Built for a Purpose: Jewish Ecology and the Technology of Language

In this article, we will examine the cybernetic technologies that enable this project. Through this journey, we will weave through history, language, and science to show the True purpose of this blog.

“Ours is not a bloodline, but a textline.”

- Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger, Jews and Words, 2012

In this article, I want to deconstruct the form of the blog, and in doing this, clarify the purpose of the Jewish Ecology project. As we read, we will meander through the history of humanity, braiding the story of tool-making, language, and collaboration into an ecological understanding of technology. 

There are innumerable human innovations which make this blog possible. Each of these tools have developed within the dynamic interface between body, mind, and environment. Language is one core innovation which has significantly influenced both the evolution of humanity and the World we have built around us. By locating the Jewish Ecology blog within the social, technological, and ecological matrix that is human technology, we will explore precisely how the cybernetic interface between you and me creates the space for transformative dialogue.

Cybernetics, a word bound up with the pop science of cyborgs and cyberspace, is not inherently technological. Cybernetics is the study of self-regulating systems. Through sensitivity, feedback, and attunement with the environment, these systems utilize cybernetics to self-organize and respond productively, harmonizing the self with the World.

If technology is the totality of tools used by a group to comprehend and engage with the world, then a cybernetic connection is a prerequisite for technology to arise. In biological systems theory, this is referred to as autopoesis: the continual coupling that allows complex organisms to create and maintain themselves in order to grow and develop. 

Technology arises as we construct a dialogue with the World: a dialogue which emerges as body-minds interact to produce new possibilities. Forged from both ancient and modern tools, this blog utilizes this very dialogue to enact its purpose. As we use these tools to engage with our communities and our environment, we will seek the intrinsic responsibility of using technology to cultivate these living relationships.

Connecting Technology and Cybernetics

What is a human being in the world? Skin and bone; flesh and blood; run through with tubes and vessels and nerve endings; a body of insides peering out. It is our senses that connect us to the Outside, protected by only a thin skin and an ego (size may vary). We see and hear and taste and touch and smell our way around, guided by stimulus, reaction, and instinct. 

While our insides peer out, the outside also makes its way in. Close your eyes and imagine the layout of your favorite place, the scent of one you hold dear, the taste of your favorite coffee or tea. These sensations have made an imprint upon your internal experience through processes that remain mostly unknown to us, and they are with you always as you move through the world.

This interface between inside and outside is the birthplace of technology. Your cells are full of little innovations which have evolved to help you cultivate your relationship with the World. Because you are a human, this relationship has also been inexorably altered by technology. All technology is inherently cybernetic: through tool-use, our bodies extend their capacities for engagement with the Outside, linking our mind to the World through intentional action and modification of our environment. 

Imagine your experience driving a car on a road. As you drive, the car becomes an extension of your body. You have a sense of your car’s position as you maneuver around other vehicles to switch lanes, or as you pull into a tight parking space. Things like steering, pressing on the brake, or peering in the rearview mirror become second nature as you become more and more accustomed to the feeling of the driver’s seat. Through sensation and feedback, you come to align your body with the body of the car, attuning your awareness to your journey. Your relationship to the tool becomes secondary, as you and your tool work together towards a mutual purpose.

This diagram shows the agent-environment interface, demonstrating how agents can construct and use technology to push the boundaries of their own sensory experience, extending their ability to act in the World.

The blog is a cybernetic system, bringing us together through an interwoven network of fiber-optic cables, electromagnetic waves, computer interfaces, but also language, social relationships, and inherited symbols. Through the internet and social media, the development of the human mind has become even more intertwined with the social, symbolic, and physical technologies that frame our environment.

This feedback diagram shows how technology brings multiple agents into creative collaboration and highlighting key steps in these reciprocally co-constructing feedback loops, this model aims to emphasize the relationship between technology and the purposes it embodies and enables.

Thanks to an expansive network of interrelated technologies, communities, and ways of thinking about the world, we have become ever more deeply interconnected with the whole of humankind. We are in a new age of human history, and yet our technologies are ever more misaligned with the collective needs of our planet. The Jewish Ecology blog seeks to use this infrastructure to create a virtual forum where transformative dialogue — bound up in the collective purpose of finding both spiritual meaning and ethical Truth — makes a transcultural and interdisciplinary synthesis of Ecology accessible to a wide audience. Through the Substack chat feature, I hope to foster a rich conversation about the many facets of Jewish Ecology.

