Looking for an Ecological God

265 Looking for an Ecological God Looking for an Ecological God1 Jonathan Schorsch Said Rabbi Tanḥum bar Ḥiyya: “Greater is the falling of rain than the giving of Torah, for the giving of Torah is a joy only for Israel while the falling of rain is a joy for the whole world, the domestic animals, the wild animals, and the birds.” —Midrash Tehillim to Psalm 1172 Our mounting environmental crises have aroused in increasing numbers of Jews a yearning for Judaism to speak to these challenges. Biblical theology rests on the assumption that the world— nature, the cosmos, existence—will last forever. The continuity of existence shows that divine eternity and continued divine concern can be relied upon; indeed, this is one of God’s specific promises to humankind (Genesis 8:21–22; Jeremiah 31:35–36). I don’t worry that our collapsing planetary environment will bring about an end to existence anytime soon. But I do fear that we human beings are pushing the earth’s planetary systems too hard and that the consequences of only two centuries of industrialism and capitalism, which are already taking a toll, might soon prove catastrophic for our species and many others. The scale of present and unfolding disasters strikes me as biblical, something that has led me to meditate anew on the seemingly straightforward yet perplexing name of God, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh. The words in Hebrew, taken from Exodus 3:14, literally mean “I will be what I will be.” The name appears only once 266 Jonathan Schorsch in the Torah (although the word ehyeh itself is used in various forms by God numerous times), yet it is central to our understanding of God’s unchangeability and the perfection of God’s character. Paradoxically, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh signifies two different and seemingly contradictory things: definitiveness, on the one hand, and unpredictability, on the other. On the one hand, “I will be what I will be” serves as a sign of God’s certainty, perfect self-knowledge, and total control over circumstance and time, as if God were saying: “I know what I will be, because I will have already chosen it. I have chosen it already. Nothing will prevent what I have chosen from coming about.” But a second reading produces another shade altogether and suggests that the future has not yet been decided, that circumstances will determine what needs to be, as though God were saying: “What I will be, then, will be what I will have had to be. There is no point in determining in advance what only being in each present moment can, and should, bring about.” Enter the Environment Severe environmental crises have been unfolding before our eyes. As the scholar and philosopher Hans Jonas recognized, shortly before his death in 1993, this global threat signifies an intriguing theological transformation: It was once religion which told us that we are all sinners, because of original sin. It is now the ecology of our planet which pronounces us all to be sinners because of the excessive exploits of human inventiveness. It was once religion which threatened us with a last judgment at the end of days. It is now our tortured planet which predicts the arrival of such a day without any heavenly intervention.3 267 Looking for an Ecological God Jonas separates environmental crises from the Divine. When I read the news or actual research about environmental degradation, I think of the warnings and curses hurled at the Israelites in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy and by the prophets. Unlike Jonas, I suspect that the environmental crises indeed represent heavenly intervention, a form of Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh. In this conception, God, like nature, is issuing a warning: if you tinker with the equilibrium, you face disequilibrium—which, although you might not realize it, actually is God’s and/or nature’s way of restoring equilibrium. In other words, the message is that our own actions are giving birth to what appear to be planetary curses or punishments. Consider the following sobering facts: • According to a study conducted by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London and published in late 2014, which measured more than ten thousand representative populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish, the total population of those species declined by fifty-two percent since 1970. That is a loss of half of all known living beings within the lifetime of many of us alive as I write, in early 2018.4 This study can be supplemented by research announced in 2017 that shows that in nature preserves in Germany the insect population went down by around seventy-five percent in the twentyseven years since steady measuring has been conducted.5 These numerous species have been killed by us for many reasons, good and bad: for food, clothing, medicinal uses of their body parts, for sport hunting, or because we are destroying, reducing, or