Summery of the conference:

• Panel exploring what Judaism adds to our understanding and ability to respond to climate change
• Two rounds of workshops, each of which will provide concrete information about a specific way to respond to the threat of climate change and to connect with others
• Opportunity to speak with community organizations and businesses involved in environmental work
• Special workshop for teens and tweens
• Short wrap-up program highlighting what has been accomplished and providing a send off
• Facilitation of informal gatherings for dinner at nearby restaurants those who want to continue the conversations.

A schedule and descriptions of workshops and bios of workshop leaders can be found at http://www.jewishclimate.org/may-2015-conference.html

When: Sunday, May 17, 3-7 PM

Where: Hebrew College, Herrick Road, Newton
Registration: https://secure.hebrewcollege.edu/form/uncertainty-action-what-you-can-do-about-climate-change

Cost: $18 donation (optional); students are free.

Co-sponsors include: Hebrew College, Center for Global Judaism, Hazon, LimmudBoston, Shomrei Bereshit: Rabbis and Cantors for the Earth, and others.

Last chance to help us make Israel a greener, environmentally healthier land: Until the end of April you can vote online for the upcoming World Zionist Congress. The results determine, among other things, the division of power at the Jewish National Fund’s international board.

For the past decade I have sat on the JNF board, largely because of the support and intervention of the Green Zionist Alliance – a wonderful group of young environmentalists who decided to get involved and improve Israel’s environmental performance. This support has allowed me to represent them and pursue any number of important green initiatives which include:

· creating new sustainable forestry policies for the JNF,

· putting bike lanes on the organization’s agenda,

· creating a brand new “affirmative action” program to systematically reach out to Israel’s Arab minorities to finance environmental projects,

· increasing the organizational commitment to green building and solar energy,

· leading the fight to prevent JNF funding over the green line,

· expanding funding for forestry and agricultural research as well as river restoration projects, and

· fighting for good government and transparency.

There is a lot more that needs to be done. Whether or not I can continue depends on whether the “GZA” – or Aytzim as they call themselves these days gets enough votes. It only takes ten dollars to register and 3 minutes online to vote. (The polls close this Thursday April 30th). Here’s a link to Vote Green Israel: www.worldzionistcongress.org

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions. And thanks to all of you who have already voted green for the support. – Alon Tal

(Considered by many to be the leading environmentalist in Israeli history, Alon Tal is a co-founder of the Green Zionist Alliance)

Maybe the first such story. Maybe even the story that inspired many of the higgledy-piggledy Boston blacksmiths and Pennsylvania farmers who thought they could defeat the world’s greatest Empire. It certainly inspired Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.

But to Jewish tradition the Book is not known as “Yetziat Mitzrayyim, the Exodus from the Narrow Place / Egypt.” It is known instead as “Sefer Shemot –- the Book of Names.”

Early in the Book of Names, God goes through a change of Name.

This is no minor side-slip. Think of the furor when Cassius Clay changed his name to Muhammed Ali; think of the political and personal transformation when David Gruen changed his name to Ben-Gurion.

And these were merely mortal heroes. For the Eternal Holy One Who suffuses all the universe to change The Name is seismic. Cosmic.

It happens first at the Burning Bush. As Moses faces the unquenchable Voice Who is sending him on a mission to end slavery under Pharaoh, he warns the Voice that the people will challenge him: “Sez who?”

And the Holy One, the Wholly One, answers: “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, I Will Be Who I Will Be” –- a fitting Name for a universe in which the powerless poor can be empowered and the pharaoh’s power can dissolve like powder into the Sea of Reeds. Then God adds, “But that’s a mouthful. You can use just ‘Ehyeh, I Will Be,’ as my nickname, if you like.”

“And oh yes, you can also call me ‘YHWH.’ “

But we actually can’t. There’s no way to “pronounce” those letters, with no vowels. And for a couple of millennia, Jews have been strictly taught not even to try pronouncing it but instead to say “Adonai, Lord.”

