The Jewish view of cats

While checking the traffic sources for this blog today, I noticed that somebody got here by searching  for "Jewish view of cats."  That's interesting, I thought to myself.  Is there a "Jewish view" of cats?  Are cats even "Jewish" at all?

Well, as Rabbi Ben Bag Bag said of the Torah 2000 years ago:  "Turn it over and over, for everything is in it" (Pirkei Avot 5:22)  So I decided to do just that -- not just in the literal Torah (Five Books of Moses) but "Torah" in the broader sense, as all of Jewish learning.  Here are a few of the interesting things I found.


Lions and Tigers and Leopards -- Oh My!

The Torah itself does not mention house cats, although it does mention big cats like lions, tigers, and leopards. The Lion is the symbol of the tribe of Judah, lineage of King David.  In Genesis 49:9, Jacob blessed his son Judah with:

Judah is a young lion,  

on prey, my son, have you grown. 

He crounches, lies down like a lion, 

like the King of Beasts -- who dares arouse him?

the Lion of Judah
on the symbol of  Jerusalem

This verse, by the way, is how the idea of the lion as "King of Beasts" entered the English language.  Not only Jews but many other ancient peoples as well associated lions with royalty -- and many still do.

Lions also appear in Ezekiel’s vision of the heavenly beings attending God’s Presence.  To this day, lions are used in Jewish art and heraldry to represent the Jewish people.  The Hebrew for lion is Aryeh, which is also a common given name for Jewish men.

Leopards are mentioned in six places in Scripture: Song of Songs 4:8; Isaiah 11:6; Jeremiah 5:6; 13:23; Daniel 7:6; Hosea 13:7.  Tigers are mentioned only once -- in  Job 4:11.

No house cats in the Hebrew Scriptures

Sand Cat

But what about those cuddly purrballs we keep as pets nowadays?  My guess is that Jews first encountered small cats in Egypt, perhaps during the time of Joseph or Moses.  It is known that cats were already domesticated in the Middle East at that time.  When I was in Berlin in 1997 I visited the zoo there and saw Egyptian Sand Cats, an endangered species that look pretty much like ordinary tabbies.  I can easily imagine them as the ancestors of my own feline companions.

Then why are no cats mentioned in the Bible?  One theory is that, because cats were worshiped as gods by the Egyptians, they were purposely left out by Jewish writers because they were seen as idols.  But that doesn't make any sense, because the Egyptians worshiped a lot of other animals and birds that are mentioned.  So this remains a mystery.

But in the Talmud -- yes!

By the time we get to the Talmud (Greco-Roman period) there is mention of house cats who are honored as teachers of virtue.  We are told that if God had not given us the Torah, then we would have learned modesty from the cat.  (Eruvin 100b)  This is probably the most-often-quoted Jewish reference to cats -- and it is very positive.  Rashi, a major 9th-century commentator, interprets the cat's "modesty" as referring to her habit of burying her feces.  But other interpretations also exist, so feel free to develop your own.  For myself, I think her "modesty" is the reserved habit cats have of sitting back and observing things first.  They certainly don't come pouncing on strangers like some dogs do!

On the other hand, cats were believed to have bad memories because they ate mice!   In Tractate Horiot we read:

"The disciples of Rabbi Elazar ben Zadok asked: Why does the dog know his master, and the cat does not? and his answer was:  It is certain that he who eats from what is left by a mouse is apt to have a poor memory, so much the more so the cat that himself consumes the mouse."

Frankly, this is not all that "certain" nowadays, when we have a much better understanding of brain function.  It's just a silly superstition.  The same tractate also says you can lose your memory by eating the leftovers of the cats' food.  (Yuck!  Was it even kosher?  Not the mice, certainly.  Maybe it means kosher food nibbled by a cat?)  And yet, I did once hear a Jewish boy tell his younger brother not to pet the cat before he went to school or he would flunk his math test.  So it lives on as a superstition among children.

At any rate, we are not required to believe this.  In the 12th century, Maimonides, a major Jewish scholar who was also a physician, stated that when it came to science and medicine, the sages of old were limited in their knowledge to what was commonly known, and did not speak with "prophetic voice."  (Guide for the Perplexed.  See also my previous article, Voting for Darwin, Evolution, and Modern Science)

As for a cat "knowing her master," they certainly do recognize their human companions.  But unlike dogs, cats don't obey commands very well -- as any cat owner can tell you.  So there is some truth in the idea that they do not know or obey a "master" -- but eating mice doesn't cause it.  A cat is simply made differently than a dog.  (Note: Some older translations rendered it as a cat "not knowing God" instead of "master" -- probably because God is "master of the universe"  (Ribbono shel Olam) but that makes no sense.  Why would a dog obey God but a cat not?  Both are God's creations.)

Black cats, witches, and Jews

This is Nightshade, a black cat who lived with us
until she passed away in 2013.  She crossed my path
every day with no ill effects LOL!

Many cultures have superstitions about cats, such as, "If a black cat crosses your path, it brings bad luck." Judaism forbids such beliefs because it violates the prohibition against looking for omens (Leviticus 19:26).  As Jewish comedian Groucho Marx once said, "If a black cat crosses your path, it means the animal is going somewhere."

