The Pilgrim Press, 2005

In the 1970s, the idea of a Jewish environmental organization seemed to many an oxymoron.  Undaunted, Ellen Bernstein created Shomrei Adamah, (Keepers of the Earth,) and the Jewish environmental movement was born.   In The Splendor of Creation, Bernstein again takes it upon herself to push the envelope.  Part midrash, part ecological science, part spirituality and part memoir, this is a book that redraws the map of Jewish environmental thinking.

Bernstein's idea is an elegant one: to explore the first chapter of Genesis, the Jewish creation story (or at least, the first installment of it), day by day, for insight into the natural world.  And there's the rub. Can "creation" speak to "environment"?  Bernstein makes an impassioned argument that it can and must -- precisely because "environment" implies a false sense of separation between humanity and nature.  The wisdom of Genesis is that it puts the connectedness, responsibility, value, and holiness back into our relationship with the environment. As she states in the introduction:

I realized that ecology and the Bible were using different languages to describe the same thing. The Bible and ecology both teach humility, modesty, kindness to all beings, a reverence for life, and a concern for future generations; They both teach that the earth is sacred and mysterious. They both describe an interconnected universe, bound together through invisible threads. They both speak of life flowing in spirals and cycles and hold that all actions - no matter how small - yield consequences.

Thus, Bernstein’s environmental midrash goes in both directions: the biblical text teaching environmentalists something about the sacred, and the environmentalist bringing out aspects of biblical texts that only environmentalist eyes could see.

One of the most powerful themes of Bernstein's work is the interconnected, patterned quality that she discerns in both text and nature: "Life (whether ecological or textual) flowing in spirals and cycles."  She notes the subtle order of the days coming in matching pairs: Day 1 and Day 4 are light/sky. Day 2 and 5 are water/air, 3 -6 are earth. Within this stable pattern of pairs subtle progressions animate the text. For example, the author observes that creation proceeds on the first two days only from God, whereas on the third day the earth's fruitfulness and creative energies are brought in. While on the third day the living things are rooted plants, by the fifth day there is movement with swimming fish and flying birds.

Bernstein ultimately believes that the ecological crisis is a personal, perceptual, spiritual crisis and she tirelessly attempts to break down that barrier between outer "environment" and our inner world.

The creation of light on the first day engenders a beautiful meditation on seeing:

It is said that 'our eyes are the window of our souls.' Our eyes allow others to catch a glimpse of our souls, and our souls see the world through our eyes. When our eyes are connected to our souls, then we see the beauty and goodness of nature and life.

Air on the second day is not simply that which we breath, but the medium of hopes, dreams and communication.

This integration of the inner, spiritual and psychological realm with the physical, natural and even cosmic hints at one more essential quality of Bernstein's work: it is imbued with a mystical perspective emphasizing the immanence of God within creation.  This is the underlying key to this book, as too often Jewish environmentalism has been stymied by the assumptions of a rationalist monotheism, overly worried about the "pagan" direction of caring about trees and rocks. Here we see that Bernstein is perhaps not so much arguing with anti-biblical environmentalists, as she is with rationalist Jews who define monotheism as meaning that God exists only outside of nature. 

Bernstein's mysticism isn't esoteric but emerges from a personal, lived experience of the spiritual goodness of creation. As such, it points toward a contemporary Jewish creation theology that can perhaps nudge Jews and environmentalists a bit closer, and bring the creation back into the environment.