Love is the precondition of justice. Might, then, the Hebrew Bible’s commandment to love the stranger — that is, to keep the stranger from exploitation and other mistreatment — be expanded to include the Earth as well? Just as Jewish strangers have long laboured under the heavy hand of history, might the Earth’s predicament also remind us of what it is to be infinitely and inaudibly vulnerable?
Of course, the Torah does not explicitly command us to love the Earth and it might be argued that such a commandment is not necessary. A whole range of practices and principles, not least bal tashchit — the prohibition of wanton destruction — is already allowing Jews to respond to the climate crisis in their own denominational idiom.
But revelation is surely cumulative, heard and felt anew in the crisis of the moment. And in this moment, a love commandment may issue a more primary and immediate summons to environmental action than the repurposing of legal principles and precedents alone.
For if the human face is not the only kind of face that is made in the image of God, then to witness the sufferings of the earth under climate change is to be drawn into a face-to-face relation with a different kind of stranger — one that is neither like me nor obligated to me — but for whom I, now, am nonetheless obligated to protect and care.
In Genesis 1, the face of the earth is the primordial mystery of all faces. As “Deep Face”, P’nei Tehom, it is the fathomlessly strange face in wind-swept turbulent darkness. But under the jurisdiction of love, it could also be the more familiar face of summer, a stranger refreshed and restored to lush and teeming life.
