This week in our year-long class on Exodus our discussion focused on Moshe’s identity struggle as played out by his early forays out into the broader world, being incensed by the injustice all around him, wondering which side he is on and in to which world he belongs. This tension is highlighted in Exodus 2.11-12 when he reacts to seeing the oppression the Egyptians are inflicting on the Hebrews by striking down an Egyptian and burying him in the sand. Perhaps Pharaoh’s daughter (Moshe’s adopted mother) told Moshe of his Hebrew origins, or perhaps growing up in the palace of Pharaoh Moshe always sensed a connection to the slaves surrounding him. Either way it is from this beginning—brought up in the Egyptian palace but somehow sensing his connection to the Hebrew slaves—that Moshe begins his journey to becoming the leader of the Israelite nation.
Moshe’s straddling of Egyptian elite and Hebrew slave worlds reminds me of the permaculture principle known as the “Edge Effect.” This principle states that the highest level of biodiversity is at the place where one ecosystem meets another. One example of this is the Intertidal zone where the ocean crashes against the rocky shoreline. An amazing array of creatures inhabit this area and thrive on the extremes of this climate, adapting to being submerged by waves during high tide and being parched and hot as the waters recede during low tide. One of the reasons Gd speaks through Moshe seems to be that he straddles two worlds and in so doing gains strength, vision, adaptability and resilience.
This idea of straddling two worlds was very present for me a few weeks ago when we hosted Adamah: The Jewish Environmental Fellowship’s first urban sustainability weekend in Boston. Throughout the weekend the twelve Adamah fellows who left their rural home of Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center for a weekend in bustling Boston were confronted with the tension between rural and urban, agriculture verses culture. Though they had only left behind New York City or Cleveland a few months prior, for these fellows waking up while it is still pitch black outside to milk goats and harvest crops had quickly become the normal rhythm of the morning.
During their time in Boston we spent a lot of time over the weekend talking about nature and culture and exploring what is gained and lost living in a city. They visited The Food Project, a local organization that works to build a sustainable urban food system, with a focus on low-income residents of the city. They also visited (ACE) Alternative for Community and Environment, which works to empower local communities to combat environmental racism. Issues that these organizations face, such as high contents of lead in the soil, food deserts, power plants in low income neighborhoods, and lack of clean air are problems that highlight the unique challenges of building sustainable communities in an urban setting.
In a world where the majority of people live in cities and where issues like fuel and land availability often make urban areas the more sustainable option can we begin to heal this divide between nature, which we love and revere but is somehow “out there,” and the city, where we live and which seems almost separate from nature. Michael Pollan said it well in his 1991 book Second Nature, “Americans have historically tended to regard nature as a cure for culture, or vice versa. Faced with the question of what to do with the land, we always seem to come up with the same crude alternatives: to virtuously subdue to in the name of “progress,” or to place it strictly off-limits in “wilderness areas,” hallowed places we go seeking an antidote to city life.”
I am interested in the ways that we can begin to straddle and draw together these two seemingly disparate worlds of city and wilderness. The Adamah Fellows, like most of us who have had incredible short-term experiences in beautiful, remote places, will reestablish themselves near an urban center when this their program is over. During the weekend that we spent together I saw the creativity and innovation that can come when we begin to imagine tending to the nature in our urban settings and using culture as a tool to do so. Perhaps in this way we can feel our roots in both worlds rather than having to choose just one.
I am an artist living in India. I am like you interested in the interconnection between religion, ecology, and embodiment. I like the idea that ecological diversity is most manifest on the edge of two eco systems. I have been thinking about mystical experience, and I think that this sense of the boundless beyond our localized and familiarized world often takes place in-between religious and cultural identities. The great experience of the Divine which Moshe had when he saw the burning bush, and the Word came to him: “I am who am”, sent him back from the wilderness to address the suffering of his people. There is a link I believe between bio diversity, and inter-religious dialog where we accept that an experience of the Divine is also diverse, but witnesses to the essential unity of all peoples and cultures. This is the unity of being human, and living on this one planet earth, where all our concerns are ultimately related to the question: How can we live in peace and justice, and in harmony with our environment ?
Thanks so much for your comment Jyoti. I fully agree that the diversity we see in the natural world can serve as an important and powerful reminder of the diversity that we, as a human community, should embrace and promote. Each one of us has a pathway into the truth, but none of us alone can grasp the entirety of the truth. I’d be interested in what you think of my most recent post, because I think it relates. It seems that we are constantly pulled between a love and appreciation of diversity and fear of the Other followed by a desire to repress and control. Perhaps the more we can work on this fear the more harmony we will be able to find.
This is very inspiring article and very relevant to my own research process as a social ecologist from a Jewish background now practising Sufism. In my doctoral research I came up with a theory of an ecology of culture. This was something that was inspired by my work on anti-racism through drama education with indigenous people from both Australia and the Pacific Islands. For them I could see there was no separation between ecology and culture.
Reflecting my on my Jewish ancestors as wandering through the Middle Eastern wilderness areas, I realised that their story also brought ecology and culture together. The prophets, patriarchs and matriarchs all had major experiences of the Divine in the wilderness.
Another relation between ecology and culture in the ancient Middle East is explored in Evan Eisenberg’s “Ecology of Eden”, which examines the story of the mountain and the tower. This is another way we need to straddle two worlds to find a balance between ecology and culture, according to Eisenberg.
Ben-Zion, I’d love to hear more about your doctoral research. Does what you learned about indigenous people from Australia and the pacific Islands relate to us in America? Where did our disconnect between ecology and culture originate. Was this just a natural development brought about by population growth?
“According to the Recent African Origin hypothesis a small group” of Modern Anatomical Humans “living in East Africa migrated north east, possibly searching for food or escaping adverse conditions, crossing the Red Sea about 70 millennia ago, and in the process going on to populate the rest of the world” see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_human_migrations
I would argue that this is the beginning of our disconnect between ecology and culture as we Modern Anatomical Humans populated various ecologies around the planet that was different from the one we came from. This has then been repeated in all future migrations.
Indigenous people are the ones that over time learnt a new culture that connected to their ecology, i.e. a new ecology of culture. This applies as much in the north America as Australia and the Pacific Islands as the Europeans who colonised these places carried their European culture and tried to recreate it in the new ecology.
Today we need to reconsider these processes to create new ecologies of culture more appropriate to where we are living and to learn from the indigenous people how to do that. To do that we need to overcome the racism that prevents us form doing that. This is what my doctoral research showed.