The midrash about the Moon’s diminishment in the previous post did not remain static over the centuries, but was reinvented to reveal new meanings. Explore the changing face of this ancient legend in depth, through this fascinating article by Melila Hellner-Eshed, the Shalom Hartman Institute, Jerusalem. It’s a bit longer than most of our pathways, but well worth the read.
I’m just 
emerging from the busy Fall Holiday season to launch a new Gateway page: Gateway of the Moon. The Jewish calendar, many rituals and colorful legends center on the Moon. This Gateway has just started, so check back to watch it grow and to learn about the meaning of the moon in Jewish tradition and as a symbol for the changes and cycles of our own lives.
As a congregational rabbi, this is my busiest time of year, so new posts may be a bit slow in the coming weeks. However, you can find several holiday related posts on Wellsprings of Wisdom that I hope will add to the meaning of the season for you.
Learn about the meaning of the Shofar and listen to the call of a shofar blown outdoors. Take it deeper by learning how the shofar is used as a symbol of justice, social activism and Tikkun Olam (repairing the world).
Other posts highlight outdoor, nature-based rituals of the season, such as the Rosh Hashanah custom of Tashlich, “casting off sins” into a flowing stream. Learn about the custom here. I also share about a personal tashlich ritual that I created to deal with a difficult life transition, and share photos of the beautiful Northern California creek where I performed it. While on the subject of Tashlich, enjoy a poem about a creek, “Today is Forever,” translated from Yiddish of Malka Heifetz Tussman by Marcia Falk, and shared from her wonderful book for the season, The Days Between (linked in the post).
After the Days of Awe (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) comes Sukkot, the harvest festival, which focuses on life out of doors by dwelling in a hut called a sukkah. Here is a post about the sukkah and the holiday and its symbolism. The post links to holiday retreats in the US East and West coasts.
Wishing everyone blessings of a Shanah Tovah! Be written and sealed in the Scroll of Life for a good and sweet New Year.
In the month of Elul, leading up the Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, it is traditional to blow the shofar daily (except Shabbat). Here Rabbi Sarah Leah Grafstein sounds the ram’s horn in the awesome setting of the Grand Canyon. The shofar calls us to awaken, arise, return to our true nature and mission in life. This is also a time to prepare for the new year by giving tzedakah (charity, righteous giving), mending relationships, remembering the departed, and doing an “accounting of the soul” (cheshbon hanefesh), meaning self-reflection in preparation for the New Year.
It is traditional to read Psalm 27 daily to build our faith and confidence. Here is a wonderful translation by my teacher, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi of blessed memory. And here is a recording of him reading it.
Ocean Breathing is a 
yogic breathing technique that I learned from Marcia (Meesha) Albert at the old Elat Chayyim Retreat Center in the Catskills. While it takes a little practice, it is a wonderful calming technique, kind of like your own portable beach. Find audio and written instructions in this New Post in the Gateway of the Sea. As a bonus, enjoy a virtual trip to the beach in Australia.
[Update 12/28/17: the “virtual trip to the beach in Australia” was from an Instagram account that closed, so it is no longer part of the post.]
Nature can be beautiful, but can also bring powerful destruction. My thoughts are with those in my home state of Texas living through the devastating floods of Hurricane Harvey and its aftermath. Jewish tradition urges us to pray, and also to anchor our prayers by giving tzedakah (charity, righteous giving). In that spirit, here are some place that you can donate to help those impacted by Hurricane Harvey:
http://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/ways-can-help-people-hurricane-harvey/
Jewish Federation of Greater Houston
Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund (Greater Houston Community Foundation)
I love to contemplate the lights and reflections on the surface of a lake, which reminds me that as human beings, we reflect our spiritual Source. Enjoy this gallery of my photographs of sky and trees in water. It is included in the Gateway of the Sea.
Many people find a total solar eclipse to be an incredibly spiritual experience in nature that opens them to the vastness of the cosmos. More eclipse resources, from practical, spiritual, and particularly Jewish perspectives have been coming my way in recent days, so here are some more wonderful materials for share. (Thank you to Rabbi Riqi Kosovske) for sharing several of these.)