During the Middle Ages, when Christians were seeing cats as the familar spirits of witches, Jews were much more practical.  I remember reading somewhere that the reason Europeans were so superstitious about cats was because cats were not native to that part of the world, so they were seen as something strange and threatening.  Well, if Jews had already encountered cats in ancient Egypt, maybe that is why we were not superstitious about them.  Cats were sometimes reviled for eating baby chicks, but they were not seen as anything but cats.  (Even today I keep my mother hens with new chicks in big cages until the chicks are older.  A cat is a cat is a cat...)

So, in contrast to medieval Christians who were killing all the cats as demons, Jews kept them around to hunt rodents and protect the holy books from mice.  To this day, Torah scrolls are made of parchment, and books back then were all bound in leather with glues made from animal hides, which made them very tempting for rodents to chew.  So it was common to have a shul katze (synagogue cat) to protect the congregation's library.

The Shulchan Arukh (Code of Jewish Law) does say that one may kill an "evil cat" if it harms children.  This is not about cats-as-demons, though.  An "evil cat" (khatul ra) would presumably be a vicious feral cat, or maybe a rabid one.  In general, Jewish Law forbids keeping any animal that is dangerous, and Talmudic references to "evil dogs" are all about dogs that bite or attack.  So there is no injunction to get rid of cats in general as "evil."  Among the medieval Jews, they flourished.

The ancient Jewish text, Perek Shirah  (The Song of the Universe), in which everything in Creation is singing a song to God, includes both lions and house cats. The cat is portrayed as singing, "I pursued my foes and overtook them, and did not return until they were destroyed" (Psalm 18:38.)  Which is a pretty good description of a stalking cat.   Perek Shirah fell out of use in modern times, but has recently been re-discovered by Jewish environmentalists and ecology groups.  It is also popular among Breslover Hasidim, because it was a favorite of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov.

Keeping cats helped control the rats that carried the Black Plague, so the Jewish communities of Europe were not as badly devastated as the Christian communities.  (In addition, Jews do not eat rats, but in medieval times the gentiles often did.)  Unfortunately, since nobody back then knew how the Plague was spread, this difference just reinforced the idea that Jews were witches with demon cats who had brought the Plague as a curse on the Christians -- resulting in a lot of innocent Jews and cats being cruelly put to death.

Jews and cats in modern times

A lot of Jews nowadays have cats.  Generally speaking, Jewish attitudes toward cats are more positive than toward dogs.    Among Orthodox Jews, cats are more common than dogs because there is a cultural phobia about dogs, based on bad experiences in past history, when dogs were used to track down and attack Jews.  I have been told by elderly Jews from Eastern Europe that the first thing they heard before a pogrom (attack on the Jewish community) was the dogs howling in the distance before the peasants with pitchforks showed up to sack the town.  So dogs barking is a scary sound to a lot of Jews.  Nazis also used dogs to track and attack Jews.  So although non-Orthodox Jews often have dogs, they are not very common among more traditional communities. (However, I do have three of them along with my eight cats.)

Unfortunately, Israel is overrun with feral cats.  Legend has it that the British introduced cats into Palestine to control rats.  I do wonder about this story -- why would the British have had to introduce them, since cats are mentioned in the Talmud, indicating they were around already in ancient times?  Were they later killed off as demons by the Christian Crusaders?  Who knows?   At any rate, they did their job of rat control but the cat population has now exploded.  There is a Jewish  organization, Concern for Helping Animals in Israel (C.H.A.I.) that offers spay-neuter services and education.  It was founded by an American Jew, Nina Natelson, who was appalled by all the hungry stray cats she saw in Jerusalem and wanted to do something about it.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe and animal toys

Yes, the giraffe is kosher, but Jews don't
eats giraffe meat, because it is not known
where on the neck to make the cut
to slaughter it. Which is just as well.

The Seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem M. Schneerson (d. 1994), leader of Chabad Hasidism, was opposed to Jewish children playing with toys or pictures in the shape of non-kosher species of animals.  (A cat is not kosher.)  He wrote: "Because what one sees leaves lasting impressions, especially on young children, the toys that a child plays with, and the pictures that he looks at, should not be of impure animals."

"Impure" (tameh) meaning animals that could not be eaten in a kosher home and/or offered as sacrifices in the Jerusalem Temple.  He believed that playing with such toys would somehow damage the child's innocent soul, or lead him/her to idolatry.  (By worshiping animals?)

The objection was triggered originally by a cartoon mouse named Mendel (in a popular Jewish children's magazine called Olomeinu, "Our World") that the Rebbe found offensive because it personified a mouse  -- an animal he saw as "unclean" -- as a Jew (read more...)   In general, he objected to cartoons and books that personified animals in human roles.

Mendel the Mouse

The Rebbe expanded his ruling to include all non-kosher species (unless directly connected to illustrating Torah texts) and it became a general prohibition among his followers that continues to this day.  Unfortunately, this includes cartoon cats like Garfield and Daniel Tiger, as well as stuffed animals like teddy bears and other animal-shaped toys,  Some people take this idea about "seeing" non-kosher animals to extremes and won't even visit the zoo. 

