present) in that primal point. In our contemporary language, that point is the instant of the Big Bang, the moment that contains the energy of existence in all its intensity. From there it flows forward into existence, garbing or “actualizing” itself at each stage in endless forms of existence.

To say this in another way, also derived from Kabbalistic language, I am depicting the entire course of evolution as the infinitely varied self-garbing of an endless energy flow All being exists in an eternal dialectic of hitpashtut, the emanatory flowing forth of that single energy, and hitlabbeshut, the garbing of that energy in distinctive forms. But now we add an important post-Darwinian caveat to that mystical view of existence. The only means this One has in this process of self-manifestation are those of natural selection and its resulting patterns of change and growth. It is nature (yes, “nature” could be another name for that which I have called “God,” “the One,” and “Being”). Hence the length and slowness of the journey. But precisely in this lies the utterly marvelous nature of what has come forth, step after single step. To see that process with the eye of wonder is the starting point of religious awareness.

As more highly developed forms of animal life emerge, the forward movement of natural selection takes place partly in the form of aggression and competition, each creature and species grasping at its chance to survive and prosper. The competition for food and other resources, the devices created by males and females of various species to attract mates and reproduce, the struggle to find and eat one’s prey rather than be consumed by one’s predators, are all essential parts of the story — indeed, our story. This is an aspect of our biological legacy that we need to own and confront. We cannot understand our own human nature without taking into account the fierce struggle we underwent to arrive, and to achieve the dominance we have over this planet, for better and worse. But that same mysterious inner process also brings about more cooperative forms of societal organization, in which such creatures as ants, bees, and humans learn to work together toward fulfilling their species’ goals. All of this is part of our biological legacy. Indeed, it is in grasping how these two trends, the competitive and the collaborative, combine and interact that we come to understand how our species survives. This should be a source of significant insight into the human condition. Once we achieve this understanding, we can make the value decisions as to which aspects of that biological heritage we want to take the lead as we proceed with our lives, both as individuals and as a species.

But it would also be disingenuous of me as a human to say that the emergence of human consciousness, even the ability to be thinking and writing about these very matters, is nothing more than a small series of steps in the unfolding linear process wrought by natural selection. That is indeed how we came about. But there is a different meaning to human existence that cannot be denied. The self-reflective consciousness of humans, combined with our ability to take a long biohistorical view of the whole unfolding that lies behind (and ahead of) us, makes a difference. All creatures are doing the “work of God” by existing, feeding, reproducing, and moving the evolutionary process forward. But we humans, especially today, are called upon to do that work in a different way. We have emerged as partners of the One in the survival and maintenance of this planet and all the precious attainments that have evolved here. Without our help, it will not continue to thrive. Being has thus turned a corner, or come back in a self-reflexive circle, as it manifests itself in the human mind.

 
Notes

1. In the background here are such works as Thomas Berry’s The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1988); Berry and Brian Swimme’s The Universe Story (San Francisco: Harper, 1992); and E. O. Wilson’s The Creation (New York: Norton, 2006).

2. I have discussed this nontemporal sense of priority briefly in Seek My Face: A Jewish Mystical Theology (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2003), pp. 55f. The point is that the One underlies the many then, now, and forever. This underlying is the true nature of its priority in the mystical context, one which is converted into temporality as mystical insight comes to be expressed in mythic narrative (since stories require a “before” and “after”). The contemporary Midrashist might see this hinted at in the syntactical awkwardness of bereshit bara’.

3. The relationship of “being” and “Being” in English is roughly comparable to that of HaWaYaH (“existence”) and Y-H-W-H (its consonantal equivalent, rearranged) in Hebrew.

4. This puts me in the camp, as Hillel Zeitlin would have said, of the Ba’al Shem Tov’s pantheism, as distinguished from Spinoza’s. The distinction between these was key to Zeitlin’s return to Judaism and the starting point of his neo-Hasidic philosophy. See his remarks in Barukh Spinoza (Warsaw: Tushiya, 1914), pp. i35ff, as well as in Di Benkshaft nokh Sheynheyt (Warsaw: Velt-Bibliotek, 1910), pp. 34f.

5. I intentionally quote the verse around which Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi wove his essential mystical treatise Sha’ar ha-Tihud veha-Emunah (the second part of Tanya), to indicate the strong Hasidic roots of the theology I am articulating here.

