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A famous verse from Psalm 104, addressing God directly, exclaims “How great are Your works” (alternative translation: “How many are Your works”). The psalm waxes breathlessly about the beasts of the land, the birds of the sky, and the fishes.
Yet Jewish theology is never simple or serene. Psalm 104 also recognizes that life has few guarantees. It says, “Take away their breath, and they perish and return to dust.”
Even more contingency is reported in the Talmud. According to Tractate Chullin 127a.10, Rabbi Akiva would recite the verse “How great are Your works, O Lord” to meditate on the estreme dependence of creatures on their environment. The talmudic verse explains, “If those in the sea would ascend to the land they would immediately die. If those that are on land would descend to the sea they would immediately die.”
Looking then at its context, the phrase “How great are Your works, O Lord” points not just to strength but to fragility. Rabbi Akiva recognized that each creature is suited to its particular ecological niche and couldn’t survive if its environment changed. With climate disruption, this extinction is precisely what is happening to many species.
At the risk of stirring up anxiety, a few statistics are worth recalling here.
Perhaps Akiva was sensitive to life’s precariousness because he lived in tumultuous and dangerous times; he himself was executed by the Romans in a horrible fashion. Later on the same page, the Talmud mentions a disastrous example of cross-breeding (Chullin 127a.16), which we can interpret as a warning about some of the recombinant experiments being done today.
Living in a land with limited soil and heavily dependent on rain, Jews recognized that the miracle of life was fragile. By extension, our religion calls on us to do what is humanly possible to preserve life’s bounty.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.