This is an unfortunately narrow view of nature, but it is not mainstream Judaism!  It is not even typical Orthodox Judaism.  Breslover Hasidim, who are more in tune with God's creation than Lubavitchers, have no such prohibition.  Neither do other branches of Judaism. (See In defense of unkosher animal toys, San Diego Jewish Press, January 8, 2012.)  Personally, I think it has produced a whole generation of Chabad Jews with a serious case of "nature deficit disorder" (read my blog post on that.)  If you can't learn about the different kinds of animals in our world, how can you appreciate God's creation?

Cats in Jewish children's books

Cats do appear in Jewish children's literature, such as the award-winning book, Mrs. Katz and Tush by Patricia Polacco, featured on "Reading Rainbow."  It's about an elderly Jewish woman who is given a kitten by an African American boy named Larnel who lives in her building.  The cat has no tail, so she names her Tush ("bottom").  Caring for the cat together, the woman and boy become good friends, and find common themes in their two cultures.  When Tush gets out of the house one day, the whole neighborhood helps look for her.  She is found and returned -- and eventually has kittens, making Mrs. Katz a happy "Bubbe" (grandmother in Yiddish.).

My all-time favorite Jewish cat book is Appleblossom by Shulamith Levey Oppenheim.  In this delightful tale, an eight-year-old boy named Naftali and  his mother want a cat but his father does not -- and Papa's decision rules.  Well, not really.  The boy meets a stray female cat and names her Appleblossom.  The cat talks to the boy (and who is to say not?  After all, King Solomon is said to have understood the language of animals), and she wants very much to be his cat.  So together they plan, and Appleblossom comes up with a clever way to wins the heart of Papa on the eve of Passover.  A great classic that should be in every cat lover's library.

*  *  *

ADDENDA:

How did I miss this one?  A well-known Mishnah exhorts us to "be bold as a leopard, light as an eagle, swift as a deer, and strong as a lion to do the will of your Father in Heaven." (Pirkei Avot 5:23).  That is certainly a positive use of big cat metaphors for how to serve God! 

*  *  *

Regarding the name Aryeh (Lion) the diminutive is Ari.  There was a great Torah scholar and mystic known as the "Holy Ari"  (Holy Lion) -- Rabbi Isaac Luria (16th century.)  His philosophical system is the basis for Lurianic kabbalah, a major form of Jewish mysticism that strongly influenced Hasidism.

*  *  *

Regarding Mendel the Mouse (discussed above), I suppose the Lubavitcher Rebbe would also have objected to the award-winning graphic novel, Maus by Art Spiegelman, where Jews during the Holocaust are portrayed as mice and the Nazis are cats.  I have never read anywhere that the Rebbe was familiar with this book, and since it appeared only shortly before the Rebbe had a debilitating stroke in March of 1992, I rather doubt he read it.  But it does seem to fall into the parameters of the Chabad prohibition.

Still, it is another example of cats used as metaphors in a Jewish context -- this time negatively -- so it deserves a mention here.  However, this is not really a commentary on the nature of cats per se.   Spiegelman used these animal metaphors to emphasize the predator-prey relationship between  Germans and Jews during the Nazi regime.  This is a common technique in political cartooning.  Maus has proven to be an excellent educational tool about the Holocaust for young people, and is often used in schools, both Jewish and not.

*  *  *

"Der Furrer" -- a kitler
owned by Sandy Weinberg

And speaking of Nazis, Adolf Hitler absolutely hated cats.  I'm pretty sure the feeling was mutual; cats have better taste when it comes to trusting humans.  

On the other hand, there is a weird website called Cats that look like Hitler with pictures of, well, cats that supposedly look like Hitler -- called "kitlers."  Perhaps the greatest irony of all:  a hated dictator is now being parodied by the very animals he would have hated in real life.  And parody, as we all know, is a very Jewish form of humor!

So nu -- are these cats reincarnations of  Jewish comedians?  Even in his lifetime, Hitler was lampooned and ridiculed on stage.  So much so, that one of the first things he did when he came to power was to shut down all the cabarets.  What a sourpuss.  So maybe the cats are finally getting the last laugh.

I care for a cat colony on my hobby farm.  People keep dumping them in the woods, and when they show up, I spay/neuter and vaccinate them.  This gets expensive on my limited income, so of you would like to help, go to: 

http://gofundme.com/rooster613-cats

The graphic I used for years on eBay.  These kittens are,
of course, long ago adopted out to forever homes,
after which their mother, Chayah Cat, was spayed. 

Bradford G. Wheler brings together art and cats in a PURRR-fect new book

Today is the first of Elul on the Jewish calendar.  It is both the start of the period of introspection leading up to the High Holy Days, and the "New Year for Animals" (see my previous post.)   So I thought this would be a good time to review a new animal art book, CAT SAYINGS: wit & wisdom from the whiskered ones by Bradford G. Wheler.   I savored this book on Shabbat afternoon the way I feel it should always be read, relaxing on the couch with three of my furry-purry feline friends curled up with me.

