We begin in the spring of 1983, with my Hebrew Union College admissions interview. For most of my undergrad career, I planned to go on to study law so when I unexpectedly shifted course and applied to rabbinical school, I was left with a significant hole in my resume: while I’d grown up in a very Jewish household, the son and grandson of Reform rabbinic alumni, over the past four years I’d taken an extended sabbatical from Judaism, failing to attend even a single Hillel seder or bagel brunch.
To address that glaring gap, my application essay highlighted the powerful spirituality I experienced in the natural world, a religiosity born on childhood Shabbat walks in the woods with my father and nurtured during my college years backpacking and canoeing in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I wrote about finding a place in Creation that opened my heart and nourished my soul. My words weren’t eloquent, or even entirely adequate, but they were honest.
Which is why I didn’t expect the belligerent leadoff question from the committee chair who admonished: “What does all of that nature crap have to do with Judaism?”
I was speechless. While I must have eventually offered some response, given that they ultimately accepted me, “nature nonsense” and all, to this day, I can’t recall a word of my reply.
But the challenge never left me. Intended as a rebuke, it grew into an unexpected blessing, a touchstone of my career. I have leaned into that question throughout the last forty years—my rabbinic lifetime of wandering in the wilderness.
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Shortly after ordination, I explored the relationship between Judaism and nature in my first book, whose title I drew from God’s advice to Job: Let the Earth teach You Torah. Since then, I’ve refined, reframed, and sometimes significantly rethought my views in academic articles, popular essays, poems, and countless sermons along the way.
Wherever my journeys have taken me, I’ve tried to listen and learn:
As a newly minted rabbi walking a thousand miles on the southern half of the Appalachian Trail.
On sabbaticals hiking around Mt. Meron in the Upper Galilee; trekking in the Himalayas; climbing glaciers in Patagonia; paddling over my ancestral Lithuanian waterways.
I’ve wrestled with the meaning of that “nature nonsense” on raging rivers and alpine lakes, red rock deserts and granite peaks—and under the cool, protective shade of the blue spruce just outside my bedroom window.
I have been lucky to share many of these adventures with dear family members; for others, I’ve been on my own. But I’ve never really traveled alone—wherever I’ve gone, I’ve enjoyed the constant company of the More-than-Human world, the magnificent menagerie of birds and beasts, of trees and stones and streams that share this glorious planet with us. I’m learning, still, to understand their unique tales and tongues, most recently in my work as a forest therapy guide. To this day, my love of Judaism and nature continues to grow. Now, more than ever, I seek solace and sacredness in wild spaces.
And it is my great joy to listen with you, my beloved congregation, and recall the twenty-nine years that we have traveled together: on retreats in McCall; backpacking with generations of CABI teens in the Sawtooth and Boulder-Whiteclouds; floating down the Colorado River outside Moab; gathering for summer Shabbat services beneath the pines at Kathryn Albertson Park; working in our community garden and, of course, celebrating the Days of Awe under this shared tent.
So what have I—have we—discovered along the way? What does nature have to do with Jewish life?
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In good rabbinic fashion, let me respond by way of a story:
Reb Yaakov Yitzhak HaLevi—later known as the Seer of Lublin—grew up near a forest. Every afternoon, he would go off into the woods. His parents could see that he drew strength from the practice and trusted his judgment. Still, they sometimes worried, so one day they asked where and why he went.
“It’s simple,” he said, “I go to the forest to find God.”
“That’s lovely,” his parents replied, “but you should know that you can do that right here at home—as we say in Sh’ma, God is One and the same everywhere.”
“Well,” noted Reb Yaakov, “God may be the same everywhere, but I’m not. I’m different in the woods, and that changes everything.”
Friends, that is why I—and I suspect many of you—seek spiritual sustenance in the natural world—because we are different there: less driven and distracted, more generous, reflective, and open. And I believe the heart of that difference—the profound shift in perspective we experience amidst the vastness of Creation—is first and foremost about awe.
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In his book, God in Search of Man, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel points to awe as the foundation of Jewish life, a sense of wonder that underlies all our mitzvot, prayers, and practices. He notes:
The meaning of awe is to realize that life takes place under wide horizons, that range beyond the span of an individual life or even the life of a nation. . . Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.
Nature inspires awe. It makes us feel simultaneously small and expansive, bit players in an almost infinite universe, yet also blessed to know that we are part of something grand and miraculous. Proverbs describes awe as the beginning of wisdom; our forefather Jacob acknowledged this when he awakened from his dream of a ladder joining heaven and earth and proclaimed: Mah nora ha-makom ha-zeh—How awesome is this place. . . this is the gate of Heaven!
Awe is where the Holy One dwells.
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For Henry David Thoreau, awe is synonymous with wildness, which he described as the preservation of the world. Thoreau recognized that for all our vaunted civilization, in the end, our aspirations of control are mostly illusory. To know wildness is to remember—and paradoxically celebrate—that we are not always on top of the food chain.