6. Love and awe (ahavah ve-yir’ah, dehilo u-rehimo) are taken by the Jewish ethical literature to be the twin pillars of religious emotion, ever to be kept in balance with one another. For the Kabbalist they represent the proper human embodiments of hesed and din, the right and left hands of the cosmic Self. Classic treatments include Meir Ibn Gabbai’s ‘Avodat ha-Qodesh (Venice, 1567), 1:25-28, and (much expanded) Elijah Da Vidas, Reshit Hokhmah (Venice, 1579). In this matter I find myself wholly within the classical tradition.

7. In the idiom of Midrash, the hidden aleph of ‘anokhi lies behind the dualizing bet of bereshit. See my discussion in “The Aleph-Bet of Creation: Jewish Mysticism for Beginners,” Tikkun 7:4 (1992).

8. The reader may properly hear an echo of Martin Buber’s words in Eclipse of God (New York: Harper and Row, 1952), pp. 7ff. I too recognize the difficulty in continuing to use this word, alongside the impossibility of doing without it.

9. My discussion of this theological viewpoint, including its roots in an understanding of the divine name, begins in my book Seek My Face.

10. Among the rabbinic phrases that leap to mind here are ke-haden qumtsa’ di-levushey minney u-veyh (“like the locust, whose garbing comes forth from his own self” [Midrash Bereshit Rabbah 21:5]) and hu meqomo shel ‘olam ve-eyn ha-’olam meqomo (“He is the ‘place’ of the world; the world is not His place” [Bereshit Rabbah 68:10]).

11. The presence of the miraculous within the natural has a long history in Jewish theological conversation. Some key prior participants in this conversation are Nahmanides, the MaHaRaL of Prague, and Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev.

12. Jonathan Day, God’s Conflict with the Dragon and the Sea: Echoes of a Canaanite Myth in the Old Testament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For the presence and survival of this theme in later Judaism, see Michael Fishbane’s “The Great Dragon Battle and Talmudic Redaction,” in his The Exegetical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 41-55.

13. Parallel structures of thought in Kabbalah and astrophysics have been noted by several writers, including Daniel Matt, God and the Big Bang (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1996); David Nelson, Judaism, Physics, and God (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2005); and Howard Smith, Let There Be Light: Modern Cosmology and Kabbalah (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2006).

Excerpts from Radical Judaism, Rethinking God and Tradition by Arthur Green, Yale University Press

Radical Judaism is available at

Yale University Press, Amazon and Barnes and Noble

As a rabbi and Israeli desert guide, I am very aware of how the natural world is portrayed in classic Western theology, a theology that crystallized in the Middle Ages and shapes the minds of many to this day. Much of it understands nature, particularly the desert, as utterly indifferent to humans. In the deserted wasteland, you likely feel thirsty, abandoned and anxious.  The world is dangerous and against you, and that explains its religious significance. When the world won’t help you, you turn to God. When the world won’t provide for you, you recognize your dependence on God. In this reading, the Israelites forty years in the Sinai desert were much more than a punishment over the failed mission of the spies. The desert—nature at its extreme—is really a theological training ground, where the Israelites learned the proper relationship to God.

The desert is indeed an optimal place to grow closer to God, and for some, it no doubt happens in the ways described above. But I am more troubled than enlightened by this viewpoint, and not only because it reflects the stereotypes of city-dwellers who imagine the desert as a lifeless wasteland of endless sand dunes. In reality, plants and animals thrive in most deserts, though they must be “wiser,” (i.e., evolve special biological and behavioral survival mechanisms) and work harder than their cousins in wetter environments.

The real damage is in the theological world-view it presupposes. God and the world are separate, and ultimately, in competition. Those who see any divinity in nature are idolaters. God acts through nature by bringing, for instance, the rains that avert famine, or striking down sinners with a flood. Nature is a tool, sometimes a weapon. God is above and behind the natural world, but not in it.

This kind of theological thinking creates many problems, including theodicy, the intractable question of why “bad things happen to good people.” But also assumed is the belief that nature’s purposes are different than God’s purposes. The world beyond civilization, despite the Bible’s claims to the contrary, is neither moral nor immoral. The natural world is just there, the stage for the only really important story: the divine/human drama. Nature has no purpose in and of itself. It is a prop and a foil.

Those who hold this human-centric, hierarchal world-view usually assume a Greek inspired spirit-mind/matter-body dualism as well—a dualistic way of thinking that can, and often is, used to denigrate the earth. This world is the place of temptation and sin. Nature and our bodies, the material reality of this life, are devalued in favor of a utopian, abstract notion of the afterlife. Religion, when practiced from this take on reality, centers on the world-to-come rather than this world, and that has often led people to focus on escaping this world rather than repairing it.