The book features full-color works by 60 different artists from 9 different countries.  Some are full time professional artists, others are hobbyists, but all share a love of animals and, in a myriad different styles and media, have captured the beauty, mystery, love and whimsy of the cat.  Add to this the wonderful collection of quotes about cats, and you have a book to treasure and savor for years to come.

 A few of my favorite quotes are:

"A black cat crossing your path signifies the animal is going somewhere" -- Groucho Marx

"A kitten is the rosebud in the garden of the animal kingdom" -- Robert Southey

"I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it" -- Abraham Lincoln

That last quote was a new one to me, and especially precious, because I have been involved in animal welfare for many years, and am currently planning, with my friend and co-writer Richard H. Schwartz, to develop a curriculum resource book for the New Year for Animals. 

As I have written on this blog before, many Jews, especially among the Orthodox, are cut off from nature and animals.  As a community, we suffer from a severe case of "nature deficit disorder," often oblivious to the beauty of God's creation.  And this in spite of the many beautiful Jewish teachings about the humane treatment of animals in the Torah and writings of our Sages -- which, sadly, often go unstudied.  So I agree with Lincoln:  If religion does not teach us to treat our animals better, of what use is it?

And I was not surprised to read that Napoleon, Hitler, and Alexander of Macedonia all hated cats. You just can't order a cat around, they are independent thinkers who can't be dictated to.   As Mark Twain is quoted on page 8:  "Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash.  That one is the cat.  If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat."  I'm not sure if cats are the only independent animal species, but they certainly don't kowtow to humans.

Quite a few of the artists included in this book are also animal activists, many of whom donate part of their proceeds to animal shelters and various wildlife causes. The author has included biographies of all the artists in the back of the book, along with contact info and web addresses where you can view more of their work and, of course, buy it.

I also got a chuckle out of this quote from Ernest Hemmingway:  "One cat just leads to another,"  because we currently have 12 cats and no, I'm not hoarding them.  Several of them are rescues who wandered into our farm when so many homes were foreclosed around here a while back.  I suspect their owners abandoned them and, as my wife would say, I'm a cat magnet.  Some people are horse whisperers,  I'm a cat whisperer.  So we end up with a lot of stray cats who wheedle their way into my heart.  I'll close with this quote from Garrison Keillor, also cited in CAT SAYINGS:  "Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function."  Some things just are.

CAT SAYINGS is available from amazon.com (this link benefits this blog) or directly from the publisher at BookCollaborative.com

"Who Stole My Religion?" -- rescuing Judaism from Right-wing politics

I haven't been blogging much the last few weeks, because my energy has been going into the final stages of publishing a book with Richard H. Schwartz, author of Judaism and Vegetarianism, as well as other works. Schwartz's new book is called "Who Stole My Religion?  Revitalizing Judaism and applying Jewish values to help heal our imperiled planet.  I'm in the process of doing the formatting and layout for self-publishing on Lulu.com.   His regular publisher (Lantern Books) did not think they could get it out in time for the 2012 election, so we went the self-publishing route.  The back cover reads:

Richard Schwartz, author of
"Who Stole My Religion?"

"In the five decades since Richard Schwartz first became a religious Jew, he has watched the mainstream Jewish community shift more and more to the Right, often abandoning the very values that originally attracted him to Orthodox Judaism. In this soul-searching book, Schwartz examines the ways in which he believes his religion has been “stolen” by partisan politics, and offers practical suggestions for how to get Judaism back on track as a faith based on peace and compassion. Tackling such diverse issues as U.S. politics, Israeli peace issues, the misuse of the Holocaust, antisemitism, U.S. foreign policy, Islamophobia, socialism, vegetarianism, and the environmentalism, Schwartz goes where many Jews fear to go — and challenges us to re-think current issues in the light of positive Jewish values."

And yes, if you looked closely at the cover (which I designed, by the way) you will see my name there under his -- in much smaller print, because although I did help with a lot of research, editing and in some sections ghostwriting for this book, Richard Schwartz is indeed the primary author. We started out doing it co-authored in dialogue form (sort of the Jewish version of the "City Mouse and the Country Mouse" -- he has spent all his life in the New York City area) but that didn't work out.  So I decided to pull back and let it be his book, for the good of the project.  Still, he generously wanted to give me credit on the cover.   A couple of our original dialogues did make it into the Appendix area, along with a section on kapporot that we had previously co-authored.  And we did include both of our bios.

As for the cover, here's my explanation of the design:

The background photo (#ISS028-E-020072 from the NASA files) was taken aboard the International Space Station on July 31, 2011, when the sun was just below the horizon. When observed from space, the palette of gaseous layers of our atmosphere reminds us of the fragility and tenuousness of the thin cocoon that shelters life on Earth from the cold harsh vacuum of outer space. Without this precious envelope of air, life on Earth could not exist.

A thin crescent of the new moon appears to hang above the Earth, although in reality it is more than 238,855 miles away. On the Jewish calendar, the important holiday of Rosh Hashanah, which begins the High Holy Days season of repentance, always begins on a New Moon. Perhaps the message of this photo is to encourage us to think about how we are treating our planet’s fragile atmosphere, and to change our polluting ways before it is too late.

