L'ovdah U-l'shomrah

 When I listen to the Torah read weekly in shul, most things sounds familiar. I’ve read most of the year’s 400+ aliyot myself from the scroll over the years. And the study of Scripture—and specifically the Torah—has been in a real sense my life’s work. So you wouldn’t think the text would have any surprises left for me to encounter. And that actually is correct, or at least it’s correct in the sense that there are no rooms in the mansion I haven’t personally wandered through many times in the course of these many years I’ve been at it. And yet it’s also not correct—because I regularly find myself focusing on words or expressions, sometimes whole verses, that I’ve passed by but never truly internalized in terms of their implications, not for the world in general or for the scriptural narrative, but for me personally.

I had just that kind of experience last week listening to Bereshit, the first section in our year-long lectionary cycle of Torah readings.

It’s a long parashah. It covers—or, more accurately, races through—the creation of the universe, the life stories of Adam and Eve (including their expulsion from Eden), the story of Cain and Abel, the generations from Adam to Noah, and that weird bit at the end about the “sons” of God marrying (or something) the “daughters” of Adam (and presumably Eve), which I’ve never known precisely what to do with. (Fortunately, it’s one of those stories a rabbi never has to preach about because there’s so much else to choose from in the parashah.)

Maybe it was because of something I read in the paper just the week before (see below), but somehow the verse about Adam’s initial experience in Eden spoke to me in a way it hadn’t on previous visits. The storyline, we all know. God makes Adam from the dust of the earth, then infuses him with “the breath of life,” thus making him—and Scripture says this explicitly—into a living creature. God then takes him, the first man and at least so far the sole human being, and sets him in the Garden of Eden l’ovdah u-l’shomrah. It’s those last two words that spoke unexpectedly sharply to me. What they mean isn’t that hard to say: the narrative is explaining that Adam, once set into the Garden, was given two specific tasks: to work the garden (presumably to grow things there in the manner of farmers working the land) and to guard it.

What Scripture omits to say is whom (or what) Adam is being charged with protecting the Garden from. There are no other people in the world, not even Eve. There aren’t any animals in the world either—in this version of the creation story, the animals too have yet to be created. So since Adam can’t control the weather (just as we also cannot) and has no people or beasts to worry about in terms of the damage they might do, from whom precisely is he being commanded to guard the garden?

The answer, staring right at me after all these years, was and is chilling: he’s being told to guard it from himself, from his inattention and innate greed, from his also innate stupidity and cupidity, from his own propensity—innate in his descendants as well—to ruin what God has offered him instead of protecting it, guarding it, and guaranteeing that it survives humankind’s first generation and is there for the second.

Earlier in the week, I read an article in the paper that was truly chilling. Two, actually, one in the New York Times and one in the Atlantic.

The one in the Times was a report that the Fish and Wildlife Service, an agency within the Department of the Interior, has formally recognized twenty-two animal species and one plant species as being extinct. The list is varied too, including eleven birds, eight varieties of freshwater mussels (who knew?), two kinds of fish, a species of bat, and one plant. All have existed not merely for millennia, but for eons, almost certainly having been present on the planet before there were anything like human beings. It’s true that the news about animal preservation isn’t all bad—since the Endangered Species Act was passed by Congress in 1973, fifty-four species on the “almost gone” list have been removed from that depressing roster because their populations have recovered to the extent that they are no long in danger of disappearing. Another forty-eight have been moved from the “endangered” list to the merely “threatened with extinction” list. So all of that is good. But not at all good is that almost two dozen species of life are now gone from the stage, presumably forever. Indeed, the only way to get off the “extinct” list would be for some enterprising birder or zoologist to prove that the species in question wasn’t really extinct in the first place. But, barring someone proving the authorities wrong, once you’re gone, you’re gone. And there is no possibility of coming back. Jurassic Park does not actually exist.

I’m not a birder. I’m not even such an avid student of the natural world. (My studies more often than not take me into the wholly unnatural world of abstruse halakhic discourse.) But something about this news both shocked and moved me. Click here, for example, to see a brief film clip made in Louisiana in 1935 showing ivory-billed woodpeckers doing their thing in a local tree. If you open that article in the Times (click here), you can also access a sound file that will allow you to hear what they sounded like, those woodpeckers. So you can see them and you can hear them…but only by clicking on internet links and not by actually encountering them in the wild. Why do I care? Even I’m not so sure. My world isn’t materially affected by the disappearance of the ivory-billed woodpecker or the Maui nukupu’u bird (pictured below), of neither of which I had ever heard until I read that article in the paper last week. Nor had I ever heard of the Little Mariana fruit bat. But that doesn’t seem to matter that much in the wake of their disappearance because the larger picture—featuring even any of the remarkably diverse fauna that co-inhabit this great planet with we human beings disappearing because we have either allowed their natural habitats to vanish or because we have overfished or poached their species into extinction, or because we have altered the climate to make their future existence untenable—that picture of us failing to live up to God’s simple command to Adam to guard and watch over the flora and fauna of the world, that is chilling and upsetting.

No one knows for sure how many species of animal life there are. 1.3 million have been catalogued by scientists, but it is believed that there could be as many as 8 million animal and plant species on the planet. (That figure includes insects.) Since the beginning of the sixteenth century, almost 700 species have been declared extinct. Even if some of those species are merely hiding and may come out again one day to play, it is certain that the vast majority of them are gone forever. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we’ve failed utterly to live up to l’ovdah u-l’shomrah, but we are certainly skating ever closer to that depressing edge each time a species vanishes from the world. As the song goes, we really do need to find a way back to the garden.

The other article was a piece by Marina Koren in the Atlantic the other week (click here) about the moon, in which she explained—in a strangely moving way—that the moon is slowly but inexorably moving away from the earth. It’s a strange idea. It’s not happening quickly at all. But the thought that the most familiar of all nighttime sights—the moon resplendent among the stars in the starry vault of heaven overhead—is also not permanent (or at least not permanent-permanent) both surprised and slightly unnerved met. It turns out—also who knew?—that 4.5 billion years ago, when the moon first came into existence out of all sorts of rocky debris that had been encircling the earth since it first came into existence, the moon was ten times closer to the earth as it orbited endlessly in the nighttime sky. Also unknown to me was that the moon glowed red back then in the sky at night, having been born of some sort of collision between earth and an unidentified object the size of Mars. Back then, the author notes almost casually, “the moon was moving away from the earth at a rate of eight inches per year.”

Things have slowed down considerably. Also in play is the length of the day: billions of years ago, the moon was closer and the earth spun faster—as a result of which the terrestrial day lasted about four hours. Now it will take a full century for the length of our day to increase by a second or two. In about 600 million years, the moon will be so far from the earth that there will be no more solar eclipses because the moon will be too distant to block the sun. So you see this isn’t something to worry about too intensely. But it still struck me as a profound counter-lesson to the one about the extinct plant and beasts: there are, in the end, things we can’t change about our world and which we must therefore accept, but there are also things we can definitely alter, and for the better, and which we must address. The moon will be up there for the indefinite future. Yes, it’s fleeing our embrace…but only very slowly. About that we can do nothing at all. But the degree to which we allow the environment to deteriorate by ignoring the impact our activities are having on our planet’s climate is the degree to which we have set ourselves on the road to perdition. No wonder the moon is fleeing! It apparently has that capacity. But we ourselves have no real choice but to clean up our mess—or at least to try to—and to do what we can, even at this late date, to foul our nest no longer.