At COP17, a reminder of the importance Judaism places on protecting our world

It’s not often these days that one sits down to eat a salad with a kippah on one’s head and someone places himself opposite you, tells you how much he learnt from visiting Israel, and turns out to be a senior environment minister from the government of Uganda.

It felt good to be Jewish, representing EcoJudaism at COP 17 for Nature and Biodiversity in Yerevan. It’s amazing to read about Noah in the Torah and find oneself that same week in sight of Mount Ararat, where the ark reputedly landed and which is currently under excavation.

I was joined by Naomi Verber, EcoJudaism’s advocacy lead and, now living in Israel and deeply committed on the international scene. Alongside carefully attentive Christian, Muslim and Hindu leaders we presented the sources of our love and concern for creation, and the mitzvot Judaism commands us to follow: don’t destroy; repair My world; cause no sentient creature suffering. These transcend politic; across our faiths our scriptures, values, and deep concern for the planet converge.

I felt that togetherness in a score of sessions I attended. Countries across the globe were working together, whether it was the protection of vulnerable coastlines in Indonesia or Kenya, or seeking the urgently needed funding for landscape-scale ecological restoration in The Netherlands, France or Ecuador. Gathered together were environmentalists, economists, agriculturalists, experts on the oceans, indigenous, regional and national leaders, NGOs from Plantlife to Birdlife International. Driven by a common fear of biodiversity collapse and the shared goal of repair, they pooled their professional insight towards meeting the target of the Kunming- Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework: that every country must protect thirty per cent of its land and waters by 2030.

I had coffee with two young Jewish representatives passionate about eco-survival. ‘Nature, forests, birds: that’s my spirituality,’ they told me, but no one has connected that with Judaism for me yet.’ This was something to which I could respond. Commitment to care for God’s word begins with the understanding that the earth is not ours to exploit, or even ours at all, but entrusted to us temporarily for the sake of all life. The key verse in Genesis (2:15) is often mistranslated as ‘God put [Adam and Eve] in the garden to till it and tend it.’ The deeper meaning of the Hebrew l’ovdah uleshomrah is to reverence and honour the earth according to God’s commandments.

Maimonides, as ever, expresses this beautifully. ‘What is the way to love God?’ he asks in his Laws of the Foundations of Torah. It is to seek to know God’s works and be filled with wonder. ‘And what is the fear of God?’ he asks next: it is the to take a step backwards in awe, thinking: ‘Who am I, a small, lowly creature before this magnificence!’ That is why the desperately urgent work of protecting our planet must begin with reconnection, wonder and heartfelt care.

The Kabbalists take this connection further: ‘The essence of divinity is found in every single thing… it enlivens them, its existence exists in each existent,’ taught Moses Cordovero in sixteenth century Sefat. One spirit flows through all creation, bestowing life on us all, each according to our particular nature and consciousness. We are interconnected spiritually, just as we are bound together biologically in fragile interdependence. Ecclesiastes put it simply: Even a king [or president or prime minister] is subject to the field.’ No bees, no rainfall, no fish, no sustaining soil, and we all perish. We are bound in one shared destiny. Hence the urgency and anguish behind the work of COP 17.

Leaving COP, I feel caught between hope and despair. By the entrance is a picture of elephants with the strapline: We Need To Talk About The Elephants In The Room. This is a report by Friends of the Earth and others, highlighting the trillions invested in extractive development, incentivised by greater legal protection for shareholders than for the ecosystems, the very ocean-, earth- and species health on which our children’s lives depend. I listened to bankers, politicians and NGOs striving to raise billions in private, corporate and public finance for nature restoration. But ten times those sums are still going in the opposite direction. You don’t have to look far for examples.

This must change. That’s why the work of EcoJudaism encompasses not just education, community engagement and nature restoration, but also lobbying, not for party politics, but the future of God’s earth. That’s why our vigil In Parliament Square is so important.

Yet I hope, as Judaism insists we must! At COP were thousands of people from dozens of countries, numerous disciplines and many faiths, all working in the same direction.

We have to join them.

Jonathan Wittenberg is Senior Rabbi of Masorti Judaism and Founder of EcoJudaism