“There Is No ‘Away:’” Ecological Fact as Jewish Theological Problem

Abstract

The “second law of ecology”—that all matter remains part of the earthly ecosystem—poses a theological challenge to Jewish monotheisms. Climate change has further underscored the urgency of understanding and acting in light of the interconnected materiality of the world. Yet Jewish theological discourse has remained largely detached from broader planetary conditions and from the metabolization of these conditions in the environmental humanities. The few contemporary Jewish theologians who recognize ecological crisis as worthy of comment have largely responded to it by propping up apologetic accounts of Jewish theology and ethics that rely on a construction of the divine as outside of the world. I argue that ecological crisis reveals the inadequacy of extant approaches to Jewish theology, which either promote ethical monotheism and a stewardship model of relation to the nonhuman world or claim to promote divine immanence while nonetheless reinscribing human dominion.