For spiritual reflections from a Jewish perspective, I loved Dr. Tamar Frankiel’s beautiful post on Rosh Hodesh Elul (the new Hebrew month prior to Rosh Hashanah), and its relationship to the eclipse. Another inspiring Jewish resource is Sun and Moon, Together, a free downloadable e-book by Prof. Nehemia Polen and daughter Adina Polen. This “mini literary magazine” includes deep teachings for adults on the moon in Rabbinic tradition, and an illustrated story to share with children.
To continue the theme from the last “What’s New” post in more depth, you can read Rabbi Joshua Heller’s teshuvah (response) to the question of whether one should offer a traditional Hebrew blessing on seeing the eclipse–and which one to say.
Finally, here are some great general guidelines for viewing the eclipse and meaningfully and safely. For those of us who are not in the path of “totality,” there are ways to watch the celestial event remotely.
The previous “What’s New” post has blessings that can be said for the eclipse.
Many people will be traveling to view the full solar eclipse the will be seen across the United States on August 21, 2017
. Here is a webpage with links to all kinds of information about this celestial event. Although traditionally, no Hebrew blessing was said upon seeing an eclipse, as in earlier generations people viewed it as a bad omen, today many people view it with wonder and find it appropriate to say a prayer from tradition. Rabbi David Zaslow recommends the blessings below.
Perhaps a blessing practice can help us to see the Eclipse in a more positive, modern light, as a fully predictable natural event that evokes awe and wonder at creation. Still, the traditional sense of the Eclipse calling us to teshuvah, to repairing and mending our ways, is always worthwhile.
Image: Photo that I took during a solar eclipse in California, 2012, using a binocular projector. (In case you needed a reminder, never look at the sun during an eclipse as you can damage your eyes. The linked article will provide some ideas for safe ways to view it.)
For more eclipse resources, read the next “What’s New“ Post.
Note: My friend and colleague Rabbi David Seidenberg is one of the leading scholars on Judaism and the environment. Whether writing about Kabbalah and Ecology, or the Biblical vision of a justice and sustainability, his teachings are both inspiring and timely. -JHD
Amphitheater at Caesarea, Julie Danan
Seven thousand years ago, Sumer, in Mesopotamia, was one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever known — the creator of paradigms and inventions that spread the world over, including writing and the plow. It was moreover a morally creative civilization, the best of whose shepherd-kings took responsibility for the poor and articulated laws to protect them. Its collapse would have had a tremendous impact on the many civilizations it had touched, whether through trade or slaves or war or treaty.
The details of Sumer’s collapse remain the subject of debate. But some combination of ecological factors probably led to this collapse, including the Sumerians’ own over-farming of what had been marshlands and over-flooding those lands with standing water that came from the Tigris or Euphrates via a system of canals, along with over-logging of the slopes where the great rivers originated, which was carried out not by the Sumerians but by their trading partners to meet Sumer’s wealth-born need for wood. The land bloomed with salt as the original water table rose, the main staple crop that could be grown shifted from wheat to barley, the land’s fertility declined, and eventually, the land of Sumer was abandoned.
In the Genesis story, Abram, soon to become Abraham, left the Mesopotamian valley and Ur Kasdim with his family to head to Canaan. His story, set after the biblical dispersion from Bavel (Babylonia), seems to start at least one or two civilizations after Sumer. What is important is that the sought-after land of Canaan was archetypally the opposite of Mesopotamia — a hilly land dependent almost entirely upon rainfall, which could not be irrigated by diverting any river’s flow.
Though Mesopotamia was the matrix from which Canaanite and Israelite culture grew, the references the Bible makes to a land watered by rivers are not to Sumer. Instead, the land of Egypt, whose social system and wealth were sustained by the annual overflow of the Nile, takes Sumer’s place, becoming the biblical paragon of an unsustainable, hierarchical, idolatrous society radically out of sync with divine intention. Being out of sync was a function of Egypt’s ecology: because the river could be counted on to flood like clockwork, Egypt had no need to appeal to divine providence for rain.
