Ellen Bernstein, a river guide turned rabbi who blazed a spiritual trail in the environmental movement by subjecting it to the nature worship of the Hebrew Bible, died Feb. 27 in Philadelphia. It was 70.
Her husband, Steven J. Tenenbaum, said the cause of her death, at a hospital, was colon cancer.
In 1988, when he was 34 years old, Rabbi Bernstein founded Shomrei Adamah — the name is Hebrew for Keepers of the Earth — which he described as the first national Jewish environmental organization.
“The story of Creation, Jewish law, the cycle of festivals, prayers, mitzvot (good deeds), and neighborly relationships reflect respect for the land and a sustainable stewardship practice,” Rabbi Bernstein wrote in “Ecology & the Jewish Spirit: Where Nature & the Sacred Meet’ (2000).
He developed curricula for students and teachers, organized conferences, and wrote scholarly articles and books to spread a gospel that resonated in progressive churches and college campuses. Her work gave a new dimension to the words “holy land” and the synergy between heaven and earth.
“The first step toward ecological repair,” wrote Rabbi Bernstein in Toward a Holy Ecology: Reading the Song of Songs in the Age of Climate Crisis (2024), “is to love and identify with the natural world.”
With the help of her friend Shira Dicker, she wrote “The Promise of the Land” (2020), an ecological version of the Haggadah, the text recited at Passover, to remind Seder participants that Passover – like the other harvest festivals of Shavuot and Sukkot – had ties to nature.
In her writing, including another book, The Splendor of Creation: A Biblical Ecology (2005), Rabbi Bernstein cited God’s creation of the Garden of Eden and his vision of the promised land as evidence of biblical environmentalism.
“Through her work with Shomrei Adamah, she illuminated and made accessible the ecological roots of the Jewish tradition and developed a foundation in Jewish ecological thought and practice,” said Mary Evelyn Tucker, director of Yale University’s Forum on Religion and Ecology. E-MAIL.
Ruth W. Messinger, the longtime New York Democratic politician who is now a global ambassador for the American Jewish World Service, said in an email that Rabbi Bernstein had used her writings “to push the Jewish community to think about our obligation to protect the planet and invest for future generations”.
And Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a theology teacher and leader of the progressive Jewish Renewal movement, said by phone: “It is clear if you read the Hebrew Bible that anyone who lives on earth is responsible for taking care if they are. What he succeeded in doing was making it clear to people what their own love for the land was and how to express it.”
Ellen Sue Bernstein was born on July 22, 1953, in Newburyport, Massachusetts, about 45 miles north of Boston, the granddaughter of shoemakers who had built a factory there. He grew up in Haverhill, Massachusetts, about 15 miles west of the New Hampshire border. Her mother, Etta (Feigenbaum) Bernstein, managed the household. Her father, Fred, was a leather salesman.
“In the summers,” wrote Rabbi Bernstein on her website“I despaired that the adult world was razing landscapes for housing, polluting the atmosphere in an effort to grow more and more commodities for our consumption, and destroying our waterways.”
Inspired by a high school ecology class, she enrolled in a pioneering environmental science program at the University of California, Berkeley. He led summer wilderness trips as a river guide in Northern California and taught high school biology. But by her 20s she had begun searching for a vehicle that could combine her spiritual passion, ignited at the Aquarian Minyan, a Jewish Renewal congregation in Berkeley, and her environmental agenda.
He received a bachelor’s degree in teaching life sciences from San Francisco State University, a master’s degree in biology from Southern Oregon State University, and a master’s degree in Jewish education from Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts. Ordained Rabbi in 2012 by the Academy of Jewish Religion in Yonkers, NY
Rabbi Bernstein married Mr. Tenenbaum, a clinical social worker and psychotherapist, in 2005, and the couple moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, where he became a spiritual adviser at Hampshire College. In 2020, she and her husband moved to the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia.
In addition to Mr. Tenenbaum, she is survived by her brother, Larry Bernstein, and stepchildren, Tatiana and Ezra Tenenbaum.
Writing about the Song of Songs in “Toward a Holy Ecology,” Rabbi Bernstein said that while it is typically interpreted as an allegory for the relationship between God and the Israelites, he was struck by the rich description of the garden where the lovers meet. .
“Although the Judaism of my childhood had never spoken to me, these words from the Bible opened my heart,” he wrote of these passages:
Get up! My love, my beauty.
I’m leaving!
For now the winter is past,
the rain is over and gone.
The red flowers shimmer on the earth,
it’s time for the singer
the voice of the turtle is heard in our country.
The new figs appeared,
the grape blossoms give off their sweet smell.
Get up! my love, my beauty I’m leaving!
“Reading the Song, I could feel the spring in my blood. I longed to get up and run with her,” Rabbi Bernstein wrote. “Whatever deity I knew seemed to be connected to this physical experience of spring—color, smell, and sound—this flood of energy and this romance with the earth. That the Song could articulate something I had no language for—from these words mine The tradition could have meaning – it comforted me and made me happy.’
“You have to feed the people,” he told them Jewish Women’s Archive in 2020. “And that comes from showing them the beauty in the world and the beauty in nature, from cultivating a love of the world, and from cultivating inspiration and possibility and creativity. This is critical to keeping people engaged and motivated. Finding beauty has been central to all my work.”