Caretaker Or Citizen: Hans Jonas, Aldo Leopold, and the Development of Jewish Environmental Ethics1
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CHAPTER FIFTEEN CARETAKER OR CITIZEN: HANS JONAS, ALDO LEOPOLD, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF JEWISH ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS1 Lawrence Troster Hans Jonas’s last public words ended with this prophetic call: It was once religion which told us that we are all sinners, because of original sin. It is now the ecology of our planet which pronounces us all to be sinners because of the excessive exploits of human inventiveness. It was once religion which threatened us with a last judgment at the end of days. It is now our tortured planet which predicts the arrival of such a day without any heavenly intervention. The latest revelation—from no Mount Sinai, from no Mount of the Sermon, from no Bo (tree of Buddha)—is the outcry of mute things themselves that we must heed by curbing our powers over creation, lest we perish together on a wasteland of what was creation.2 I fi rst encountered the work of Hans Jonas twenty years ago when I read “The Concept of God After Auschwitz.”3 At the time, I did not fully appreciate Jonas’s radical theology. Since that initial reading I returned to Jonas’s work again and again as my own interest in 1 I dedicate this paper to the memory of my late father Jack Martin Troster z”l (1913–1984) who, like Hans Jonas, was a combat veteran in World War II. 2 Hans Jonas, “The Outcry of Mute Things,” in idem, Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good After Auschwitz, ed. Lawrence Vogel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 198–202, here 201f. This is from a speech that Jonas gave on January 30, 1993, in Italy on the occasion of receiving the Premio Nonino Prize. He passed away six days later, upon his return to the United States. 3 Now printed in Mortality and Morality, 131–43. This version is a translation of a lecture given in Germany in 1984. It was a revised version of “The Concept of God After Auschwitz,” published in Out of the Whirlwind: A Reader of Holocaust Literature, ed. Albert H. Friedlander (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1968), 465–76. This incorporated material from an earlier essay, “Immortality and the Mod- ern Temper,” published originally in 1962 but also included in The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, 2nd edition), 262–81; and in Mortality and Morality, 113–30. I fi rst encountered the essay in Out of the Whirlwind and referred to it in my article, “The Defi nition of Evil in Post-Holocaust Theology,” Conservative Judaism 39, no. 1 (Fall 1986): 81–98. 374 lawrence troster bioethics and environmentalism grew. As I spoke and wrote about Jonas,4 it became clear that he and his work are not generally known among Jews and Christians, even among those who are interested in the kind of philosophy and theology that he represented.5 Within Jewish circles, Jonas has been one of the most neglected philosophers of the twenti- eth century. And while among European environmentalists his writing on environmental ethics is highly regarded,6 among North American environmentalists his work is not well known.7 This is the case despite the esteem that his work on bioethics and in general discussions of the relationship between religion and science has generated.8 Jonas is the only modern Jewish philosopher who has fully integrated philosophy, science, theology, and environmental ethics. At this time, Jewish environmental theology, and ethics is still in its infancy and there are few real thinkers upon whom a modern Jewish environmental ethic can be based.9 I believe, however, that Jonas’s work can provide a foundation for a Jewish environmental ethic. Jonas’s work is a prophetic voice that challenged the way we live. Unfortunately, most of the North American Jewish community has not yet been willing to listen to such a call. We have been, individually and communally, too embedded 4 Lawrence Troster, “Hans Jonas and the Concept of God after the Holocaust,” Conservative Judaism 55, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 16–25. 5 See Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 107: “there is little doubt that his was one of the more original and important philosophical minds of the twentieth century. Sadly, it seems that his philosophy never really caught on in North America.” Exceptions are William Kaufman, The Evolving God in Jewish Process Theology (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), 150–54; Sandra B. Lubarsky and David Ray Griffi n, Jewish Theology and Process Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 15, 143–57; Martin D. Yaffe, ed., Judaism and Environmental Ethics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), 34–36, 250–63; John F. Haught, God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), 168–84. 6 Jonas’s writings were an important infl uence on the Green Party in Germany. See Christian Schutze, “The Political and Intellectual Infl uence of Hans Jonas,” Hastings Center Report 25, no. 7 (1995): 40–43; Vogel’s introduction to Mortality and Morality, 3; and Wolin, Heidegger’s Children, 107–8. 7 For example, the recently published Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, ed. Bron R. Taylor and Jeffery Kaplan (London: Continuum, 2005), does not have an entry for Jonas. 8 See, for example, the essays of Leon Kass and Strachan Donnelley in Hastings Center Report 25, no. 7 (1995). 9 An exception to this is Arthur Green, who bases his environmental ethics on Kabbalah. See Arthur Green, Seek My Face, Speak My Name: A Contemporary Jewish Theology (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc., 1992); and idem, “A Kabbalah for the Environmental Age,” in Judaism and Ecology: Created World and Revealed Word, ed. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 3–15..