David Seidenberg

Biblical and Hebraic thought (secondary sources) Classical rabbinic literature and pre-rabbinic literature (secondary sources) Medieval Jewish philosophy (secondary sources) Kabbalah (secondary sources) Hasidism (secondary sources) Science, ecology, and history of science Secular ecological thought and philosophy Christianity and Islam, Christian and Muslim ecological thought Philosophy, secular thought and history

I. How we eat is a huge piece of how we relate to the earth itself. Kashrut, along with all Jewish mores and customs about eating, not only reflects the ecology of ancient Israel, it also impacts our sense of place and purpose in the greater world. In this brief essay, I want to ask you to imagine that there is some deeper ecological meaning to kashrut, and to explore what that meaning might be. By the end of this essay, I hope to propose a convincing theory for which animals we eat, and don’t eat, according to Jewish law.

NEW JEWISH RITUAL, especially ritual celebrating the earth, is often based on very old rituals whose meaning has been forgotten and remembered in a new way. Tu B’shvat seders, for example, are almost ubiquitous nowadays, but the first modern seder was celebrated just under 25 years ago; only a few decades earlier, the Jewish National Fund connected Tu B’shvat to their tree planting campaign. The first Tu B’shvat seder, however, was published in the 1600s, and the custom of eating fruit on this holiday goes back at least another century to the circle of the great kabbalist Yitzhak Luria, the Ari. In that seder, called “P’ri Eitz Hadar,” we are taught to eat a seder meal of fruit on the full moon of Shvat (usually two moons before Passover), and to pray, “May the flow of desire and blessing and free energy flow over the fruit trees, and may the protectors and guardian angels over them be filled with strength, and may the whole creation return to its original strength.” With so much ecological juice in this prayer, it is astonishing that the traditional seder only recently returned to communal use. Yet we have made good use of our forgetfulness. When the holiday was reclaimed by Zionists and ecologists, the thickness of the tradition didn’t overwhelm people’s creativity. Now, as contemporary Jews begin to renew and reweave the seder, the words of this prayer, in particular, are filled with new meaning and hope. Good rituals hold their shape as they change, and deeper meanings fill in where old ones have become inadequate. When Tu B’shvat became the Jewish Earth Day, a direct line was drawn back to the Mishnah’s declaration that this day was “Rosh Hashanah la’ilan” — the trees’ New Year, or, as the Kabbalists understood this phrase, the New Year of the Tree of Life. The essential shape of the kabbalistic Tu B’shvat seder, moving through the four worlds from doing to being, can embrace new understandings of the Tree of Life — not only the kabbalistic sefirot, but also the web of life studied by ecologists, and the evolutionary tree of life, in which all species are related to one another. At the Tu B’shvat seder, therefore, the exact order for eating the 30 fruits found in “P’ri Eitz Hadar” is rarely followed, but the order of the four worlds almost always is. Most Jewish rituals and observances have a connection to the earth’s cycles. For example, the purpose of the Sukkot ritual cycle is to bring fertility and rain to the land. We pray on Hoshanah Rabbah — “Please save, renew the face of the ground! Save the planting of trees...undergrowth to strengthen... flowers to uphold...Save the one who drinks. Exalt her! Save what is suspended upon nothingness.” Yet because the ritual of Hoshanah Rabbah — circling the Torah with lulav and etrog while singing these chants — is usually muttered top-speed, with little understanding of the difficult Hebrew poetry, its purpose is usually overlooked. As old as this custom is, few people associated Sukkot with environmental activism until Arthur Waskow suggested taking Hoshanah Rabbah out of the synagogue to the river bank. Not surprisingly, the majority of people who first responded to his call were people who had never celebrated the holiday. New ritual can still fall into a rut — liturgy can be written to soothe, not challenge; prayers can be recited without understanding. But in periods of creative change, experimental ritual can be quickly transformed when it doesn’t work. One of the challenges is that we are a “texty” people; it’s a rare Tu B’shvat seder that isn’t cut and pasted from a dozen or more books and pamphlets (and at a celebration of trees, copied onto many sheets of paper). The ecological rituals we create should open doorways to the world around us rather than wrap us in a new cocoon of words. To this end, I’ve written a one-page “Save-the-Trees” haggadah template that doesn’t require a lot of photocopying to make a beautiful seder. The new rituals we develop for Tu B’shvat will help us connect to all life, to our creatureliness, to the richness of our senses. We can strengthen this evolution by recognizing how truly old these connections are within Judaism. For example, our rituals can revive the teaching of Sefer Bahir, an 11th-century text that describes the waving of lulav and etrog as a way to recreate the cosmic tree that sustains the universe. Similarly, when we do an ecological seder, we are bringing back to life themes of that first seder, offering prayers for the bounty of the fruit of the earth and the fruit of our bodies. David Seidenberg holds a doctorate in Jewish Thought on Ecology and Kabbalah and received s’michah from JTS and Rabbi Zalman SchachterShalomi. David lives in Los Angeles where he is on the faculty of the Academy for Jewish Religion. His published work can be found in Trees Earth and Torah (JPS), in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (Continuum), and on the web at www.coejl. org and www.ohalah. org. The blessing…