 Where to order:   

Who Stole My Religion?  is available in both print and ebook versions on Lulu.com.  If you order the print version by February 17, use the coupon code FLIGHTLESS at checkout to get free ground shipping in the USA (and maybe elsewhere, too -- not sure about that, but give it a try):

Due to the urgency of his message, Professor Schwartz has also made the PDF ebook version is available as a FREE DOWNLOAD (click here).  However, if you can afford it, you are encouraged to buy a download for $5 on Lulu.com to help support his efforts to help heal our planet.  Either way, in addition to getting your book super-fast, the download has the advantage of seeing the photos in color:

Will there be ebook versions for Kindle, iPad and Nook?

Not unless those programs are vastly improved for handling academic works.  Epub, the program used on iPad and Nook, completely reflows the text -- which means it does not respect page numbers, indented paragraphs for long quotes, footnotes, and other academic formats.  Every time the reader changes the font size, the pages are all renumbered.   Kindle does the same thing, plus the feedback on it's handling of footnotes is horrendous!  The fact is, these new e-reader formats are mostly suitable for novels and non-fiction works with plain prose text, but just can't handle the more complex layout of  an academic work.  Until such time as the program developers solve these problems, the format best suited to Who Stole My Religion? is PDF, which preserves the original layout and can be read on your desktop or laptop computer.

You can't fast forward a sunset ~ and other TIME-ly thoughts

A while back I was teaching a circle dance to some children and told them to go clockwise.  They looked at me blankly and had no idea what I was talking about.  Their generation is used to digital clocks -- which do not go in circles at all -- and that got me to thinking about how we experience time.   "Clockwise" comes from the way that the shadow moves on a sundial.   Later, this was carried over onto the faces of mechanical clocks.  In both cases, time is seen as a continuous, cyclical flow.  

An hourglass, on the other hand, is not cyclical. It has a beginning and an end. But it still shows a flow of time, as the grains of sand slowly run down. A digital clock, however, shows time as broken up into a bunch of individual numbered moments that are often disconnected from each other.  All of this may seem like a bunch of nitpicking, but I wonder how it affects the way we see the natural world.   Nature goes in cycles. Days, months, years-- all are based on the somewhat circular patterns of rotations and orbits. Even the elliptical orbits of comets go in cycles.  And they all move at their own pace. But are we losing that sense of the "flow" of time?

So last week I was watching a program on PBS about how families are spending less and less time outdoors, and how this, combined with the high speed of modern technology, is indeed distorting our inner sense of time.  "You can't fast forward a sunset," one of the panelists said, and that statement has stuck with me. In a world where you can speed up, slow down, or freeze-frame a movie, or watch it over and over anytime you want to, the slow steady pace of nature  often seems boring. So kids prefer to stay indoors and play speedy video games instead.

Yet it is precisely that slowness that allows us to relax and tune in to God's creation.    Being with nature is a form of meditation. Our bodies evolved in nature, the Garden of Eden was in nature -- however you define it, we need the natural pace of with nature.  But nowadays, even meditation is speeded up -- or at least people try to shortcut it. They go to a weekend seminar to get "enlightened" and are disappointed it it doesn't "work" right away.   But true enlightenment is a lifelong process that takes hours and hours of quiet contemplation.  You can't get there by plunking down your money for a workshop and no, there isn't an app for it, either.

The only way you can freeze-frame a sunset - or any event in nature - is to take a picture of it. Even then, you only have a small part of the real experience.  In photographing sunrises (which I seem to do more than sunsets lately), I have found that there is always a perfect moment where everything in the picture is just right.  The minutes before and after that are beautiful, too, but that peak moment is the best picture in the series.  However, in order to capture that moment, I have to patiently sit there for about 45 minutes or more, because the sunrise is going to unfold at its own pace, and there's not a darned thing I can do about it. It's happening on God's time, not mine.

Watching a sunrise is a "letting go" experience that requires us to fit into nature's pace, not the other way around. Only when you are willing to just sit there quietly and absorb the experience are you able to notice the subtle changes from second to second and minute to minute. There's that magical moment about an hour before dawn,  when the first bird begins to sing, when the rooster begins to crow and the wild geese begin to honk. In Jewish law, the earliest time you can say the Shema prayer is when you can distinguish a blue thread from a white one.  Try it at dawn sometime.

  

Sunrise on the Gershom farm
Pine County, Minnesota, Sept. 21, 2006

  

To collect or not to collect -- is that really the question?

A while back, I had a conversation with a vegan who thought it was wrong for children to catch fireflies in jars.  Her reasoning was, that the flashes were mating signals and we would be interrupting their love lives.  "How would you like to just fall in love and then somebody grabs you and puts you in a cage?"  Interesting anthropomorphism, and a perfect example of how our society confuses sex with love.  But I highly doubt that fireflies actually fall in love.   A Black Widow spider certainly doesn't -- she EATS her mate.  So does a praying mantis sometimes. Nature in the raw is often far from romantic.

