AUGUST 31 • 2023 | 7

guest column
Teshuvah and the Environment 
A

s we engage during the High 
Holidays in the process of teshu-
vah/repentance or change, we 
mostly focus on how we have hurt other 
people and how we want to 
be a better person. Another 
category of wrongdoing, that 
of misdeeds between you and 
God, gets much less attention. 
Even in the confession of 
sins (al heit), we focus on 
interpersonal wrongs. Is it 
because while we all under-
stand that hurting another person is wrong, 
we struggle with the notion that God really 
cares if a person eats a cheeseburger? Or 
perhaps, some of us are atheists and even 
more of us are agnostics? Despite this, I 
believe the great sin of our time is not an 
interpersonal one — it is contributing to the 
destruction of our planet.
Where does polluting the environment 
fit in the traditional category of com-
mandments/mitzvot? Can we use the word 
sin when we pollute this world? When we 
destroy the ozone layer, we haven’t actual-
ly hurt another person, but we have “hurt 
the world.” 
I want to suggest that we re-interpret a 
biblical category that has basically fallen 
into disuse—tum’ah/impurity. In the Torah, 
especially in the Book of Leviticus, the cate-
gory of tum’ah is very prevalent. It is not the 
same thing as sinning. It defines that some-
thing is impure. It can happen because you 
did something wrong or through no fault 
of your own. Death is the most powerful 
form of impurity and touching a dead body 
makes you impure. 
There were rituals supervised by the 
priests that involved immersions of the 
impure person and/or sacrifices that could 
be offered in order to be returned to a state 
of taharah/purity. With the destruction of 
the Temple, this category became irrelevant 
since the purification rituals couldn’t be per-
formed without the Temple. Only remnants 
of this idea have survived among traditional 
Jews. 
I wonder whether tum’ah as impurity is 
redeemable as a term to describe the pollu-

tion of the Earth. Pollution seems to me not 
just a modern term for destroying the envi-
ronment, but it also echoes the biblical sense 
that tum’ah can affect the world in ways that 
might not be visible but still have a negative 
impact. 
In Leviticus, there is an understanding 
that impurity is an inevitable byproduct 
of existence. The task of the priests and 
Levites was to try to protect the sanctuary 
from impurity in part by purifying people 
that had become impure. The fear was 
that over time, too much impurity would 
build up and that God would be driven 
away from the sanctuary. The Holy One 
“couldn’t stand” being in the presence of so 
much impurity.
We can reconstruct the notion of 
impurity, not by understanding it as an 
invisible force infecting society, but as a 
consequence of human activity that is det-
rimental to the environment. To put it in 
contemporary terms, tum’ah would make 
the world uninhabitable to human beings. 
Tum’ah is toxic to life. Reclaiming the cate-
gory of tum’ah as pollution is a useful way 
to frame the challenge of living a life with 
an awareness of the need to protect the 
environment. 
Just as the Torah believed that you 
could not live without causing impurity 
however unintentional, so, too, we cannot 
live without leaving a carbon footprint on 
this planet. The challenge is how to offset 
or minimize our negative impact on the 

Earth’s environment.
Everything in this world is a creation of 
God. Nothing should be taken for granted. 
Life is an amazing interconnectedness of 
all beings. We need to be careful making 
changes to this world because we have seen 
over and over again that the impact of what 
we do can have far-ranging and unexpected 
consequences. Whether it is acid rain or 
plastic bags, what we do can affect people 
living far away from us.
Does the concept of sinning against God 
still have meaning? It could mean failing to 
live up to the values represented by God. If 
we fail to live up to being an image of God, 
haven’t we besmirched God’s name or God’s 
honor? There is a traditional notion of hillul 
hashem, desecrating God’s name. It is not 
only other human beings we can hurt with 
our actions, but also God’s name or at least 
the values of Judaism. 
A place to begin our rethinking is the 
traditional name for this category — mitzv-
ot bein adam la-makom — commandments 
between a person and God. The name 
used for God in describing this category 
is makom/ place. It is not an accident that 
mitzvot bein adam la-makom — command-
ments between people and God — use 
the name of God that means place. As the 
midrash says, God is the place of the world. 
Being careless about how we treat this 
planet is being disrespectful to God. In fact, 
I would suggest that today it is a primary 
way that humans are desecrating the name 
of God. Instead of being co-creators of the 
world, we are destroying makom — God as 
manifest in the diverse world of creation. 
Each time a species disappears from this 
world, haven’t we in effect diminished God’s 
name? 
On Rosh Hashanah, we recite in the litur-
gy: Today is the birthday of the world/hayom 
harat olam. The question that haunts us this 
year is: How many more birthdays will the 
world as we know it be able to celebrate? 

Based on the chapter on the environ-

ment from Judaism Disrupted: A Spiritual 

Manifesto for the 21st Century by Rabbi 

Michael Strassfeld (Ben Yehuda Press 2023}

Rabbi 
Michael 
Strassfeld