fatally polluting their habitats in multiple ways. • In 2012 the World Health Organization reported that seven million people worldwide had died that year because of indoor and outdoor air pollution, making it the eighth leading cause of death.6 268 Jonathan Schorsch • The Great Barrier Reef, one of the world’s most amazing and vibrant ecological features and a UNESCO World Heritage site, is so large that it is visible from outer space. According to a report from the Australian Institute of Marine Science, about half of the reef ’s coral died between 1985 and 2012 due to the warming of the ocean, which is thought to be a result of climate change.7 • Land degradation and desertification afflict more than 168 nations. Caused by climate change, intensive farming practices, and poor water management, land degradation removes an area three times as large as Switzerland from agriculturally productive use every year, costing collectively some $490 billion annually.8 • Henderson Island, a tiny uninhabited atoll in the Pacific thousands of miles from inhabited land, was declared a World Heritage Site in 1988 because of its unique ecosystem, which UNESCO described at the time as “practically untouched by a human presence.” In 2015, only twenty-seven years later, scientists estimated that the manmade debris (mostly plastic) littering the island’s sandy beaches, all brought there by ocean currents, weighed 17.6 tons.9 Dayeinu—enough! If we don’t know all this already, it can only be because we have not been paying attention. These examples reflect damage already done. Even if only half of the above information is correct, we’re still in pretty bad shape. The immediate future is not promising to bring relief. The Nigerian writer and activist Ken SaroWiwa, murdered for his activism, once called the ever-expanding oildriven pollution of his country an “omnicidal” weapon: “human life, flora, fauna, the air, fall at its feet, and finally, the land itself dies.”10 Environmental deterioration, more than almost all of the other pressing issues facing humanity, causes me to wonder whether our species will survive—or even if we should survive. 269 Looking for an Ecological God “Is a Tree of the Field a Human, That It Should Fall under Your Siege?” (Deuteronomy 20:19) We are fouling up our own camp en masse, something Scripture forbids explicitly at Deuteronomy 23:13–14. This seems to reflect a kind of psychopathic category error: we seem unable to distinguish poison from nutrient or friend from foe, or to connect cause and effect and thus reasonably to predict the present’s impact on the future so as to finally understand that there is no “away” where effluents—like sins—can go, without generating consequences. Wendell Berry warns: If we represent knowledge as a tree, we know that things that are divided are yet connected. We know that to observe the divisions and ignore the connections is to destroy the tree.11 Our delusions regarding climate denial and similar attitudes come from people who refuse to see that everything is interconnected: that pollution knows no borders, that toxicity and species loss bear consequences up and down the food chain, that rising temperatures wreak havoc on ecosystems micro (bacteria, viruses) and macro (weather patterns, coral reefs), and that economic policy impacts environmental conditions. Whence this refusal to understand cause and effect? Today’s sins differ rather little from the ancient ones. American environmental leader James Gustave Speth was quoted in an article in Orion magazine, saying: I used to think that the top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought that with thirty years of good science we could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation.12 270 Jonathan Schorsch We could add hubris, lack of compassion for the vulnerable, corruption, and a perversion of our judgment due to the love of money and the idolatrous worship of wealth, success, power, and our own knowledge. In short, to use a traditional idiom: once again we have forgotten God. Modern-day plagues and some form of potential apocalypse appear to be upon us. This is not some fundamentalist condemnation (e.g., hurricanes for homosexuality) but, more terrifyingly, it is the predictable consequence in the world of our playing with our planetary systems, what one anthropologist calls “supernatureculture.”13 Some more extreme forms of discourse about divine wrath have made many moderns wary of invoking notions like divine reward and punishment, cosmic consciousness, or karma. But perhaps ecology is a realm where distasteful moralizing can be left aside. Indeed, with the circulation of ecological causes and effects there is something direct and transparent, even naked, about how we are situated in a system that we influence and that, in turn, affects us. While environmental sins are ultimately moral, they always bear a physical form and outcome—even if that outcome is not directly perceptible to us. When we speak of the