“Everything—you, I, every particle in the universe—is infused
with divinity.” So spoke a Sikh priest at an interfaith event I attended
recently at a Hindu Temple.
I recall once discussing environmental issues at a gathering
in a friend’s Sukkah during the Jewish Festival of Sukkot. One of the three
harvest festivals mentioned in the Bible, Sukkot is also one of the three
pilgrim festivals when the ancient Israelites would flock to the sanctuary to
celebrate the goodness of God’s bounty. At our gathering, someone made
reference to the sacredness of nature and the religious obligation to maintain that
sanctity.
“That’s pantheism,” came a retort, hurled with the intensity
of a four-letter invective. “We Jews don’t believe in pantheism.”
Well, maybe not, but consider this. Twice every day, Jews
pray the kedusha, which includes a
passage from the prophet Isaiah describing his call to prophecy. This passage
is also part of the Christian hymnal. The prophet has a vision of heavenly
beings appearing in the inner sanctum of the Temple declaring kadosh kadosh kadosh adonai tsevaot melo’ kol
ha’arets kevodo, “Holy, holy, holy is Adonai Tseva’ot (usually translated Lord
of Hosts); the earth is full of His glory.
That’s normally how this passage is translated, but I think
it’s wrong. “The earth is full of His glory” would be malei kol ha’arets kevodo. The actual words, melo’ kol ha’artez would be translated “the fullness of the earth,”
i.e., that which fills the earth. And while kevod
is often translated glory, it comes from a root that means heavy, weighty. That
which fills the earth is God’s gravitas,
God’s indwelling presence on earth.