Now why do we think that God’s Name has changed? Maybe it has been these mysterious Names all along?

But God, and Torah say: Not so. The second time the voice tells Moses that the new Name is “YHWH” is in Exodus 6: 2-3. Moses is in Egypt, and his first try at liberation and at organizing “Brickmakers Union, Local #1” has miserably failed. This time the Voice explicitly says that the Name by which He/She/ It was known to the forebears — El Shaddai, the Breasted God, the God of Nourishment and Nurture, is no longer the Name for use in the liberation process.

Why this second Voicing of the new Name?

I suggest that Moses has, since the Bush and during his first effort in Egypt, been careless about using the new Name. He has often used the old one on the warm-hearted assumption that his listeners would be more comfortable with it.

But the old Name cannot inspire a new sense of reality. That’s why Moses has failed, the Brickmakers Union has collapsed. So this time the Voice makes it absolutely clear: “Stop already! I am YHWH, not El Shaddai, even though your forebears knew me that way.”

And that is why I have been urging us to know, grok, God in our own generation through “pronouncing” the Unpronounceable Name by simply breathing — YHWH with no vowels, as the Interbreath of Life, the ONE that keeps all life alive, that intertwines, interbreathes, the trees and grasses and ourselves.

We breathe in what the trees breathe out;
The trees breathe in what we breathe out:
We breathe each other into life:
YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh.

What we call the “climate crisis” is a radical disturbance in the balance of what we breathe out and what the trees breathe out — the balance of CO2 and oxygen.

And therefore what we call the “climate crisis” is a crisis in the Interbreathing Name of God.

“Science” and “religion” fuse into a single truth.

If we are to do as Torah demands, heal our deeply wounded planet from impending disaster, I think we must do as Moses learned to do and ReName God.

I think we must rid ourselves of the old Name — Adonai, Lord, King, dominating Dominus – and address Divine Reality as the Interbreathing Of All Life. That is the Truth, and we are Called to say it.

With a sacred but outdated Name, an outdated way of understanding our world, we will, like Moses, fail at the task before us.

For years, I have encouraged prayer communities to breathe the Name as YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh and then to use “Yahhh” instead of “Adonai.” And then I have said that anyone who feels deeply God-connected through the use of the “Adonai” which they have recited, chanted, sung a thousand times should — for God’s sake! –- keep on using what connects them.

But I have come to think this is an inadequate teaching. I am now intending to say all this, and then to add my understanding of why Moses failed at first. And why the Voice had to insist on the new Name. And I will invite people to keep that challenge in mind as they voice their own response to the Voice.

Interbreathing, not OverLordship, is how our world now works. How our world Is and becomes.

The Hebrew word “dibbur” can mean either “word” or “deed.” If we can conceive of God and Universe through a new word, a new name, we can also act far more effectively to bring about the changes that our planet needs.

For Moses, the new Name made possible both resisting Pharaoh and shaping a new kind of society.

For us, it means both resisting the modern Carbon Pharaohs that are bringing new Plagues upon our planet; and shaping a new society in which we are constantly aware that all life is Interbreathing, that we are interwoven with the eco-systems within which we live – that indeed, YHWH, the Breath of Life, is ONE.

And the religious and spiritual communities of our planet have the wisdoms and the tools to do the healing.

Judaism is especially relevant because, unlike most world religions, we preserve the teachings of an indigenous people in the biblical tradition –- the spiritual wisdom of shepherds and farmers. And yet as a world people, we can now apply the earthiness of our origins to the Whole Earth.

That does not mean simply repeating the ancient practices. For instance, the ancient code of kosher food does not take into account that we now “eat” coal and oil and crucial minerals like lithium. Is there an “eco-kosher” way of eating them, as well as caring for vegetables and fruit and kosher animals in ways traditional kashrut did not? Can we shape our ceremonial ways of celebrating Sukkot and Pesach and Tu B’Shvat and life-cycle ceremonies so that they embody social action to heal our wounded Earth as an aspect of spiritual deepening?

