For example, Israel’s ban on picking the wild herb za’atar is claimed by some as part of an effort to “erase the Palestinian way of life, an ethnic crime,” he says.
Instead, he explains, it is simply sensible conservation. “It’s just about stopping this plant from becoming extinct,” he says. “It was manageable to let people harvest wild plants when there were only a few hundred thousand people in Israel but now there are millions and millions, you can’t do it.
Rabbi Natan Slifkin. (Photo: Biblical Museum of Natural History)[Missing Credit]
“It’s like picking flowers. Jews used to pick flowers for Shabbat and now it’s illegal. Because if you let people pick wild plants, there are not going to be any left.”
Slifkin, who has a doctorate in rabbinics and zoology from Bar-Ilan University, says the “key to understanding so many things is realising that the animals and plants of Tanach are the animals and plants of Israel, which are not the same as the animals and plants of Europe.”
That might seem obvious but “only when America was discovered did people start to realise that different parts of the world really have different animals. But still the ramifications of that for Judaism, for the study of the Bible, are still not widely appreciated, even today.”
When Britons settled in America, he observes, there “was a debate about what should be the new national bird. I think Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey. it was the American bald eagle that won.” They picked a native animal, rather than something that reminded them of the motherland.
“For Jews it was the opposite: they are desperately trying to hang on to the wildlife of the Bible.”
Take the olive, for instance. “One of my most simultaneously popular and controversial articles I ever wrote was about how much matzah to eat on Seder night. The size that is given [in rabbinic sources] is kezayit, the size of an olive.
“What I researched is that people in Europe were not familiar with how big an olive was. So in the end they made this mistake, thinking it was a much bigger quantity.”
Visitors pose with an armoured elephant at the Biblical Museum of Natural History. (Photo: Biblical Museum of Natural History)[Missing Credit]
They might have been mistaken but “look at what they were trying to do. They were still trying to recreate the size of an olive. They are not trying to abandon that as a unit of measurement, they are trying to recreate this because it has sanctity. The olive is one of the seven fruits and grains the Land of Israel was blessed with. That is part of our culture even when we don’t have olives.”
In the book, he ranges from quails to crocodiles, from olives to palms. When he gives talks about it, “the first surprise for people is that wildlife has anything to do with Judaism. But the second surprise is that it ties into the whole Israel-Palestinian conflict, or at least to the way it is taught in Western academia.”
The sabra, the juicy cactus fruit, is another botanical weapon that is sometimes wielded against Israel. “They say this is Israeli cultural appropriation, that the sabra is the symbol of the timeless Palestinian connections to the land; they used the cactus as fencing for their villages, they have all these recipes for the fruit.
“But the truth is the sabra comes from Mexico. It was imported into the Middle East 150 to 200 years ago. I have many more stories like this in the book where it is claimed that it is a Zionist theft and it turns out to be nothing of the sort.”
Conversely, some “extraordinary” Israeli efforts to reintroduce once native animals like the oryx is taken by critics as a Zionist incursion.
Rabbi Slifkin encounters a lion. (Biblical Museum of Natural History)[Missing Credit]
It was 20 years ago that Slifkin made headlines – for very different reasons – when some of his earlier writings were proscribed by leading Charedi rabbis. The son of a university physics lecturer, he was scientifically curious and sought, for example, to show that evolution was compatible with a Torah worldview. He also took the view that the talmudic sages were limited by the science of their times and sometimes entertained erroneous notions – which was too much for the Charedi bigwigs. The ban on his books forced him out of the black-hat world into Israel’s dati leumi, national religious, camp.
”Chazal [the talmudic sages] and science was the bigger issue,” he says. An “even bigger” issue was not accepting the authority of the gedolim, the modern-day elders.
But he continued to pursue his interests, culminating in the founding of the museum 10 years ago. Five years ago it moved into purpose-built new premises, a tribute to his passion and his charisma. Israelis from all walks are among its 50,000 annual visitors, a third of whom are Charedi.
“They enjoy it very much. We don’t get into any of the Torah science topics at the museum – obviously if we introduce controversial topics, they are not going to come and everyone loses,” Slifkin says.
One of his favourite new exhibits features a hundred artistic models of Noah’s ark from around the world which demonstrate geographical diversity.
A visitor to the Biblical Museum of Natural History poses with a chameleon. (Photo: Biblical Museum of Natural History)[Missing Credit]
“If you are living in South America, you put llamas and toucans in it. And [Noah] is dressed in Latin American clothing. If you are a Chinese Christian, it’s pandas and Asian water buffalos and Noah is wearing Chinese clothes," he says. “Every culture has its own way of connecting to the animal kingdom.”
For Jewish culture, the representative animals are lions, leopards, gazelles, griffon vultures – creatures of biblical heritage. “These are not animals from Golders Green.”
Outside the museum, Slifkin continues to write on Torah and science in his blog Rationalist Judaism, which now has 10,000 followers. More recently, it has become a commentary on religion and society in Israel. With leonine ferocity he has turned on the Charedi establishment, in particular its demand for exemption for yeshivah students from the army, at a time when “there is a terrible manpower crisis causing enormous suffering for the rest of the population.”
One of his sons who is in the midst of a five-year hesder yeshivah programme, which combines Torah learning with army duty, has just paused his studies for military service. “The idea is that after he has finished the army part he is supposed to come back to yeshivah and then get a career and build a family. But the problem is we have no idea if that will happen because there is such an IDF manpower shortage they are not generally now letting the guys go back to yeshivah.
“And reserve duty has shot up to 70 days a year until they are 45. Obviously that is a tremendous burden that’s harming people’s careers, family lives – and that’s because there are just not enough soldiers.”
His knowledge of rabbinic sources has enabled him to dispute the Charedi claim that studying Torah acts as a kind of protective shield for the country as a whole which makes it unnecessary for yeshivah students to take up arms. He once believed that idea too but came to realise it to be a fallacy; in classical Judaism, prayer and study never replaced the need for action.
Slifkin was recently in the UK, his first visit in several years. He has done speaking tours of the US before and hopes to come back here more often – not only to lecture.
“In the museum, we have a lot of live exotic animals, and they all need specialised equipment,” he explains. “That equipment is really hard to buy. In the US, it is the wrong voltage but in England there is all this incredibly specialised 220-volt reptile equipment and so I will be museum-shopping also.”
The Lions of Zion is available via www.biblicalnaturalhistory.org
