Keeping it Eco-Kosher: A Jewish Ethics for This Time of Crisis

What Does Ethical Living Look Like in the Late Anthropocene? How might Jewish ecology help us bring all our relations back into alignment with the Earth?

Is it a coincidence that the first species to have the ability to destroy our biosphere as a fit habitat for all higher forms of life is also the first to be equipped with the moral conscience and perspective that might prevent us from doing so?

– Arthur Green, Judaism for the World, 2020

This essay marks the start of a new movement in Jewish Ecology, shifting from a focus on the human niche to its implications for ethics. Building on the integrative approach to the human niche I have outlined, we will now examine how this framework intersects with a Jewish approach to ethics. By exploring Jewish law and tradition across Reform, Orthodox, and Reconstructionist perspectives, I highlight the diversity of voices and approaches to Jewish ethics. Entwining myth and history, custom and conscience, philosophy and science, this essay offers an ecological approach to Jewish ethics. This journey aims to illuminate how we can weave these rich traditions into a compelling vision for a more ethical and sustainable future. While this may be new and challenging for you, I hope you will work through it and find it meaningful. To help, I have linked key words and concepts to deeper explanations within my glossary. I hope these act as signposts to guide you on this journey. Enjoy!

Approaching Ethics as a Jewish Ecologist

Through examining our place in the world — what I’ve described as the “human niche” — and grappling with its inherent openness and our potential for self-directed co-creation, we confront a key question: What does it mean to live well? Like all other organisms, we require a niche to sustain ourselves. Yet human thriving arises not only from our ability to establish a home and a sustainable way of living, but from our ongoing capacity to negotiate — whether through forceful action or peaceful compromise — our place in community here. This negotiation is a key process in human evolution and history; our well-being is increasingly intertwined with that of others. We thus need to trust and support our community.

The success of others is not a threat to our own; our flourishing does not depend on the failures of others. When our community thrives, we thrive; when our community falters, we falter. This truth extends beyond species boundaries. Since the dawn of cities and agriculture, when faced with years of famine, our whole ecosystem experiences famine. From the cows who wither with the crops to the sparrows that come to rely on the margins of our fields, and from the dogs who scavenge our waste to the carrion that would feast on our unburied dead. Thus, navigating this complex web of interdependence and obligation compels us to establish guiding principles.

For Jews, from antiquity to modern Orthodoxy, our mitzvot — the commandments given to us in the Torah — serve as our divine principles. Through their practice, we fulfill our obligations to our community and to God. But, in today’s predominantly secular society, this has come to feel antiquated and insufficient. Surrounded by crises our ancestors could scarcely imagine, we now must ask: Are our mitzvot adequate for building ethical relationships in the contemporary world? Can we afford to restrict Jewish ethics to traditional mitzvot while struggling to develop proper relations with our community and our shared home? As we struggle with these hard questions, it becomes essential to explore how we might help shape this traditional approach to meet our modern challenges.

In this essay, I aim to unpack these questions and explore how ecological principles might inspire a new approach to our sacred path. This is not a novel idea: the rules of kashrut, rooted in our holy commandments, are the Jewish customs for proper engagement with the world around us – a code rich with ecological wisdom. Yet, in this critical moment of the Anthropocene, as we face down the interlocking crises of climate change, social dislocation, and mass extinction, we increasingly need a new ethical framework. Perhaps we need an 'eco-kashrut' — a system of commandments guided by our conscience and constructed through dialogue, textual interpretation, and creative liturgical play — that can provide us the tools we need to cultivate ethical relations within and across our communities.

Jewish Ethics in the Human Niche

This leads us to the question of collective well-being — that is, of mutual thriving, of ethics. This is fundamental to learning how humankind has sustained such variegated, diverse, and integrated niches across our rich histories. And more so, it is in the bedrock of ethics that the stones of our sacred paths — which continue to lead people to commit themselves to living in loving relation to all — have been carved and laid forth. 

Judaism represents one of these sacred paths. From our holy Book, from which our Halakhah — the divine path prescribed in the Torah ​​— is founded, Jewish law is rooted in G-d’s love. This path intends to bind us in an ethical relation — a covenant — which extends beyond the knowable bounds of reason all the way to the source of Creation. Yet, in these stories, the Divine love, on occasion, reveals itself as deeply unhuman. When Abraham answered G-d's call to sacrifice his child atop Mount Moriah, he allowed his religious instinct to triumph over his ethical (and biological) imperative. This is often used to show that our faith in G-d and G-d’s plan ought to overcome our “baser” human instincts – especially because in the last moments before Abraham sacrificed his son, G-d presented him a ram to sacrifice in Isaac’s stead. However, in this story, we see religious devotion standing over and against our ethical obligations. This is precisely the break we need to interrogate. When does our ethical drive become secondary to religious call? And when, if ever, ought we put our ethics and understanding first, against the commandments of our religious tradition? Can we reinterpret the religious text, going back to our understanding that love is its ground-level intention, to bring these our ethical and religious obligations back into alignment? 