biological, chemical, physical, and ecological consequences of putting too much carbon into the air, of killing too many other living creatures, of producing too many things out of non-renewable resources—consequences such as the decimation of entire species, the deoxygenization of large zones in the seas, the rising of oceans, and the increased incidence of more intense droughts, fires, and storms—we are speaking of how Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh responds in order to maintain balance. The world may be an assemblage of material systems, it may be a living organism, and it may be a manifestation of God’s will. In any case, the world—the God-world, I would call it—is acting to restore a healthy state. The natural chain of reactions to human impact on the environment is 271 Looking for an Ecological God simultaneously conscious, agential, and divine. Many commentators understand Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh as a name for divine compassion— as opposed to another common name in Biblical Hebrew for God, Elohim, which is taken to reference God’s strict judgment—because the Ehyeh name is used exactly when God steps in to redeem the people Israel from terrible slavery.14 Just as the biblical God came to redeem Israel from suffering, is it possible for us to see the global ecosystem’s current disequilibrium—the system’s attempt to restore equilibrium, no matter how potentially devastating to us humans such attempts might be—as an act of divine compassion, as the removal of trans-species suffering on a planetary scale that has been caused by us? Disturbingly, in the contemporary version of this story humans have become Pharaoh, hard of heart, unwilling to stop exploiting and disregarding the environment—no matter how many prophets insist that we do so. Although this should all be fairly obvious, many traditional Jews still persist in seeing environmentalism as a form of paganism that denies the Jewish idea of God. Some evangelical Christians in the United States have even gone so far as to claim that “the fear of climate change is promoting a new pagan religion similar to the medieval fear of hell.”15 In contrast to these perspectives, I understand environmentalism to promote a modern face of Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, very much resonating with the increasingly popular slogan, “Respect Existence or Expect Resistance.”16 “This Is Holy Ground” (Exodus 3:5) We have been lulled into distorted understandings of God and God’s relationship with the world. We refuse to remove the shoes we have made for ourselves that prevent us from feeling the very 272 Jonathan Schorsch ground on which we walk. Many thinkers have offered correctives to inadequate ideas of God and the world based on unfolding human understanding and (particularly environmental) knowledge in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—falling somewhere between what they take Torah and Judaism to be, to have been, and what they believe it could and should be. Among these thinkers are Abraham Joshua Heschel, Hans Jonas, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Arthur Waskow, Arthur Green, Lawrence Troster, and David Seidenberg. From their rich and compelling thinking we learn several key lessons: • The Torah views the world holistically: everything is connected. This is among the lessons conveyed in Jewish sources ranging from the creation story to the intentionally jumbled sequence of the commandments, and to the talmudic anecdote about the man who learned the importance of the commons when he tried to remove stones from his private field by dumping them onto the public road and later tripped over them.17 Economics, religion, agriculture, culture: all lean on, and impinge on, one another. • God and the writers whose voices we hear in the Torah love the world, despite its seeming imperfections. Jewish observance and ritual require existence, nature, bodies, and objects, both natural and cultural. If you think mind or spirit are the only (or the most important) aspect of being, try to philosophize or study Torah for more than ten minutes—without breathing. Forty days seems to be the mythical maximum of human survival without food and water. Forty days! This is a pretty humbling limit. If you think we live apart from nature, meditate on scientific estimates regarding what the world provides us with: oxygen, water, metals, lumber, fish, game, and recreational sites; the making of soil; the treatment of many forms of waste; the control of soil erosion; the supply of bees and 273 Looking for an Ecological God other creatures that pollinate plants—all together, these are worth $16 to $54 trillion, every year!18 That is what we humans owe nature from an econometric point of view: a wondrous and awe-inspiring sum, belittling human selfimportance. In an approach known as shiur komah, some ancient Jewish mystics meditated on detailed descriptions of God’s cosmos-sized body.19 Our times call for