Is Torah for the Birds?

My maternal grandparents live in beautiful yet inconvenient Kingston, WA, a remote hamlet toward the northern tip of the Kitsap Peninsula, where I imagine most would not expect to find a pocket of religious Jews. Luckily for me, the chevra has its tentacles in the most random out-of-the-way places, so whenever I have a family function such as my grandfather's 80th birthday celebration to attend in Kingston, on Shabbat, I take the turn down an anonymous dirt road to a gorgeous view of the Kingston ferry terminal shared by a number of Jewish households (though I understand Elaine Wolf-Blanke is moving to Ashland, so there will be one fewer). Shabbos in the wilderness! It is a rare and delightful treat.

So it was that I spent the Shabbat before Moshav haAm's next-generation maggidut, intentional community, and Jewish leadership summit at the home of my friend Yael and her many, many birds. So many birds! Yael is a true lover of animals -- a network adminstrator who left good money to become a veterinary assistant -- and her house is teeming with animals of all kinds. But it is the birds really who take center stage. Yael's birds are her immediate family, and they have strong personalities and intellects. My personal favorite, a young African Grey named Coco who literally sings and dances with the Friday night niggunim, may not even be the brightest of the flock.

Perhaps it's surprising, then, that Yael is not wholely satisfied with this arrangement she has with such wonderful birds. They are pets, part of domestic, that is to say human, society, and she believes that there is a richer conversation that needs to take place in the ecosystem, between the human chevra and the avian chevra, each coming from a standpoint of integration in its respective society, rather than between one chevra and a transplant from the other.

A couple of local biologists evidently agree. Yael produced a well-loved copy of this recent publication, In the Company of Crows and Ravens, which doesn't stop at making the argument for crows and ravens as cultural creatures with their own sophisticated, intelligent, even tool-using society; it then argues furthermore that the culture of crows and ravens has emerged through a symbiotic relationship with human culture known as "cultural coevolution." In other words, these two parallel worlds have informed each other's evolution, and the conversation between them carries on into our collective future.

It seems obvious that such a theory would have significant implications for human society's priviledges and responsibilities in ecological stewardship. That is, there's Torah in this. Yael yearns to learn that Torah. But it is, as yet, invisible Torah, a dimension of our Revelation that we have yet to realize. The body of midrashic wisdom we already possess with respect to ecological relationships between sentient species is all based in an Old World paradigm. The language of classical Torah provides two categories for animals with respect to human society: wild animals, which are antithetical to civilization (the Sages invoking wild dogs as a symbol of cultural breakdown), and domestic animals, which are an assimilated component of civilization itself. While not untrue, this paradigm is also not complete. It is blind to the possibility and the implications of cultural coevolution.

I improvised an argument that this shows no inherent deficiency in Torah, per se. It just shows where we've come from, literally. Geography, the physical land upon which we dwell, is a deep and many-layered storehouse of Divine wisdom. Most anyone who has traveled from the Diaspora to Eretz Yisraeyl has sensed this, palpably: the power of landscape to imprint particular outlook and understanding upon the society/ies it hosts. It is to be expected, then, that the language of any culture emerging from the Old World will resonate to the idiomatic sensibilities of those lands. And it seems that the landscapes of the Middle East and Europe do not bear certain ecological sensibilities that are strongly imprinted by North America. All human cultures native to North American landscapes carry a strong notion of cultural coevolution. It is not necessary to vilify, to deify, or to assimilate Crow in order to have a conversation with him.

Imagine what we can learn about the Torah's directives to ecological stewardship, once we learn how to have this (I would argue more mature) American sort of discourse between species! Yael practically begged me and my generation to seek this Torah. My first thought was, I wonder what R' Gershon Winkler is coming up with in this regard, through his dialogue with Native American medicine men.

R' Gershon's work is building bridges between human cultures, which is essential and holy. That said, I think we can only fully realize the Earth-based Torah by being based in Torah and on Earth! There is Torah in every crack and corner of known geography, and we have been systematically threading our culture through the land, absorbing it along the way. So really we just need to keep it up.

Diaspora Jewry is as integral to the living flesh of Torah as limbs are to the body. We need to keep reaching, and (if I may stretch the metaphor) foster good respratory and circulatory health. What does this look like in tachlis (practicality)? How do we keep the blood oxygenated and pumping, so that the Diaspora remains inspired and engaged in Torah, and that the newly-realized wisdom flows back and is integrated?