For The Shalom Center (see https://www.theshalomcenter.org ), this transformation in our reality calls for action in four aspects of reality:

1. Spiritually, the creation of new forms of prayer, meditation, and celebration that draw us into fuller awareness of the interweaving of all life: for instance, “pronouncing” and understanding the Sacred God-Name “YHWH” as YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh, the Interbreathing of all life – Ruach Ha'Olam — rather than Lord or King, Melech Ha'Olam.

2. Intellectually, the absorption of ecological science into what we teach and learn as sacred Torah, just as Maimonides absorbed the best science and philosophy of his day into Torah. Ecology takes seriously both each distinctive niche of each life form and the flow that connects them into an ecosystem. It does what Kabbalah yearns toward: reintegrating what seem to be the two Trees of Eden — the Tree of Flowing Life and the Tree of Distinction-making — into One.

3. Relationally, our recognition of the varied ethical, religious, and spiritual life-paths as necessary and valuable unfoldings of the varied “organs” of human civilization and planetary life – as different from each other and as equally necessary to each other as the brain, liver, heart, and lungs in a single body. Just as the bodily organs not only “dialogue” with each other but actually work together, we need to move beyond interfaith dialogue into the pursuit of interrelational work among the different communities.

4. Vigorous action to confront the modern Carbon Pharaohs that are bringing plagues of drought, flood, war, and famine on the Earth and all Humanity – action that might include lobbying, voting, rallies, vigils, nonviolent civil disobedience, organizing counter-institutions like coops, organic farms, etc., and economic action to Move Our Money/Protect Our Planet (MOM/POP) – moving our money from corporate investments and banks that endanger Mother Earth to companies, banks, coops, etc. that protect and heal her.

As we move forward in all these aspects of the world, we create a Judaism that heals and transforms itself in order to heal and transform the world. We learn anew what ancient Torah teaches: – “Sh’sh’sh’shma! Hush’sh’sh’sh and Hear, all you who wrestle with the Ultimate — Hear the still small voice of almost-silent breathing: the Breath of Life is ONE!

Heschel had been living in Berlin for some years, acquiring his Ph.D. and a liberal rabbinic ordination (he had already gotten a traditional ordination when he was a teenager in Warsaw). During his years there, he was a witness to rise of Nazism even while he taught and began to publish his work.

In 1938, it was clear to many people that war in Europe was coming. In the very month that Heschel spoke came the Anschluss, the Nazi takeover of Austria. Heschel was arrested in October of 1938 and deported to Poland. Six weeks before the invasion of Poland in September 1939, Heschel was able to get to England and from there to the United States. In a speech given in 1965 called No Religion is an Island, he referred to himself as “a brand plucked from the fire in which my people was burned to death.” (He was alluding to Zechariah chapter 3 where the High Priest Joshua, who had been born during the exile in Babylon and was one of the first to return to Judea, was called by God, “a brand plucked from the fire.”)

Heschel warned of the coming cataclysm in vivid and forceful language, evoking images of the demonic. He said, “At no time has the earth been so soaked with blood. Fellowmen turned out to be evil ghosts, monstrous and weird.” He asked the question, “Who is responsible?” We are, he said, by not fighting for “right, for justice, for goodness.” He said that we should be ashamed, and after the war, when the full horror of the Holocaust was revealed, he said that we should not ask, “Where was God?” but “Where was man?”

