Tikkun Olam: Rekindling an Ecology of Love
Reconstructing Religious Ethics in the Face of Social, Ecological, and Psychological Crises. Sharing Two Ecological Commandments, with Call to Return to a Jewish Art.
“The commandments or mitzvot are to be understood as the customs that embody our ideals. They are always amenable to modification when they cease to function. The goal of Jewish ritual is to foster community and to encourage the members of the community to live a more ethical life.”
- Professor Mel Scult on the Reconstructionist philosophy of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan
This article was written during the first month after I started my new job, working full-time on a field restoration crew. As I continue to adapt and adjust to this new relation to my labor, I have been working to build living relations with my coworkers, the company, and the ecological projects on which I work. Within these nascent relationships, I have been reflecting on the ethical guidelines by which we can learn to live in socially and ecologically sustainable relations with our community, our environment, and our world. This article is the second in my series on Eco-Kashrut. I hope you find meaning and clarity here.
The intention of Jewish Ecology, since we first began this journey, has been to expand of our notions and understandings of G-d, life, and our living relationship to nature. This began with a focus on community. A focus on love.
Love roots us in all our relationships, not by negating who we are, but by opening us up to the reality of an other, transforming our self image into something more expansive, more grounded, and more whole. Love guides us to form life-affirming attachments, devoting ourselves to something other than ourselves. Through this love, we don’t lose freedom; instead, we find positive freedom — such as the freedom to act with care and love, or the freedom to find a place to live where we can support our community. These freedoms take work; none of us are free to turn away. Assuring that all life can thrive is a responsibility we all bear together. Love reminds us that we are larger than just a body and mind, but bound to our whole place, to the whole cosmos. By expanding our sense of self (extending into our notions of kinship and peoplehood) and our connections to place — beyond a narrow sense of ego or homeland — to include our all relations to all others, we can come to understand ourselves as bound to an ecology of love.
Orienting our Ethical Compass: Love and its Opposites
When I first taught “The Ecology of Love”, a seminar class taught to a small cohort of undergraduate students, I began by simply asking the question “what is love?” I found that a fruitful place to begin interrogating and expanding our understanding was not simply by examining our implicit notions of what love is, but also by considering what love is not: the opposites of love. As of now, I feel that by examining opposing concepts — anger, fear, disgust, and alienation — we can get an adequate picture of what love is and is not — and how it structures our relationships in and with the world.
If the opposite of love is hate — the passionate, and often righteously felt, anger towards an other, directed toward either the annihilation or reconciliation — then love is a passionate feeling that drives us to preserve, and attune to the needs and desires of others.
If the opposite of love is fear — the instinctual desire to remove yourself from an other’s presence, in order to preserve one’s self — then love is the desire to come closer to an other’s presence, in order to ensure togetherness and mutual wellbeing. Disgust, too, paints a similar picture, only more extreme form: disgust yearns not only for the removal of one’s self from the other's presence, but the elimination of that presence from the world.
If, on the other hand, the opposite of love is alienation — the sense of disconnection, leading to a sense of strangeness, separateness, an overall indifference toward an other’s well-being and existence — then love arises when we come to see ourselves as entirely connected with an other and the world, secure in our attachments; striving to attune with our whole body and mind, our community, our environment, and the natural world.
I laid all this out because it is my intention here to work towards integrating the ecology of love with a Jewish approach to ethics. Over the past couple of months, I have been reckoning with my fraught relation to the traditional Halachah — the 613 mitzvot bestowed to us in the Torah — and struggling to see the relevance that adhering to this ancient sacred doctrine has for us in our modern world.
The Ecology of Love and a Renewed Jewish Ethics
As I outlined in my last article, I take a reform — though increasingly reconstructionist — approach to these archaic commandments: many of these laws and proscriptions fail to make sense in our modern world. Some we must discard. Others might best be applied metaphorically – or perhaps reinterpreted under a new light and rewritten to better illuminate an ethical path fit for this world today. It is here that I hope to find an ethical path, capable of helping us navigate the perilous struggles — and the interconnected crises — of the 21st century.
As a first step towards sketching out an integrative Eco-Kashrut, I am working to outline 10 vital commandments, through which we may better understand how philosophy, ecology, science, and Judaism might guide us towards ethical living in the midst of so many contemporary crises.
The “Ecology of Love” is already at the heart of numerous Jewish texts, commandments, and traditions. All our stories which remind us to care and to cultivate our community, to embody our love in ritual, and in all our relations with life, our home, and our Torah — each are laced with a devotional love that aspires to help us connect ourselves to our body and soul, to G-d, and to all of G-d’s Creation. In loving one’s neighbor as one’s self, we commit ourselves to cultivating and tending this ecology of love. This love must transcend beyond tribalistic identities and national borders, interweaving across differences towards reconciliation with other peoples, worldviews, and species. This will root us in a holistic notion of neighborliness, expanding beyond both natural and human-enforced boundaries. This itself is very the root of what it means to be a Hebrew — Ivri, border-traverser.
We must move beyond an alienated vision of our place in relation to others, and root ourselves in the fundamental aliveness which permeates and unifies our bodies, communities, and ecosystems. We must build this world with love. Inspired by the words of Rabbi Menachem Creditor, at the heart of the song Olam Chesed Yibaneh:
Thou shalt build this world with love
This is the first commandment of my ecological reconstruction of Jewish ethics. Following the form of the traditional Ten Commandments, I am aiming to maintain a balance of positive (thou shalt) and negative (thou shalt not) commandments. Each of the 10 commandments I will be outlining and inscribing here will be interlinked with each other. but for now, we will begin by considering the responsibilities we have as co-creators — builders — of the world. To build this world with love — free from alienation and domination — we must truly understand what we owe each other. Not just for our lives, but for the entirety of our existence: every meal, every story, all the beauty and all the energy that has brought us to this moment. We must orient our life-work in accordance with our desire to give back, to act with gratitude for the sake of future generations.
