‘Upon Three Things the World Stands:’

Simon the Just says confidently that the world stands on three things. But how securely does our world actually stand today? Given the climate and nature crisis, can we still take it for granted that, in the words of Ecclesiastes, ‘Generations come and go, but the world stands firm forever’? This essay, added for the second edition, explores the spirituality of creation and asks what we must do to safeguard and restore God’s world. These concerns are even more urgent now, and press far more relentlessly on our consciousness and conscience, than they did just three decades ago.

In The Hebrew Bible

The Hebrew Bible opens with a magnificent hymn to the glory of creation. The world is understood as God’s work, from the first light to the separation of land and ocean, the growth of trees and grasses, and the abundance of life, of fishes, birds and animals which fill the earth. Human beings are not created on a separate day from the other mammals, but as part of the continuity of becoming, pointing to the kinship and interdependence of all living beings. The account is not an empirical description and should not be discredited as failing to be scientific. In the words of the great twentieth century rabbi and mystic, Abraham Isaac Kook,

‘Everyone knows that the creation is one of the mysteries of the Torah, and if all the statements are merely to be taken literally, what mystery is there?’

However, he notes nevertheless that:

‘The theory of evolution… is more in harmony with the mysteries of Kabbalah than all other philosophical theories.’ ¹

Rather, what the opening chapter of the Bible communicates, briefly, simply and with great beauty, is that the world is God’s work and everything in it deserves and demands our respect. As the Jewish mystics saw it, the Torah begins with the all-important teaching that the earth is created and sustained by the sacred divine energy that flows unceasingly through all life. That may be why so many, who struggle with the idea of an interventionist God who rules over history and determines our destinies, feel moved in the natural world by a deep sense of awe and wonder.

The flow of Jewish life, the daily liturgy, the weekly recurrence of the Sabbath and the rhythm of the Jewish year all constantly remind us of the preciousness of creation. The morning prayers emphasise how God ‘made all things in wisdom.’ The weekly Sabbath recalls the completion of this work, and, with its commandment to refrain from all labour, ensures that the day is set aside for the appreciation and honouring of God’s world. On shabbat we are reminded that ‘the earth is the Lord’s.’ (Psalm 24:1) Just as on the Sabbath work on the construction of the holy tabernacle in the wilderness had to cease, so must we refrain from labour on Shabbat in order to remind ourselves that the whole world is God’s temple. 

The Hebrew Bible repeatedly shows a close awareness of the natural world. Its authors intimately knew the bird and plant life around them, the trees, the domestic and wild animals, and even the insects, from the ants to the threat of locusts. They understood all too well the devastating impact of droughts and the blessings of sufficient rain in its due season. They saw the weather as the divine instrument of reward and punishment for human conduct, as stated in Deuteronomy: ‘If you listen to my commandments… I will give the rain of the land in its due season.’ But if we fail to listen ‘God will close the heavens and there will be no rain.’ (Deuteronomy 11:13, 15) Nowadays we generally regard meteorology and theology as entirely different subjects and are apt to dismiss the notion that our actions might affect the weather. But our entry into the Anthropocene era forces us to reconsider whether the climate might not after all be, at least to some degree, a response to how we behave.

To be a human is to bear responsibility for God’s world. What is required of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is paradigmatic for all times and places. God commands them ‘to work [the earth] and keep it.’ (Genesis 2:15) ‘Working’ in Hebrew carries the connotation of reverence, even worship; ‘keeping’ indicates honouring and obeying God’s laws.² We are thus called upon to show deep respect and care for the home we share with all life. The instruction to Noah to take two of every species with him into the biome of the ark can be seen as symbolic of the challenge facing our generation to preserve biodiversity and prevent extinctions, as the floods of climate change threaten to engulf us.

Specific commandments in the Torah mandate respect for non-human life. It is forbidden to ignore an animal which has collapsed under its load or which has been lost by its owners. (Deuteronomy 22:1-4) It is not permitted to take a mother bird together with its eggs or fledglings; she must be allowed to go free. (Deuteronomy 22:6-7) The great biblical commentator Nachmanides (1194 – 1270) understands this as injunction against any action which could lead to the collapse of a species. The rabbis summarised the laws concerning animals as a prohibition against all forms of cruelty. They expanded the Bible’s injunction against cutting down fruit-bearing trees even in times of war (Deuteronomy 20:19-20) to include all forms of needless destruction and waste, pithily expressed as the principle of bal tshchit, ‘Do not destroy’. ‘Do not destroy my world,’ the rabbis warned, ‘because [if you do] there is no one who can come after you to repair it.’³ These rules form core principles of Jewish environmentalism today.

