Rabbi Ellen Bernstein, who saw ecology as God’s work, dies at age 70

Ellen Bernstein, a river guide turned rabbi who blazed a spiritual trail in the environmental movement by supporting it with the worship of nature in the Hebrew Bible, died Feb. 27 in Philadelphia. She was 70.

Her husband, Steven J. Tenenbaum, said the cause of her death, in a hospital, was colon cancer.

In 1988, when she was 34, Rabbi Bernstein founded the foundation Shomrei Adamah – the name is Hebrew for Keepers of the Earth – which she described as the first national Jewish environmental organization.

“The creation story, Jewish law, the cycle of holidays, prayers, mitzvot (good deeds), and relationships with neighbors all reflect a reverence for land and a viable practice of stewardship,” Rabbi Bernstein wrote in “Ecology & the Jewish Spirit: Where Nature & the Sacred Encounter” (2000).

She developed curricula for students and teachers, organized conferences, and wrote scholarly articles and books to spread a gospel that resonated in progressive congregations and on college campuses. Her work gave a new dimension to the words ‘holy land’ and to the synergy between heaven and earth.

“The first step toward ecological restoration,” Rabbi Bernstein wrote in “Toward a Holy Ecology: Reading the Song of Songs in the Age of Climate Crisis” (2024), “is to love and identify with the natural world.”

With the help of her friend Shira Dicker, she wrote “The Promise of the Land” (2020), an ecological version of the Haggadah, the text recited on Passover, to remind Seder participants that Passover – like the other harvest celebrations Shavuot and Sukkot – had ties to nature.

In her writings, including another book, “The Splendor of Creation: A Biblical Ecology” (2005), Rabbi Bernstein invoked God’s creation of the Garden of Eden and his vision of the promised land as evidence of biblical environmentalism.

“Through her work with Shomrei Adamah, she has illuminated and made accessible the ecological roots of Jewish tradition and developed a foundation in Jewish ecological thought and practice,” said Mary Evelyn Tucker, director of the Yale University Forum on Religion and Ecology, in an e-mail.

Ruth W. Messinger, a longtime New York Democratic politician and now global ambassador for the American Jewish World Service, said in an email that Rabbi Bernstein had used her writings “to encourage the Jewish community to reflect on our duty to protect the planet and invest for future generations.”

And Rabbi Arthur R. Waskow, a theology teacher and leader of the progressive Jewish Renewal movement, said on the phone: “If you read the Hebrew Bible, it is clear that everyone who lives on the land is responsible for caring for it. What she has achieved is helping people understand what their own love for the earth is, and how they can express it.”

Ellen Sue Bernstein was born on July 22, 1953 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, about 45 miles north of Boston, the granddaughter of shoe manufacturers who had built a factory there. She grew up in Haverhill, Massachusetts, about 15 miles west, on the New Hampshire border. Her mother, Etta (Feigenbaum) Bernstein, managed the household. Her father, Fred, was a leather salesman.

“During the summers,” Rabbi Bernstein wrote on its website“I despaired that the adult world was flattening landscapes for housing, polluting the atmosphere in an effort to develop more and more goods for our consumption, and destroying our waterways.”

Inspired by an ecology course in high school, she enrolled in a groundbreaking environmental science program at the University of California, Berkeley. She led summer wilderness trips as a river guide in Northern California and taught high school biology. But in her mid-20s, she had begun looking for a vehicle that could connect her spiritual passion, ignited at the Aquarian Minyan, a Jewish renewal congregation in Berkeley, and her ecological agenda.

She earned a teaching credential in life sciences from San Francisco State University, a master’s degree in biology from Southern Oregon State University, and a master’s degree in Jewish education from Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts. She was ordained as a rabbi in 2012 by the Academy for Jewish Education. Religion in Yonkers, NY

Rabbi Bernstein married Mr. Tenenbaum, a clinical social worker and psychotherapist, in 2005, and the couple moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, where she became a spiritual advisor at Hampshire College. In 2020, she and her husband moved to the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia.

In addition to Mr. Tenenbaum, she is survived by her brother, Larry Bernstein, and her stepchildren, Tatyana and Ezra Tenenbaum.

Writing about the Song of Solomon in “Toward a Holy Ecology,” Rabbi Bernstein said that while it is typically interpreted as an allegory about the relationship between God and the Israelites, she was struck by the lush description of the garden where the lovers meet. .

“Although the Judaism of my childhood had never spoken to me, these words from the Bible opened my heart,” she wrote of these passages:

Stand up! My loved ones, my beauty.
Come away!
Winter is over for now,
the rain is over and gone.
The deep red blossoms glitter in the land,
the time of the songbird has come
the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.
The new figs have appeared,
the grape blossoms spread their sweet scent.
Stand up! my beloved, my beauty; Come away!

‘When I read the song, I felt spring welling up in my blood; I longed to get up and run away with her,” Rabbi Bernstein wrote. ‘Whatever deity I knew seemed to be intertwined with this physical experience of spring – of color, smell and sound – of this flow of energy and this romance with the earth. That the Song could express something for which I had no language – where the words came from my own tradition could be meaningful – comforted and delighted me.”

“You have to feed people,” she told the newspaper Jewish Women’s Archive in 2020. “And that comes by showing them the beauty of the world and the beauty of nature, by nurturing a love for the world, and by nurturing inspiration, possibility and creativity. This is crucial to keep people engaged and motivated. Finding beauty is central to all my work.”