Still, the question remains:  Is it ethical to allow children to collect living things from nature?  My vegan friends say no, we don't need zoos or bugs in jars, the kids can learn from watching nature videos.  But TV just isn't "real" in the same way as seeing the actual live animal.  Things happen fast on nature shows because they edit out the long hours of waiting for the "action."  But actually stalking a frog takes focus and patience!

Thinking back to my own childhood, we regularly caught fireflies, watched them flash in the jar in our rooms after lights out, then released them in the morning.  I can't say what effect this had on the fireflies, but I do know that my sister and I learned a lot from watching the various bugs, toads, snakes, and other things we caught and kept in captivity for a while.   From our "catch and release" activities, we discovered a lot about nature firsthand.

We learned that you can't just throw any old leaves in with the caterpillars, you need the right species of plant and a way to keep the leaves fresh (which we accomplished by covering the mouth of a small jar of water with foil, then poking holes for the plant stems.  The food stayed fresh without caterpillars falling into the water and drowning.)   We learned what toads, snakes and turtles eat, and how they eat it, where to find it.   And we also learned how to look up and identify the things we found.  By 5th grade, I was reading college-level biology books.   And I must admit that I also collected insects in the usual way, mounting them on pins in boxes and attracting the attention of the high school biology teacher, who invited me to go on a museum entomology field trip.   Although I no longer collect, I still love entomology.

So I find myself wondering if kids today, who are often  forbidden by well-meaning parents to do this kind of hands-on learning, are  really discovering very much about the outdoors.  Have we gotten so politically correct about nature that we are defeating the purpose by creating a barrier between children and nature?  Lately there has been a public service ad running about "discover the forest," where two kids wander into the woods, turn over a log and look at some bugs, and then Shrek come along and eats one (a bug, that is, not a child!)  A cute fantasy, but in real life, how many parents would let their kids turn over a log in the first place?  (If you do, please teach them to put it back as it was when they are done, so you don't destroy the homes of things that live there.)

When I was a kid, there would have been no need for such an advertisement.   You could hardly keep me out of the small suburban woodlot we called our "forest."  Contrast that with my 8-year-old grandson, who has been spending daycare time with us in the country this summer, and who, although he has 15 acres here to play and explore in, rarely goes outside on his own.   Too boring.  When he first came, he could not tell a daisy from a sunflower, but has gradually learned some basics about the outdoors.   Today, we both looked up an unfamiliar purple flower and learned it was a species of vervain.  When we are outside, we watch things happening in nature, such as bees pollenating squash flowers or wasps hunting caterpillars among the broccoli -- things he would never stop and watch on his own.   One day, I took him into the back woods and then told him to lead me home.  He did -- by following the sound of our roosters crowing and our geese honking.  "See?" I said, "You won't get lost if you pay attention to what is around you."

So is it ethical to catch and collect things?  I think it depends on how you do it.  Certainly it is wrong to pull wings off flies or leave animals starving or dying of boredom in cages.  But I see nothing wrong with letting kids keep a toad for a few days, then release it back into it own environment.  When I find a snake or turtle, I bring it in the house for the kids to see.  Who knows?  Maybe the snake benefits spirtually from having helped a child learn more about the world.   In the long run, maybe a little reptilian inconvenience now might well save that snake's home in the future.

Unplugging for God and nature

The past two days were the Jewish festival of Shavuot, which is both the Feast of First Fruits and the commemoration of the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai.  (For our first fruits, we ate our first leaf lettuce of the year from our garden.  In addition to liturgy, we like to tie our holidays in with what is happening in nature.)  On the major holy days, as on the Sabbath, religious Jews do not use the phone, computer, TV,  CD player, radio, or other electronic communications devices.  No texting, blogging, surfing, chatting, gaming, etc.  No, we don't turn off the electricity -- the lights and fans were still on -- but we do unplug from the endless chatter of the outside world.

My non-Jewish friends cannot conceive of doing this.  "What if there is an emergency?  How will people contact you?" Well, if it is really an emergency, then I will hear the sirens, see the tornado, or the police will come to my door.  Anything less than that can wait.   And you know what?  We survive being unplugged just fine.  In fact, we more than survive -- we actually enjoy it.  Turning off all the human chatter gives us the quiet space to enjoy the natural sounds in the woods around us.   Birds, frogs, toads, insects, the rustle of the wind in the leaves -- how can you hear these things if you are always plugged into your ipod? 
In 1987, as part of a series of lessons on kabbalah (49 Gates of Light), I wrote the following about Moses and the Burning Bush: 

What is genius? Perhaps it is the ability to see familiar things in a new and different way. For example, how long did it take Moses to realize that the burning bush was not being consumed? After all, this was something he had never encountered before. Most of us would probably have glanced at it and said, “Oh look, there's a bush on fire.” Then, shrugging our shoulders, we would have continued on our way. But Moses took a little more time. Turning aside to investigate, he became personally involved. Only then, the Midrash tells us, did God call out, “Moses, Moses.”

The question is, how many other potential prophets have missed their opportunity to receive, simply because they were distracted and did not recognize the vision? In this fast-paced world of ours, it’s so easy to say, “I don't have the time.” Yet in order to receive inspiration, we must be willing to make time for the Creator to speak to us.

