## Faith in the Future, Part IV; Jewish Ethics and Spirituality, Chapter 29; Jewish Environmental Ethics

###### Faith in the Future, Part IV; Jewish Ethics and Spirituality, Chapter 29; Jewish Environmental Ethics 1
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
***Jewish Environmental Ethics***¹ 9 February 1990.

footnotes:
¹ The Jewish Chronicle,


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Towards the end of the 1980s, environmental concerns moved fast from obscurity to the top of the political agenda. Throughout Europe, green parties sprouted and attracted widespread support. Politicians of the right and left announced their conversion and competed to establish their ecological credentials. It bore all the signs of a passing moral fashion.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
But the issues will stay with us. For as other dangers recede, we may well come to feel that the greatest threat to human civilisation is now no longer war but peace, not the pursuit of ideology but the pursuit of affluence. As capitalist and former communist states have moved from collectivism to individualism, we have begun to fear the effects of unregulated economic growth: depletion of natural resources, destruction of rain forests, industrial pollution, damaging aerosols and car exhaust emissions, and a host of other threats to the quality and long-run viability of life. We have moved from the politics of confrontation to the politics of conservation.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
This raises issues on which a religious, especially a Jewish, voice should be heard, for they overturn some of our most deeply held assumptions. For centuries we have believed that science was the key that would unlock the bounties of nature. Today we are fearful that it will destroy its ecological balance. Economics was the discipline that would allow us to plan and maximise growth. But environmental questions cannot be answered by conventional economic theory. For they pose the *ethical* dilemma of how to weigh the future against the present. By what principles shall we restrain growth for the sake of generations yet unborn?


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Environmental ethics touch on the most profound features of the human situation: our relationship to nature, our responsibility to posterity and the limits to our exploitation of natural resources. These issues are in the deepest sense religious, and they are addressed by the Torah from its opening chapters. Judaism’s guidelines remain directly relevant today.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Few passages have had a deeper influence on human civilisation than the first chapter of Genesis. Through its momentous vision of creation we see the universe as the work of God. Man is its final and supreme creation, the only being made in God’s image. Nature has been handed over to his dominion. He is commanded to “fill the earth and subdue it” and “rule” over the animals.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
It was the nineteenth-century sociologist Max Weber who argued that this chapter laid the foundations of Western rationalism and ultimately of the scientific revolution. Against paganism, the Torah set forth a vision in which nature was not sacred. It rejected mythology and magic. The world was neither unfathomable nor intrinsically hostile to man. Without this background, suggested Weber, the scientific enterprise might never have got under way.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
But here lies the problem. Turning Weber’s theory on its head, radical ecologists have suggested that Genesis is not the answer to our present crisis but its cause. If we are given the unrestricted right to subdue the world, there is nothing to prevent the “rape of nature.” What has led to our present danger, they argue, is precisely the biblical ethic with its enthronement of man as nature’s master. Against this, they call for a new paganism which worships the earth as a living organism with its own personality and rights.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
John Passmore, the Australian philosopher, has shown that this approach is doubly mistaken. Firstly, it proposes a cure worse than the disease. To turn our back on technology will not improve but substantially reduce human welfare, now and in the future. Indeed it will impair our ability to conserve nature as well as exploit it. What is needed is not less science but a more far-sighted view of its effects.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Secondly, it misreads Genesis. For immediately after reading of man’s rights we are given, in the second chapter, a statement of man’s responsibilities. Adam was placed in the garden, we are told, “to serve it and guard it.” Man is not only the *master* but also the *guardian* of nature. This is perhaps the best short definition of the ecological imperative as Judaism understands it.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
A guardian is entrusted with property that does not belong to him. His task is to take charge of it and eventually return it to its owner intact. So it is with nature. The world is not ours. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” a fact of which we remind ourselves every time we make a blessing over the things we enjoy. It has been handed into our safekeeping only on condition that we maintain it undespoiled.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch expresses this in a striking way in his commentary to the Torah. When God is about to create humanity, He says, “Let us create man in our own image.” Who is the “us?” According to Hirsch it is the rest of creation. Before making mankind, with its potential for disrupting nature, God invited nature itself to give its assent. The implied condition was that man would use nature only in the service of God, its maker. Our mandate is therefore moral rather than technical. It comes with responsibilities. To exploit nature rapaciously for our own ends is *ultra vires.* It breaks the condition on which man was made.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
There is, of course, no more powerful metaphor for this than the passage which immediately follows the story of creation. God sets limits to the enjoyment of nature. There is a tree from which man may not eat. Man ignores the restriction, eats from the fruit of the tree, and as a result suffers exile from Eden. Nature turns against him: “Cursed shall be the ground because of you; by toil shall you eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall sprout for you.” Today we are right to read this as an ecological parable. Once we lose the idea of limits and focus instead on short-term enjoyment, we set in motion long-term disharmonies which have devastating effects on the human situation. Man must not abuse nature for he is part of nature: “Dust you are and to dust you will return.”


