Since the emergence of the environmental movement, Torah-committed Jews who resonate deeply with environmental concerns have scoured the texts of our tradition for sources within Torah reflecting these same values. Many texts have been "unearthed", some of them halachic, others aggadic, which previously were seen as unremarkable but now were viewed in new light. A corpus of Jewish environmental texts has slowly emerged, and perhaps the key source, the one which serves in a sense as the ethical grounding of the entire enterprise, is the following passage from Kohelet Rabbah:
"See the work of G-d, for who is able to set right what He has made crooked?" (Kohelet 7:13)
When the Holy One (praised be He!) created the First Man,
He took him and brought him (back) around to all the trees of the Garden, and He said to him:
"See My works, how beautifully appropriate and praiseworthy they are!
And everything I have created - I have created for you!
Put your mind [to matters] that you not spoil (m'kalkel) and destroy (machariv) My world,
for should you spoil, there is no one to put things right after you".
Although the midrash goes on, this is the portion which is usually quoted. The environmental associations of the midrash, when presented in this manner, immediately assert themselves: To list a few:
The world is a closed ecosystem, so that destructive imbalances cannot be rectified by outside resources.
The human being, in occupying a uniquely empowered niche, has the ability to upset the entire system by inadvertently upsetting the balance of nature.
The human being, precisely because of his privileged place, has the responsibility, derivative of this privilege, to avoid this kind of impact.
Yet this reading of the midrash would seem to be problematic precisely when subjected to light of a "holistic" reading. This is because the midrash as presented above has been artificially truncated. In fact, the speech of G-d Himself has been interrupted! Let's let G-d "finish His thought" and see how this impacts our understanding:
"… Even more, you will have brought death upon that singular tzaddik!"
And who is this tzaddik about whom Hashem is seemingly even more concerned than the fact of His entire creation?
"To what can [this case of] MOSHE OUR MASTER can be compared?
To a pregnant women who has been imprisoned in the king's dungeons.
She bore there a son, she raised him there, and she died there.
One day the king passed by the entrance to the dungeon.
While the king was passing, that boy cried out and said,
"My master, O king! Here was I born, here was I raised,
due to what sin I find myself here I do not know!"
The king replied, "Due to your mother's sin!"
Thus, with Moshe:
It is stated [regarding the First Man]: "indeed, the man has become like one of us,"
AND it is stated [regarding Moshe]" "indeed, your days have drawn close to die."
We learn, then, that the central concern of this midrash is the profound injustice done to the ultimate exemplar of righteousness, THE MAN par excellence: Moshe. Even without examining the parable in the second half of the midrash closely, we can still hear the "boy's" outcry: Why am I confined to this cell? The vastly reduced horizons bequeathed to all subsequent generations must include the man who would stand on Har Nevo and compass the entire land with one sweeping gaze. It is hard to discern which tragedy is more pathos-evoking: the inevitable death of Moshe brought on by Adam's sin, or the constriction in vision ("no MAN may see me and live") which Moshe is compelled to suffer due to his ultimate grand-parent.
In either case, a simple reading of the entire midrash makes it clear that there would seem to be no special primacy here for environmental concern.
Even within the segment originally presented, however, the environmental reading is problematic. To see this, let's stroll through the narrative once again. Upon his creation, Adam is taken for a walk in the garden. Hashem shows him all its flowering delights, placing special emphasis on trees (as does the Biblical narrative itself). He makes a point of telling Adam, "I've created this all for you!" Such an emphatic emphasis hardly squares with a classical environmental perspective that sees man as one species amongst many. It's all for YOU, Hashem tells Adam, you need not consider another. This still leaves us with the possibility that what is being recommended is wise stewardship of resources, if only for reason of self-interest. But not even this can be maintained as we return to the midrash and listen carefully to Hashem's directive to Adam:
"Put your mind [to matters] that you not spoil (m'kalkel) and destroy (machariv) My world, for should you spoil, there is no one to put things right after you".
The italicized transliterated words usually have been translated as above, but what has been ignored is that the words are actually technical terms pregnant with associations, especially in Midrashic usage. The root kilkel, when used without a direct object, is usually used to indicate transgression, often sexual transgression. Seeing as how this is precisely the allusion, even for classic Jewish authors like Ibn Ezra, associated with the sin of the garden, it is hard to see what recommends translating kilkel as "spoil" thereby setting up an English-language based resonance with spoilage of untrammeled nature which is perhaps foreign to the text. G-d is not warning man against running roughshod over natural resources by a usage which "spoils" them; rather, He is warning him of the consequence of sin.
And what are those consequences? "You will destroy My world". It is difficult to avoid the temptation to understand this term quasi-literally, making it an almost perfect candidate for ancient Jewish environmental terminology. Yet we must resist such a hasty conclusion, because a look through its usages in the Talmud shows that the term "to destroy the world" is intended in an abstract, perhaps figurative sense.
Rabbi Meir, who is a sofer (scribe) is warned by Rabbi Yishmael to be exceedingly careful in his work, "lest you omit a letter or add a letter and, it will turn out, you will destroy the entire world!"