Nowhere is it made clearer that the earth belongs to God that in the context of the Sabbatical year, when the land must be left fallow and all produce must be shared with the poor, with refugees and even with the domestic and wild animals. The seventh year is a cyclical reminder that no one has outright ownership over the land, because ‘the earth is Mine,’ says God. (Leviticus 25:23) This is the opposite of the what the prophet Ezekiel sees in Pharaoh, who’s attitude that ‘the Nile is mine and I made it,’ ultimately leads to the destruction of Egypt. (Ezekiel 29:3) Pharaoh can be understood as the prototype of the extractive profiteer who cares nothing for the devastation left in his path. Despite the challenging verse in Genesis commanding humans to ‘conquer the earth and fill it,’ (Genesis 1:28) often pointed to as the source of exploitative anthropocentrism, the Hebrew Bible emphasises over and again God’s sovereignty over creation and our duty to honour it, down to the everyday details of how we treat all our fellow creatures on earth.

But to be human is not just to be held responsible; it is also to be privileged to experience the majesty and wonder of the world. The beauties of the created world give us joy in times of hope and offer us solace in hours of distress. In ‘answering’ Job out of the whirlwind, God does not respond to his challenge to explain the injustices he has suffered or address any of his burning questions. Instead, God confronts him with the glory of nature, from the heavenly constellations to the ocean’s depths, in a pouring forth of magnificent poetry. Though unanswered, Job is satisfied, as perhaps we may be too in times of, albeit less radical, trauma, when the melodies of small streams, the shelter of the trees and the birdsong bring healing to our spirits without any explanations of the whys and wherefores of our suffering.

Mishnah and Talmud

The rabbis of the Mishnaic period, from a generation before the common era to the close of the second century CE, were deeply connected to the land. They debated in detail how domestic animals should be cared for on the Sabbath, since the commandment to rest applied to oxen and donkeys as well as their owners. During the autumn festival of Tabernacles, prior to the prayers heralding the winter rains, they pleaded, in a moving litany recited to this day, for ‘man and beast, the renewal of the earth, the planting of trees in desolate lands; for powerful rains to bring healing and life to forsaken places.’ ⁴ They knew all too well the impact of droughts, locusts and pests, establishing an entire order of fast days to plead with God to intercede and protect us from them.⁵ They saw the blessings and curses of good or bad harvests as heaven’s reward or punishment: God’s judgment was executed through a good or bad grain crop at Passover and by plenteous or meagre fruits on the trees following Pentecost. The rabbis well understood Ecclesiastes’ warning that ‘Even a king is subject to the soil.’ (Ecclesiastes 5:9)

They established a structure of blessings, including for the most basic actions such getting up in the morning, eating and drinking, and visiting beautiful places or sites resonant with history. When one smells scented flowers, one blesses God ‘who creates fragrant herbs.’ When witnessing lightning, one acknowledges God ‘who fashioned the works of creation.’ When one goes out into the fields in the spring month of Nissan and sees flowering fruit trees, one thanks God ‘for creating good trees for people to enjoy.’ This is God’s world, and we enjoy it not by right, but as a gift, a precious but fleeting privilege.

The Talmud has no time for the culture of entitlement. In a striking passage, it insists that ‘whoever benefits from the things of this world without saying a blessing is to be considered as if they had committed the sin of misappropriation.’⁶ This is a reference to the biblical transgression of inadvertently using items belonging to the temple for one’s own purposes. (Leviticus 5:14-16) Notably, it’s a sin about lack of recognition. Whereas the Torah specifies only the unintentional misuse of objects belonging to the tabernacle, the Talmud metaphorically extends this prohibition to the whole world, implicitly likening all creation to God’s temple: we are not allowed to derive benefit from it without according its true owner due appreciation. Addressing the question as to what someone should do who has committed this wrong, the Talmud instructs them to ‘Go to a sage and learn the blessings.’ The meaning is not just that we should study the appropriate forms of words, but that we should deepen our consciousness and stop taking the gifts of the world for granted. Indeed, one interpretation of the Hebrew word for blessing, berachah, connects it with bereichah, a pool of waters, suggesting that to recite a blessing is to acknowledge and give thanks for the flow of sacred energy that gives life to creation.

The Talmud understands the ‘Works of Creation’ as a divine mystery, to be studied only among the initiated. In a remarkable passage, it describes how the first century sage Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai is approached by one of his closest disciples to impart the divine secrets. He sits down beneath an olive tree and covers himself with his garment, because ‘the presence of God is with us, and the ministering angels are accompanying us.’⁷ The trees around them begin to dance, singing the words from the Psalms, ‘Praise God from the earth,’ and the angels join in. Perhaps we should read the account today as a humbling evocation of what it feels like to be smitten by sacred wonder.