Enter Arthur Green.

In Green’s contemporary interpretation of Jewish mysticism, God is not to be discovered behind or above nature. God is in nature, just the way a kabbalist (a Jewish mystic) would describe the relationship between God and a human being. Since God is in everything, or more accurately, everything is in God, one can encounter God externally, but often the most fruitful place to look is within, in our hearts and souls. Human purposes, when we are at our best, are an extension of God’s purposes, and while we are not identical with God, we are hardly separate or indifferent. For panentheists, the same is true of all creation.

To my mind, Arthur Green is the most innovative American Jewish theological thinker in the last two decades, and Bradley Artson is the most compelling American Jewish theological thinker in the last few years. Both Artson, through Process Theology, and Green, through Jewish mysticism, insist on ending the divorce between theology and science that has characterized modern times. It is no coincidence that both champion this point. For if God is in nature, science is not a threat to theology. Rather, it is (indeed, science must be) a rich source of religious insight and wisdom.

Here is Green’s argument:
​

God cannot be understood as acting on or behind nature, but only within the evolutionary drama itself. Indeed, the story of the universe is so central to Green’s thinking that he proclaims in the first paragraph of Radical Judaism:
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Why is Green’s non-dualistic, evolutionary thinking important?

For those of us who experience the sacred in the natural world, understanding God to be in nature is critical. I feel most spiritual in wilderness, in what should be according to dualistic thinking, the most material and ungodly of places. As particle physics, neuroscience and medicine show, the spirit-mind/matter-body divide is bogus, and theological thinking must catch up or forfeit its fidelity to truth. If God manifests in all of creation, religion that ignores science—the most successful and in many areas our most compelling source of knowledge and truth about the universe—is religion that is at best, watered down, and at worst, irrelevant.

Another reason to follow Green’s lead is the ethical implications of his thought. One can certainly be a spirit/matter dualist and care deeply about the earth. Witness many Christian fundamentalists, New Age spiritualists and followers of dualistic Eastern philosophies who advocate for a sustainable society. But one can just as easily invoke dualism to “desacralize” the natural world and justify the kind of thinking behind our current environmental crisis. Historically, that has been the dominant view and, in many places, continues unabated.

Would it not be better to embrace a theological/ethical world-view where trashing the earth is not an option? In our time, writes Green, the urgent, ethical task of authentic religion is to present the stories, the poetry, the ethics and the ideals—the building blocks of a world-view—that see human enterprise in sustainable harmony with the planet that enables and nurtures it. Not everyone agrees. That must change if religion is to be relevant as part of the solution rather than the problem and we humans are to thrive for generations to come.

I know of no spiritual path where greed and power for greed and power’s sake are promoted. I know of no religion where the prohibition on murder is optional. For a religion to be considered true and wise, certain things are universally recognized.
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We live in an unsustainable civilization. Our grandchildren’s world, perhaps our children’s, hangs in the balance. One day, I pray, spiritual/faithful/religious people will take it for granted that we honor the earth and respect its inhabitants in the same way we honor our mothers and our fathers and respect other people.

Arthur Green’s prophetic vision shows how Judaism can and should contribute to this holy task. And when you see the world as he sees it, like any of God’s moral commandments, it’s not optional.

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Radical Judaism is available at Yale University Press, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

You are welcome to reprint this article if you include the following by-line:
Rabbi Mike Comins is Founding Director of the TorahTrek Center for Jewish Wilderness Spirituality (www.TorahTrek.org) and author of Making Prayer Real: Leading Jewish Spiritual Voices on Why Prayer is Difficult and What to Do about It (Jewish Lights Publishing; www.MakingPrayerReal.com) and A Wild Faith: Jewish Ways into Wilderness, Wilderness Ways into Judaism (Jewish Lights Publishing; www.AWildFaith.com).

