Non­fic­tion

To For­ev­er Inhab­it this Earth: An Eth­ic of Enoughness

  • Review
By – May 12, 2025

For over two decades Rab­bi Nina Beth Cardin has been a major leader in the Jew­ish Envi­ron­men­tal move­ment. Her new book, To For­ev­er Inhab­it This Earth, is a cap­stone on her vision­ary focus on the see­ing the issues of cli­mate change and sus­tain­abil­i­ty through a unique­ly Jew­ish lens.

In a time when the cur­rent Fed­er­al Admin­is­tra­tion seeks to roll back recent laws and reg­u­la­tions to pro­tect the earth and anath­e­ma­tize the words cli­mate” and cli­mate change”, to pub­lish now harks back to an ear­li­er time when the move­ment was top of mind and action. But looked at anoth­er way, this book res­onates with those out of cur­rent pow­er who know what is des­per­ate­ly need­ed for the long game of chang­ing our behav­ior and pro­tect­ing the planet.

This book weaves togeth­er both the larg­er issues to focus on and the prac­ti­cal ways we can make changes in our own lives in a par­tic­u­lar­ly nuanced way.

The book is divid­ed into sev­en chap­ters, per­haps to mir­ror the sev­en days of cre­ation. The intro­duc­to­ry chap­ter sets forth the need to pro­tect and sus­tain the plan­et. Cardin’s ambi­tion is to deep­en Aldo Leopold’s ground­break­ing con­cept of a land eth­ic,” through a Jew­ish per­spec­tive, to artic­u­late a Jew­ish land ethic.

In the sec­ond chap­ter, Rab­bi Cardin elo­quent­ly devel­ops the con­cept of Yishuv Ha’olam, pre­serv­ing a hab­it­able world, which she views as a mitz­vah, indeed as one of the 613 com­mand­ments we are enjoined to do as Jews. Of the con­cept of Yishuv Ha’olam she writes, there is nev­er a time it can­not be pur­sued. It is impli­cat­ed in all our acts and deci­sions for almost every­thing we do affects the nat­ur­al world and thus life all around us.”

She fol­lows with a bril­liant read­ing of the first two chap­ters of Gen­e­sis, with Gen­e­sis 1 embody­ing the prin­ci­ple of Sur­viv­abil­i­ty and Gen­e­sis 2 incul­cat­ing an eth­ic of Sus­tain­abil­i­ty. This is a mod­el of how to read bib­li­cal text in a con­tem­po­rary way and feels nat­ur­al and unforced.

Chap­ter four is the most poet­ic of the book, Holy Sparks.” Rab­bi Cardin cel­e­brates the holi­ness of the nat­ur­al world in mov­ing prose with both rab­binic and mod­ern respons­es brought to our attention.

If Yishuv Ha olam is the most impor­tant pos­i­tive com­mand­ment, bal tas­chit, do not destroy, is the essen­tial neg­a­tive com­mand­ment for the envi­ron­men­tal move­ment. Build­ing on past com­men­tary from Mai­monides, through Samp­son Raphael Hirsch to con­tem­po­rary thinkers, she shows how this seem­ing­ly sim­ple phrase can be enact­ed. Rab­bi Cardin even cre­ates a chart for us to show how on a prac­ti­cal lev­el we can fol­low this sim­ple com­mand­ment on a week­ly basis in our dai­ly lives.

For an eth­ic of enough­ness, it is no sur­prise that bib­li­cal laws of shmit­tah are adapt­ed in the penul­ti­mate chap­ter to chal­lenge a cul­ture of consumption,

In her last chap­ter — sev­en, just as God finds his cre­ation good on the sev­enth day, Rab­bi Cardin cel­e­brates the plan­et we have and the grat­i­tude we should feel for it. IRig­or­ous, yet lyri­cal, lofty yet prac­ti­cal, To For­ev­er Inhab­it This Earth belongs on the book­shelves of those who cher­ish Jew­ish texts and the envi­ron­ment around us.

Josh Han­ft holds Advanced Degrees in Eng­lish and Com­par­a­tive Lit­er­a­ture from Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty and curat­ed the renowned read­ing series, Scrib­blers on the Roof, for over twen­ty years.

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