new forms of such appreciation, perhaps along the following lines: And for Your groundwater salinity maintenance, 800 billion dollars, annually; And for Your water filtration, 800 billion dollars, annually; And for Your carbon sequestration, 800 billion dollars, annually; And for Your plants with medicinal uses, 800 billion dollars, annually; And for Your wool, 600 billion dollars, annually; And for Your ivory, 300 billion dollars, annually.20 • We are used to seeing God as somehow in conflict with the world, as a supernatural person without need for anything, as a principle of self-contained autonomy. Despite millennia of rhetoric, we continue to resist taking seriously the cardinal Jewish idea that God is not a “person.” The Kabbalah has taught us how to conceive of the Divine as a network that comprises and includes every individual being, every particular collective, as well as “the all.” The kabbalistic understanding that we perceive God’s unity through multiplicity, through perhaps infinite perspectives, and the hasidic expansion of kabbalistic panentheistic and even pantheistic notions that all of existence is divine, that God is itself actually this “all,” encourage us to understand all of creation, the world or nature, as simply one aspect, one manifestation of Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh.21 Both the 274 Jonathan Schorsch name Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh (Exodus 3:14) and the most sacred name for God, YHVH (Exodus 6:3), each a form of the verb “to be,” point semantically to existence, being, and permanence.22 Even the rationalist Maimonides held that nature is divine. When Moses asks to see God’s face, something he is unable to do as a human being, God hides Moses in a cleft of the rock, covers his (i.e., Moses’) eyes when God passes and then lets Moses see God’s back (Exodus 33–34). Commenting on this, Maimonides says that what Moses saw (that is: was allowed to comprehend) was God’s back—that is, God’s nature, which can only be comprehended by humans through the natural world.23 If nature is God’s back, it is still an integral part of the Divine!24 In any case, panentheistic and even pantheistic ideas can be found in mystical Judaism, even if the notion that all of existence equals God would seem to go against Jewish doctrine. Arthur Green cites the hasidic Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac Epstein of Homel (1770–1857) as an example of someone who held that “all is God.”25 Green himself has come to express and recommend an increasingly panentheistic Judaism.26 • The biological and ecological sciences not only do not contradict the Torah; in fact, they confirm its holistic cosmology. It is easy to see why the Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh name has been associated with existence—which God makes possible, inhabits, or perhaps even comprises.27 This could be how to read God’s emphasis on God’s own permanence: “This is My name forever (l’olam)” (Exodus 3:15); this is My name for the world. Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, explains God, is My name for the world. Many peoples have believed (and continue to believe) in a trans-species, animated cosmos, and contemporary thinkers likewise propose that we ought to think in such a manner: when we make policy we should take into account the needs and agency of, say, a river, bay or forest.28 The Torah tells us 275 Looking for an Ecological God similar things: the earth wants its rest (Leviticus 26:34– 35) and hence we have the Sabbatical year as a response to the needs of the land. Both cutting-edge philosophies and the Torah itself suggest that humans are part of the supernaturalcultural system, but they are not the whole of it. The world is animated. That which seems invisible exists, must be taken into account, and inevitably delivers to us the consequences of our actions, thus helping us see ecology as an extension of the spiritual cosmology found throughout the Bible and rabbinic thought. As in the past, we need to believe in what is invisible, hopefully in a way that accords with our biological, cultural, and informational evolution. Can we imagine what we are doing when we intentionally or accidentally cause the extinction of a form of life, one of God’s creations—and, according to the midrash, a potential agent of God like all beings?29 Our situation cries out for a suitable liturgy of mourning: Remember the Great Auk, the last living pair captured in 1844, the first North American animal to go extinct entirely at the hands of modern man. Remember the Passenger Pigeon, of whose tens of billions of flocking members not one survived into the twentieth century. Not one. Remember the Carolina Parakeet, whose last survivor died in captivity in 1918. Remember the Pinnated Grouse, the last survivor unofficially sighted in March 1932. Remember the Sardinian Pika, the Sea Mink, the Tasmanian Tiger, the Indefatigable Galapagos Mouse, Schomburgk’s Deer, the Saudi