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Rabbi Arthur Waskow teaches about the organic connection between humanity and the earth in Judaism, and the Jewish roots of environmental justice.
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Rabbi Waskow founded and directs The Shalom Center, a prophetic voice in Jewish, multireligious, and American life that brings Jewish and other spiritual thought and practice to bear on seeking peace, pursuing justice, healing the earth, and celebrating community. Since the late 60's, Rabbi Waskow has been one of the leading creators of theory, practice, and institutions for the movement for Jewish renewal. Among his seminal works:

• The Freedom Seder (1969), the first Haggadah for Passover to intertwine the archetypal liberation of the Jewish people form slavery in Mitzrayyim with the modern liberation struggles not only of the Jewish people, but also the Black community in America and other peoples.
• Godwrestling (Schocken, 1978), an examination of new ways of interpreting Torah and applying it to contemporary issues.
• These Holy Sparks: The Rebirth of the Jewish People (Harper and Row, 1983), a study of the history and meaning of the Jewish renewal movement in North America.
• Seasons of Our Joy (Bantam, 1982, Summit, 1985; Beacon, 1990 and 1991), a history of the development of the Jewish festivals; a pioneering reinterpretation of their meaning in the cycles of earth, sun, and moon; a guide to the festivals as steps in a spiritual journey; and a practical handbook for observing them today.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes that "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal" and that "observed changes are unprecedented." It's time to act now, writes Rabbi Mike Comins.


Last week the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its fifth report on global climate change. (See full report here.) A total of 209 Lead Authors and 50 Review Editors from 39 countries and more than 600 Contributing Authors from 32 countries took part.  Their conclusion: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.”  Climate change is real.  The reports findings are conservative; they have omitted the most extreme predictions and the research has all been peer-reviewed.  

Our featured teacher, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, has been leading the way on climate change for years through the work of his organization, The Shalom Center.  If you haven’t already, it is time to join him, and Bill McKibben’s 350.org, to help move our society into a sustainable relationship with the earth.

Global temperatures have risen less than predicted in the last fifteen years, a good thing.  Hopefully, we have more time to reverse the trend.  But skeptics take this fact out of context, wishfully thinking that we can radically change the composition of the atmosphere without consequences, or that humans are powerless to effect climate change.  That’s why the report’s conclusion is not only that the temperature is rising, but that humans are the main factor behind it. “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.” 

The earth, as the research around James Lovelock’s Gaia hypotheses indicates, is a living organism.  There are likely compensatory mechanisms at work that we do not understand today.  Early climate models were thwarted when increasing heat led to more clouds which reflected sunlight back into space.  But global warming continues.  The report claims that the current slowdown is temporary, and theorizes as to the causes.  The overall trend is clear.

Critics like to ignore that global warming does not progress in a linear fashion.  When a glacier or an ice shelf melts, it begins slowly, but as the newly exposed water or rock absorbs sunlight rather than reflect it back like the snow, the pace picks up exponentially.  The oceans have absorbed huge amounts of greenhouse gases, but cannot do so indefinitely.  The North American and Russian tundra is packed with greenhouse gases.  It has already begun to melt.  A small rise in temperature and massive amounts of methane will be released, which will cause a spike in the warming.  How serious a spike we can only predict without the kind of certainty we would like to have.  But to think that it won’t happen is simply wrong.

There is more scientific consensus on global warming than most issues.  There are critics of chemo-therapy, but we don’t hear about them because the economic interests of a major industry are not threatened, and there is no right/left ideological divide to be cultivated by Fox News and the blogosphere.  How many of us would reject the scientific consensus if we were deciding on an immediate matter that would affect our health and quality of life, like chemo-therapy?  For our children’s children, climate change is an immediate matter of health and quality of life.

Let’s be clear.  We’re not trying to save the earth.  The earth will keep going regardless.  We are out to save our way of life, so that future generations may prosper as we have.

It is time to act.

In this video interview, Rabbi Jill Hammer discusses the intimate connection between humanity and the earth in ancient Judaism, and why many Jews seek to update and reestablish that connection today.
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Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD, is an author, educator, midrashist, myth-weaver and ritualist. She is the co-founder of Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute. She is also the Director of Spiritual Education at the Academy for Jewish Religion, a pluralistic Jewish seminary. Rabbi Hammer is the author of Sisters At Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women, The Jewish Book of Days: A Companion for All Seasons, and the co-author of The Hebrew Priestess and Siddur HaKohanot: A Hebrew Priestess Prayerbook.  Rabbi Hammer conducts workshops on ancient and contemporary midrash, bibliodrama, creative ritual, kabbalah, Jewish dreamwork, and Jewish cycles of time. She was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary and holds a doctorate in social psychology from the University of Connecticut. Read her writings at RabbiJillHammer.com.