Jewish ethics have always been reflected in our obligation to do mitzvot. Growing up as a Reform Jew, I was taught that a mitzvah (one of many mitzvot) is a good deed: lending a helping hand, caring for the sick or the grieving, and celebrating a marriage. This emphasis on ethical action appeals to our conscience, guiding us to live in accordance with our values. Only years after learning this word, did I learn that the word "mitzvah" literally means a commandment, not just a good deed. This difference reflects a key tension within modern Judaism. While Reform Judaism teaches mitzvot as ethical actions, the Orthodox traditions sees them as binding obligations — some even go so far as to say that the observance of mitzvot is essential for one to actually be Jewish.

For me, mitzvot are holy because they engage our conscience, and force us to reflect on the real responsibilities that stem out of our relations. From my perspective, to approach the Halakhah as an unquestionable code of laws and obligations, without questioning the divine purpose and ethical value of these commandments is to entirely miss the point.

The Evolution of Jewish Law

Judaism as we know it today — rooted in Torah, guided by Rabbis, and carried through millennia of debate — first emerged as a textual tradition following the destruction of the First Temple. After Judeans were exiled, spiritual leaders had to preserve their cultural identity without a physical center for worship. This led to the compilation of the Torah and the codification of 613 mitzvot, which became the foundation of proper Jewish ritual practice. Generations of scholars continued to debate and reinterpret these commandments as empires rose and fell, adding layers of meaning to the Jewish canon.

Judaism thus evolved in response to exile, and our mitzvot served not only to preserve cultural identity but also to guide ethical living. The Jewish practices of today emerged from this process. Through the publication of new texts and evolving commentaries, ongoing debates among scholars and sages have led to competing interpretations of the 613 commandments. We cannot arrive at the truth alone. Like the Talmud, where difficult debates conclude with the phrase Teiku (an abbreviation for the Aramaic phrase “Tishbi Yetaretz Kushyot U’Baayot," meaning "Elijah will resolve the difficulties and problems"), we must acknowledge that complete agreement will only be achieved when the world is perfect—during the messianic age, when Elijah the Prophet is said to return. In this tradition, Jews continue to value Eilu v’Eilu, “this and that,” struggling for truth while honoring the reality of different viewpoints. This has been our strength, allowing Jewish tradition to diversify in various environments, learn from different societies across the diaspora, and root ourselves in many communities worldwide.

This evolution has enabled Judaism to adapt to shifting historical contexts while maintaining the belief that the 'right' way of living is revealed in sacred texts. In this way, the Jewish cognitive niche has developed through a continuous process of interpretation and adaptation. For the purposes of Jewish Ecology, we must interrogate the intentions behind our kosher rules and grapple with the meaning of our inherited commandments to guide us toward right relations with our entire community.

EcoKashrut: An Ecological Ethics 

In the 1970s, Reconstructionist Jews sought to do just that, coining the term “EcoKashrut” to describe the project of aligning Jewish commandments with modern ecological wisdom. By intentionally restructuring the contours of the Jewish cognitive niche, Reconstructionist, Renewal, and Humanist Jewish approaches aim to preserve the heart of the Jewish tradition—with its concern for the social, ethical, and spiritual dimensions of the Jewish experience—while discarding the premodern biases embedded in our inherited customs. In future articles, I aim to contribute to this project by examining our commandments and sketching how they can be adapted to our modern existential challenges. But for now, I will leave you with some final words.

There is no one way of being Jewish. The cognitive niche of Jews is informed by the Jewish textual tradition — with some Jews more rooted here than others — but in every case, what it means to be Jewish is informed by the words, stories, and relationships we realize to be essential to our Judaism. The human cognitive niche is fundamentally open: we are forced to reckon with our place in the world, and to work together to find meaning in our lives. For Jews, we must reckon with our texts – our commandments, our Torah. And yet, we must not presume that anyone knows the truth, or that our sacred texts hold all the answers. In the Anthropocene, we must view our traditions not as immutable but as evolving tools for ethical and ecological justice. By adapting commandments to our modern needs, we can align Judaism's sacred values with the imperative to build a sustainable and just world. In this way, religion may renew our relationship to life, our community, and the planet.

Will this restored relationship help us confront this urgent planetary crisis? Only together can we build the bridges necessary to heal our damaged world. Bridges from past into present and present into future; from one culture into another; from science into religion and from religion into science. These bridges are the pathways through which new cultural sensitivities and values must be fostered. Together, we must figure out what it really means — and takes — to love all our neighbors. The future depends on it. 

If the image of God is an image of the diversity of life, then God’s image is diminished every time human beings cause another extinction.

- Rabbi David Seidenberg, Kabbalah and Ecology, 2015

Thank you for reading Jewish Ecology. This blog aims to build a participatory dialogue in which important ideas at the intersection of Judaism and ecology can help us root ourselves in the World. This blog is not just for Jews; I aim for these articles to be accessible and impactful for anyone that is interested in building up an understanding of the role that spirituality, philosophy, and/or ethics play in bringing about a more peaceful, ecological, and sustainable future for all People and the whole of Nature. If you can think of someone who might enjoy these articles, please consider sharing this blog!

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