In The Chapter of Song, a tractate attributed to the Mishnaic period but likely to be of later authorship, every part of creation, the elements themselves, the rivers and seas, and many kinds of birds and animals are all understood to have their favourite scriptural verse and their special music. The earth itself declares, ‘From the ends of the land we have heard melodies;’ the trees say, ‘Then shall the trees of the forest make music before God who has come to judge the earth,’ while the birds sing, ‘Even the swallow has its nest for her fledglings.’ A recent translation subtitles the work ‘The Symphony of Creation.’⁸

An eleventh century prayer for the Day of Atonement by Rabbi Elijah ben Mordechai beautifully catches these hidden melodies of creation, if we are attentive enough to hear them:

On high all is holy, below all is blessed; the waters are mighty, the rivers cry out; the earth is melody, the trees make music; the mountains dance, the hills sing; every ear hears and every mouth gives praise.

If only we perceived the world in this manner, how much less heedless we would be!

Maimonides

Following the Bible’s warning that ‘no one shall see me and live,’ (Exodus 33:20) and the rabbinic understanding that God’s mind is unfathomable to human thought, the great philosopher and legalist Maimonides (1138 – 1204) stresses that, while it is impossible for human beings to comprehend God as God truly is in God’s own self, we do have the privilege of being able to know God’s works. The more deeply we study and respect them, the closer we come to fulfilling the commandments both to love and to fear our God. Such study begins with the endeavour to comprehend the physical world, from where it extends into the domain of metaphysics.

In the Mishneh Torah, his seminal code of Jewish law, Maimonides asks, ‘What is the way to the love and fear of God?’ before answering:

When one contemplates God’s great and wondrous works and creatures, and from them obtains a glimpse of God’s wisdom which is incomparable and infinite, one will straightway love, praise and glorify God, and long with an exceeding longing to know God’s great name… Pondering these matters, one recoils affrighted, realising that one is a small creature, lowly and obscure, endowed with slight and slender intelligence, standing in the presence of God who is perfect in knowledge.⁹  

Love and fear lead us into a kind of emotional dance: love draws us forward in wonder, fear makes us step back in awe as we behold the majesty of creation.

Though Maimonides stresses the role of the human intellect in apprehending God’s works, he regards all forms of life as significant in their own right:

It should not be believed that all beings exist for the sake of the existence of humankind. On the contrary, all the other beings too have been intended for their own sakes and not for the sake of anything else.¹⁰

Focussing on the laws in the Torah concerning the treatment of animals, he explains the prohibition against slaughtering an animal and its mother on the same day in terms of animal sentience:

There is no difference between the anguish humans and animals feel, for a mother’s love and tenderness towards her child is not dependent on the powers of reason, but of the imaginative faculty [that is, the emotions].¹¹

In this way, he precedes Jeremy Bentham by many centuries in appreciating that the key question is not whether animals can reason, but whether they can suffer. In a similar vein, many centuries later, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook suggested that behind the seemingly inexplicable commandment not to wear garments made of wool and linen together, there might lie the concern that, whereas no pain is involved in harvesting flax, shearing the wool from a sheep or goat might cause the animal hurt:

Man, in his boundless egocentricity, approaches the poor cow and sheep. From one he seizes its milk, and from the other, its fleece…. There would be no impropriety in taking the wool were the sheep burdened by its load; but we remove the wool when its natural owner needs it. Intellectually, we recognize that this is a form of theft — oppression of the weak at the hands of the strong.¹²

Creation is thus central to Maimonidean spirituality: we respect God’s commandments by treating all life with compassion; we deepen our understanding of God’s works by studying God’s world, as a stepping stone to higher speculation. The Jewish mystical tradition takes these principles a significant step further.

Kabbalah and Hasidism

The Talmud notes that the words ‘God said’ are repeated ten times in the opening chapter of Genesis, if one includes ‘In the beginning’ as the first of God’s speech acts. The Jewish mystical tradition understands these ‘Ten Utterances’ not as once-off pronouncements but as ongoing speech acts, indicating the unceasing flow of sacred vitality through all creation. The words in the morning service are therefore to be taken literally: ‘God renews every day the works of the beginning.’ The world is unceasingly sustained by the divine speech; were that flow of energy to stop, all life on earth would end. The Zohar, The Book of Splendour, the central text of Jewish mysticism, expresses this through the image of a tree with its roots in heaven and its branches and twigs reaching down to earth:

The world to come cares for this tree all the time, watering it and preparing it through its work, crowning it with crowns, never at any time withholding its streams. Faith depends on this tree…¹³

At the core of Kabbalah is the understanding that creation is an act of emanation, the descent, rung by rung, of divine energy, which eventually becomes garbed in material form in our physical world of objects and actions. Yet, though concealed, God’s presence remains immanent within all things, flowing through everything and bestowing consciousness on all forms of life according to their nature and capacity:

The essence of divinity is found in every single thing – nothing but it exists. Since it causes every thing to be, no thing can live by anything else. It enlivens them; its existence exists in each existent.¹⁴

Thus, creation is not only God’s work, fashioned by God and then left, as it were, to its own devices. Rather, God’s presence remains immanent in all things; God can be found within everything that exists. According to the cosmogonic mythology of Lurianic Kabbalah, sacred sparks of divinity became scattered throughout the earth following a cataclysm in the process of creation. Here they lie, concealed within all things. The task of the human beings is, in the phrase popularised by Hasidism, ‘to raise up the sparks’: that is, to develop our spiritual sensitivity through study, meditation and good deeds, so that we become aware of these sparks and reunite them, through our consciousness, prayer, and good deeds, with the supernal God.

This is remarkably expressed in a passage written in 1942 by Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, known as the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto, whose teachings, buried by their author, were discovered in the ruins of the city after the war and published posthumously:

God is one and God’s Word is one…As that Word cascades down the chain of emanations, it branches into two modes. One mode is the Divine Speech, which summons creation into being. [The other mode is God’s revelation in the Torah, but both modes are ultimately one]. This Speech, imprinted in the natural order, causes the sun to shine by day and the moon by night. So, when an individual makes the ascent, conjoining in unity with the voice of God in the Torah, such an individual hears the sound of the Torah [ie the voice of God] from the world as a whole: from the chirping of the birds, the mooing of the cows, the voices and tumult of human beings… ¹⁵

Hence when we listen mindfully to nature, we not only deepen our knowledge of God’s works, but actually hear, and enter into relationship with, that aspect of the voice of God manifest within each tree, bird or animal. For, as the Zohar puts it, ‘There is no place free of God’s presence.’ In an earlier work, Rabbi Kalonymus marvels at our inability to apprehend this divine voice, the flow of sacred energy, in all creation:

Scripture says, ‘You are deaf, hear!’ (Isaiah 42:18). The essential thing is not to be deaf, but to listen. For one who listens to how all created beings above and below testify and declare that God is one and God’s name is one will not separate himself from them; such a person too, together with them, will, in every deed and actions, constitute an affirmation and testament that God is one.¹⁶

The awareness of the sanctity of all life, of the oneness of the spirit which flows through all being, and of the kinship which unites us, obliges us to rethink our attitude to everything. There can be no such thing, certainly no such living being, as mere commodity. Nothing deserves our carelessness, let alone our contempt. This is brought home in the chastening anecdote concerning the Hasidic rabbi who reprimanded his son for mindlessly tearing leaves off a tree and crushing them in his fingers:

“How do you know that your ‘I’ is more precious to God than the ‘I’ of that tree?” he asked him. “True, you belong to the domain of the human, and the leaves to the domain of vegetation. But both are filled with God’s holy spirit.”

The story constitutes a radical challenge to the anthropocentric assumption that man is master of all things, and suggests that, important as we humans are, we must see ourselves as only a small, interdependent part of the sacred divine work in which we are not entitled to assume that we have priority of value.

So where are we now?

In a speech delivered in 1993, just days before he died, the moral philosopher Hans Jonas warned that

The latest revelation – from no Mount Sinai, from no Mount of the Sermon, from no Bo (tree of Buddha) – is the outcry of mute things themselves that we must heed by curbing our powers over creation, lest we perish together on a wasteland of what was creation.¹⁷

There is a challenging eloquence to this ‘outcry of mute things’: the planet is in fact neither silent nor passive; it’s screaming at us in wildfires and torrential storms. Yet it’s proving tragically, disastrously, possible to remain deaf. We cannot afford such heedless indifference. In the daily prayers we ask God to open our hearts ‘to understand, take note, listen, learn, teach, preserve, carry out and fulfil.’ We urgently need to do exactly that; we must rethink our habits and change our behaviours. But in order to so, we must restore and deepen our spiritual attentiveness. In the words of the contemporary theologian, Arthur Green, we need a faith:

unafraid to proclaim the holiness of the natural world, one that sees creation, including both world and human self, as a reflection of divinity and a source of religious inspiration.’¹⁸