Kabbalah and Ecology is a groundbreaking book that resets the conversation about ecology and the Abrahamic traditions. David Mevorach Seidenberg challenges the anthropocentric reading of the Torah, showing that a radically different orientation to the more-than-human world of nature is not only possible, but that such an orientation also leads to a more accurate interpretation of scripture, rabbinic texts, Maimonides and Kabbalah. Deeply grounded in traditional texts and fluent with the physical sciences, this book proposes not only a new understanding of God's image but also a new direction for restoring religion to its senses and to a more alive relationship with the more-than-human, both with nature and with divinity.

Chapter 12 focuses on language, a chief element of tselem according to early midrash, in the form of prayer, song, and naming. While it does discuss midrashic themes and texts, unlike other chapters it relies on modern thinkers, in particular Martin Buber and Nachman of Breslov, to elaborate the idea that all Creation has language.

In Chapter 3, I tease apart the value complex that unites within the human being the ideas of tselem, soul, and infinite value. This value complex characterizes most modern Jewish thought. I use the term “modernist-humanist” to refer to this value complex in the rest of the book. Midrashic texts thought to be the source of these ideas are carefully analyzed to show that they do not ground human value in God’s image, but in the value of Creation. Four points are drawn from chapters 1-3: 1. Tselem according to the rabbis is not limited to human beings but includes the angels and the heavens. 2. Soul, nefesh or n’shamah, is not equated with tselem in early midrash. 3. The modern idea that human life has “infinite value” has no clear representation in rabbinic thought. 4. The rabbis do not connect the idea of God’s image with imitating God until after the close of the Amoraic period (around the eighth century). Focusing on these points clears space for alternative readings of the tradition. Modernist-humanist theology is not “disproven” by this. In fact, a central element in the modernist (and medieval) understanding of tselem, the idea that God’s image is realized through imitating God, is also central to any ecotheological interpretation. Rather, the modernist-humanist interpretation is shown to be a hermeneutical choice.

Biblical and Hebraic thought (secondary sources) Classical rabbinic literature and pre-rabbinic literature (secondary sources) Medieval Jewish philosophy (secondary sources) Kabbalah (secondary sources) Hasidism (secondary sources) Science, ecology, and history of science Secular ecological thought and philosophy Christianity and Islam, Christian and Muslim ecological thought Philosophy, secular thought and history

This compendium definitively demonstrated that the accepted history of tikkun olam is incorrect, and that the roots of the social justice understanding of tikkun olam are older than the kabbalistic understanding. The texts included trace the development of several different interpretations of tikkun olam through Jewish intellectual history. Going back already to the 10th century, tikkun ha'olam is connected with religious humanism and with the idea of loving one's not-Jewish neighbor. These texts also reveal a firm foundation for an ecological interpretation of tikkun olam going back to early midrash. Furthermore, liberal Judaism's understanding of tikkun olam is shown to be sourced in Eastern European humanism going back to the 17th century, and transmitted in large part via Zionist thought in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This collection of texts has been published in several forms and journals. The version here is the most comprehensive.