(Eruvin 13a)
Rabbi Akiva suggests that he be sent to inform Rabbi Eliezer of his excommunication, lest someone less appropriate go and it will turn out that he will "destroy the entire world". (Bava Metzia 59b)
Rabbi Shimon and his son are sent back to isolation in the cave after "burning everywhere they looked" upon emerging and finding the Jews engaged in mundane occupations, with the words, "You have emerged to destroy My world?" (Shabbat 33b)
In none of these cases is the destruction caused by wanton misuse of the world's resources. Furthermore, the destruction spoken of, while sometimes affecting the surrounding natural realm, is not directed against nature per se, but against the orderly realm of human society.
It has been demonstrated that the midrash in Kohelet Rabbah, on the level of its plain (peshat) meaning, is NOT an early manifestation of the environmentalist ethic as commonly understood, even when the latter is narrowly construed as enlightened self-interest. So what IS the message of this midrash?
It will be helpful to see another midrash which, I believe, is intimately related to this one. We read in Bereshit Rabbah 14:6 the following midrash:
"(And the Eternal, G-d, formed) the man (dust from the earth)" - by the merit of Avraham. R. Levi said, "the man, great amongst giants" (Yehoshua 14:15) - this refers to Avraham.
And why is he called, "great"? It is because he was fit to have been created before the First Man,
but the Holy One (praised be He!) said: lest he (the First Man) spoil and there be no one (left) to put things right after him.
Rather, I'll create the First Man first, so that if he spoils, Avraham will come and put things right in his stead.
Rabbi Abba bar Kahana said: it is customary that when a man (building a house) has an exceptionally strong beam, where does he position it?
Is it not at the center of the structure, so that it can bear the weight of the other beams that precede and follow it?
Likewise why did the Holy One (praised be He!) place Avraham in the midst of the generations?
So as to be able to bear those who came earlier and those who would come later".
The Maharzu points out the contradiction between the two midrashim in his commentary on Kohelet Rabbah. Note the almost identical terminology - spoiling and fixing - yet here, there IS someone who serves as the Catcher in the Rye, preventing Adam's misdeeds from spinning out of control: Avraham! In fact, it is precisely in order to serve this role that Avraham is "held back" by G-d, instead of himself being the first created human being. Rabbi Abba bar Kahana goes further, claiming that Avraham's placement is l'chatchila (ab initio) and not bedi'avad (post facto) - Avraham is set into the midst of the generations in order to serve as the weight-bearing moral foundation of all of humanity.
Maharzu attempts to reconcile the two by explaining that in Kohelet Rabbah, the words of Hashem, "for if you spoil" are directed toward Adam HaRishon and ALL of his subsequent offspring. But this cannot truly resolve the dilemma, since the midrash in Bereshit Rabbah indicates that it was precisely with this possibility in mind that Hashem placed Avraham in a fail-safe position. Furthermore, the midrash in Kohelet Rabbah explicitly rules out the possibility of a latter-day savior: even Moshe Rabbenu is unable to escape the fate of all humanity brought upon us by Adam's sin; how much the less Avraham!
I believe that the resolution of the apparent contradiction is as follows: Hashem's words to Adam are not directed toward something outside himself, but are intended to teach Adam how to see himself. HOW man impacts his environment (understood in the original, more generalized sense) - whether he dwells in the garden or the wasteland - flows ultimately from WHO man sees himself to be. Hashem created us in His image, and that image certainly includes the pivotal notion of "the buck stops here". Although, on one level, the two midrashim are talking about who follows who in time, note the subtle change of text: in Kohelet Rabbah, we have: "put things right AFTER you", while in Bereshit Rabbah the text is "put things right IN HIS STEAD", or literally, "under him". Avraham can come "in his stead" because Avraham IS Adam HaRishon, the essence of man as distilled through two sets of ten generations of removing the dross and allowing the best to remain and to grow. Avraham, the first self-transcendant man, the first person to confront Hashem with the implications of self-awareness ("Hashofet kol ha'aretz lo ya'aseh mishpat?"), the one who discovers and thus reveals the unity of all, ALSO understands that the moral and the natural realms are so profoundly and intricately interwoven that to work toward harmonizing ourselves with the world around us while paying inadequate attention to the world within us is an exercise in futility. We will inevitably project onto the world our own unaddressed inadequacies even as we will clamber to the moral high ground and batter and bludgeon our opponents from its safety.
The environmental dictum "think globally and act locally", if consistently applied, demands from us first and foremost that we rectify the most immediate locality, ourselves. Teshuva, the paradoxical achievement of wholeness through the existentially shattering recognition of one's own brokenness, is the indispensable first step toward healing the human interaction with the environment.
Rav Yehoshua Kahan
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Rav Yehoshua Kahan is a teacher at Yeshivat Bat Ayin. He has held pulpits in Knoxville, Tennessee and Los Angeles, and served as educational director of Livnot U'Lehibanot. He blogs on Parashat Hashavua here |