While we are not facing another world war and I am usually loath to reference the Holocaust when dealing with contemporary issues, I could not but be struck by the urgency of Heschel’s speech when I think about the looming disaster of climate change. The meaning of this hour is that we are continuing to argue about the fact of climate change when it is already happening and millions of people are already feeling its effects. Droughts, floods, increases in forest fires, stronger earthquakes, seas rising and thousands of scientific indicators seem not to move us. Several years ago, CARE published report on climate refugees which conservatively estimated that by 2050 there would be 250 million climate change refugees. A long lasting drought in the Middle East was one of the factors which precipitated the civil war in Syria, just one more example of how climate change has and will cause unrest, strife and war.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) a coalition of thousands of scientists worldwide who have been tracking and evaluating the research on climate change since 1988. Its fifth assessment report will be issued later this month. A draft of that report was leaked to reporters last month and it says that there it is “extremely likely” that human actions are the cause of most of the temperature increases of the last sixty years. “Extremely likely” is the way scientists say something is 99% certain. They wrote, “There is high confidence that this has warmed the ocean, melted snow and ice, raised global mean sea level and changed some climate extremes in the second half of the 20th century.” And things could get much worse. If carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases continue to be emitted into the atmosphere at present rates, global temperatures will rise by more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit. This would cause large scale melting of ice, more extreme heat waves and flooding, disruptions in the world food supply and the massive extinction of plant and animals species.

The IPCC, because it is a collective group of scientists under the auspices of the United Nations, has always been a conservative in its assessments. Many climate scientists believe that the situation is even worse and some believe that we may in fact be too late to avoid a catastrophic change in the global climate. To some extent they are right. Even if we were to eliminate all the carbon emissions today, the CO2 already in the atmosphere will continue to have an effect for hundreds of years. But we can stop situation from getting more dangerous.

In the published version of his speech Heschel wrote, “The Almighty has not created the universe that we may have opportunities to satisfy our greed, envy and ambition. We have not survived that we may waste our years in vulgar vanities.” These words can easily apply to our lack of action on climate change. We often think that it is all a matter of technology; that we can somehow come up with some gadget that will make all the CO2 go away without our having to change anything about the way we live. The only way to prevent a disaster for future generations is to phase out carbon based energy as quickly as possible. And to do that, we need to act now.

In the Haphtarah for Yom Kippur morning, we read Isaiah 57:14-58:14. In this passage the prophet says that people don’t understand why God has not forgiven them even though they have fasted. God replies that their ritual is hypocritical because even while they fasted they have acted immorally by oppressing their workers. A true fast, says God, must be one that accompanies justice and the care of the poor and powerless. Only then, will God answer, Here I am, when you call.

Climate change is one of the greatest moral disasters of human history as the people who will suffer the most have been the least responsible for its cause. Those of us in the developed countries somehow think that we will escape its results, turning away from the hundreds of millions who will be caught in the whirlwind of misery that is coming.

The meaning of this hour is that we must recognize what we are doing, admit our fault and bring about the necessary changes to prevent further damage. Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of the “fierce urgency of Now.” Once again, that is the meaning of this hour.

(This was originally published in the New Jersey Jewish Standard)

One of my favorite Science fiction authors, Kim Stanley Robinson, has utilized this theme in several of his books, the latest being, 2312 which won the 2012 Nebula award for best science fiction novel and has been nominated for the Hugo award for best science fiction novel of 2013.

2313 mostly takes place off Earth among colonies on Mercury and the moons of Saturn. Earth itself is still recovering from massive flooding due to climate change that took place starting in 2060: Florida is completely under water and New York is now like Venice with people going from skyscraper to skyscraper by boat. There are attempts alleviate the flooding through massive geo-engineering projects that will take more than a hundred years to complete. It is not a pretty picture of the future of this planet.

It was lack of action in the period from 2005 to 2060 that brought Earth to this state. In 2312 this period is known as “The Dithering.” Dithering is defined as “a state of indecisive agitation” and is a very good term to use to describe what is going in this country regarding climate change action. Scientists are growing increasing alarmed at the rise in CO₂ levels in the atmosphere and although many politicians know the dangers of climate change, they are afraid to take action. They are “dithering”: agitated by what they know is coming in the future but still indecisive as to how to proceed.