This aspect of awe is even more explicit in the Hebrew, where the word for it—yirah—can also mean fear. But while both meanings point to our relative powerlessness, fear causes us to shrink from the object that inspires it whereas awe draws us near. The multivocal root yirah also means to see and be seen. Awe is about seeing—and being seen by—something larger than ourselves.
A bit over a month ago, I paddled the North Fork of the Flathead River along the western border of Glacier National Park. It’s grizzly country, so before setting up camp each night, we’d inspect the potential site for scat, paw prints, and any other evidence of bears. It was both scary and invigorating, as Rabbi Lawrence Kushner recognizes in a chapter from his book, Invisible Lines of Connection. He writes:
The first time my wife and I were up in the mountains of Montana, we were awed and even a little frightened by the scale and power of the wilderness. . . Everywhere, signs warned of bears.
Karen and I drove up to the end of the road at Two Medicine Lake, where there is a log cabin, general store and a little boat which can ferry you to the trailhead on the far shore. Inside, having a cup of coffee, I met Charlie Slocum, who spends his summers working for the National Park Service. In the pristine Eden air, I understood why he had returned now for a score of summers. But I was also more than casually concerned about being eaten by a grizzly.
“Get many bears up here, do you?” I asked.
“Sometimes we get quite a few.”
“How about on that easy trail around the lake over there? Any chance of running into any this morning—so near the store…?”
He paused long enough to hear the question behind the question and took a slow sip of his coffee. “If I could tell you for sure there wouldn’t be any bears, it wouldn’t be a wilderness, now, would it?”
I thanked him for his candor, and we went on our hike. Maybe that is all it ever comes down to: You can walk where things are predictable—or you can enter the wilderness. Without the wilderness, there can be neither reverence nor revelation.
That’s it, in a nutshell.
For much of our lives, like it or not, we all wander in the wilderness. It’s scary—and there is no other path to the Promised Land. Without awe—there is no reverence or revelation.
No Sinai, no Torah.
Without wildness—without nature—there is no Judaism.
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In the tamed, technological civilization we inhabit most of the time, it is easy to forget this truth, to deceive ourselves into believing that we humans are the masters of the universe. That arrogant illusion has led us down the road to disaster. Today’s catastrophic climate change is rooted in our pursuit of material comforts and conveniences at the expense of future generations and all of God’s creation. This crisis is, at heart, a spiritual one, and our only real hope lies in recovering our sense of awe, re-orienting our relationship with the natural world toward reciprocity and respect.
That is the essential project of these holy days, which is why we call them Yamim Nora’im, the Days of Awe. Perhaps the best-known prayer of the season, recited like a mantra from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur, reiterates that message again and again:
Avinu Malkeinu, chaneinu v’aneinu, ki ein banu ma’asim—Holy One, be gracious to us, for our deeds are as nothing before You
To pray—to plead—for grace is the ultimate expression of awe, of surrender. It is to put our own deeds into perspective, to acknowledge that life really does unfold under vast horizons, unimaginably greater than us. This is essential spiritual wisdom for our Anthropocene age, and our experiences of wild nature remind us of its ancient truth. And while we’re not all going out to wander in the wilderness with grizzlies, everyone can find sanctuaries of wildness, in wind and weather, dawn and dusk, in animal companions, starry skies, neighborhood parks and backyard gardens. Like Torah, awe is neither far away in the heavens nor beyond the sea—it is in our mouths, to praise, and in our hearts, to embrace.
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What does Judaism have to do with nature? Everything, which is why we are here tonight.
You can learn a lot about a culture from the way it measures time. Christians number years anno domini, from the birth of their lord. The Islamic calendar begins with Mohammed’s move from Mecca to Medina. While there are several Buddhist new year’s, celebrated by different regional traditions, they all celebrate the Buddha’s journey of enlightenment. So, too, Hindu, and Chinese and many other new year’s mark significant occasions, mythological and historical, in the annals of their own particular communities.
But we Jews reckon time beginning long before there was a Jewish people, with the creation of the world. Today, on Rosh Hashanah, we proclaim: HaYom harat olam—today, the entire, breathtaking universe was born! Never mind the Rabbis’ timetable being off by give or take 13.7 billion years—that’s just logistics. The point is, our tradition is anchored in story of the whole, glorious, unimaginably vast and ever-expanding universe that we are each privileged to experience for the hopelessly brief yet brilliantly beautiful moment we are here. If that’s not awe, what is?
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HaYom harat olam. As we sing these words that celebrate the world’s birth, we sound the shofar. Its call is rough and raucous, an essential wild shock to our routine-dulled systems. As the prophet Amos rhetorically asked nearly three thousand years ago: Can the shofar be blown in the city and the people not tremble?
And so friends, let us listen and tremble together, in awe and inspiration, and so begin the sacred labor of healing and hope that might guide us through this new year 5784. It has been my deepest pleasure and privilege to wander the wilderness with you all and I look forward to sharing many milestones this last go-round.
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