This compendium definitively demonstrated that the accepted history of  tikkun olam is incorrect, and that the roots of the social justice understanding of tikkun olam are older than the kabbalistic understanding.  The texts included trace the development of several different interpretations of tikkun olam through Jewish intellectual history. Going back already to the 10th century, tikkun ha'olam is connected with religious humanism and with the idea of loving one's not-Jewish neighbor. These texts also reveal a firm foundation for an ecological interpretation of tikkun olam going back to early midrash. Furthermore, liberal Judaism's understanding of tikkun olam is shown to be sourced in Eastern European humanism going back to the 17th century, and transmitted in large part via Zionist thought in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This collection of texts has been published in several forms and journals. The version here is the most comprehensive.

Veganism is often presented as the highest ideal for anyone who is concerned about animal rights or opposed to what deep ecology calls “speciesism.” Here I explore whether veganism should be seen as an ideal moral practice and whether it can be affirmed as an authentic or ideal Jewish practice. If veganism represents the ideal, then people’s choices from best to worst would fall on a spectrum whose extremes run from not using animals at all to using them however one wishes. The fundamental question behind that wider spectrum is what kind of dominion or dominance, if any, humanity may exert over other animals. If dominion is the principle underlying our current food system, the opposite ethic would be to reject any use of animals. This ethic is often called “abolitionist veganism,” can be summed up in the words of one of its leading proponents, Gary L. Francione: “There is veganism and there is animal exploitation. There is no third choice.”

In Judaism, though, there is a clear third choice. The ideal of covenant that is so fundamental to the Torah’s understanding of the human-divine relationship also shapes a mutualistic understanding of people’s interactions with other animals. If covenant is the ideal, however, the question of veganism looks substantially different. The only way to create a covenantal relationship is for humans to be directly involved with animals. in different historical contexts one or another of these perspectives dominates. The Torah's understanding of covenant can be used to establish a baseline to measure human- animal relationships in subsequent stages of Jewish literature and thought. Those eras and genres characterized by a covenantal perspective are less favorable to a purist vegan ideology, whereas those that base morality on the individual and extrapolate that morality to our relations with animals are more favorable to veganism.

The 2019 version of the haggadah that reveals the deep structure of the seder, and how it guides us on a path toward freedom. You'll find signposts and cues indicating where important transformations of the seder's symbols take place, helping you to follow the process of liberation. And you'll learn about different customs from different communities. The Haggadah of the Inner Seder can work as your main haggadah, but it's also a great supplement alongside other haggadot. And understanding the deep structure of the haggadah will help you create and lead your own seder.

The 2019 version includes corrections from 2018. Like 2018's haggadah, it also includes:
* Torah quotes about taking care of refugees
* Earth-centered kavvanot and prayers
* An abbreviated but halakhically complete Birkat Hamazon
full Hallel (transliteration only)
* More midrash
* Commentaries related to peace and Israel

The Haggadah is 19 pages long (plus cover) but does not (yet) include all the fun songs like Chad Gadya - so make sure you supplement!

This paper explores parallels between Native American ritual and Jewish, specifically Kabbalistic thought, from several perspectives, focusing on the very precise parallels between the structure of the Inipi or sweatlodge ceremony, and Kabbalistic ideas about the unification of Tiferet and Shekhinah, the divine masculine and feminine. It also explores the issues of cultural appropriation with respect to both Judaism and Native American religions. The framework of this paper is in many senses outdated, but the structuralist exploration of ritual and theology remains potentially useful. Delivered at 2010 symposium on Jews and Native Americans held at Columbia University.

