There are hours when I’m troubled with mourning, not for the past but the future. It isn’t just fear for humanity, for a world from which, in Matthew Arnold’s warning words, faith has withdrawn like an ebbing tide and ‘ignorant armies clash by night’. It’s fear for the future of nature itself, of beauty and awe, of birdsong and the sound of the wind in the woods and the mountain crags.
The Hebrew Bible opens with an ode to the wonder of creation. Humankind is not made alone, but fashioned to the rhythm of dawn and twilight, surrounded by the abundance of trees and grasses, set amidst the companionship of the birds and animals. I worry, often: will we destroy all this? Will not just Noah’s dove, but all the birds in existence ‘find no resting for the soles of their feet’ in our concrete agglomerations? What will happen then to the human soul, malnourished without the wildlands and the animals?
That’s why I linger on our last nights on Scottish holidays, staring out at the blackening sea, listening to the seabirds and waders who cry out like a piercing prayer in the thickening light:
Music, as desolate, as beautiful
as your loved places,
mountainy marshes and glistening mudflats
by the stealthy sea
Norman MacCaig, ‘Curlew’ in Mary Colwell, ‘Curlew Moon’
God worries that ‘It’s not good for man to be alone’. I imagine God had not just to human partnership, but this strange kinship with all that lives which those who love nature know.
That is why I appreciate the Torah’s description of the sabbatical cycle. In the seventh year, when the land is left fallow and all have equal rights to whatever it naturally brings forth, the border fences come down. The rich are forbidden to exclude the poor. ‘My’ dissolves into ‘our’. For one year in seven, it’s not ‘my land’ but ‘our land’. Stranger and citizen have equal access. They cannot be banned from anyone’s ‘territory’ because the sole proprietor is God, and my fellow human being is as much God’s creation as I am.
Nor does community comprise only humans: wild and domestic animals are entitled to roam the land, and eat. It is a return, temporary for sure, symbolic perhaps, but a return nevertheless to the full community of creation.
Sunday is Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day. I’ll never forget how my father woke me, a boy of nine, in the middle of the night, to tell me Israel had recaptured the Old City. He bitterly remembered its loss in 1948; he was there. Some regard the date as solely about territory. Kehillat Zion, the remarkable open and inclusive community led by Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum is celebrating more profoundly, by listening to voices from the different peoples of the city, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Armenian, Bucharan, Yemenite. I imagine that’s what the Psalmist meant in describing Jerusalem as ‘shechubrah lah yachdav, – united all together’, in one fellowship before God.
Alongside the earthy city, Judaism speaks of a ‘heavenly Jerusalem’, a dream, an ideal. It’s that Jerusalem which William Blake sung of creating (with only metaphorical bows and spears) ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’. In that Jerusalem there will be space for all. There will be wild places too, forests, mountains, wet lands, meadows. No one will be persecuted; no species will become extinct; birdsong will not cease. Until we have created it, in Israel, England, anywhere, there will be no completer resting for our soul.