David Seidenberg, also a contemporary mystic in the Hasidic tradition, goes further, arguing in his ground-breaking Kabbalah and Ecology that not just humans but all creation bears God’s image. In a telling footnote, he argues that perceiving the world differently will lead to exercising our skills and powers differently too:

When the sacred guides our seeing, science readily becomes a way to open up to the world, rather than to control the world, just as understanding becomes an expression of humility, to “stand under” something, to listen and to wait faithfully upon it.’ ¹⁹

Decades earlier, Albert Einstein expressed a similar need to rethink our place in creation, but in plainer, less theological language:

A human being is part of the whole called by us “the universe,” a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical illusion of our consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us… Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of Nature in its beauty.²⁰

Deepening our consciousness has to go hand in hand with changing our conduct. The rabbis of the Talmud admired those who engaged in study in order to become learned. But they reserved their deepest praise for those who followed their learning through into action. Once we become more attentive to creation, the practical commandments to eschew destructiveness and cruelty and instead to respect, revere, restore and protect God’s world become intuitive, urgent, almost involuntary responses, commanding both our heart and our hands.

We cannot continue the same as before; there is no way to escape our custodial responsibilities for creation. The challenges are immense. But we must not allow ourselves to be intimidated, to succumb to feelings of powerlessness at the scale of the task. The words of the second century Rabbi Tarphon remain as apt as ever: ‘It is not your duty to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it.’ (Chapters of Ethics, 2:16) Judaism believes in Teshuvah, the possibility of rethinking and returning, and affirms the possibility of Tikkun, the capacity to repair and restore.

In his beautiful book Is A River Alive? Robert MacfarlanecitesE O Wilson, a pioneer of contemporary ecology. Wilson refers to the current era not as ‘The Anthropocene’ but as ‘The Eremocene’, from the Greek eremos meaning ‘an isolated place’:

‘The loneliness Wilson had in mind … is the silence of a mute planet on which the speech, song and stories of other beings have become inaudible because extinguished.’²¹ 

This contrasts sharply with an ancient rabbinic insight:

All of the trees, plants and spirits that dwell in nature would converse with one another. The spirit that lives in the trees and nature would speak with humankind, for all of the beings in nature were created for mutual companionship with people.²²

It is to this understanding of creation as profoundly interdependent that Jewish spirituality calls us to return. Entrusted into our care despite all our failings, it is up to us to protect and preserve God’s world, with reverence and respect.

1. Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook, cited in Feliks, Yehuda: Nature & Man in the Bible: Chapters in Biblical Ecology. The Soncino Press. 1981, p. 2, p. 6)
2. Davis, Ellen F: Scripture, Culture and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 29-30
3. Kohelet Rabbah 7:13
4. The Daily Prayer Book of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, 4^th edition, 2006, p. 717
5. Mishnah Ta’anit, ch. 1-3
6. Talmud Berachot 35a
7. Talmud Hagigah 14b
8. Perek Shirah: The Symphony of Creation, with commentary by Rabbi Daniel Worenklein, Feldheim Publishers, 2012
9. Maimonides: Laws of the Foundations of Torah, 2:2
10. Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, Part III, Ch.13
11. Maimonides: Guide for the Perplexed, Part III, Ch. 48
12. Otzarot HaRe’iyah vol. II, p. 97; https://www.ravkooktorah.org/KEDOSHIM58.htm
13. Zohar III 239a-b
14. Moses Cordovero, Shiur Komah 206b, quoted in Daniel Matt: The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism, Castle Books, 1997, p. 24
15. Cited in Polen, Nehemia: The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. Jason Aronson Inc. 1994, p. 131-2)
16. Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira: Derekh Hamelekh. Family Publication.1994, p. 205
17. Hans Jonas: Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, ed. Lawrence Vogel. Northwestern University Press, 1996. p. 201-2
18. Cited in Hava Tirosh-Samuelson: Judaism and Ecology. Harvard University Press.  2002, p. 4
19. David Seidenberg: Kabbalah and Ecology: God’s Image in the More-Than-Human-World. Cambridge University Press, 2015: note 1020, p. 310
20. Cited in Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee: Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth. The Golden Sufi Center, 2013, p. 182
21. Robert Macfarlane: Is A River Alive? Penguin, Random House UK, 2025. p. 92
22. Genesis Rabbah 13:2

 This essay is published in English with the kind permission of Julia Enxing and Klaus Vellguth, co-editros: Gemeinsam Schöpfung sein. Schöpfungsspiritualitäten in Europa im Dialog (Creation Spiritualities in Europe in Dialogue), Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, Ostfildern 2025.