Starting from Judaism's inherently Creation-centered perspective, one can build a robust ecotheology by incorporating medieval ideas of holism found in Maimonides and in Kabbalah or Jewish mysticism. Details of Maimonidean cosmology, epistemology, and ethical theory that emerge from Maimonides' holism are discussed, along with several Kabbalists whose work, though differing substantially from Maimonides with respect to cosmogony and the role of the imagination, touches on similar themes. Over the course of its history, Kabbalah has increasingly embraced the more-than-human world as divine in all its aspects. Equally importantly, Maimonides rejected anthropocentrism and embraced the whole of Creation. Both teach us to see ourselves in relationship to the whole, and to regard the whole as the ultimate ethical end.

The bloods of circumcision and menstruation create an imaginal Jewish body which is always male or female, not one body but two. This double body has been reduced to a single one by the priority tradition has given to circumcision. A natural consequence of women's fuller participation in Jewish life  is that this centrality of the male body is destabilized. Egalitarianism, however, cannot ultimately effect the re-creation of the Jewish body as both male and female. The neutered body imagined by the ideology of egalitarianism is not who we are inside, and it cannot connect to the body that desires. One response to this need is to lift up the rituals of menstrual taharah to the level of covenant, so that brit taharah and brit milah become equal foundations of the imaginal body of the Jew. Through the Temple cult, ancient Israel constantly re-inscribed a different order of sacredness on the human body and the body of the animal -- the first through mikveh and the the second through sacrifices. Through taharah, the sacred wholeness of the human body was not merely affirmed but actively created and renewed. If the rituals of menstrual taharah could express an understanding of the returning wholeness of the human body through its cycles, then a covenantal reconstruction of taharah would be easy to achieve. The imaginal body of the Jew, inscribed by women through embodied rituals, would in parallel to circumcision create and define the covenant of the Jewish people as a whole in relationship to God.

A deep dive into the structure of the Seder. This haggadah includes commentary, explanations of customs, new concordant translation, and more. The precision of the traditional ritual and its transformative program that this haggadah reveals is stunning!

Chapter 9 looks at how Kabbalah conceives the universe in its totality. In particular, the terminology “Adam Qadmon” describes the cosmos, including the Sefirotic worlds, as divinity. Some Kabbalists, especially Yosef Ashkenazi, drew the conclusion that if Adam is in God’s image and the universe in the form of Adam Qadmon is in the human image, then Creation is b’tselem.

Beginning:

"The body of this world is the Shekhinah below." (Tiquney Zohar, §70)

This chapter examines resonances and parallels between the Gaia hypothesis, Adam Qadmon, and Maimonides’ cosmology. All three conceptualize the world system – whether that be the cosmos or the spheres or the planet – as a kind of living individual. While the differences between these ideas are significant, the affinities between them are extraordinarily powerful for ecotheology.

Chapter 8 discusses the connection between chiyut or lifeforce and divinity in the thought of Shneur Zalman of Liady and Yaakov Lainer and whether a general theory about the extension of tselem to all the tachtonim (lower beings) can be grounded in these concepts.

In Chapter 3, I tease apart the value complex that unites within the human being the ideas of tselem, soul, and infinite value. This value complex characterizes most modern Jewish thought. I use the term “modernist-humanist” to refer to this value complex in the rest of the book. Midrashic texts thought to be the source of these ideas are carefully analyzed to show that they do not ground human value in God’s image, but in the value of Creation.

Four points are drawn from chapters 1-3:
1. Tselem according to the rabbis is not limited to human beings but includes the angels and the heavens.
2. Soul, nefesh or n’shamah, is not equated with tselem in early midrash.
3. The modern idea that human life has “infinite value” has no clear representation in rabbinic thought.
4. The rabbis do not connect the idea of God’s image with imitating God until after the close of the Amoraic period (around the eighth century).