Never has it been so easy and fruitful (thanks in no small part to you) for a young person like myself to share words, stories, and ideas with a community stretched across the World. As the technology harnessed by this blog allows us to percolate through energy and matter, symbol and metaphor, science and language, I hope that it will bring our minds together towards the collective endeavor of loving, honoring, and taking responsibility for our presence in the World. As we commune with one another, I hope to spark a deeper desire for a deliberative, Truth-seeking, and integrative approach to Judaism and Ecology. Indeed, it seems that this pursuit of common understanding is precisely the communicative challenge at the heart of the purpose-driven evolution of language. 

The Evolution of Language

What were the preconditions that enabled the evolution of language? This question cannot be answered empirically – language leaves no trace but its impacts on those who listen and respond. 

Members of our own species, Homo sapiens, were likely not the first, nor the only human species to develop the technology of language. Our contemporary cousins (up until 50,000 years ago), the Neanderthals and Denisovans, are theorized to have had abilities to communicate using language. Archaeologists have uncovered evidence that these species were producing and comprehending symbolic meaning in the form of specialized stone tools, medicinal knowledge, funerary practices, and art. In combination with their large craniums, this evidence suggests they may have had the capacity to use language. Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans interbred extensively while they shared the Earth, and there is evidence that multigenerational communities consisting of multiple early human species and their hybrid offspring lived together in the caves of Eastern Europe. It is easy to imagine that these early human communities may have relied on language to survive, persist, and develop a shared understanding of their environment.

Scientific debates regarding the evolution of language remain contentious and ideologically divided. We remain in awe – human language is a highly specific and unique faculty made possible only through the Living context which enables it. Through our ears and vocal chords, and, perhaps most critically, our big brains — highly folded and complexly compartmentalized, with their proclivity for pattern recognition and the pursuit of information necessary to make predictions and plan actions — our ability to comprehend language is made possible. Neuroscientists are still unraveling all of the disparate, functionally specific, and deeply interconnected areas of the brain which are responsible for turning an arbitrary sign into a communicable idea. 

Beyond the brain, Language emerges at the intersection of minds, as we extend our personal understandings through a common medium in which ideas and knowledge can be exchanged, integrated, and advanced towards the Truth. Of great importance, here we recognize that language could have only evolved in community, guided by the Purpose of communicating knowledge and sharing experiences necessary for our species to survive and adapt to changing conditions.

As our human ancestors roamed the Earth, adapting to diverse ecosystems across time and space, our tool-making faculties were crucial to our collective survival. While the creation of stone tools and fire are commonly understood as vital technological innovations in the origin of humankind, perhaps the central advancement among these was the collection of signs we call language. Language is the technology whose purpose is to communicate and preserve information through symbolic sounds. Later advancements in this technology — notably the introduction of abstract language and physical symbols to express sounds and words  — have since transformed the potential uses of language. 

Yet its central purpose remains. Through language, communication becomes clear and concrete. Through words and names, we appreciate the unity and diversity of Life, creating the preconditions for human culture, development, and diversification. 

The Cybernetics of Knowledge and the Word

Language serves a crucial cybernetic purpose through which human cognition is oriented and realized. Within cybernetics, this connection — between agents, tools, and the social/physical environments in which they operate — is described as structural coupling. But the actual structures that are coupled within the Living World are bound up in the evolving relationships through which organisms and species come to be. Language arises as a tool through which individual minds come to know others. Through signifying and collaborating to describe the existence of an individual — a place, a process, an ordering principle, or a loved one — names allow us to extend our understanding deeper into the Truth of Nature.

Through this intimate interconnection, I propose that names provide the basis for the linguistic structures in which the Word evolved. Through constructing a signifier and building its cognitive context, we come to know the signified. Names transform into words as they begin to structure our understanding of other individuals and objects within the social, ecological, and ideological systems, which orient us in the Cosmos. It is through this collaborative work of understanding that human knowledge, ethics, and responsibility emerge as concrete phenomena in the World. 

Words act as essential mediators between ourselves, our communities, and the World. But this mediation is imperfect. Language has fundamental limits, arising from the fact that a word — such as “you” — does not convey the whole truth about that to which it refers: you, in all your complexity and richness, the depth of your soul and your concern for the world, all your fears, all your desires, all your beauty. Despite the collaborative construction of language, the words we use are always grounded in our own particular contexts. For example, consider your interpretation of this sentence:

 We will work together to love our neighbors. 

The meaning bound up within these words — the experiences enmeshed in the ideas you carry about “love” and “neighbor,” “work” and “we/our” — will intrinsically shape the way you comprehend the sentence’s meaning. Whether you have grown up receiving loving care from others, or whether you grew up neglected by your family, community, society or government; whether you have lived in a community where neighbors were to be trusted or feared; whether you are accustomed to menial toil or meaningful work — our comprehension of language is grounded in our lived experience.

