Environmentalism and Jewish Law
A look at some basic Jewish concepts that relate to the environment and our responsibilities to it
Tomorrow evening (January 24, 2024) begins the special day of Tu B’Shevat, the 15th of the Jewish month of Shevat. This day is known as the New Year’s Day of Trees. Produce from trees that begin to bloom on or after this day are considered to be fruit of this year; produce from trees that began to bloom before this day—even when the fruit is harvested after this date—are considered fruit of last year.
Photo by Michela Serventi on Unsplash
Certainly in European and American cultures, this is a meaningless distinction. However, it is very important in Israel, where, among Jews who adhere to Jewish law (the government of Israel is secular) the laws of shmitta and yovel are important. Shmitta and yovel are to the land what the Sabbath is for people and animals: a period of rest[i] when things grow naturally or not at all—that is, without the benefit of human assistance.
Books have been written on the subject; in this space I can just give a very brief overview. I will undoubtedly leave out many important things. As always, if you have questions or comments, please leave them for me and I will respond.
Awareness and Gratitude
As I wrote last week in the article “Freedom and Jewish Law,” Jewish law mandates blessings to be said over many things. Some are called “blessings of enjoyment” and are reminders that God created a world for us to experience and to enjoy, for which thanks are due to Him. Examples include blessings when greeting a friend whom we have not seen in a long time, reaching a milestone, eating different kinds of foods, and many more.
Other blessings are said when we experience the powerful forces God set in this incredible world.
Many if not most blessings begin with the words,
Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, Ruler of the universe … and are completed with the action that we are acknowledging:
…Who re-enacts the work of Creation.
We say this on these occasions:
On seeing a shooting star, comet, or meteor;
Witnessing an earthquake
Seeing lightning
Seeing great oceans, seas, or spectacular waterfalls
Seeing very high mountains
…Whose power and might fill the world.
On hearing thunder
…Who remembers the covenant, is faithful to His covenant, and fulfills his covenant[ii].
On seeing a rainbow
As these blessings make clear, we are supposed to be aware of the environment and not take it for granted.
There is a perception that the Bible is the root of our environmental problems because it calls for man to subdue (dominate) the world and all living beings. This is based on Genesis 1:28, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and rule over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the sky and over all the beasts that tread upon the earth.”
However, this is an oversimplification. Two verses earlier Genesis says, “And God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and they shall rule over the fish of the sea and over …” To say that the former passage gives man the right to destroy the world is bizarre if man is made in God’s image. Why would the God who created the world mean for humans to destroy it?
Imagine baking a cake, frosting it, and setting it on the counter, only to have your child come in and throw the cake on the floor. The child certainly subdued and dominated the poor cake, but this was not your plan. You were going to decide how many slices would be needed, cut the cake into equal-sized slices, place each piece on a plate, and set these on the table with a fork and napkin at each place. In the end, the cake would still be “destroyed and dominated,” but in an orderly fashion for a benign purpose.
The responsibilities that humans have for the world are defined more clearly a little further on. Genesis 2:15 points out that when people were created and put in the Garden of Eden, God’s purpose was for us “to work [the garden] and to guard it.” As the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks explained,[iii]
The two Hebrew verbs are significant. The first – le’ovdah – literally means ‘to serve it.’ Man is not just a master but also a servant of nature. The second – leshomrah – means ‘to guard it.’ This is the verb used in later Torah legislation to describe the responsibilities of a guardian of property that does not belong to him. He must exercise vigilance in its protection and is liable for loss through negligence. This is perhaps the best short definition of man’s responsibility for nature as the Bible conceives it.
In other words, in direct contradiction to the common perception that the Bible mandates man’s exploitation of the environment, humanity is given the direct responsibility to protect it and to care for it.
A number of other general principles in Judaism concern the world that God created. Here are a few of the major ones.
Bal Tashchit: Do Not Destroy
Today’s environmentalists talk about sustainability as though it were a new concept. However, an ancient Jewish principle is “Do not destroy” (bal tashchit). One of the best-known applications of this principle is that when laying siege to a city, it is forbidden to cut down fruit- and nut-trees. The sage Maimonides (1135-1204 CE) stated about this law, “Not only does this apply to trees, but also to whoever breaks vessels or tears garments, destroys a building, blocks a wellspring of water or destructively wastes food transgresses…”[iv]
On a very small scale, this precept means that in religious communities, food fights are not seen as a normal part of childhood, but as serious breaches of appropriate behavior.
On a larger scale, in Israel farmers sometimes bring huge crates of vegetables to lower-income communities and leave them for people to take.[v] This is either surplus salable food, items that do not meet market requirements, or some that for some reason will spoil too quickly to be transported and sold. Destroying surplus food, as is sometimes done in the USA to maintain prices, is to the best of my knowledge not done in Israel.
And Thou Shalt Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself
This precept, first stated in Leviticus 19:18, is fundamental to Judaism. The following story is told about Hillel, a rabbi who lived from the end of the first century BCE until early in the first century CE. He had the reputation of always remaining calm and answering every question brought to him. Late one Friday afternoon, shortly before the beginning of the Sabbath, an apostate who wanted to upset him came to him and asked what was in the Torah—and could Hillel please explain this while standing on one foot. Hillel raised one foot and said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.[vi]” (The apostate was so impressed that he became religiously observant.)