Gazelle.30 In our anthropocentric myopia we are dismembering the Creator 276 Jonathan Schorsch when we dismember creation, and we are dismembering ourselves when we dismember the world by means of which God allows us to flourish. Do Something! The point of divine castigations is not for us to welcome them as necessary purgation, but rather to learn from their threat, changing our behavior in order to prevent such castigation in the first place. This message is obvious in the Book of Jonah, among many others sources. The point of Torah is for Jews and humankind to do mitzvot. The point of realizing that the world is truly divine is to treat it differently than we currently do. Most commentators emphasize that the Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh name points to God as the only truly autonomous being, as the only being utterly independent of everything else that might exist. This traditional vision of God posits the Divine as the opposite of the world, of nature, of us humans. We humans stand as far from such independence from nature and materiality as we do from the Divine. It is time to name such dreams of total autonomy as toxic.31 If nothing else, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh reminds us that we humans cannot afford such dreams of autonomy from nature. Self-separation and selfsegregation—since the Enlightenment often called “liberation”— come at a steep price. Many now search desperately for liberation from the millennia-old search for “liberation” from nature. Psalm 121:5 says that “God is your shadow on your right.” The Baal Shem Tov (c.1700–1760), often considered the founder of Hasidism, explains that this teaches that God’s actions mirror our actions, that God reciprocates our behavior, and that in some sense each of us creates with our actions the shape of our own God.32 There 277 Looking for an Ecological God is no reason Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh might not include us as well; we are one of the factors causing God to appear this way or that. What kind of God do we really want to create? To say that we belong to God should not mean that we transcend nature. Just the opposite: it is to say that we live—hopefully well—in God’s world. The Torah focuses on bringing out or re-connecting the Divine to every person, time, place, and thing. To say, as does one famous hasidic story, that the land belongs not to this owner or to that owner but to God (based on Leviticus 25:23) is to say that we humans belong to the divine network of geographically and cosmologically variegated ecosystems. As a species we are called in Hebrew adam because we come from the earth, the adamah. In the most fundamental, profound, and blessed sense we are earthlings. Armed with the right consciousness, think of all the mitzvot we can do to help set the God-world aright: looking out for our own well-being (as ordained at Deuteronomy 4:9); avoiding wanton destruction, not engaging in cruelty to animals, engaging solely in mindful agricultural techniques, and not working on Sabbaths or festivals—all of these can be interpreted as eco-theological practices, as I believe they were originally intended. Faced with ecological crises that stem from human character flaws rather than mere technocratic errors, Dale Jamieson, a professor of environmental sciences and philosophy, lays out what he calls “green virtues,” which include cooperativeness, mindfulness, simplicity, temperance, and respect for nature.33 Judaism, properly understood, has offered similar advice as a path to better living for millennia.34 Scientific research seems to confirm that negative human behavior can be modified, affecting the whole, as Judaism, both rationalist and mystical, has long understood.35 Thus will we hopefully bring in the World to Come, that is (as the Zohar reminds us36) the world that is always in the process of 278 Jonathan Schorsch coming into being, the world unfolding constantly at least in part because of our right actions. What kind of world will this be? This is the same as asking about the nature of Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh. Will We Love the World as Much as God Does? Rather than fear environmentalists as pagans, traditional Jews should be the first and most ecological zealots, leaping to remove the litter we have strewn all over God’s back.37 Commenting on Exodus 3:14, Rabbi Annaniel son of Rabbi Sasson notes that God communicates through various natural phenomena, as God sees fit: stretching out a heavenly arm to touch the earth, placing three angels beneath a tree, speaking (to Job) from the midst of a storm or (to Moses) from a bush.38 That nature can serve as a channel of divine communication is nothing other than standard biblical and rabbinic theology, yet both unbelieving secularists and literalist believers are now united in denying it. Unlike in any other period of history, we humans are now in the position of being capable of preserving or altering the Global