The purpose of language is communication – not the exchange of falsehood but of honest information. Through an iterative and ever-unfolding dialogue, human language facilitates the refinement of this information into lasting knowledge. Life is an evolving process, and in each generation, knowledge is brought to life anew. Across time, alternative ways of thinking about the Cosmos are continuously tested against innumerable lived experiences. For True knowledge to emerge, information of all kinds must be woven together, stretching through sense and memory, metaphor and symbol, to find a Truthful form in a shared framework of words and concepts. Without cross-cultural and intergenerational dialogue, the quest for Truth is impossible; true information remains forever bound up with the particularities of various cultural and temporal contexts. Without intercultural exchange, words remain inseparable from the myths and implicit assumptions bound up within the various frameworks of each culture.

Jewish Ecology seeks to contextualize and extend our shared struggle to understand the Holy Word — a term I use to express the Truthful knowledge of the World bound up within our frameworks and stories. Within the fundamental gap between words (signifiers), and Reality (that which is signified), lies a generative space within which diverse perspectives can be brought to bear, together seeking shared Truth. This is why I have dedicated my earliest articles to laying out the fundamentals through which I comprehend the Living World. As this blog continues to unfold, I will be expanding the Jewish Ecology glossary, and hope that you will challenge my definitions and struggle with me to seek a common understanding of the terms we use to understand the World.

The Work of Jewish Ecology

We have now laid out the technologies which constitute the cybernetic interface of this blog. As you may have noticed throughout your reading, one common thread is that all tools seem to be constructed with an intended goal. This begs the question: what is the purpose of Jewish Ecology? Towards what end are these means directed?

Jewish Ecology seeks to use language for the dialogical reconstruction of a Living Judaism: a Judaism where holding fast to our Torah — our Eitz Chayim (Tree of Life) — is an act which commits us to the pursuit of Truth and love for our community. Our goal is a deep understanding of the World, the human place in the Cosmos, and a loving responsibility for our unique place, time, and relationship with Nature.

Between Living Holiness and the Holiness of the Word, we find the two pillars of spiritual life. A long tradition of Jewish scribes, prophets, teachers, and scholars have built up a rich dialogue enmeshed in the unfolding history of our Word through our books. Over the many centuries, new thinkers have approached this vast body of knowledge, seeking to separate spiritual Truth from archaic tribal myth — each building upon those who came before. This has left a veritable library of esoteric Jewish thought, rich in its spiritual meaning, but near unapproachable within a modern secularized context. And yet, Jews, both secular and not, remain rooted in their Judaism — often not through connection to this textual tradition, but through the ritual, communal, and ethical threads of Jewish Life. 

One of these strands emerged in the 19th century, as Hasidic Judaism sought to revive actively embodied spiritual life. This embodiment gained new life through language: Avodah Gashmius, the work of corporeality. Whereas much of Jewish spiritual life has been grounded in communal study of text, Avodah Gashmius seeks to inspire a lived relationship with Holiness – religious life again rooted in ethical action, genuine community, and convivial Life. The traditional work of Judaism — Avodah Ruchnius, the work of spirit — was to become secondary to the soulful work of material life. The work of spirit, or cerebreality, can be seen in the work of the linguistically-attuned mind struggling to understand the Word and the World. Our work was to become committed to the betterment of corporeal reality, of pursuit of supporting Life.

Through centuries of secularization and radical changes to our social, ecological, and technological circumstances, these two pillars — cerebreality and corporeality — cast a shadow over my spiritual and scientific pursuits. The work of Jewish Ecology is to build a bridge between the purely physical unfolding of material life and the historical unfolding of human ethics, knowledge, and Spirit.

The purpose of the Jewish Ecology blog is to engage with Ecology to understand the foundations of Art, Religion, Philosophy, and Love. The Word and the World are both physically and symbolically intertwined, but only through a living dialogue can we come to understand their Truth. By engaging with the creative spiritual dialogue at the heart of the Jewish tradition and grounding ourselves within the modern sciences of Life, we will seek a transformative ethical paradigm. We will reimagine religion and science, philosophy and reality, cerebreality and corporeality as parts of a Whole which reflect the Truth within the Other. While there will always be an element of Reality that alludes our descriptions, I hope we can use this space to collaboratively construct a shared dialogue which braids science and spiritual meaning within transdisciplinary and transcultural frameworks, leading us toward Truth. This is the process of Jewish Ecology. I hope you can join me on this journey.

“To be a Jew, then, is first and foremost to stand within a textual tradition and engage it through the act of interpretation, which never yields a single authoritative reading.”

- Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Jewish Environmental Ethics, in Religion and Environment, 2020