Rabbi Nachman of Breslov was fond of saying that a person who does not have an hour of solitude with God each day was not truly human. By this he meant that we were created to be channels of God's blessing. If we do not make time in our lives for this, we are not fulfilling our purpose. To be truly human is to bridge heaven and earth, to join together the spiritual and material worlds. To do this, we must listen to the "still, small voice" speaking to us from the Silence.  (From  49 Gates of Light: A course in Kabbalah, 2010 revised edition.  Also available as a download on Lulu.com on my Lulu Storefront page.)  )

This is even more true today.  I recently read about a survey where college students were asked about their use of electronic devices, and a large percentage said they cannot go for more than ten minutes without checking their email or Twitter or whatever.  And here I am, turning off the whole Internet for 26 hours every Sabbath, and two days for the Festival of Shavuot.   Not only that, but I do not carry a phone everywhere I go, because I don't want to talk to you or anyone else when I am out communing with God and nature.

In his now-classic book, The Sabbath, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described it as "a palace in time."  He was the first Jewish theologian to spell out for the Western world how traditional Jews live more in time than space.   While gentiles tend to travel to sacred places to feel holy, Jews have sacred times that we carry with us.  The Sabbath is a portable sanctuary, a retreat that you can have anywhere.   This is not to disparage the importance of sacred space, but if you clutter that space up with emails and text messages, then where is the holiness?  When we prepare for the Sabbath, we speak of creating the "Sabbath space."  By this we mean more than just setting the table.  We are creating an atmosphere where we can interact with God, nature, and each other in a personal, "be here now" kind of way. 

The Sabbath is based on the Seventh Day of Creation, when God rested.  It is not that God got tired.  Rather, God ceased creating, thereby making it possible for us to do the same.  On the Sabbath, we are not doing our busy-ness.  We are free to just be.   Try it sometime:  Turn off your phone, don't log on, don't play video games or watch TV, etc. for a whole day.    Instead, watch and listen to the real world around you.  Who knows?  You might even discover your own equivalent of a burning bush.

The rural roots of Hasidism -- and my love of nature

A while back I heard a Chabad rabbi remark at how annoyed he was that people were portraying the Baal Shem Tov ("Master of the Good Name," founder of Hasidic Judaism) as "that guy living out in the woods."  Somehow, the rabbi felt this was an insult to the Baal Shem Tov's memory, making him into some sort of backwoods simpleton instead of a great Torah scholar.  I beg to differ.  I think the fact that that he spend a period of time wandering and meditating in the Carpathian Mountains contributed to the deep spirituality that he later taught his disciples.  In fact, I would even go so far as to say that rural life was an essential part of the origins of early Hasidism. 

Like many American Jews, I grew up hearing about how Jews in medieval Europe were locked into urban ghettos where the sun never shined and nature was totally absent -- so much so, that lovers met in the cemetery because it was the only green place in the ghetto.  That was true in some locations, but not in Eastern Europe where Hasidism began in the mid-18th century.  True, there were restrictions on Jews in The Tzar's domain (the expression "Beyond the Pale" comes from this period, referring to the Pale of Jewish settlement in Russia where Jews were required to live) and they were limited in what occupations they could pursue, etc., but for the most part, Jewish life was happening in small towns (stetls), not big urban centers.  Jews might not have owned land (in many places they were forbidden to), but they certainly saw trees, mountains and rivers on a daily basis.  Nature was up close and everywhere.

This point was driven home to me when, in 1997, I traveled to Uman, Ukraine, to the grave of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov.  I was struck by how, even today, this is a very rural area.  Many people were still drawing water from wells with buckets, plowing with horses, and tethering goats in their front yard.  Goods were bought and sold in open air markets.  Everywhere there were sights and sounds that made the details of Hasidic stories come alive.  I walked along the Bug River, mentioned frequently in Hasidic lore, climbed the rocks along its banks, visited the Sophia Park and saw what was probably the bridge that inspired that most famous saying of Rebbe Nachman:  "All the world is just a narrow bridge, but the main thing is not to fear."  (Read the full story of my Uman pilgrimage)

On that pilgrimage, I became very much aware how connected to nature those early Hasidim must have been -- and how much their urban descendants of today have lost.   As I have written here before, the Hasidic world -- and much of the Hasidic community in general -- is suffering from a serious case of Nature Deficit Disorder.  Back when I lived in the city, people thought me very odd for wanting to spend time alone in the park, or take the shortcut through the golf course to get away from the sounds of traffic on the Sabbath.  Everyone rushed from one place to another in such a hurry, there was no time to smell the flowers -- if indeed anyone even noticed the flowers were there.   I don't ever remember anyone pointing out a bird or butterfly, and when I did so, there was little or no interest in it.

To the urban Hasidim, the outdoors was merely an inconvenient gap between one building and another.  There was a disturbing expectation that, as I  became more "acclimated" to Hasidic life, I would eventually give up the goyim naches (gentile pleasures) of nature study and settle into the urban Jewish world.  Nobody seemed to understand that it was the Baal Shem Tov's connection to nature -- so very obvious to me! -- that had drawn me to Hasidism in the first place.  More and more, I felt an extreme disconnect between the beautiful teachings I was reading and the modern reality I was seeing.  In 1988, my wife and I left the city, never to return -- but we have remained observant Jews.

