Community Blog Remembering Rabbi Ellen Bernstein z”l

It was an honor to take part in the holy task of bringing the teachings of Rabbi Ellen Bernstein z’l, a matriarch of the Jewish environmental movement, to more than 60 of her beloved friends, family, colleagues, students and teachers, who gathered over Zoom on April 28.

The Miller Center, along with my home spiritual community B’nai Or of Boston, had planned to co-host a conversation with Ellen at Hebrew College in early April, to discuss her recently published book Toward a Holy Ecology: Reading the Song of Songs in the Age of Climate Crisis (Monkfish Book Publishing 2024). But this was not to be – on February 27, one week after the publication of Toward a Holy Ecology, we lost Ellen.

The organizers began to reimagine the gathering as a way to honor Ellen’s legacy – to bring together the many people and places which were part of her journey, including Hebrew College where she received her Masters in Jewish Education; ALEPH- the Jewish renewal movement where she had found one of her spiritual homes; and the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, where she served on the advisory group.

Rabbi Kaya Stern began her remembrance of her dear friend Ellen by describing her as” a great lover of beauty . . . on a path to revive beauty as a potent and necessary value on the spiritual path within Judaism. Ellen was in pursuit of truth, and she understood that the appreciation of beauty was a necessary element in bringing balance into Jewish life and beyond.”

Over the past two decades Ellen pursued this truth through her studies, her poetry and publications, and her activism, spotlighting the significance of land and ecology in the Hebrew Bible. Most recently she delved in to the ancient verses of the Song of Songs–with its nature-filled love poetry–to illuminate its ecological wisdom.

Ellen found that connection in the way that this long biblical poem places the lovers in lush surroundings bursting forth with ecological beauty, and describe each other in the evocative language of the natural world:

“The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. The fig tree ripens its figs, and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance.” Chapter 2: 12-13

“Oh, how beautiful! Your eyes behind your veil are doves. Your hair is like a flock of goats descending from Mount Gilead.Your teeth are like a flock of sheep just shorn, coming up from the washing.” Chapter 4:1-2

Amidst centuries of interpretation about who the beloveds are in this love poetry– frequently interpretated by Jewish sources as a love song between the Jewish people and God–Ellen offers us another possibility, encouraging us through her poetic interpretation to read The Song of Songs as love poetry between ourselves and the earth. As she wrote in Toward a Holy Ecology: “The first step toward ecological repair, is to love and identify with the natural world.”