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Genesis sets forth a view of nature which is not man-centred but God-centred. To be sure, humanity with its unique capacity for moral choice is the focus of its concerns. But Maimonides warns us against an anthropocentric view of reality. “The universe does not exist for man’s sake, but each being exists for its own sake and not because of some other thing” (*Guide for the Perplexed*, 3:13). The climax of the book of Job, as God speaks to Job from the whirlwind, is a magnificent poem on this theme: the hubris of believing that man can subject the universe to his comprehension and control. Not only can he not tame Leviathan. Even the most harnessed of animals, the donkey, has an existence independent of man:


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Who let the wild donkey go free?
Who untied his ropes?
I gave him the wasteland as his home, 
The salt flats as his habitation.
He laughs at the commotion in the town;
He does not hear a driver’s shout. (Job 39:5–7)


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Passmore concludes that there *is* a strong Western tradition that man is free to deal with nature as he pleases. But we are wrong to trace it to Genesis, which though it grants man rights over the earth, at the same time “insists that the world was good before man was created, and that it exists to glorify God rather than to serve man.” Instead, “it is only as a result of Greek influence that Christian theology was led to think of nature as nothing but a system of resources, man’s relationships with which are in no respect subject to moral censure.”


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Judaism has seldom been content with broad statements of principle. To be effective they must be translated into the life of society. The Torah does this in two ways: through education and direct legislation.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Each age adds its own commentary to the Torah. In the light of contemporary knowledge we can now see the three great commandments of *periodic rest* – Shabbat, the sabbatical year and the jubilee year – as powerful forms of environmental education. On Shabbat we are commanded to renounce our manipulation of the world. It is a day that sets a limit to our intervention in nature and the pursuit of economic growth. The earth is not ours but God’s. For six days it is handed over to our management. On the seventh day we symbolically abdicate that power. We may perform no “work,” which is to say, an act designed to alter the state of something for human purposes. Nor may we allow our animals to work. It is a day in which we respect the integrity of nature and set limits to human striving. No secular equivalent remotely rivals Shabbat as a day of “green” consciousness.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
What Shabbat does for man and the animals, the sabbatical and jubilee years do for the land. We owe the earth its periodic rest. Indeed, the Torah stipulates that if the people of Israel do not respect this, they will suffer exile: “Then shall the land make up for its sabbatical years throughout the time that it is desolate and you are in the land of your enemies; then shall the land rest and make up for its sabbath years” (Leviticus 26:34). Behind this are two interwoven propositions. One is environmental. As Maimonides pointed out in his explanation of the sabbatical year, land which is overexploited eventually loses its fertility. *Yishuv ha’aretz,* the settlement of the land, means conserving its resources and not pursuing short-term gain at the cost of long-term desolation. The second is theological. There is no absolute ownership of the land. “The land,” says God, “is Mine; you are but strangers resident with Me” (Leviticus 25:23). No statement more succinctly defines the conditional nature of human stewardship. Even the promised land is never an owned land. We are guests on earth.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
There are other commandments, too, which restrain our interference with nature. The Torah groups together three prohibitions: against crossbreeding livestock, planting a field with mixed seeds and wearing a garment of mixed wool and linen. It calls these rules *chukkim* or “statutes.” Nahmanides, and later Samson Raphael Hirsch, gave this word a novel interpretation.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
They understood *chukkim* to mean laws which respected the integrity of nature. To mix different species, argued Nahmanides, was an affront to the Creator and an assault on the creation. Each species has its own internal laws of development and reproduction, and these must not be tampered with. “One who combines two different species thereby changes and defies the work of creation, as if he believes that the Holy One, blessed be He, has not completely perfected the world and he now wishes to improve it by adding new kinds of creatures.” Nahmanides saw the law against sending the mother bird away when taking its fledglings (Deuteronomy 22:6–7) motivated by the same concern. Acts like these threatened the continuity of species. Though the Torah permits us to use some (but not all) animals for food, we must not cull them to extinction. Later authorities were particularly strong in their condemnation of hunting: killing animals *not* for the sake of food. This was wanton and destructive cruelty and had no place in Jewish life.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
No one attached more far-reaching significance to biblical “statutes” about animals and nature than Samson Raphael Hirsch. For him, *chukkim* were laws which embodied the principle that “the same regard which you show to man you must also demonstrate to every lower creature, to the earth which bears and sustains all, and to the world of plants and animals.” The reason these commandments are difficult to understand is that we approach them from the wrong perspective: from the direction of man and his needs. If we could put ourselves in the place of animals and plant life, we would find it as easy to comprehend the “statutes” as to understand the Torah’s laws of social justice. “They ask you to regard all living things as God’s property. Destroy none; abuse none; waste nothing; employ all things wisely…. Look upon all creatures as servants in the household of creation.”