Operating Dimension (G.O.D.). Without extremely serious, immediate, multidimensional global countermeasures, I believe our ecological crises could threaten the very existence of our species. We know what we need to do to avert catastrophe. But this action must originate in deep belief and inspiration if it is to be sustained. Jews need to have ways of being at home in the world, feeling part of the larger-than-human universe without having to feel guilty for forgetting or abandoning God.39 Judaism itself features great capacity to renew itself in creative old-new ways. Rabbi Abraham Hakohen Kook (1865–1935) believed that in the Third Temple the sacrifices would involve only fruit, vegetables, and grain, thus eschewing 279 Looking for an Ecological God the killing of animals as a sacred or necessary act. In this spirit of innovation (and radical democracy), Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Halevi Epstein (b. 1753) taught that the name Ehyeh shows that God allows—or perhaps insists— that “I will be called [what I am] by each according to the level of his or her own worship-service,” that even in the future, “for the coming generations I will be called by each one according to his or her level and attainment.”40 The Baal Shem Tov’s understanding of the intersubjective nature of God—that God and we construct, influence and partake of one another—offers us the answer to the dilemma posed by Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh (definitiveness and permanence vs. unpredictability and change): God’s character in the future is at least in part shaped by us. As always, strange and attractive new paradigms abound for figuring ourselves out and reconfiguring ourselves: biocentrism, metamodernism, the Singularity, and transhumanism; not to mention the older new ways such as capitalism, communism, and totalitarianism.41 The question is: How will we take the best of human knowledge, the wisdom God gave to flesh and blood (to quote the benediction one is supposed to say when seeing a great Gentile sage), and emulate the living God, the God of the spirits of all flesh, El Shaddai, a name that might be rendered as “God of my breast”?42 If God alone can say “I will be what I will be,” then we earthlings, Jewish and otherwise, must continue (but quickly!) to decide—as God’s partners, as parts of God perhaps like microbes in a human gut—what we hope to be. What kind of God-world will we shape? 280 Jonathan Schorsch NOTES 1 I wrote this essay, based on a sermon I gave at the Conservative Synagogue Adath Israel of Riverdale, New York, in 2015, over the course of a few winter weeks in Berlin two years later. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted. 2 Ed. S. Buber (Vilna, 1891), p. 479. 3 Hans Jonas, “The Outcry of Mute Things,” in Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, ed. Lawrence Vogel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), p. 201. 4 Living Planet Report 2016; https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/livingplanet-report-2016. 5 Gretchen Vogel, “Where Have All the Insects Gone?” Science (May 10, 2017); http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/where-have-all-insects-gone. For the published results see Caspar A. Hallmann, et al., “More Than 75 Percent Decline Over 27 Years in Total Flying Insect Biomass in Protected Areas,” Plos One (October 18, 2017); http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/ journal.pone.0185809. 6 Http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-pollution/en. 7 Australian Institute of Marine Science, “Declining Coral Growth on the Great Barrier Reef,” https://www.aims.gov.au/docs/research/climate-change/ declining-coral-growth.html; Glenn De’ath, et al., “The 27-Year Decline of Coral Cover on the Great Barrier Reef and its Causes,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (October 30, 2012); https:// www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3497744. 8 United Nations Convention to Stop Desertification (UNCCD), Background document, The Economics of Deserti-fication, Land Degradation and Drought: Methodologies and Analysis for Decision-making (2013); http://2sc.unccd.int/ fileadmin/unccd/upload/documents/Background_documents/Background_ Document_web3.pdf. 9 Quote from https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/487; Jennifer L. Lavers and Alexander L. Bond, “Exceptional and Rapid Accumulation of Anthropogenic Debris on One of the World’s Most Remote and Pristine Islands,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (May 15, 2017); http:www.pnas.org/content/ early/2017/05/09/1619818114.full. 10 “Statement by Ken Saro-Wiwa to Ogoni Civil Disturbances Tribunal” (September 21, 1995); https://ratical.org/corporations/KSWstmt.pdf. 11 Wendell Berry, “The Loss of the University,” Home Economics: Fourteen Essays (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1987), pp. 82–83. 