Judaism and Climate Change: Stewardship, Prophecy, and the Warming Planet

The Garden and Its Guardians

The Bible begins with a garden. God creates the world — light, water, land, vegetation, animals — and declares it tov me’od, very good. Then God places the first human in the Garden of Eden and gives a job description: l’ovdah ul’shomrah — “to work it and to guard it” (Genesis 2:15).

Two verbs. Two responsibilities. Work the land — cultivate it, use it, draw sustenance from it. And guard it — protect it, preserve it, ensure it endures. The human being is not the owner of creation. The human being is its steward.

This framing — which appears on the very first pages of the Torah — establishes something that subsequent Jewish tradition would develop into a comprehensive environmental ethic. The earth belongs to God. Humans are tenants with responsibilities. And the lease has terms.

Bal Tashchit: Do Not Destroy

The most well-known Jewish environmental principle is bal tashchit — “do not destroy.” It originates in Deuteronomy 20:19-20, which prohibits cutting down fruit trees during a military siege: “When you besiege a city… you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an axe against them. You may eat from them, but you shall not cut them down. Is the tree of the field a man, that it should be besieged by you?”

The question is almost poignant — the Torah defending the tree, asking: what did it do to you?

The rabbis took this specific wartime prohibition and expanded it into a broad principle against waste. The Talmud (Shabbat 67b, Bava Kamma 91b) extends bal tashchit to include:

• Wasting food
• Destroying clothing unnecessarily
• Diverting water sources without reason
• Breaking vessels out of anger
• Any destruction without constructive purpose

Maimonides codified the principle: “Whoever breaks vessels, tears garments, demolishes a building, stops up a spring, or wastes food in a destructive way violates the prohibition of bal tashchit.” The scope is breathtaking — it is not just about trees. It is about a fundamental orientation toward the material world: use it, but do not waste it. Consume, but do not destroy.

Applied to climate change, bal tashchit becomes a powerful argument against carbon-intensive waste, single-use plastics, deforestation, and the reckless exploitation of natural resources. If the Torah forbids cutting down a single fruit tree during war, what does it say about practices that are altering the chemistry of the entire atmosphere?

The Prophetic Tradition

The Hebrew prophets — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea — are best known for their thundering demands for social justice. But their vision of justice included the natural world. The prophets understood that human sin damages not only society but the land itself.

Hosea 4:1-3 makes the connection explicit: “There is no faithfulness, no kindness, no knowledge of God in the land… Therefore the land mourns, and all who live in it languish; together with the wild animals and the birds of the air, even the fish of the sea perish.”

Human moral failure causes ecological collapse. The prophets saw this not as metaphor but as reality — a covenantal relationship in which the land responds to the behavior of its inhabitants. The implications for climate change are hard to miss. When the Torah warns that the land will “vomit out” its inhabitants if they defile it (Leviticus 18:28), one does not need to be a mystic to see the resonance with rising seas and failing harvests.

Tu BiShvat: The Birthday of the Trees

The holiday of Tu BiShvat — the “New Year of the Trees” on the 15th of Shevat — has become the ecological holiday of the Jewish calendar. Originally a date for calculating the age of trees for tithing purposes, Tu BiShvat was transformed by the Kabbalists of Safed in the 16th century into a mystical celebration of creation, complete with a seder featuring fruits, nuts, and wine.

In the 20th century, Tu BiShvat was reimagined again — this time as a day for tree planting, environmental education, and ecological activism. Jewish environmental organizations hold Tu BiShvat seders focused on sustainability. The Jewish National Fund’s tree-planting campaigns in Israel — whatever their political complexities — reflect a deep cultural commitment to reforestation and land stewardship.

Tu BiShvat demonstrates how Jewish tradition can evolve: a legal technicality becomes a mystical ritual becomes an environmental movement. The tree — rooted, patient, life-giving — becomes the symbol of Jewish ecological consciousness.

Shomrei Adamah and Jewish Environmentalism

The organized Jewish environmental movement gained momentum in the 1990s with the founding of several key organizations:

• COEJL (Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life) — founded in 1993, brought together Jewish denominations and organizations around environmental advocacy. It was one of the first major interfaith environmental coalitions.

• Shomrei Adamah (Guardians of the Earth) — promoted environmental awareness within Jewish communities through education and programming.

• Hazon (now Adamah) — launched in 2000, connecting Jewish life to food systems, sustainability, and environmental justice through CSA programs, bike rides, food conferences, and educational initiatives.

• The Jewish Climate Action Network — mobilizes Jewish communities for climate policy advocacy.

These organizations draw on the full range of Jewish tradition — biblical, rabbinic, mystical, and ethical — to make the case that environmentalism is not an add-on to Jewish life but an expression of its core values.

Israel and Solar Energy

Israel — a small country with abundant sunshine and scarce water — has become a laboratory for sustainable technology. Israeli innovations in solar energy, drip irrigation, water desalination, and agricultural technology have global significance.

The Negev desert hosts some of the world’s most advanced solar energy facilities. Israeli companies are global leaders in solar technology development. The country’s water recycling rate (over 85% of wastewater is recycled for agriculture) is the highest in the world.

These technological achievements are not explicitly “Jewish” in the religious sense, but they reflect a national culture shaped by Jewish values: yishuv ha’aretz (settling and developing the land), resourcefulness born of scarcity, and the belief that human ingenuity can — and must — be directed toward sustaining life.

The Sabbatical Year and Sustainability

Every seven years, the Torah commands the land of Israel to rest. The Shemitah (sabbatical year) prohibits plowing, planting, and harvesting. The land lies fallow. Whatever grows on its own is available to all — rich and poor, human and animal.

Shemitah is radical ecology encoded in law. It recognizes that the land cannot be endlessly exploited — it needs rest, recovery, renewal. It also asserts that human ownership of the land is conditional: every seventh year, the land reverts to a kind of commons, reminding the farmer that ultimate ownership belongs to God.

The principle behind Shemitah — that sustainability requires periodic restraint — is precisely what climate science tells us today. Endless growth is not sustainable. Systems need rest. Resources need time to regenerate. The Torah encoded this insight in law three thousand years before the concept of sustainability was coined.

What Is Required?

Jewish environmentalism is not a matter of sentiment. It is a matter of halakha — law and obligation. If bal tashchit prohibits wasteful destruction, then contributing unnecessarily to environmental degradation is a violation. If pikuach nefesh (saving life) is the highest priority, then the health consequences of climate change — drought, famine, extreme weather, displacement — demand action.

The question is not whether Judaism supports environmental responsibility. It does, emphatically. The question is whether Jewish communities will translate that support into the kind of systemic change that the climate crisis demands — not just recycling and tree planting, but advocacy, policy engagement, and a willingness to live differently.

The garden still needs its guardians. The terms of the lease have not changed. And the landlord, tradition teaches, is watching.