At the end of July, I attended the Climate Reality Project Leadership Corps training in Chicago. This was something I have wanted to do for a long time. It was a very exciting and stimulating experience. There were 1500 people from all 50 states as well as from 40 other countries. We had three days of training on how to spread the message of the necessity of action on climate change but the center of the training was an all-day session with Al Gore. He showed us his updated presentation that was shown the movie An Inconvenient Truth and showed us how to use it effectively. We were given the presentation at the end of the training and we all committed to carry out at least ten actions over the next twelve months.

It was exciting to be a room filled with people from all over the world so passionately committed to combating climate change denial and to press for real action by our governments. But there was also a real fear in what the future will bring if we don’t succeed.

I got into environmental activism almost thirty years ago primarily because I was the father of two young children and I was really concerned about the world that their children would live in. Now they are grown up, married and have given me three beautiful grandchildren. My fears for their future have only grown greater as we are living in the age of “The Dithering.”

In the Jewish calendar, we are in the middle of the month of Elul, the days before the High Holidays. This month is supposed to be time of reflection of what we have done in the previous year. We are especially supposed to consider our failings to others and to God and begin a process of teshuvah (repentance). One of the classical descriptions of teshuvah by Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) says that our teshuvah is not complete until we find ourselves in the same situation where we previously had sinned and we do not repeat it. It might be years later but our teshuvah is still not complete.

Einstein once famously defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. That is what we are doing now and as much as we may know that we must act on climate change, we keep doing the same thing over and over, dithering, hoping it will go away. We are creating in the heavens a great sin that will literally hang over future generations for hundreds of years (the time it will take for the carbon we are producing now to naturally leave the atmosphere) and still we cannot even begin our teshuvah. Enough with dithering; it is time to act.

Torah warns against overworking the earth, as well as overworking ourselves and each other. It provides that not only every seventh day but every seventh year is to be a time to pause from working. The seventh year is to be Shabbat Shabbaton, Restfulness to the exponential power of Restfulness. (Lev. 25).

The passage calls special attention to its teaching by beginning “B’Har, On the Mountain” — uniquely going out of its way to say this is revelation from Sinai.

In that seventh year, all regular agricultural work would pause; the community would eat from stores of food that had been previously laid aside, and from the freely given fruitfulness of the land, not shaped by organized sowing, harvesting, and pruning.

And the Torah goes on to say that if human society does not allow the land to rest each seventh year, it will rest anyway – through drought, famine, exile. (Lev. 26.) Indeed, the land — for each year its Restfulness was robbed — will be repaid by a year in which it gets to Rest because the community that made it work suffers a year of Exile. (See also II Chron 36: 20-21, at the very end of the Hebrew Scriptures.)

The Restful Year is not merely a nicety: It is like the Law of Gravity.

This practice, says the Torah, is to renew the understanding that no human beings “owns” the land; only YHWH, YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh the Interbreath of all life, can be said to own the land, the Earth.

In Deuteronomy, the Torah adds that in this seventh year, all debts are to be annulled. This is to be a year of Shmitah — Release, Non-attachment — in which no human boss or banker can subjugate another human being, just as the human community as a whole cannot oppress the Earth. Sh’ma: Listen, you Godwrestlers: We all breathe together, and our breath – YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh – is One. That’s God.

Today our scientists have learned that the sense of Interbreathing as the root of all life is not only rich metaphor but factual truth: We breathe in what the trees breathe out, and the trees breathe in what we breathe out. The resulting balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen in our atmosphere keeps all life in balance – and it is the disturbance of this balance by human action, the overburning of fossil fuels, that we call the “climate crisis.”

For the shepherds and farmers of the indigenous land-rooted community in which the Torah emerged, it was obvious that this Restful teaching applied to their own land, and to agriculture.

But does this mean there is wisdom in the Teaching only for the tiny sliver of land on the Eastern edge of the Mediterranean, not for the great round Earth at large? And even if it does apply throughout the world, does it bear wisdom only in the sphere of agriculture, or can it also teach us how to behave in an industrial/ information economy — lest we also find our earth ruined by drought and flood, famine and the Death Marches of millions of exiled refugees from every land and culture?