12 “Climate and Creation: A Conversation with Imam Jamal Rahman, Pastor Don Mackenzie, and Rabbi Ted Falcon,” Orion (May–June 2017); https:// 281 Looking for an Ecological God orionmagazine.org/article/climate-and-creation. 13 Mayanthi L. Fernando, “Supernatureculture,” The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere (December 11, 2017); https://tif.ssrc. org/2017/12/11/supernatureculture. 14 See the comment of Naḥmanides (1194–1270) to Exodus 3:14; the comment of Moshe Alshekh (1508–1593) to that same verse in his Torat Moshe; and that of Ḥayyim ibn Attar (1696–1743) in his Or Ha-ḥayyim, also on Exodus 3:14. 15 Sigurd Bergmann, “Climate Change Changes Religion: Space, Spirit, Ritual Technology—Through a Theological Lens,” Studia Theologica 63 (2009), p. 102; and see also Barbara R. Rossing, “‘Hastening the Day’ When the Earth Will Burn? Global Warming, 2 Peter and Revelation,” in The Bible in the Public Square, eds. Cynthia Briggs Kitteridge, Ellen Bradshaw Aitken, and Jonathan A. Draper (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), pp. 25–28. 16 A man named John Boyl (a.k.a. John Enjoy Life) claims to have concocted this phrase in 2010 for Mika Rasila, a member of the Canadian Freemen, an anti-authority group (see https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?q id=20110808090704AAmM7D5). Rasila is known for his racist and antiSemitic comments online. See Barbara Perry, David C. Hofmann and Ryan Scrivens, “Broadening our Under-standing of Anti-Authority Movements in Canada,” Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society (August 2017); http://tsas.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/2017-02-Perry. compressed-1.pdf. Those who worry about the real or potentially anti-Jewish stances of radical environmentalists should worry no less about the parallels and alliances between Zionists and European right-wing nationalists. Politics sometimes does, indeed, create strange bedfellows. 17 B. Bava Kamma 50b. 18 Robert Costanza, Ralph d’Arge, Rudolph de Groot, et al, “The Value of the World’s Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital,” Nature 387 (May 15, 1997), pp. 253–260. 19 See, for instance, Martin Samuel Cohen, Shiur Qomah: Liturgy and Theurgy in Pre-Kabbalistic Jewish Mysticism (Latham, MD: University Press of America, 1983). 20 The passage and its numerical estimates invented by the author. 21 Though I read it after I wrote this essay, Arthur Green’s Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2003), esp. chap. 8, lays all this out far more eloquently and learnedly than I have. That chapter first appeared as a freestanding essay: Arthur Green, “A Kabbalah for the Environmental Age,” Tikkun 14:5 (1999), pp. 33–40. See also idem, Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), chaps. 1–2; David Mevorach Seidenberg, Kabbalah and Ecology: God’s Image in the More-than-Human World (New York: Cambridge University 282 Jonathan Schorsch Press, 2015); Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus, “Kabbalah, Food, and Sustainability,” in The Mountains Shall Drip Wine: Jews and the Environment, ed.Leonard J. Greenspoon (Omaha, OK: Creighton University Press, 2009), pp 37–47; Jeremy Kalmanofsky, “Cosmic Theology and Earthly Religion,” in Jewish Theology in Our Time, ed. E. J. Cosgrove (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2011), pp. 23–30; and Jay Michaelson, Everything Is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism (Boston: Trumpeter Books, 2009). 22 Many mystical commentators note this kinship; see, e.g. Naḥmanides on Exodus 3:14 or Avraham Saba, in his Tz’ror Ha-mor commentary on Exodus 3:14. 23 In Guide to the Perplexed I 21, Maimonides calls God’s back “the actions attributed to Him…which are so many attributes [of Him],” whereas in I 54 he writes that: “when [Moses] would know [God’s] ways he would know [God].” All God’s “goodness” (tuvi, Exodus 33:19) “is a hint to show [Moses] all [created] things that exist, so that he should comprehend their nature (tivam).” Moses’ trustworthiness comes from the fact that “he understood the reality of My world entirely.” Naḥmanides, on the other hand, considered the name El Shaddai to refer to nature (ha-teva; see his comment to Exodus 6:3). Based on the fact that the words elohim and ha-teva (“nature”) each has a numerical value of eighty-six, thinkers such as Maimonides, Abraham Abulafia, and Joseph Gikatilla have linked these terms to each other (see Moshe Idel, “Deus Sive Natura: The Metamorphosis of a Dictum from Maimonides to Spinoza,” in Maimonides and the Sciences, eds. Robert S. Cohen and Hillel Levine (=Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 211; Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer, 2000), pp. 87–110. Regarding Moses and God’s back, see Rachel Adelman's essay elsewhere in the volume. 24 Sociologist and scholar of religion Peter L. Berger sees the world as a fragmented face of God, a beautiful image with which I think many kabbalists might agree (see his Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity [New York: Anchor Books, 1993], pp. 160–165). 