I was raised in a Jewish home and I have always followed Jewish law, but until one particular lesson my observance had been by rote. It was the 11th grade and I was sitting in Bible class, when I decided I truly wanted to live my life according to the precepts of Judaism. I had not been on a quest for answers or meaning; they simply found me. My epiphany was not profound; if anything it was quite mundane and always seems quite lame when I spell it out for others. The teacher was lecturing about some minute, hidden meaning of the Bible in a mixture of Hebrew and English that I simply could not keep straight. Around me my friends were studiously taking notes, unaware of the orange and black butterfly fluttering just outside the window. As I attempted to recreate the path the butterfly was flying upon the blank page of my notebook, I heard the teacher mention the biblical source for the law forbidding meat and milk to be eaten within the same meal. My attention was redirected to class (where it should have been the entire time), even if only for a little while.
“You shall not cook a tender young animal in its mother’s milk” (Exodus 23:19). Once again unaware of my teacher’s lesson, I wondered about the nuances in the wording of the commandment, its specific decree and the broad, overarching law (not to eat milk and meat together at all) the Rabbis learned from it. Why would it matter whose milk a baby animal was cooked in? So what? Well, I thought to myself, if a mother and her child are killed on the same day then two generations are decimated at once. In today’s society the notion that people must be careful to ensure the propagation of species is quite obvious (even if it is ignored). More and more wildlife is becoming endangered and then extinct as people carelessly use nature to satiate their hunger for more. Yet thousands of years ago when the bible was given to mankind (regardless of its source), our population was too small and our technological innovations too minor to cause any great impact on nature. Only a divine, all-knowing source could know that humankind would one day be able to so easily impact nature. So, there was a commandment warning us to carefully use the bounty around us. If we take and take without giving nature enough time to replenish, than our lives will become unsustainable and destructive.
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Religion has always played a huge part in my life; actually, religion affects every aspect of my life. Science is a means of understanding God for me. As a student of ecology, I want to learn about the intricate connections between “everything”. I then want to use the knowledge gained to help steady the disrupted state nature is currently in. It is not only my desire, but, I believe, also my duty to rectify the wrongs done to God’s beautiful creations. I pray that in the near future we will properly care for our environment and in return nature will benefit us as God intended it to.
Religion has equally played a big part on my life. I respect and equally support everything you have said =) I could not have put it in better words. I believe God has provided nature with its own system of rising and falling in a natural way, knowing that humans would have the capability to destroy, recreate, create. That is why, "Energy can neither be created nor destroyed," because we as humans have options. There are so many alternatives to doing things, it is our own choice to pick which option fits our priorities and mindset. It is our choice to use knowledge as practice or just have it remain simply what it is, knowledge. He has even created us with the option the live and survive the way we want(although as we have learned in class, to live and to survive are two completely different things). I think He made nature the way it is so that there is room for human error and mistakes.
ReplyDeleteReligion has played an important role in my life as well. I can not say that I am the most religious person in the world, but it has certainly effected the way I view the world. Science, on the other hand, has also effected the way I view religion. In any case, it is my understanding that the world is interconnected, and that the most important thing in the universe for anything is to exist. Living or non-living, dead or alive, moving or not moving, it is important for the existence of anything. The universe has proven to us that you do not need to be alive to exist and that you do not need life to sustain itself as a system.
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