Going back to our roots
PROFESSOR MELISSA Raphael is a keen gardener. As part of Leo Baeck College’s Lehrhaus adult education programme, she is teaching a course on The Jewish Gardener. Below, we learn more about the course from the professor — who also teaches in the areas of modern Jewish thought and Jewish responses to evil and suffering at Leo Baeck, and is Professor Emerita (Jewish theology) at the University of Gloucestershire and an associate lecturer at the University of Chichester:
“Often accused of being ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, diaspora Jews too often have a sense that we’re a people who, in all senses, don’t put down roots. But Jewish theology suggests we might think otherwise! So, whether my students are gardening a kitchen windowsill or a rolling acre, I want to help them reimagine the garden through their Jewish beliefs, values, texts, and practices, and explore how those might shape their practice as gardeners.
“The course will begin by investigating the significance of God’s establishing primordial existential space not as a field or walled city, but as the Garden of Eden: the fragrant gift of an enclosed garden of delight; a place that nurtures a beauty that grows and blooms for beauty’s own sake. The question then arises, if the cool breeze of the divine spirit blows through our gardens — as the book of Genesis suggests — how might they help us to encounter God’s presence? If God is a gardener, how might we better come to know God and ourselves by gardening?
“In the biblical narrative, humanity’s first task in history is not to farm, but, rather less strenuously, to tend a garden that has been designed and planted out by God. In other words, the text commissions us to be a nation of gardeners long before we are commissioned to be a nation of priests and scholars. In thinking about how we might take on this role, the second session will explore the relevance of rabbinic theology, blessings and prohibitions to the way we approach our increasingly climatevulnerable gardens. By its third session, the course will be using ideas that have informed modern Jewish thought to imagine how we gardeners can collect and scatter the seeds for the messianic garden, proposing that the work of gardening, which brings harmony to chaos,
How might we better come to know God and ourselves by gardening?’
is a key contribution to tikkun olam. Here, the garden is far from a traditional showcase for its patrician owner’s wealth, power and leisure. It is, instead, however small, a restorative place of welcome, overcoming alienation from God, nature and other people by returning a fragment of the original peace, beauty and eros of creation to a damaged world. Contemporary Jewish gardening breaks cracks, as it were, in the concrete and allows life back in. “In the end, it’s not the how of gardening that might be distinctively Jewish. After all, even if we want to introduce some of the plants mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, Jews go to the same garden centres, use the same techniques and tools, and watch the same gardening programmes as anyone else. “Our appreciation of gardens is shared with people of all faiths and none. Rather, it is the underlying vision — the why of a Jewish garden — that makes a Jewish gardener both a universal gardener and a Jewish one. “Having been invited to share images of their own gardens and any favourite plants and creatures those and other gardens host, the final class will invite the group to work collaboratively towards an outline of its own Jewish spirituality of gardening.”