Bal tashchit, combined with And thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, prohibits wasteful and dangerous behaviors, from simple things like littering to major issues such as toxic dumping.
Kilayim: Crossbreeding
The Torah forbids many kinds of mixing: crossbreeding animals of different species; planting fields with a mixture of seeds; grafting together two species of trees; using two species of animal together for work, such as hitching a horse and an ox together to pull a wagon, or having a donkey and a horse turning a millstone; and even combining wool and linen in the same fabric or article of clothing. It is speculated that crosses of these kinds are forbidden because they can be seen as attempts to improve God’s handiwork.[vii]
With in-vitro fertilization and genetic modification, such crosses are not unknown today. Are they improvements on God’s creations? Some strange animals are being produced. If you look carefully at this picture that I took in 1991 at the University of Alaska field school outside of Fairbanks, you will notice double antlers on the creature, a cross-breed between moose and caribou (if I remember correctly—or possibly elk-caribou). The purpose was to create a meat animal that could be raised on ranches in the far north, where the climate is too cold for traditional domestic animals. I was told that the double antlers make the head so heavy that animals can hold their heads up for only a few moments at a time. As a result, the animals are prone to serious problems, from neck and shoulder issues to accidents because their posture impairs their field of view.
On the botanic side, there is speculation that genetic modifications in wheat are related to the dramatic rise in celiac disease, gluten intolerance and gluten allergy in recent years. The people who stand outside donut shops, sniffing the fragrant air with tears in their eyes, testify to the failure of those modifications as improvements to creation.
But Orthodox Don’t Do Anything To Fix The Environment
This criticism is, to some extent, true. While perhaps the laws create a society where people as a matter of course respect the environment (although littering is a huge problem in Israel), Orthodox Jews are not known as environmentalists. At the same time, action by advocacy groups can do more harm than good. As the Jewish Chronicle, a British newspaper, reported, Shimon Cohen, director of Shechita UK, the kosher meat protection organization in the UK, said about an article about another Jewish group’s environmental activism, “…the woeful ignorance displayed in this article, which has attempted to take a definitive stance on a complex and conflicting body of scientific evidence, is a potentially dangerous interference and is frankly a reckless disgrace.[viii]”
In my opinion, Torah-true leaders should be encouraging better education about and adherence to these laws. However, I also believe that Jewish advocacy groups that attempt to influence the larger world in the name of Judaism often fall into the trap cited above. Perhaps worse, I believe they greatly increase the perception that Jews are trying, if not succeeding, to control the world.
We are expected, as Jews, to be a light to the nations. Light is passive: by its presence or absence it changes perception. At the same time, it leaves each of us free to interpret (within the limits of the law) what we see in our own way.
[i] Shmitta is every seventh year; the Yovel (or Jubilee) is every 50th. In these years, the land is left fallow. No agricultural labor is to be done; no one is to make any profit of the produce. Everything that grows—from potatoes under the ground to dates high up on palm trees—is considered ownerless: anyone may take and use it. This practice gives the land an opportunity to rest, with weeds filling the land on which crops have been grown. This was an early form of crop rotation that prevented, or at least minimized, the land being depleted of minerals necessary for healthy crop growth.
[ii] The covenant God made with Noah to never again destroy the world with water.
[iii] Sacks, Lord J., Environmental Responsibility, OUTorah.org,
https://outorah.org/p/26044/
, accessed Jan. 22, 2024.
[iv] Hilkhot Melakhim 6:10, quoted in Sacks, Rabbi Lord J., Environmental Responsibility, OU Torah,
https://outorah.org/p/26044/
accessed Jan. 24 2024.
[v] Two years ago I was told about such a crate of carrots. I had sorted carrots for four hours daily for many weeks when I was young on a work/study program on a kibbutz (communal farm). The crate that was left in front of our food bank was filled with the kinds of tiny, misshapen carrots that, on the kibbutz, I had thrown into the scrap box, to be used for animal feed or chopped up and composted. But although they took longer to peel than grade A or B carrots, I used those little, free ones into wonderful carrot jam.
[vi] This is actually very different from the Christian aphorism, “Do unto others as you would have others do to you.” Hillel’s version recommends refraining from doing to others any behaviors that are repugnant to you. In the Christian version, one is to take actions that he might want, but which the other person might not like, want, or need.
[vii] Bloom, D., What is Kilayim? The Torah prohibition against mixing seeds or species. https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3570273/jewish/What-Is-Kilayim.htm, accessed Jan. 21, 2024.
[viii] Shechita UK condemns Reform report that says that pre-stunning better for animals. Simon Rocker, July 14, 2022, The Jewish Chronicle, https://www.thejc.com/news/shechita-uk-condemns-reform-report-that-says-pre-stunning-better-for-animals-djn8gzfs?reloadTime=1659052800011, accessed Jan 21, 2024.