Thursday, April 8, 2021 | netzach she’b’gevurah Dear All, It’s Earth Day two weeks from today. This prompts me to think about Earth Day as the secular equivalent of one of the festivals of Jewish life. Doing so helps us to better understand both Earth Day and the Jewish calendar. In a theological sense I’m not a believer. If emunah is translated as faithfulness, then I strive to be a faithful Jew; but if it signifies actual faith, then I am a doubter, to put it mildly. (If I had to describe my theological orientation it would be in a phrase that Rabbi Art Green used many years ago – a spiritual humanist. This was a riff on the notion of a secular humanist – which I’m not, despite my absence of emunah. Art himself, a few years after he introduced this phrase, published Radical Judaism. In a marvelous moment, I was chairing a session, I think at Limmud, where he was speaking. In the Q&A I said to him, “Art, you wrote this great essay on spiritual humanism a few years ago, which had a big impact on me. But now you don’t sound like a spiritual humanist, you […]
