Ellen Bernstein, a river information turned rabbi who blazed a non secular path within the environmental motion by subordinating the worship of nature within the Hebrew Bible, died Feb. 27 in Philadelphia. She was 70 years previous.
Her husband, Steven J. Tenenbaum, mentioned that the reason for her demise, in a hospital, was colon most cancers.
In 1988, when he was 34, Rabbi Bernstein based Shomrei Adamah — the identify is Hebrew for Keepers of the Earth — which he described as the primary nationwide Jewish environmental group.
“The story of Creation, Jewish legislation, the cycle of holidays, prayers, mitzvot (good deeds) and neighborly relationships all mirror a reverence for the earth and a viable follow of stewardship,” Rabbi Bernstein wrote in “Ecology and the Jewish spirit: the place nature”. & the sacred encounter” (2000).
He developed curricula for college students and lecturers, organized conferences, and wrote scholarly articles and books to unfold a gospel that resonated in progressive congregations and school campuses. His work gave a brand new dimension to the phrases “holy land” and to the synergy between heaven and earth.
“Step one towards ecological restore,” wrote Rabbi Bernstein in “Towards a Holy Ecology: Studying the Track of Songs within the Age of Local weather Disaster” (2024), “is to like and establish with the pure world.” .
With the assistance of her buddy Shira Dicker, she wrote “The Promise of the Land” (2020), an ecological model of the Haggadah, the textual content recited on Passover, to remind Seder members that Passover – like the opposite harvest celebrations Shavuot and Sukkot – had hyperlinks with nature.
In his writings, together with one other e-book, “The Splendor of Creation: A Biblical Ecology” (2005), Rabbi Bernstein referred to God's creation of the Backyard of Eden and his imaginative and prescient of the promised land as and proof of biblical environmentalism.
“Via his work with Shomrei Adamah, he illuminated and made accessible the ecological roots of the Jewish custom and developed a basis in Jewish ecological thought and follow,” mentioned Mary Evelyn Tucker, director of the Discussion board of the Yale College for Faith and Ecology. electronic mail.
Ruth W. Messinger, the longtime New York Democratic politician who’s now a worldwide ambassador for American Jewish World Service, mentioned in an electronic mail that Rabbi Bernstein had used his writings “to push the Jewish group to consider our obligation to guard the planet and make investments for future generations”.
And Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a trainer of theology and chief of the progressive Jewish Renewal motion, mentioned by cellphone: “It’s clear if you happen to learn the Hebrew Bible that whoever lives on earth is answerable for taking good care of himself. What he achieved was to make it clear to the individuals what his personal love for the land was, and specific it.
Ellen Sue Bernstein was born on July 22, 1953, in Newburyport, Massachusetts, about 45 miles north of Boston, the granddaughter of shoe producers who had constructed a manufacturing unit there. She was raised in Haverhill, Massachusetts, about 15 miles west of the New Hampshire border. His mom, Etta (Feigenbaum) Bernstein, managed the household. His father, Fred, was a leather-based salesman.
“Through the summer time,” Rabbi Bernstein wrote on his web site, “I despaired that the grownup world was flattening the landscapes for housing developments, polluting the environment in an effort to develop increasingly commodities for our consumption, and ruining our waterways.”
Impressed by a highschool ecology course, she enrolled in a pioneering environmental science program on the College of California, Berkeley. He led summer time wilderness journeys as a river information in Northern California and taught highschool biology. However in his mid-20s he started on the lookout for a automobile that might couple his non secular ardour, ignited by the Aquarian Minyan, a Jewish Renewal congregation in Berkeley, and its ecological agenda.
He obtained a life sciences educating credential from San Francisco State College, a grasp's diploma in biology from Southern Oregon State College and a grasp's diploma in Jewish schooling from Hebrew School in Newton, Massachusetts. Faith in Yonkers, NY
Rabbi Bernstein married Mr. Tenenbaum, a scientific social employee and psychotherapist, in 2005, and the couple moved to Amherst, Mass., the place he turned a non secular adviser at Hampshire School. In 2020, she and her husband moved to the Mount Ethereal neighborhood of Philadelphia.
Along with Mr. Tenenbaum, she is survived by her brother, Larry Bernstein, and her youngsters, Tatyana and Ezra Tenenbaum.
Writing in regards to the Track of Songs in “Towards a Holy Ecology,” Rabbi Bernstein mentioned that whereas it’s usually interpreted as an allegory in regards to the relationship between God and Israel, he was struck by its description lush backyard the place lovers meet. .
“Though the Judaism of my childhood had by no means spoken to me, these phrases of the Bible opened my coronary heart,” he wrote of those passages:
Stand up! My beloved, my magnificence.
Come away!
For now the winter is previous,
the rain is over and gone.
Scarlet flowers sparkle within the floor,
the time of the singing chicken has come
the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.
New figs have appeared,
the grape flowers give off their candy scent.
Stand up! my beloved, my magnificence; Come away!
“Studying the Track, I might really feel the spring in my blood; I longed to rise up and run away with it,” wrote Rabbi Bernstein. “Each deity I knew gave the impression to be linked to this bodily expertise of spring – of coloration, odor and sound – of this torrent of power and this romance with the land That the Track might articulate one thing that I’ve no language for – that the phrases from mine custom might be significant – consolation and pleasure.”
“You must nurture individuals,” she advised the Jewish Ladies's Archive in 2020. “And that comes from exhibiting the sweetness on the planet and the sweetness in nature, from nurturing love for the world, and from domesticate inspiration, risk and creativity. That is essential to maintain individuals engaged and motivated. Discovering magnificence has been central to all my work.”
