Jewish Wisdom: Divine Nature

One of the orienting ideas in the classical rabbinic understanding of the world is that everything in the world belongs to God, an idea sometimes pithily expressed with a citation of Psalm 24:1: "The earth is the LORD’s and all that it holds."  The entire world is sacred.  Indeed, the entire economy of rabbinic food blessings is based on the notion that we may only make use of the earth by desacralizing it.  Practically speaking, this prohibits us from consumption without mindfulness.  Thus, everything in creation, whether plant, animal, mineral, or metaphysical, has a particular and special relationship with God that must be acknowledged.  

This divine relationship is expressed in two primary ways: praise and commandedness.  Every entity in creation sings songs of praise to God.  This idea, articulated by the Psalmist (e.g., Psalm 148) and expanded upon by the rabbis (e.g., Leviticus Rabbah 30:4), reaches its apotheosis in Perek Shira ("A Chapter of Song"), an anonymous Medieval composition that ascribes different praises of God to each entity in creation.  In Perek Shira, the breadth and majesty of creation is expressed in these praises, each of which quotes a different biblical passage.  A few examples:

The Rains are saying, “You, God, poured a generous rain, to strengthen your heritage when it languished.” (Psalms 68:10) ...

The Grasses are saying, “May the glory of the Lord endure forever; may the Lord rejoice in His works.” (Psalms 104:31) ...

The Crane is saying, “Give thanks to the Lord with the lyre, make music for him with the ten-stringed harp.” (Psalms 33:2) ...

The Sea Monsters are saying: “Praise the Lord from the land, the sea monsters and all the depths.” (Psalms 148:7) ...

Perek Shira's author spends verse after verse cataloging creation and pulling countless citations to prove that each entity has cause to praise God and lives in relationship with the divine.

And just as each entity sings its praise to God, God issues commands to each entity.  The belief that every entity has a direct relationship with God and acts an agent in God's plan is repeated several times in rabbinic literature.  For example, in Genesis Rabbah 10:7:

Our Rabbis said: Even those things which you may regard as completely superfluous to the creation of the world, such as fleas, gnats, and flies, even they too are included in the creation of the world, and the Holy One, blessed be He, carries out His purpose through everything, even through a snake, a scorpion, a gnat, or a frog.

What follows is a series of stories in which the rabbis observe animals carrying out divine missions.  The story culminates in a gruesome and opt-repeated story in which a gnat exacts divine vengeance on the Roman Emperor Titus for destroying the Jerusalem Temple by flying up his nose and feasting on his brain.

In both of these framings, creation as God's fan club or as God's hitmen, the necessity of each element comes into sharp relief.  Kill an unwanted beetle and you have interfered directly in divine providence.  Cause a species to go extinct and you have silenced an entire section of God's praise choir.  The rabbinic sages could not have conceived of the power that post-industrial humans would have to alter our environment.  Indeed, the idea that we could raise the temperature of the earth or wipe out entire biomes by the way we go about our daily lives would have seemed supernatural to them.  But they could conceive of it on a smaller scale.  They were familiar with the human desire to consume without thought to the consequence.  We silence the choir, but we never properly heard the song.  This is the rebuke I hear in the Medieval work, Pirke Rabbi Eliezer, "When people cut down a fruit tree, its cry travels from one end of the earth to the other, but it is not heard."

Written by Benjamin Kamine

Benjamin is the Assistant Director of the Milstein Center for Interreligious Dialogue at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, where he is an Adjunct Instructor and PhD candidate in Rabbinic Literatures and Cultures.  He is also an adjunct instructor in Interreligious Engagement at Union Theological Seminary.