I believe the “climate crisis” and other aspects of human over-reach to over-control the Earth teach us that the ancient Torah teaching does apply world-wide: indeed, it is exactly what ecologists are saying in our own generation. And I believe it applies not only to farm, food, and forest, but – all the more! — to all the much more intrusive technologies we use today.

Then what might it mean to apply the Year of Restfulness to our own society?

Could we shut down almost our whole economy (preserving only life-protective medicine — since pikuach nefesh, saving life, trumps Shabbat)?

Hard to imagine?

OK. We might explore something one step less all-embracing: What it would mean to give all our engineers and techies, and all scientists not working directly on life-threatening diseases, a year off from their regular work, every seventh year? A year for them to spend the year reflecting on and reevaluating their own work and the whole direction of modern technology..

Their regular work is what not just carries out but speeds up our present race to go over the precipice into planetary disaster. Not because technology is inherently destructive, but because technology created with no Shabbat, no Shmita, IS inherently destructive. (See Leviticus 26.)

Suppose they all had a paid year off from even being allowed to create new technology, and during that year were paid instead to rethink and reshare the values technology should be enabling, and to work out how to make sure technology does in fact support humane and life-affirming sacred values?

A year of “Don’t just do something, sit there!

That might be one example of an industrial Shmita.

Or imagine requiring an environmental-impact assessment before the introduction of any new product — mechanical, electrical, biological, digital, or chemical: a new automobile model, a new vacuum cleaner, a new soap, a new computer program. That would not fit the “seven-year” pattern of Shmita, but it would address some of the same concerns the Torah expresses.

An even broader application of Shmita to our society – and this could draw on the seven-year cycle – would be to enact something like the proposal from Rabbi Michael Lerner/ Tikkun/ Network of Spiritual Progressives for an Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the US Constitution. Their proposal calls for a review every five years – I would make it seven – of the operational license of every corporation over a certain size, to see whether it is operating with care toward not only its stockholders and executives but to its customers, its geographic neighbors (human and ecological), its workers, and the Earth.

This whole approach sees the Torah provisions for Shmitah /Shabbat Shabbaton, as a seed of wisdom that in our own society can sprout into new creativity. Who among us will gently tend these seeds into their growing?

For most of history in many cultures and tradition including Judaism humans did see themselves as qualitatively different and “above” other forms of life. This was the “Great Chain of Being” which had non-life at the bottom, followed by plants, then animals, then humans, then angels and finally God at the top. With Darwin’s theory of evolution, this concept had to be abandoned. Since the decent of species showed that all living organisms came from a single ancient ancestor, humans could no longer claim that there was a qualitative difference between themselves and other forms of life; the difference could only be quantitative. The toppling of the sacred hierarchy was completed by the discovery of DNA. The DNA of every living thing (including plants and microbes) has a large share of commonality and humans, in particular share a large percentage of their DNA with other primates—in the case of chimpanzees around 96%.

In the face of this new science which our ancestors could not have conceived of, what can we do with our Jewish classic sources?

In the Hebrew Bible as usual has more than one voice coming from a variety of different authors from different time periods and ideologies. (It must be noted that the Hebrew words nefesh [life], neshamah [breath] and ruah [wind] which are often translated as “soul” which in later Jewish sources connotes a spiritual entity or self within the body do not have that meaning in the Hebrew Bible.) Here are a few examples:

In Genesis 1 all animals are created through the medium of the sea (fish and birds) or the earth (domesticated animals, “creeping things” and wild animals) and only humans are created directly by God and in the image of God. Humans therefore are given control over all the other animals as agents of God’s power over the earth (see also Psalm 8). This source is probably the basis for later beliefs about the ontological gap between humans and animals. The concept of the “image of God” was interpreted in various ways in later Jewish sources but it eventually was understood that humans had a qualitatively different “soul” than animals.