To live wholly in communion with one another — a holy community — we must decenter our ego in our vision of who we are, and learn what it means to be free as an individual that is part of an ever-evolving ecosystem. It takes a village to bring a human child into the world, and a mutually-loving community to turn that infant into a responsible adult. Likewise, it takes work across a near endless web of relations — spanning continents and cultures, weaving innumerable species and individuals into relations with varied modes of human and non-human labor — in order to bring many modern meals to our tables. For all this, we must give gratitude.
All of this is to say: modern “civilization” — if we can (or should) call it that — is built of and upon a nigh infinite flow of energy, time, care, and commitment. The love that has built up our cultures and perpetuated human life and society has been filtered through the lenses of power, of alienation, of fear, of disgust. Together, with the mounting crises of wars and the impending threat of climate change, the looming danger of isolationism and nationalism and the resurgence of fascism, we must turn again to our expansive love — and free it from both the destructive instincts that plague us and overwhelming alienation that haunts us.
Whereas our imperative to “build this world with love” reminds us that love must be the guiding purpose and intention underlying all our work, this must be balanced with another commandment that reminds us what it means to be truly devoted and present in our work.
Here’s one possible form of this balancing intention:
Thou shalt not be alienated from thy labor
What does it mean to be entirely unalienated — or rather, integrated — with one’s labor? To start, I need to be clear about what I don’t mean by this. I don’t mean that we all must bind ourselves — in both our lived experience and our identity — to our work, regardless of the nature or contexts of that labor. Nor do I mean that you should be as committed to the company you keep as you are to the rest of your community. This is because life and work — which frequently oppose one another, as in the phrase work-life balance — ought to become integrated: we need to find ways to ensure our work is beneficial to our life and our community; and to ensure our lives work for the benefit of all. To remove alienation from our labor then is to strive towards making one’s life-work fully an expression of our love for the bodies, minds, places, and communities that make up our world. To do this ecologically, our work must coincide with what is sustainable and beneficial for not just ourselves or our family, but for the web that weaves all of us together.
How can we do this? To struggle with our emotions and work to reflect and reconsider the instincts that lead us astray, to expand our sense of self beyond the limitations of our individualistic egos — and to recognize that we are essentially rooted in One family, One world: this is the action that lies at the heart of our struggle with G-d, Yisrael.
In the midst of alienation, we are estranged from our true selves. We fail to truly root ourselves in our bodies and mind; we disconnect our thinking and actions from our conscience and contexts. We see others as either part of our tribe or against us, turning away from the stranger and the impoverished, and foolishly think that we can lift ourselves up while still holding others down. We think we can be masters of nature, failing to realize that nature is both within us, and forever binding us together: past, present and future. We are entangled with the cosmos, with our cultures, with our community, and we are the cosmos, our culture, our community. If we fail to assume our responsibility as co-creators of the world, failing to participate in the perpetual construction of our world — or if we simply become disaffected, and rather than build this world with love, build it with apathy, fear, and hate — we will remain trapped in this hellish prison of creeping fascism and runaway climate change.
Only together can we overcome these dangers. But if we only look beyond ourselves, we will be unable to accept that these dangers exist within us as well.
A photo of a reservoir, taken from the top of the dam. In the distance, an ecological restoration site can be seen, where we are working to bring back the native vegetation in order to support the local ecosystem.
Prayer as Healing: The Jewish Art of Tikkun
Prayer is the process by which we enter into an honest and vulnerable dialogue with our inner self, allowing us to confront the dissonance between who we are and who we are called to be. It is through this act of turning inward that we begin to bridge the estrangement between ourselves and the broader Whole — the world we inhabit and the relationships that sustain it. As Rabbi Zevi teaches, in moments of true prayer, the love of our neighbor and the love of G-d become indistinguishable, each reflecting and extending the other. Through this sacred practice, we come to recognize the divine spark that exists within all life, guiding us toward greater connection, humility, and responsibility.
It is in prayer that we discover that the love of God and the love of our neighbor are truly one and inextricable… In prayer we heal a divided, fragmented and disintegrated psyche, and the estranged, shattered, and conflicted world that it creates. In prayer, we create a quiet, soft mind, and a kind, gentle world.
- Zevi Slavin, The Art of Prayer: A Practical Guide, 2024
It takes self-reflection, be it introspection or prayer, to reckon with our complacency, our acceptance of the alienation in which we are blinded and chained. In prayer, an inward dialogue between our ego, our conscience, and that which is beyond ourselves, we may come to find that expansive love within us: a still small voice calling us to be our highest self. From that still small voice, we can learn that the love of G-d, and the love of our neighbor truly are one and the same.
This begins the work of Tikkun, Repair. Tikkun begins within each of us, and is the perpetual dance through which we might redeem our world. Only together, in dialogue, in community, in relationship, can we rekindle an ecology of love. Only together can we come to recognize our shared devotion, our commitment to our home. Only from this realization — overflowing with that which binds our sacred community — will we learn to work together for the benefit of our extensive community that we all call home. This is the heart of Tikkun Olam — repairing the world.
We must rebuild our world, knowing that we have no other place. This planet is our home. Only here can we — in our billions of human neighbors and our uncountably many other-than-human neighbors — learn to live in sustainable harmony. Only here can we come again to thrive. One people. One biosphere. One home.
Thank you for joining me on this journey through 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 ethics play in bringing about a more peaceful, ecological, and sustainable future for all People and the World. If you can think of someone who might enjoy these articles, please consider sharing this blog!
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