Noahide Law Contra Natural Law
Excerpts below from an article published in the “Jewish Political Studies Review” (1999). Bold markings are my own.
Neo-paganism is part of the search for roots and may be interpreted as a religious root therapy. Thus, not only is nature being re-evaluated in modern Western society’s thinking; with the return to prominence of the forests and the lakes, the spirits which lived in them have also been resurrected.
Many of these sects rightly see the worlds of both Jewish and Christian thought as their enemies. There is no place in monotheism for the divinity of nature to which humanity must bow. In it nature may be valued as a manifestation of God’s majesty, but it is not sacred. The adherents of the single God, Creator of the world, have a long record of destroying pagan idols and desecrating their holy places. While one may claim that a variety of the present forms of nature adoration are un-Jewish, many neo-pagan reconstructionists can be considered anti-Jewish.
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Famous American precursors of modern environmentalism such as Muir32 and Thoreau33 expressed strange ideas or behaved oddly. In the next century, some of the more extreme currents of modern environmentalism may well become a significant vehicle for the spreading of neo-pagan ideas and pseudo-religious concepts linked to nature. Here, I can only refer to this briefly, although these ideas and their influence in the public square merit a fully-fledged discussion…
Several Jewish authors have identified these pagan traits in environmentalist currents.34 Among these are Michael Gillis, who writes that the “pagan view can give rise to worship of animals, the sea, the soil or whatever. People are subject to these divinities and can only seek harmony with them. Such a view is manifestly ecological….Ecologism is thus secular paganism.“35
Wyschogrod is the one who most unequivocally equates some currents of environmentalism with paganism. He states that “upper ecology is ‘nature religion,’ primarily a religious attitude toward nature….In relationship to the divine, upper ecology usually expresses itself as polytheism, the theological view that there are many gods. These gods dwell within the forces of nature and are symbols of these forces…
While pragmatic approaches may often be similar, the values of Jews and fundamental environmentalists, however, are radically different. Norman Lamm, president of Yeshiva University, stated that he refused to participate in a major ecology conference because it focused around the concept that “nature is sacred.”41
… As far as paganism was concerned: why fight it if it had faded away from most societies where Jews lived? The developments in this soon-ending century indicate that this was too hasty a conclusion.
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Halakhah is the antithesis of the laws of nature. The latter are cruel: there is no charity in nature; there is no mercy. There is no safety net in nature for marginal beings. The strong eat the weak. The old are abandoned. In the Bible, the Utopian Latter Days are characterized by the disappearance of these characteristics from the world, when Isaiah prophesies that “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb…the cow and the bear shall graze…a babe shall play over a viper’s hole.”54
Meanwhile, the image of the wolf in Western society is already rapidly changing. A few decades ago it was considered a ferocious predator and in folklore, it was perceived as a devourer of grandmothers. Nowadays we are told that it does not usually attack human beings; rather than being hunted, it has become a highly protected animal within the framework of the Bern convention.
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Another popular slogan of our time is that man should learn to “live in harmony with nature.” Those who propagate it hardly understand what they are promoting. Firstly, if man had done so, his average life-span would have remained at thirty years or so. Furthermore, I postulate that no nation in the twentieth century has lived as much “in harmony with nature” as Hitler’s Germany. Blood and soil became central values. In the pseudo-religious world of national socialism, nature and its rule, i.e., the survival of the fittest, played an important role. Not surprisingly, the Jews, the people who introduced moral laws into society, were to be wiped off the earth.
At the same time new negative characteristics have been attributed to certain human beings. They are “alienated from nature.” This tag is at least as negative as being “undemocratic” and even less precisely defined. The one modern Jewish thinker, however, who vaunts an alien attitude toward nature is Steven S. Schwarzschild. He wrote:
In my philosophy department the graduate students organize an annual picnic. For some time past quasi-formal invitations have explicitly excluded me on the ground that I am known to be at odds with nature. So I am. My dislike of nature goes deep: nonhuman nature, mountain ranges, wildernesses, tundra, even beautiful but unsettled landscapes strike me as opponents, which, as the Bible commands (Gen. 1:28-30), I am to fill and conquer. I really do not like the world, and I think it foolish to tell me that I had better….One explanation of my attitude is historical. My paternal family lived in Frankfurt-on-the-Main, where I was born, since before 1500. We have been urban for well over half a millennium.57
Schwarzschild is very much the odd-man-out among those writing about Judaism and the environment; apologetics around the urban character of Jews — and thus their supposedly limited interest in nature and the environmental movement — are more common among contemporary Jewish writers.
Anybody who places nature as the central value in society must be suspect in the eyes of Jews. One should not lump together neo-Nazis, neo-pagans, and extreme environmentalists. Yet all should be watched carefully by Jews, even if the degree of worry they cause greatly differs.
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In the Torah, God tells not only the Jews but also humanity in general that they should not live according to the laws of nature. Judaism totally rejects the “animal in man” and attempts to suppress it. Among the 613 commandments given to the Jews, there are seven which Judaism considers binding for all humanity. Non-Jews are expected to practice these Noahide laws at the very least: they prohibit idolatry, the vain use of God’s name, murder, sexual transgressions, theft, and eating the flesh of live animals, and require all people to establish courts of law to govern themselves. Two of these commandments are relevant to man’s relation with nature: not eating the flesh of live animals, and the recognition of God and the prohibition of idolatry. The latter forbids revering nature or any part of it as sacred.
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It is not very clear where we are going. We live in a rapidly changing world where we must continuously catch weak signals and watch whether they get stronger. Nothing good for the Jews — nor for society at large — can come out of a worldwide strengthening of paganism. The same goes for a distorted emphasis on the importance of nature.