It’s rare for people to have a reference point in their lives to which they can return over and over, year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation. Yet, such is the gift of our cottage in Quebec’s Laurentian Mountains, a short hour’s drive from the city of Montreal, where I was born and raised. My family built it in 1966, two years before I was born. It has been a home to me for every one of my 57 years.
The house, the lake, the mountains and the trees have all seen me through every stage of my life. Stable and enduring, the landscape of my personal “Zion” supported me as I toddled and tumbled; bore witness as I entered adolescence and young adulthood with confidence and doubt, hope and despair, searching for my place in this world. In the days before I married, it was to my lake I returned to immerse myself in her loving and caressing waters — the same waters that playfully enveloped me and kept me afloat as I dove into each new wave of my evolution. In every season of my life and in every season of my soul, this place was — and continues to be — there to hold me, giving me air to breathe, trees to protect me, trails to summon me, hills to challenge me, and to be an anchor of unspeakable beauty and strength, keeping me balanced throughout the more unsteady moments of my journey. How in awe I am of nature’s uncritical, accepting embrace. It is to her eternally welcoming sounds, smells and physical wonder that I return repeatedly to retreat, to renew; to continue writing my story, to continue telling my tale.
But it’s not just my story. The beauty of our natural wonderland inspires deep and warm fellowship as our lake community unites around our shared appreciation for our precious habitat. It proved to be soul-saving during the lonely and frightening years of the pandemic, expanding and deepening our bonds. Maintaining the required distance, groups of friends and neighbors would hike together throughout the seasons. We’d host concerts on our docks in the summer for audience bubbles in kayaks, canoes, ski boats and pontoon cruisers. Jewish residents and some of other backgrounds would meet up in our boats every summer Friday for spirited Kabbalat Shabbat gatherings on the lake with music, dancing, food and drink. I’d have my rabbinic “Ozark” moments, offering words of Torah standing in my boat in the most original sanctuary of all. Nature brought us — and kept us — together even as we were required to be apart. These connections and activities have only expanded in these post-Covid years.
I have come to think of nature’s embrace of our own fragility as an empathic one, borne of the earth’s deep awareness of its own vulnerability. The need for us to offer it the same compassion and loyalty has only deepened as the planet faces its growing volatility. Apathy, denialism, war and politics have raised the stakes even as local activism gains some ground. Among myriad strategies to strengthen the effectiveness of climate advocacy, religion has taken its place, using its vision of human stewardship to motivate action. But what happens when the visions of science, spirituality and sociology coalesce?
Jeremy Rifkin, in his remarkable 2009 book, The Empathic Civilization, argues that the arc of human history is moving us to greater and greater expressions of empathy. Building on millennia of biological history, Rifkin documents how in our modern world, traditional hierarchies have given way to collaborative frameworks in business, media, energy distribution, governance and medicine, all furthering our empathic instincts. But to me, it’s the natural landscape that often proves a more effective teacher than any text, trend or data set.
For my annual “Rabbi on the Road” global adventure last year, I led 20 people through Norway’s majestic territories and its green social infrastructure to examine the issue of sustainability through the prism of Jewish environmental ethics. The fjords and the Scandinavian Mountains (“Scandes”) were highlights of our itinerary, but so was a waste treatment facility on the island of Langøya outside Oslo. We had a briefing from a representative of Noah — an aptly-named waste treatment, containment and recycling company — about how they’re redeeming the impact of inorganic waste on the environment by creatively containing or repurposing it for environmental regeneration projects. Then we explored why it was that the urban planners of ancient Jerusalem placed Sha’ar Ha’ashpot/Dung Gate, where garbage was collected, closest to what is now the Kotel/Western Wall. We reflected on the relationship between our aspiration to holiness and the need to continually rid ourselves of the inner detritus that weighs us down, between spirituality and personal sustainability, between our need for continual renewal and that of the surroundings which inspire us as we make our way through life. Many of my travelers reveled in how a garbage facility was among the most inspiring settings to cultivate in them a more empathic response to planetary healing.
Let’s think about the choices ahead of us through the wider lens of natural selection with a renewed commitment to empathy and collaboration.
A family safari provided yet another classroom. In 2015, In 2015, my wife Andi and I took our kids to Africa — the birthplace of my South African wife and the most compelling setting to sensitize our kids to the reality that we are not the main characters in this story we call “life”; to teach them to more graciously share this planet with the many other creatures whose destiny also depends on a healthy environment. One especially memorable lesson came to life in a scene we observed from our jeep, of a zebra and wildebeest traversing the veldt together. The zebra’s keener eyes kept watch for predators while leading its meandering friends; the wildebeest’s more refined hearing listened out for attackers while munching away on low-lying grasses as the zebra feasted on higher ones. Two creatures sharing resources and protecting each other from a deep sense of their own vulnerabilities. Far and away the most spiritual of our family trips, our visit to this majestic animal kingdom was humbling and instructive, giving us perspective on our place in the universe among these magnificent beings, reaffirming our often-calcified creaturely instinct to support each other’s search for safety and dignity. We added these two animals to the snakes, doves, donkeys and fish who feature in the Bible as teachers of Torah — of life’s most enduring, if demanding, lessons.