This distinction, which to most modern ears would sound like a boon, is the reason for Egypt’s contumely and Canaan’s praise:
For the land that you are coming to is not like the land of Egypt, which you came out from, where you sowed your seed and gave drink with your foot (by pumping water from the Nile), like a garden of greens. [For] the land where you are passing over to is a land of mountains and valleys – through the rain of the heavens will she drink water
A land that must drink from the heavens, however, is a land subject to drought. And yet the Torah teaches this is the ideal land, the land of promise, because “the eyes of YHVH your God are continually upon her.” This mystical-sounding relationship describes a simple ecological reality, imagined from a divine perspective: the lack of human control over irrigation means that God is continually assessing whether the people merit rain.
Canaan was the opposite of the land of Egypt, which can go for centuries sustained by the Nile’s flooding and the technology of the pedal pump, no matter the state of the weather or the state of justice, until it finally gets its proverbial seven years of famine or its ten all-consuming plagues. Unlike Egypt, the feedback loop in Canaan is short and swift — the loop may be closed, the consequences felt, within a season or two. It is that very fact — that everyone’s tenure is tenuous — that makes Canaan/Israel a holy land.
Orange Blossom, Ashdod, Israel, Julie Danan
That this is the intended meaning is clear from the passage that follows, Deuteronomy 11:13–21, which Jews the world over recite as the second passage of the prayer called the Sh’ma. The first promise of the passage is the very definition of sustainability: “[Y]our days and the days of your children will increase on the land which YHVH swore to your ancestors to give to them, like the days of the heavens over the land” (Deut. 11:21). The second promise, the consequence of not listening to the covenant, follows: “the heavens will be shut up and there will be no rain, and the ground will not give her produce, and you will be destroyed quickly from off the good land which YHVH gives you” (Deut. 11:17).
What sustainability looks like is also specific to Canaan: the land will receive both early rains and late rains, the people will gather their grain and their wine and their olive oil, and there will be grass in the fields for their animals (Deut. 11:14–15).
Could the ancient Israelites have also realized that land watered by rainfall can never be made permanently infertile by salinization the way that the Mesopotamian valley was? Perhaps that is why a third promise is found in many similar passages (though not in Deuteronomy 11): a remnant of the Israelites will eventually return to the land, and the land will return to its fecundity (Lev. 26:42–45; Deut. 30:1–7).
The continuity of living on the land for as long as the heavens stay suspended over the earth was not simply a reward for obedience. Three commandments most determined one’s fitness to remain in the land: eschewing idolatry, allowing the land to rest, and doing justice for the poor, widow, orphan and stranger, that is, for the vulnerable. Sustainability in the ecological sense and in the social/political sense is a direct outcome of following the latter two.
Tying all three together was the observance of Shabbat, the weekly celebration of Creation and Creator, when agricultural activity stopped and animals and people rested. Shabbat in turn was a miniature version of the Sabbatical or Shmitah year, when land ownership was annulled, when poor and rich would be sustained equally from a common food supply, when wild animals would share the produce of the land with the people, when the land would rest, and when the people would recognize God’s sovereignty over the land (Lev. 25). The Sabbatical year was the capstone achievement of a society following the covenant.
One could say that the purpose of religion, from the Torah’s perspective, was to teach people how to achieve a true symbiosis with the land. This is what it means to “choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19). If the mission of the Torah was to create a truly sustainable model of agriculture, then another way to frame that is that the Torah’s mission is to change the direction of what we now call the Anthropocene.
~~~~~~~~~~~
This post first appeared on Times of Israel Blogs, and is reprinted with permission of the author. Rabbi Seidenberg’s personal website is: NeoHasid.org. He is the author of Kabbalah and Ecology: God’s Image in the More-than-Human World (Cambridge University Press), and teaches widely on Judaism and the environment.
Post adapted from “The Third Promise: Can Judaism’s indigenous core help us rise above the damaging politics of our time?” Read the expanded article, along with the footnotes for this article, at: tikkun.org/th
Featured Image: Sunrays at the Sea of Galilee in Winter, Julie Danan
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