​Is there a connection between the Sabbatical and Jubilee years mentioned in the Torah, and the sacred character of the earth? Rabbi Jill Hammer shares her comments on the weekly Torah portion, Behar-Bechukotai at Romemu in New York City.

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"That's not dirt. It's earth!"

By Rabbi Jill Hammer

We’re all influenced by where we come from. I grew up on a decent-sized piece of land in the Hudson Valley, with a flower garden, a vegetable garden, a blackberry patch, trees, and a creek. Although I went to a civilized school like everyone else, at home I was a child of nature, using a forked birch tree as my secret entrance to the woods, and playing house in a nest of pine needles. My parents were gardeners and taught me many lessons about the human relationship to the earth. I remember one lesson in particular from my father. I told my father that I had dirt on my hands. My father looked up and said to me very sternly: “That’s not dirt. It’s earth.” In that one exchange, I learned so much about what it means to respect the soil, the few inches of fertile dust that make life on this planet possible.

My father’s lesson could have come from this week’s Torah portion. In Parashat Behar-Bechukotai, a double portion, God commands the people that the land itself is to have a Sabbath. After six years of sowing and reaping, the seventh year is to be a shmita, a sabbatical year. The people are not to plant or to reap, though they may act as gatherers, picking what the land produces on its own. Agriculture grinds to a halt. The land rests from its role in the food production industry and returns to its wild state. The people remember what it is like to be wanderers on the land, rather than its owners. In Israel, this law is still observed, but it’s largely circumvented by way of legal loopholes because it is so hard to observe. How to manage a society where agriculture stops dead every seven years? This is almost economically impossible. So why does the Torah ask this of us?

After seven cycles of these seven-year patterns, after forty-nine years, the fiftieth year is a jubilee year, a yovel. “That fiftieth year is a jubilee year, you shall not plant, you shall not sow, you shall not reap the aftergrowth or harvest the untrimmed vines. It is a jubilee and it is holy to you. You will eat the growth that comes from the field. In the fiftieth year, each person shall return to his or her holding.”

In this year, the land rests, and not only does the agricultural cycle cease, but ownership itself is transformed. Any land that you have sold to pay your debts or earn money for yourself returns to your tribe and clan—really, the land cannot be sold but only leased until the jubilee year. Any indentured servant that has been enslaved because of debt must be set free. And any loan must be forgiven. The jubilee year is an immense reset button. Economic inequalities are redressed. The people, like the land, must be returned to their free state, their natural or wild state, if you will.

Why this law of the jubilee year? The Torah tells us: vehaaretz lo timacheir litzmitut ki li ha’aretz ki gerim vetoshavim atem imadi. Uvechol eretz achuzatchem geulah titnu la’aretz. The land must not be sold in any permanent way, for the land is mine and you are strangers and temporary residents with me. In all the lands of your holding, you must give redemption to the land.” This text teaches us first that our natural state is as wanderers. Second, the text teaches that the land requires redemption. For people, redemption means being bought out of slavery or brought back from exile. For the land, redemption means leaving its own slavery to humans, and restoration to the state of connection to the divine. The land itself, and the people, need to be fallow, need this period of rest which is also wildness, to be whole. The jubilee is holy, just like the temple. It is the ultimate sanctuary in time. It is a sacred time when all space becomes sacred space, owned not by people but by God.

The necessity of having fallow space on our planet cannot be overstated. I recently read of how a team of researchers in the Amazon, a group of students and professors from Yale University, discovered a fungus that eats plastic. Can you think of a greater miracle than an organism that eats plastic? Nothing eats plastic; that is the point of plastic. And yet in the vast unfarmed diverse alchemical cooking pot that is the Amazon jungle, they found something that did. What a gift from the Holy One, a fungus that eats plastic. This, plus the other plastic-eating bacteria we’ve developed, could save us from drowning in our own garbage. So many medical and biological miracles have come from the fallow spaces in our world, where hunter- gatherers still live. We agriculturalists and cattle-herders keep cutting these places down because they are not useful; we can’t grow anything there. This is not so bright. The wild spaces of the world are where God invents, not us, and this we must respect. The rule of the sabbatical year should not only be a technical mitzvah but a reminder that letting some of the earth be free of our control is a divine mandate and a human necessity. The wild spaces are a delight for God, they’re a necessity for us, and they may just save our lives.