Focusing on these points clears space for alternative readings of the tradition. Modernist-humanist theology is not “disproven” by this. In fact, a central element in the modernist (and medieval) understanding of tselem, the idea that God’s image is realized through imitating God, is also central to any ecotheological interpretation. Rather, the modernist-humanist interpretation is shown to be a hermeneutical choice.

Chapter 12 focuses on language, a chief element of tselem according to early midrash, in the form of prayer, song, and naming. While it does discuss midrashic themes and texts, unlike other chapters it relies on modern thinkers, in particular Martin Buber and Nachman of Breslov, to elaborate the idea that all Creation has language.

Six entries on ecology and the Bible, including Hebrew Bible, Rabbinic Judaism, modern Judaism, Christianity, Islam. My entry is the second one here (II. A.), pp.974-81, with other sections by Ellen Bernstein, Russell Butkus, David Johnston, Gaye Ortiz.

This paper explores parallels between Native American ritual and Jewish, specifically Kabbalistic thought, from several perspectives, focusing on the very precise parallels between the structure of the Inipi or sweatlodge ceremony, and Kabbalistic ideas about the unification of Tiferet and Shekhinah, the divine masculine and feminine. It also examines the romanticization and commodification of tribalism and the concurrent problem of cultural appropriation with respect to both Judaism and Native American religions. The framework of this paper is in many senses outdated, but the structuralist exploration of ritual and theology remains potentially useful. Delivered at 2010 symposium on Jews and Native Americans held at Columbia University.

This text study resource, "Loving the Neighbor/Loving the Stranger", includes all the verses from Tanakh that mention the stranger. The first version was completed for National Refugee Shabbat October 19, 2018, parshat Lekh L'kha, where Avram declares himself ger v'toshav, a stranger and sojourner. Later versions included verses from the Prophets (most esp. Jeremiah 7), and reference to all 92 verses in which ger/stranger appears, organized by themes and significance, as well as more rabbinic texts and revised translations. This most recent version tweaks the translation of Deut. 24:17, where the verse literally states, "You will not bend justice for the orphan stranger" -- to me "orphan stranger" suggests the children locked in cages who have been deprived of their parents by ICE.

The most important sections from Torah come first and are quoted at length (Exodus 22, 23, Leviticus 19, Deuteronomy 10, 16. 24, 26). I also sifted through many text study sheets on immigrants found on Sefaria.org to include some of the best examples of the spectrum of rabbinic texts and commentaries.

The 2019 version of the haggadah that reveals the deep structure of the seder, and how it guides us on a path toward freedom. You'll find signposts and cues indicating where important transformations of the seder's symbols take place, helping you to follow the process of liberation. And you'll learn about different customs from different communities. The Haggadah of the Inner Seder can work as your main haggadah, but it's also a great supplement alongside other haggadot. And understanding the deep structure of the haggadah will help you create and lead your own seder.

The 2019 version includes corrections from 2018. Like 2018's haggadah, it also includes:
* Torah quotes about taking care of refugees
* Earth-centered kavvanot and prayers
* An abbreviated but halakhically complete Birkat Hamazon
full Hallel (transliteration only)
* More midrash
* Commentaries related to peace and Israel

The Haggadah is 19 pages long (plus cover) but does not (yet) include all the fun songs like Chad Gadya - so make sure you supplement!

Kabbalah and Ecology is a groundbreaking book that resets the conversation about ecology and the Abrahamic traditions. David Mevorach Seidenberg challenges the anthropocentric reading of the Torah, showing that a radically different orientation to the more-than-human world of Nature is not only possible, but that such an orientation also leads to a more accurate interpretation of scripture, rabbinic texts, Maimonides, and Kabbalah. Deeply grounded in traditional texts and fluent with the physical sciences, this book proposes not only a new understanding of God’s image but also a new direction for restoring religion to its senses and to a more alive relationship with the more-than-human, both with Nature and with divinity.