In Genesis 2 the animals created are separately from humans as aids or companions to the human (adam) but both come from the common source: adamah (earth) and both have a nefesh hayyah: an animating life-force or breath of life that comes from God. The human, while made of the same earthy material as animals and infused with the same animating force are nonetheless created first. The animals are created as adjuncts to the human. All life that moves and breathes have the nefesh hayyah which like the wind allows them to move but trees and plants do not since they do not breath or move.

In Ecclesiastes 3:18-21 the author believes that humans no different than beasts: they both have the ruah, the animating spirit. After death, they go the same place, the earth.. The author of Ecclesiastes which was probably written in the 3^rd century BCE when Greek ideas began to influence Jewish society, was aware of the idea that claimed that humans had a “soul” which survived after death and rises to the heavens to be with God. (The rejection of this idea is also probably found in Job 14:12-14)

In Psalm 148 all life is depicted as a community of worshippers and humans do not have pride of place. In Psalm 104 God seems to be equally concerned with both human and animal life. And in Job 38-41, the author describes a world without people and thereby claims that humans are not the center of God’s concern—God cares for all life of which humanity is only one part.

These biblical texts show a wide variety of ideas about the status of humans and animals in relation to each other and in relation to God. Only in Genesis 1 is there a significant gap between them.

In the second Temple period (500 BCE to 70 CE) many (but not all) Jews accepted the dualistic Greek idea of the body and soul, and the ontological space which separates humans from animals. This was also true in the Rabbinic period (post 70 CE) but the rabbis did not see this gap as a “hard dualism.” They also understood that human beings have both animal/ bodily characteristics and divine/spiritual characteristics (See for example: Midrash Genesis Rabbah 7:11 to Genesis 1:27). They reinterpreted Ecclesiastes 3:18-21to refer to the wicked who will have no place in heaven unlike the righteous (Midrash Ecclesiastes Rabbah 3:18 §1).

In Medieval Jewish philosophy, the concept of the soul became influenced by Platonism and Aristotelianism and while there are a variety of views about the nature of soul in all life, the human soul was seen as qualitatively different. Human souls had a rational expression which connected humans to the ultimate rational soul of the universe—God. This rational expression was what would survive after death in communion with the divine. And although Saadiah Gaon (882-942) believed in the possibility of animal resurrection within limited circumstances (Book of Beliefs and Opinions 3:10), most Jewish thinkers like Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) rejected any idea that animals survive death (Guide for the Perplexed 3:17). For Maimonides animals existed under the general providence of God which meant that they were subject to natural law and its contingencies.

For many of us today, we are not believers in the Jewish ideas of the afterlife that become almost a dogma by the Middle Ages. And there is an environmental critique of the dualism of spirit/soul and matter/body which denigrates matter and can lead to a lack of concern for the natural world and its non-human life. Modern evolutionary science and genetics has also shown us how closely we are connected to all life and while there are individual species, the lines dividing them are not rigid and in many cases one species “blends” into another.

And many so-called unique “human” traits have been found to originate in animal behavior like tool making, language, altruism, cultural transmission, and social grouping. Recently there was a story in the New York Times of how it is possible that chimpanzees exhibit a kind of mourning and death ritual which throws an interesting light on the origin of human ritual behavior.

As an eco-theologian, I believe that we must return a more biblically based unified vision of life. All life (and now we can include plants) have the same basic characteristics: it seeks to survive individually and as a species. The differences between humans and animals is one of degree and is in degree not kind—human differences can be seen within context of each species being unique in its own way.

For us the question is one of value and responsibility: how much do we value non-human life? Are other creatures only valuable to us as resources to be exploited or do we see them as fellow members of the Creation choir of Psalm 148? I believe that the Jewish tradition asks us to exercise responsibility not arrogance. We are all part of the universe, formed out of the dust of stars and all part of that special expression of Creation which is life.