This is also a teaching for our inner soil, the ensouled bodies we have been given to walk this earth. We too need fallow time. We too need to stop the cycles of work, of planting and harvest, of making ourselves produce, and give ourselves true rest. True rest is play. True rest is rediscovering the wild self, the self of dreams and visions and prayers, the self that God invents, not us. I can’t help but think of the artist and author Maurice Sendak of blessed memory, who died this week, and who taught so many of us about the importance of being among the wild things for a while before we go home for dinner. We too need to go back to our original owner, who is not our employer or our customer or even our beloved families or friends, but the holy blessed One. We need to free ourselves from the indentured servitude of our assumptions and routines. We need to remember that the messy stuff inside us is not dirt, it’s earth, and earth grows things.

I want to suggest that there is an even greater mystery in the law of the jubilee year. The freeing of the land and its inhabitants is not only a matter of ethics or of self-discovery; it is also a matter of quantum physics. You can’t own land. The topsoil of this planet isn’t a thing; it is a life-giving mystery permeated with water, air, and organisms. You can’t own space. Space is full of atoms that are mostly nothing; it is an immensely potent and dynamic emptiness. You can’t own souls. What we call ownership and control and inheritance and commerce is really stewardship. The Torah teaches that our interactions with all physical entities, including the earth, need to be touched by humility and by holiness.

I want to share a teaching I have been thinking about ever since I heard it. Shneur Zalman, called the Alter Rebbe, was the writer of the mystical work known as the Tanya. He writes that: “The radiance [of the Divine]... manifests its power and ability in the element of the earth in an immense manifestation, in more enormous strength than even the hosts of heaven.” This means that all people and all creations emanate divine radiance, but the soil itself, the physical earth which was considered by the kabbalists to be most distant from the ethereal realms of God, has an extra portion of the divine radiance, even more than the angels.

Why is this so? The Alter Rebbe goes on: “For the other creations do not have it in their power and ability constantly to bring forth something from nothing, like the element of earth which constantly makes grow something from nothing—these are the plants and trees—from the creative power it possesses, which is Ayin [Divine void].” This means, very simply, that the earth can do what God can do. The earth can make a space for creation to happen. You put a seed in it and it grows. This is God’s power, to make something exist where there was nothing. The Alter Rebbe suggests to us that the earth is full of divine radiance and transmits that radiance to us in the form of life. We are all part of that sacred economy. When we rest, and treat our lives and everything around us as a gift rather than something we own, we have the opportunity to feel that radiance. As the liturgist Marcia Falk wrote in her creative translation of the Shema: The Divine abounds everywhere and dwells in everything. The many are one.”

Every Shabbat morning at Romemu, guided by Rabbi Ingber, we pray a healing prayer for our loved ones and conclude it by praying for the earth, which also needs healing. May it be that we come to invest that prayer with the power of our hearts, voices, and hands. To that prayer I want to add one more prayer. In Parashat Bechukotai, near the end of this week’s reading, God promises: “Venatati shalom ba’aretz,” I will give peace to the land. But what this really means, in the original Hebrew, is “I will put peace in the land.” The peace is there in the soil, in its power to create and sustain. We only have to listen with our wild selves. When we encounter the soil, the body, the world, may we see not dirt but earth.

​Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD, is an author, educator, midrashist, myth-weaver and ritualist. She is the co-founder of Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute. She is also the Director of Spiritual Education at the Academy for Jewish Religion, a pluralistic Jewish seminary. Rabbi Hammer is the author of Sisters At Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women, The Jewish Book of Days: A Companion for All Seasons, and the co-author of The Hebrew Priestess and Siddur HaKohanot: A Hebrew Priestess Prayerbook.  Rabbi Hammer conducts workshops on ancient and contemporary midrash, bibliodrama, creative ritual, kabbalah, Jewish dreamwork, and Jewish cycles of time. She was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary and holds a doctorate in social psychology from the University of Connecticut. Read her writings at RabbiJillHammer.com.

Zelig Golden, founding Co-Director of Wilderness Torah, presents Teshuvah as a return to nature.

A community Maggid, wilderness guide, youth mentor, environmental educator, and attorney, Zelig Golden brings over a decade of visionary leadership to the Jewish environmental movement. To help connect people and community to their highest purpose, Zelig develops and guides programs such as the Jewish Vision Quest, B'naiture, and Wilderness Torah's annual cycle of land-based pilgrimage festivals. Learn more at www.wildernesstorah.org. 