So here I am, many years later, a Hasid living without a local community in the Great North Woods of Minnesota.  Critics accuse me of assimilating into rural American culture -- how little they know!  It is they who have really assimilated -- into an urban life that would have been as alien to the Baal Shem Tov as if he had landed on Mars.   Every morning I wake up to the sound of a live rooster crowing -- and I make the special blessing that one says upon hearing a rooster at dawn.  When was the last time my urban friends did that?  On clear Saturday nights we end the Sabbath by literally going out and looking for three stars.  I will make shehechiyanu, the blessing that thanks God for reaching another season, when the first Canadian geese come honking back in the spring.  There are so many other things in our daily life that resonate with early Hasidism, that I feel closer to the Hasidic masters here than I ever did in the city.   Which is one reason I started this blog -- not to kvetch (complain) but to share some of the wonderful nature experiences that have deepened my love and understanding of Torah.

Nature Deficit Disorder and Jews

I just finished reading a book called Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv. “Nature deficit disorder” is not a medical diagnosis; it’s a term he made up to describe what he sees as a very serious deficit in childhood experience nowadays. The book examines some serious psychological research and concludes that direct exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood development and for the physical and emotional health of children and adults.

Louv makes the point that, as parents have become more and more worried about child abductions, accidents on playgrounds, lawsuits, etc., the lives of children have become overly controlled and, more and more, their playtime is all happening indoors. With many housing developments and condos having covenants forbidding tree houses, playhouses, even gardens in some areas, kids who do have a backyard have only dull, boring places to play. Everything is being so tightly organized by adults, there is little or no free time for children to develop their creativity. Add to this the fact that kids are spending hours and hours in front of TVs and computers, developing obesity problems and having heart attacks in high school (unheard of when I was growing up), and there is a serious problem affecting modern society.

And we Jews are not immune.  In fact, I think we have a worse case than the general population.  I am often appalled at the lack of basic knowledge about nature in the Jewish community.  In Chaim Potok's children's  book, The Tree of Here, he describes a robin living in a hole on the tree -- but robins do not live in holes!   Even Artscroll's beautiful coffeetable version of Perek Shirah: The Song of the Universe  misidentifed a photo of a Grackle as a Starling, and one of the rooster pix is really a hen.  Nor are these the only nature-oriented bloopers I've found in recent Jewish books.   Although the Psalms and siddur (Jewish prayerbook) contain many verses about God's beautiful creation and how everything in nature is praising God, these have become mere words to be recited at breakneck speed with little thought as to their meaning in the real world.

So, although many of our patriarchs and matriarchs were shepherds and farmers who spent a lot of time outdoors, and we have their beautiful references to nature in our classical texts, these teachings don’t stand out to most Jews nowadays.  Why?  Because there is no real contact with the outdoors to ground the texts in everyday life.

For example, there is so much pollution in the atmosphere in urban areas that even if someone were to try to gauge the time for saying the evening Shema by seeking three stars, they would err -- if they could see any stars at all.  So they rely on their wristwatches and astronomical calculations, which are not bad things in themselves, but if you have never looked up at a starry sky or listened to a chorus of birds singing at dawn, how can you make any real connection with the texts that describe such things?  How can you picture God as a mother eagle sheltering Her nest if you’ve never seen a bird nesting, and know eggs only as something in Styrofoam boxes that you buy at the supermarket? 

In many of our yeshivas, even the teachers often lack these firsthand experiences with nature. So they focus on stuff that is familiar to them, namely, the rules of kashrut and using animals as food.  This, in turn, causes Jewish kids to see nature as something totally utilitarian.  My good friend Richard Schwartz (author of Judaism and Vegetarianism) tells how, when he was at an outdoor Sukkot gathering, the kids saw some ducks and said "Let's schecht (slaughter) them."   This is a far cry from when I was a kid and we used to go feed the ducks in the park.   When was the last time you and your kids did that?

I was very lucky, in that I grew up in an area where I could go play in the woods --and my parents let me do it.  This was not wasted time -- it was learning in a very different way.  It enriched my understanding of Torah in ways that my nature-deprived urban brethren often cannot grasp.   And it ultimately led to me becoming a Breslov Hasid, because of Rebbe Nachman's teaching about hisboddisus -- the practice of spending an hour alone with God each day.  He recommended doing it in a forest or field  because, he said, the plants and animals would join in our prayers.  And he meant that literally. 

Breslovers still try to do that today, although in a city it is hard to find the solitude. But at least they have the teachings about spending time in nature, which many other groups do not. In fact, mainstream Jews have sometimes considered the Breslovers crazy to go wandering in the woods. Rabbi Odesser, (may he rest in peace), a Breslov teacher who died in 1994, once told how, when he started following that path in his youth, the local rabbi warned his parents that roaming in the woods could cause their son to literally lose his mind. Now, I don’t think being with nature makes you go insane. Quite the opposite is true: It restores your sanity and opens you up to connect with God in a very real and personal way.