In Memoriam: Rabbi Ellen Bernstein, who saw ecology as God’s work

•  SAM ROBERTS

NEW YORK: Ellen Bernstein, a river guide turned rabbi who blazed a spiritual trail in the environmental movement by undergirding it with the Hebrew Bible’s veneration of nature, died on Feb. 27 in Philadelphia. She was 70. The cause of her death, in a hospital, was colon cancer. In 1988, when she was 34, Rabbi Bernstein founded Shomrei Adamah — the name is Hebrew for Keepers of the Earth — which she described as the first national Jewish environmental organisation. “The Creation story, Jewish law, the cycle of holidays, prayers, mitzvot (good deeds) and neighbourly relations all reflect a reverence for land and a viable practice of stewardship,” Rabbi Bernstein wrote in “Ecology & the Jewish Spirit: Where Nature & the Sacred Meet” (2000).

She developed curriculum for students and teachers, organised conferences, and wrote scholarly articles and books to spread a gospel that resonated in progressive congregations and on college campuses. Her work gave a new dimension to the words “holy land” and to the synergy between heaven and earth.

“The first step toward ecological repair,” Rabbi Bernstein wrote in “Toward a Holy Ecology: Reading the Song of Songs in the Age of Climate Crisis” (2024), “is to love and identify with the natural world.” With help from her friend Shira Dicker, she wrote “The Promise of the Land” (2020), an ecological version of the Haggadah, the text recited on Passover, to remind Seder participants that Passover — like the other harvest celebrations Shavuot and Sukkot — had links to nature. In her writing, including another book, “The Splendour of Creation: A Biblical Ecology” (2005), Rabbi Bernstein invoked God’s creation of the Garden of Eden and his vision of the promised land as evidence of biblical environmentalism.

“Through her work with Shomrei Adamah, she illuminated and made accessible the ecological roots of Jewish tradition and developed a foundation in Jewish ecological thought and practice,” Mary Evelyn Tucker, a director of the Yale University Forum on Religion and Ecology, said in an email.

Ruth W. Messinger, the longtime New York Democratic politician who is now global ambassador for the American Jewish World Service, said in an email that Rabbi Bernstein had used her writings “to push the Jewish community to think about our obligation to protect the planet and invest for future generations.”

And Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a theology teacher and leader of the progressive Jewish Renewal movement, said by phone: “It is clear if you read the Hebrew Bible that whoever lives on the land is responsible for taking care if it. What she accomplished was making clear to people what their own love of earth was, and how to express it.” “During the summers,” Rabbi Bernstein wrote, “I despaired the adult world was flattening landscapes for housing developments, polluting the atmosphere in an effort to develop more and more commodities for our consumption, and ruining our waterways.”

“You have to nourish people,” she told the Jewish Women’s Archive in 2020. “And that comes from showing them the beauty in the world and the beauty in nature, from nurturing a love for the world, and from nurturing inspiration, possibility and creativity. This is critical to keeping people engaged and motivated. Finding beauty has been central in all my work.”