Rabbi Zelig Golden is a founder and executive director of Wilderness Torah, a Bay-Area organization that seeks to promote earth-based Judaism.
What do you see as your role in confronting the climate crisis?
I would say our role as human beings is to remember that we are the earth, and that we have a profound impact and influence. This is physical, this is spiritual and this is cultural. It’s physical because that which we put into the atmosphere impacts the atmosphere. It’s spiritual because our spiritual lives need to inform a certain conduct on Earth. And it’s cultural—this is where it gets very specific about Judaism.
Judaism is an indigenous culture that was based on being and remaining in harmony with its climate. In a land where water was scarce, we were rain-praying people, and therefore the very center of our spirituality had to do with participating in the balance of the natural world through our cultural expressions. Sukkot is the primary example—it’s the culmination of the whole cycle of teshuvah from the beginning of Elul through Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot. In the last days of Sukkot, through Hoshana Rabbah and then Shemini Atzeret, we pray for rain in earnest. Our entire spiritual process up until then is about balancing our inner spiritual lives, our communal spiritual lives and our spiritual lives with God so that we can then effectively pray for a balanced ecosystem. The second, central section of the Shema is a prayer for rain. When you say the shema—”All is one, listen, now go love”—the next thing the shema says is if you do this, it will rain, and if you don’t, it will not.
Wilderness Torah is also about helping mentor and initiate human beings from childhood into adolescence and from adolescence into adulthood. This is the key. The Western world is currently in a state of suspended adolescence. If you look at our political system, if you look at our economic system, even if you look at many of our communities, what do we put at the center? We put ourselves. We put, what do I want? That is adolescent behavior by definition.
Shockingly, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson spoke beautifully about this recently. On the march to the climate change talks, he said that in order for humanity to survive the climate catastrophe that is coming, we need to graduate from our adolescence. To become an adult means to put something outside yourself at the center. Your children, your community, the Earth. Judaism is profound in its teachings around this, and yet we still live in a world that is very much an adolescent world.
What is one way the climate emergency has directly impacted your life?
We have experienced catastrophic wildfires on a repeated basis. Where I live in particular, it’s considered to be in a high fire danger, and we have been evacuated twice. We breathe a lot of smoke. Most pointedly, our partner, Camp Newman, completely burned to the ground in 2017.
Where have you found community, allies and connection in your work?
When I personally received this vision to get Judaism back to the earth, I was a lawyer and I was on a career track that, in practical terms, was successful. I had gotten my professional degree, I was making a living, I was successfully doing what I was doing. It was challenging to jump ship onto an unknown path from a whole career I had built. There was no money there, there was no financial support, there was no assurance of any kind of success or security or any of the things that my culture and my family had taught me to value.
Fourteen years later, I find community, allies and connections all over the place. It’s happening everywhere, people are waking up. A growing number of people in the Bay Area, and frankly all over the Jewish world, are yearning to reroot in nature. Wilderness Torah is a regional organization, but when we did our training institute online last year, which was a COVID pivot, people called in from all over the planet to learn and to share their stories. Hazon, of course, is a large umbrella for these Jewish environmental movements (for more on Hazon’s climate work see Moment’s interviews with Abby Bresler on disability justice and Hannah Fine on community resilience). Pearlstone, a retreat center in Baltimore, and Eden Village Camp in New York and Eden Village West in California, and the Kohenet Institute, are reawakening earth-based spirituality through awakening the priestess lineage. Really asking the question, how do we reroot Jewish culture, tradition and wisdom in the earth?
I’ve also found allyship with local synagogues and federations that want to partner and bring in this kind of nature-based education.
And of course, Camp Newman and Wilderness Torah have committed to developing a collaboration to build a Center for Earth-Based Judaism. The Center will create a real home where we develop programs to evolve Judaism and to strengthen Jewish community focused on climate resilience.That is the kind of collaborations and the kind of partners and the kind of communities that I think will uplift the Jewish community.
On a smaller scale, just this past Sunday, we completed a weekend with our B’naiture youth and their parents at the opening fall camping trip where the kids and the parents come together to launch the program for the year. California had unprecedented rainstorms this past weekend, and a lot of parents were really nervous about floods and questioning whether we should even do the program. In the end, on Sunday, in the middle of the downpour, all of us, the mentors, the youth and the parents, were all outside standing around this big raging fire we had built, singing, dancing and giving gratitude.
This was a moment where the anxiety of people who live with historic trauma and are afraid for their safety even in simple circumstances like a rainstorm, got a chance to drop in and say, “You know what? I can do this. I’m okay. I’m safe, and not only am I safe and am I okay, but this is beautiful.” Just standing in the rain and remembering that rain is not a threat but that rain is life, that rain is essential. Without rain, we’d all die. We need to actually pause and honor rain. Not all the parents, but some of the parents, went through a whole 180 shift from being afraid and anxious to get home to embracing being soaked and wet and dancing in the rain.