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Hirsch was what today would be called a “deep” ecologist. He believed that there is such a thing as “justice” toward nature and that the world cannot be subordinated to the interests of man. It was a view shared by the great mystic, Rabbi Abraham Kook, who held that animals have rights and that one should not needlessly even pick a flower. “All of creation,” he said, “sings a song.”


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
These are extreme rather than representative views. For the most part, Jewish thinkers did not attach rights to nature or to animals. Indeed, as Maimonides argued (and in this he was later echoed by Hume and Kant) the idea itself is incoherent. Rights belong to the world of relationships and reciprocities inhabited by moral beings. It is one thing to say we have a duty to respect nature, another to say that nature has rights. Nonetheless, the rich texture of biblical law is woven out of a fine balance between our mandate to use nature for human benefit and our duty to conserve it. Species should not be tampered with nor exploited to extinction. Neither the land nor animals should be worked to exhaustion. Above all, in its periodic sabbaticals of rest, biblical society enacted regular reminders of an ideal – once realised in Eden, to be recaptured at the messianic end of days – of man in harmony with nature “not hurting or destroying in all My holy mountain.” We are not there yet, but we must not lose sight of it. That is Judaism’s way of treating the inevitable conflict between the ideal and the real.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Jewish law, however, required a more precise environmental ethic, one that applied to an urban as well as rural environment, and one that dealt with what we might today call a consumer society. The Talmud finds the basis for such legislation in the biblical laws of war:


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When in your war against a city you have to besiege it a long time in order to capture it, you must not destroy its trees, wielding the axe against them. You may eat of them, but you must not cut them down. Are trees of the field human to withdraw before you into the besieged city? Only trees that you know do not yield food may be destroyed…. (Deuteronomy 20:19–20)


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
In context, this is a prohibition against a “scorched earth” policy in war. However, the rabbis understood it not as a limited provision but as an *example* of a more general imperative. They extended it to peace as well as war, to indirect as well as direct destruction, and to other objects as well as trees. It became the basis of a universal rule against pointless destruction (*bal tashchit*)*.* In Jewish law one may not needlessly waste anything of potential human benefit.


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This is a remarkable constraint on human ownership. Normally, to own something is to be able to dispose of it as one wishes. Jewish law denies absolute property in this sense. You may not break plates, tear clothes or set fire to furniture in a spirit of vandalism even if they belong to you, you do so on your own property, and no one else is harmed. Vandalism is a betrayal of the condition on which things are given over to the stewardship of man.