(December 27, 2010)
(Originally published in PresenTense)

Our contemporary society has become radically disconnected from nature. Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, explains that modern society suffers from an epidemic of nature-disconnection. “Our society teach[es] young people to avoid direct experience in nature,” he writes, and concludes that this disconnection leads to an array of diseases from autism to Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). 

At the turn of the 20th Century, the early labor Zionist A.D. Gordon understood exile to be the very type of nature disconnection that Louv writes about today. More than separation from the political state of Israel, Gordon describes Jewish exile in the Diaspora as a “rift between the Jew and nature,” reflecting a broader human condition that must be healed. Today the majority of the Jewish population lives in A.D. Gordon’s “exile” because we live in urban centers across North America and Israel, without meaningful relationships to nature.

As humanity becomes increasingly aware of the looming ecological issues we all face in global climate change, water scarcity and food insecurity – to name just a few – there is a growing realization that we must care for Creation as a means of self-preservation. The impulse to engage in environmental action begins with a spiritual connection to nature. Thus, we must do teshuva in our relationship to nature.

Teshuva, most commonly understood as the process of repentance we undergo during Yom Kippur, also connotes spiritual “return.” As A.D. Gordon explains, “Teshuvah, ‘return’ back to G-d,’ really means human’s return to nature. This is because teshuvah means going back to one’s point of origin, one’s source, coming back home after a period of absence.”

Reaching back over 3,000 years, Judaism contains ancient teachings and traditions that can help us return to spiritual harmony with the earth. “In its aboriginal form Jewish spirituality has less to do with religion that it does with direct, uninhibited experience with Creator through Creation,” writes Rabbi Gershon Winkler in Magic of the Ordinary. “[W]hat was once a holistic spirit path that encompassed all the nuances and dynamics of the spirituality of earth and body ha[s] over the centuries mutated into a parochial focus on religion as an institution by itself.” At its core, Rabbi Winkler teaches, Judaism “emphasizes the sacredness of the earth.” Part of our teshuva, then, is to reclaim our earth-based traditions as a means of returning into harmony with Creation.


As a starting point, the Torah teaches that we humans (Adam) are made from the very fabric of nature, the earth (Adamah). (Genesis 2:7). To create Adam, last in the order of Creation, G-d turns to all that It had created prior to humans and proclaimed: “Let us make Adam in our image, after our likeness.” (Genesis 1:26). “In creating the human, G-d incorporated all of the attributes of all the animals, plants, and minerals that had been created up to this point. In each of us, then, are the attributes and powers of all the creations of the earth,” writes the seventeenth century Rabbi Cordovero (Cordovero, Shi’ur HaKomah, Torah, chpt. 4.). To return to ourselves, we must return to a direct relationship with nature.

Our ancestors teach us that alone in nature we can discover deep truths about our lives. Moses encounters G-d in the burning bush with a vision to lead his people to freedom; Jacob wrestles an angel all night earning his name Israel. Even just a few hours of intentional nature time can be profoundly healing. As the co-director of Wilderness Torah, which awakens and celebrates the earth-based traditions of Judaism, I guide people through solo nature encounters. “I’m reminded that spending time in nature revitalizes me and I return home with new hope,” reflected Tom Levy, who participated in a daylong program after a sudden and traumatic late-career lay-off. “The mirror of nature taught me that life is not over for me. I’m a leaf on the great tree of Creation and I have a lot of living to do.”

Teshuva with nature does not have to be a solo experience, however. Judaism provides an incredibly rich set of traditions that are designed to align our communities with nature. Our festivals, for example, celebrate seasonal changes and hallmark moments in the agricultural cycle. At Passover when we tell our liberation story, we also celebrate Spring and the first grain harvest. At Sukkot when we recall our desert wanderings, we also hail the ingathering of the Fall harvest and begin praying for autumn rains to nourish the cycle again. Every seven years, we are taught to observe the schmita (“release”), a year-long Shabbat for the land when we cease working the land to provide a respite from our environmental impact. (Leviticus 25:4).

We are taught that when we honor these cycles, we will receive the seasonal rains that nourish fruit trees and fields of grain. (Leviticus 26:4). But if we fail to do so, the Torah describes the potential that our “skies will turn to iron and the earth to copper . . . and the earth will not yield produce nor the trees fruit.” (Leviticus 26:19-20). You may recoil from this part of the Torah as a threat from a vengeful G-d. But, what if the Torah is merely presenting the potential consequence of our disconnection from nature? Might “iron skies” be an ancient warning about global climate change? If so, we may begin to understand the importance and the opportunity for meaningful teshuva in our relationship with the natural world.