25 Arthur Green, “Hasidism: Discovery and Retreat,” The Other Side of God: A Polarity in World Religions, ed. Peter L. Berger (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1981), p. 119; this and the previous Berger quote come from Alan Brill, “A Jewish Reflection on Peter Berger’s Theology, Part II, available online at https:// kavvanah.wordpress.com/2017/10/25/a-jewish-reflection-on-peter-bergerstheology-part-ii-mysticism-and-interfaith. The Yiddish formulation is als iz Got. 26 In Green, Radical Judaism, p. 72, the author calls for Jewish panentheism to go public. 27 See Ibn Ezra on Exodus 3:14; Maimonides’ Guide, I 57; Zohar III 65a; and Avraham Saba’s Tz’ror Ha-mor on Exodus 3:14. 283 28 Looking for an Ecological God I have in mind some of the work of Bruno Latour; cf. Bronislaw Szerszynski, “Gods of the Anthropocene: Geo-spiritual Formations in the Earth’s New Epoch,” Theory, Culture, and Society (February 10, 2017); or Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 29 For example, Bereshit Rabbah, chap. 10. 30 Another liturgical liberty taken by the author. For a moving account of a ritualized commemoration of species gone extinct, see P. K. Read, “A New Mourning: Remembrance Day for Lost Species,” Undark: Truth, Beauty, Science (April 10, 2018); https://undark.org/article/new-mourning-species-extinction. 31 This is of course the critique of many environmentalists, perhaps beginning with the (in)famous essay of Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155:3767 (March 10, 1967), pp. 1203–1207. 32 One source for such a view might be the midrash that explains that when Moses asks God’s name, God says, “I am called according to My actions,” sometimes being known by one name and sometimes by another (Shemot Rabbah 3:6). The Baal Shem Tov’s idea is also expressed by Naḥmanides in his comment to Exodus 3:14. 33 Dale Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed —And What It Means for Our Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 34 The literature on Judaism and ecology is growing. Among other texts, see: Jeremy Benstein, The Way Into Judaism and the Environment (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2006); Judaism and Ecology: Created World and Revealed Word, ed. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Judaism and Environmental Ethics: A Reader, ed. Martin D. Yaffe (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001); Torah of the Earth: Exploring 4,000 Years of Ecology in Jewish Thought, ed. Arthur Waskow (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2000); idem, Down-to-Earth Judaism: Food, Money, Sex, And The Rest Of Life (New York: William Morrow, 1995), pt. 1; Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Theodore Hiebert, The Yahwist’s Landscape: Nature and Religion in Early Israel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); as well as my father’s essay, Ismar Schorsch, “Learning to Live With Less,” Spirit and Nature: Why the Environment Is a Religious Issue: An Interfaith Dialogue, eds. S. C. Rockefeller and J. C. Elder (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), pp. 25–38. 35 Adam Corner, “Tiny Individual Decisions Really Could Help Avert Climate Chaos,” New Scientist ( January 12, 2018); www.newscientist.com/ article/2158432-tiny-individual-decisions-really-could-help-avert-climatechaos. 36 Zohar I 83a, 1:92a b, 3:290b. 284 37 Jonathan Schorsch If God is a network of cosmological ecosystems, we can understand the staggering amount of pollution that humans emit as k’lipot, the kabbalistic term for the “shells” or obstacles that block light and goodness. 38 Shemot Rabbah 3:6. How fitting that this is the view of Rabbi Annaniel, whose name means “God is my cloud” or “My cloud is God.” 39 Ecology offers to takes Jews beyond the by-now sterile Zionism/Diaspora binary, the subject of a study-in-progress of mine. 40 Sefer Ma∙or Va-shemesh (ed. Warsaw, 5637 [1876/1877]), p. 2b, s.v. va-yomer moshe hinneih anokhi. 41 Biocentrism or Deep Ecology is the idea that humans are no more important than other parts of the world. Meta-modernism is a school of thought promoted by thinkers hoping to transcend obsolete left-right political and cultural debates and escape what is seen as the stagnation of postmodernism; see the writings of the pseudonymous Hanzi Freinacht). Transhumanism supports the idea that science, technology, and advancing thought will allow humans to transcend their natural limits. More specifically, the Singularity is a theory and goal, originally developed by Ray Kurzweil, holding that at some point in the near future (which he called the Singularity) engineering and artificial intelligence will produce such super-natural humans. 42 The living God: Deuteronomy 5:22, 32 40 (and see 32:39); Psalm 42:3, 84:3; Jeremiah 10:10, 23:36; Hosea 2:1; and differently in Ezekiel 5:11). God of the spirits of all flesh: Numbers 27:15. El Shaddai: Genesis 17:1.