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To be sure, conservation is not an absolute value in Jewish law. Halakhah permits the destruction of natural resources in the course of constructive projects that will ultimately enhance human welfare. But the onus of proof is on the developer. And there remains a deep-seated reverence for trees in Judaism, expressed in modern times by the afforestation of Israel and the celebration of Tu Bishvat, the “New Year” for trees. No Jew should be indifferent to the destruction of rain-forests.


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The Talmud tells the story of one of the saints of early rabbinic times, Honi the Circle-Drawer:


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One day Honi was journeying on the road and saw a man planting a carob tree. He asked him, “How long does it take for a carob tree to bear fruit?” The man replied, “Seventy years.” Honi asked, “Are you certain that you will live another seventy years?” The man answered, “I found carob trees in the world. As my forefathers planted them for me, so I too plant these for my children.”


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
That is a leading motif of Jewish law. We are guardians of the world for the sake of future generations. Trees are a symbol of the long-term nature of the human enterprise. In the book of Psalms, the wicked grow like grass, the righteous slowly like cedars. Our decisions – economic, political and military – must be taken on the basis of calculation of distant consequences (the Israelites, for example, are warned against too rapid a conquest “lest the land become desolate and the beasts of the field multiply against thee”). The world we inherit is due to the efforts of those who came before us. The world we leave our children is dependent on what we do. Conservation is part of what Burke called the “partnership…between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”


###### Faith in the Future, Part IV; Jewish Ethics and Spirituality, Chapter 29; Jewish Environmental Ethics 35
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Beyond conservation, the rabbis extended the Torah’s rule that waste should be disposed of far from human habitation. They banned garbage disposal that interfered with crops or amenities, pollution of the water supply and activities that would foul the air or create intolerable noise in residential areas. The biblical provision for open space around the levitical cities is one of the earliest examples of town planning.


###### Faith in the Future, Part IV; Jewish Ethics and Spirituality, Chapter 29; Jewish Environmental Ethics 36
[Faith in the Future, Part IV; Jewish Ethics and Spirituality, Chapter 29; Jewish Environmental Ethics 36](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Part%20IV%3B%20Jewish%20Ethics%20and%20Spirituality,_Chapter%2029%3B%20Jewish%20Environmental%20Ethics/r/36)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
So Judaism contains detailed precedents of environmental legislation as well as commands that educate us in respect for and restraint toward nature as God’s creation. Admittedly environmental ethics has not yet received the same intense halakhic treatment as has medical ethics. Probably that is because medical decisions are taken by individuals while environmental decisions are usually taken by governments. An individual turns to Jewish law for guidance. Governments rarely do. But it is not because Judaism regards ecological issues lightly. To the contrary: *tikkun ha-olam,* “perfection of the world,” is one of the mandates of Judaism. Maimonides repeatedly insists that we cannot pursue spiritual ideals without first ensuring our physical survival. That has always needed long-term planning and the decision to limit consumption in the present for the sake of the viability of the future.


###### Faith in the Future, Part IV; Jewish Ethics and Spirituality, Chapter 29; Jewish Environmental Ethics 37
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Judaism categorically rejects two attitudes to the environment. One, associated with the Stoic tradition, is that we have no moral duties towards nature. The other, drawn from some Eastern religions, is that nature is holy and to interfere with it is sacrilegious. The first allows technology to run rampant while the second turns its back on it altogether. Neither extreme, we believe, does justice to the challenge of human civilisation.


###### Faith in the Future, Part IV; Jewish Ethics and Spirituality, Chapter 29; Jewish Environmental Ethics 38
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
God, said Isaiah, did not create the world to be desolate: He formed it to be inhabited. He gave man the intelligence to control nature. Therein lies his dignity. But He charged him with the duty of preserving nature. Therein lies his responsibility.


###### Faith in the Future, Part IV; Jewish Ethics and Spirituality, Chapter 29; Jewish Environmental Ethics 39
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The rabbis put it simply. They said: When God made the first man, He took him to see all the trees of the garden of Eden. He said to him: “See how beautiful are My works. All that I have created I have made for you. But be careful that you do not ruin My world, for if you do there is no one else to put right what you have destroyed.” That is as lucid a way as any of stating one of the great imperatives of our time.