At Wilderness Torah, we provide one approach to this teshuva through an annual cycle of land-based pilgrimage festivals. At Passover in the Desert, we create a rustic, wilderness village near Death Valley National Park for five-days to honor Spring and our liberation. At the Sukkot on the Farm Festival, we gather community of all ages on an organic farm for four-days to immerse ourselves in the essence of the harvest and to awaken our ancient water-drawing ritual. “When we come together as a tribe on the land, we shed our urban façade and open up to each other in profound ways. Here under the sukkah, we gather as equals,” explained Rebecca Redstone, who attended Sukkot on the Farm with her two daughters. Rebecca recalls the full moon rising over the redwood skyline, the Hebrew melodies soothing her from inside the sukkah, and a deep trust that her children are safe even when out-of-sight. “When we leave the car, the house and the technology behind, eat food from the fields, sleep on the ground, and get into nature’s rhythm . . . the tension seems to leave and true joy comes. I feel like I have a sense of what it was like for my ancestors.”

Jews are known as the people of the book. Yet Judaism at its roots is an earth-based tradition. As environmental concerns become more widespread, and our communities seek innovative avenues to invigorate our lives and our communities, perhaps the way forward is to pause and take a look back and reconnect to our ancient roots

Co-Founder Zelig Golden shares the remarkable program and the inspiring vision of Wilderness Torah.
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Rabbi Mike Comins writes of his experience of "Pesach in the Desert" with Wilderness Torah.

I recently attended my third “Pesach in the Desert” near Death Valley with Wilderness Torah, and it gets better each time.

It’s counter-intuitive to raise up a village in the middle of the waterless desert, exposed to the elements and far away from grocery stores. It’s counter-intuitive for wilderness people, who love space and solitude, to spend time in nature with more that a hundred others. But it works. And just as it is intended to do, it makes me think of another counter-intuitive happening: the Exodus from Egypt.

Joining a temporary village in the desert just might be our best way to understand our ancestors. What is it like to live in the desert, not like an adventurer, explorer or trekker, but with our families and our holiday traditions and with our book, the Torah?

It takes teamwork and tolerance, volunteerism and generosity. It requires each person to accept being outside their comfort zone. We take what nature brings, the hot wind and the hard ground (though most find the starry sky, the red mountains and the nearby canyon stream and swimming hole more than enough compensation).

Most important, it requires a communal vision; otherwise, we would surely not make the effort. And when it comes to vision, Wilderness Torah has no lack. The community is inclusive and welcoming. The food is kosher and vegetarian, so all can enjoy. Newcomers are paired up with returning participants. The village is divided into small 10-12 person tribes, so no one gets lost in the crowd. The LGBT community is welcomed, as individuals and as a group, and joins in the leadership, not by blending in, but by being who they are and bringing their distinctive gifts. The best of the Jewish food movement is represented. The tasty meals are prepared with extraordinary care, with the help of everyone in the village, from organic, local and healthy fruits, vegetables and grains. Eating is the spiritual, ethical mitzvah intended in the Torah.

Activities abound. Formally, there are hikes, spiritual walks (that would be TorahTrek’s contribution), learning sessions, arts workshops, Yoga and more. Informally, people gather in the main tent or around the campfire to talk, sing and make music.

The village comes together as community on Shabbat, and the creative interplay between individual and group continues. All join together for prayer on Friday night, but enjoy different alternatives on Shabbat morning, such as unconventional but traditional services, or a hike. In the afternoon, the entire village gathers for study, and then each individual, in the age-old spiritual tradition of our people, finds a splotch of desert and spends a couple of (guided) hours alone, experiencing for themselves what Moses, Miriam and our ancestors found in the wilderness. Like a meditator in a meditation hall, each person is supported by the village, but left alone to fathom the depths of their soul, and open themselves to God in God’s greatest sanctuary: the wild, untamed desert.

Among the rich array of Jewish environmental projects, Wilderness Torah is the closest to TorahTrek. As an “elder,”… OK, let me just get over it and remove the quotations. As an elder, it simply warms my heart to see the next generation so full of vision, creativity and responsibility. This is one of the very few places in the Jewish world where one sees so many interesting, excited and engaged young Jews, and along with a Hazon bike ride, the only place with as many men as women. One leaves P in the D, as we participants call it, renewed and reinvigorated: inside and out.