Food for thought: Eyeing the wonders of nature
I’m a Brooklyn boy, born and bred. Apart from occasional visits to the Prospect Park Zoo and the park’s lake and skimpy woods, I grew up in a totally urban environment, with few opportunities to experience the wonders of nature.
I spent my teenage years, when my religious beliefs were beginning to take shape, at a yeshiva on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. There, nature was even scarcer. The local Hester Street Park was a great place to play basketball and chat with aged Russian Jewish survivors of the Communist Revolution, but I do not recall a single blade of grass there, let alone a patch of green.
Fast forward to my post-high-school years, when I came under the tutelage of several teachers who had studied in the prominent pre-Holocaust Lithuanian yeshivas. I was more than exposed to their teaching methods; I was indoctrinated in them. They included intensive Talmud study and heavy emphasis on classic medieval theological works, among them the opening chapters of Mishneh Torah by Rambam and Chovot HaLevavot by Rabbenu Bahya ibn Paquda.
Chronologically, it was Rabbenu Bahya who first shocked me into recognizing that the preferred way to build a relationship with the Ribbono shel Olam was to contemplate the wonders of nature.
In the second section of his book, which he titled “Shaar HaBechinah (Gate of Analysis),” he advocates careful study of the world around us — mountains, forests, climate, animal behavior and the remarkable workings of the human body. Through such study, one can come to appreciate the Almighty and develop a relationship with Him.
Even more powerful than Rabbenu Bahya were the words of Rambam:
This revered and mighty G-d — it is a mitzvah to love and stand in awe of Him, as it is written, “And thou shalt love the L-rd thy G-d” (Deuteronomy 6:5), and “of the L-rd thy G-d thou shalt stand in awe” (ibid., verse 13).
What is the path to His love and awe? The moment when a person beholds His actions and His wondrous great creations and discovers in them His immeasurable and endless wisdom, he will immediately love, and praise, and glorify, and profoundly desire to know His great name! As David said: “My soul thirsts for G-d, the living G-d!” (Psalms 42:3).
“As he further meditates upon these very matters, he reflexively falls backward with fear and trembling and realizes that he is but a tiny creature, lowly and dim, who stands with a trivial and puny intelligence before Perfect Intelligence. As David said: “When I behold Your heavens, the work of Your fingers … what is man that You are mindful of him?” (Psalms 8:4-5). As our Sages have taught us, “Only thus can you truly recognize Him who spoke and created a world!”
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I must confess that, as a youth deprived of the opportunity to encounter raw nature, I was initially overwhelmed by these teachings. My earliest memories of communion with the divine were of my cousin and me watching our great-grandmother, Yitta Leah Kriegel, may she rest in peace, bake challah for Shabbos every Friday morning.
As she kneaded the dough, and more fervently as she turned on the oven, she would gaze heavenward and speak to the Bashefer, the Creator, pleading with Him to ensure that the kinderlach, her great-grandchildren, would have delicious challah for Shabbos!
That person-to-person connection with the Ribbono shel Olam was reinforced in the many synagogues in our neighborhood. Men and women who had been uprooted from the alte heim, their “old home” in pre-Holocaust Europe, knew how to “love G-d and stand in awe of Him.” They knew how to pray to Him as they wept and sobbed, and even more so as they sang and danced. Ah, did they know how to sing!
My faith in the One Above arose from watching people who lived their faith. Finding faith by contemplating nature did not come easily to me, and that troubled me for many years.
Much later in life, I came across a passage by Rav Shlomo Aviner, a renowned contemporary Religious Zionist rabbi, may he be well, in “Tal Chermon,” his collection of sermons on the weekly Torah portions. In his sermon on this week’s Parashat Vayera (Genesis 18:1-22:24), he writes:
Abraham was the ‘knower-believer-lover’ of the L-rd, par excellence! It is by virtue of this knowledge-faith-love that he came to love other people, all creatures, and the beauty of nature itself. [It is o]ut of his ability to reveal the Light of the Almighty that he came to appreciate all of creation at its many levels.
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I remember first coming across this passage and exclaiming to myself, “Wow! He is reversing the teachings of his medieval predecessors! It is not from nature that we learn to appreciate the Almighty, but it is from our connection to the Almighty that we come to appreciate nature!”
Rav Aviner bolsters his contention with an observation drawn from his experience with modern man: “There are those who think that reflection upon the wonders of nature can bring one to faith in the Creator. They therefore find great value in physics and biology and the like and thereby fail to discern that contemplation of nature without a basis in religious faith swiftly leads to paganism, heresy, and falsely deifying nature itself, a kind of pantheism. … At best it leads to aesthetic pleasures, to the exclusion of true spirituality.”
I recommend that you, the reader, consult the full passage in Rav Aviner’s work. I didn’t write this column to argue against the great wisdom of Rabbenu Bahya and Maimonides. I merely suggest that, writing so long ago, they could not have foreseen the excesses of nature worship that typify our modern and postmodern world — the world Rav Aviner knows so well.
Food for thought, for sure. I look forward, dear reader, to your response.
Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb is vice president emeritus of the Orthodox Union.