Each human being is a living fragment of the Earth as a whole, and lives a symbiotic relationship to it and to all other creatures.
Interspecies relationships are often explained by natural selection — a process of aggression and competition as species compete to survive and thrive. But finding food, shelter and mates, reproducing and defending against predators are also features of our biological history and destiny. And yet, these days, it can feel as if only one side of our story is being told — that of the competitive struggle for dominance, for ideological, economic, political, religious and even racial dominance. Can we think about the choices ahead of us through this wider lens of natural selection, with a renewed commitment to empathy and collaboration?
The late Reb Zalman Shachter Shalomi, z”l, cast the Gaia Theory in Jewish terms. He taught that the Earth is a living, vast organism on which each creature is a cell, a small component of the larger planetary body. Just as in a human body each cell exists in relation to others, each human being is a living fragment of the Earth as a whole and lives a symbiotic relationship to it and to all other creatures. Could we reframe our struggles so that we understand ourselves to be fighting not for dominance but connection? If the drive in evolution mirrors the narrative arc of Bereishit (Genesis), which unfolds progressively more diverse, complex and beautiful life, can we evaluate the environmental and societal choices we face in terms of which will, for the long term, nurture and sustain more human and planetary compatibility, vitality and holiness?
In Judaism, memory is never just the recollection of facts. Memory is purposeful and redemptive. Memory drives empathy. The Torah repeatedly reminds us to show kindness to the stranger because of our own experience of having been strangers in Egypt. Could we similarly behold the world around us with a vision that can look back billions of years and look ahead with similarly astonishing focus, all while maintaining a humble acceptance of life’s unpredictability and fragility? Or, as Rabbi Art Green writes in Radical Judaism,
As we unravel the genome and the mysteries of DNA, the truth that each of us bears within us the memory of all earlier generations, indeed of the whole evolutionary process, becomes ever clearer. What will it take to convert that understanding into real memory, and how greatly will that add to our appreciation of who we are and the long journey on which we have come?
And, even more urgently, the long journey that yet awaits?
Religion, too, is constantly evolving. Core to Judaism’s perseverance is its own evolutionary quality, continually adapting to changing cultural, demographic, political and even environmental circumstances. The challenges Judaism faces now as the contours of Jewish belonging and behaving have rapidly changed are part of the universal crossroads at which humanity stands. As Jeremy Rifkin suggests, our ability to deepen spiritual and moral consciousness in a world of increasing connectivity opens up the possibility of extending our empathic embrace beyond the human race to all forms of life and to the planet itself. The consequences of Judaism’s failure to reimagine itself will be devastating, and for some they already are. The consequences of humanity’s unwillingness to do the same could have far more catastrophic effects. Creating a sustainable Judaism — one that is open-sourced, nonhierarchical and collaborative — is part of the global urgency today to create a similarly sustainable planet.
It is this vision that has inspired one of the most exciting journeys Andi and I have made yet. Or, more precisely, that we will one day make, but not for many decades to come, we hope.
It is urgent to create a sustainable Judaism — one that is open-sourced, nonhierarchical and collaborative — as part of the creation of a sustainable planet.
Near the shores of Lake Manitou on which our Laurentian home sits is the site of our future green Jewish cemetery, Makom Manitou. For many of us, this beautiful mountain area is home not only in a geographic and recreational sense but in a deeply existential one. It is to its ground we can imagine surrendering and returning with greater serenity when the time comes. We’re making thoughtful choices around how to honor our beloved countryside in our deaths just as we endeavor to in our lifetimes. Some of that involves implementing best ecological practices regarding land maintenance, stewarding the earth as the Torah demands. Some of it involves welcoming alternative, green approaches to burial that align with Jewish tradition and values. All of it is inspired by a desire to return the love and grace nature continually gifts all of us.
Standing at the top of a mountain after a grueling hike up, I imagine the psalmist being moved to pen the words How great, how wondrous, are Your creations, Adonai, how profound Your thoughts and designs! (Psalms 92:6) Yet, after one notable Laurentian climb, my friend looked out at the tapestry of lakes and forests below us and instead just whispered to the Divine, “Thank you.” Maybe gratitude is the surest path to empathy.
Put this essay down. Look out your window or go outside. Behold a tree, a bird, a river, a flower. Say thank you. Reciprocate with love and protection.
