Friday, January 5, 2001
By Tamar Hausman
With a large boa constrictor wrapped around his torso, Rabbi Nosson Slifkin admits that while he loves snakes, and has been handling them since childhood, he understands why most people recoil from them in fear.
But then he explains that just as the snake's punishment for its sin in the Garden of Eden was the removal of its legs, it gained the advantage of greater maneuverability. And thus the lesson: Even where there is evil, there is reason to find compassion and good. Within minutes, onlookers are approaching the boa and slowly stroking its skin.
Slifkin develops education programs at Tisch Family Zoological Gardens in Jerusalem, better known as the Biblical Zoo. Working off a huge computerized database of biblical references to animals, Slifkin gives tours, lectures for adults and classroom lessons for kids on the animal kingdom based on the idea that Torah is the vehicle to learning about the natural world. While the zoo displays animals from throughout the world, it emphasizes the animals mentioned in the Bible. Placards next to most exhibits cite biblical passages referencing that animal. That was about the extent of the zoo's biblical element, until Slifkin began giving his “Zoo Torah” tours there last year. They have become, well, wildly popular.
Slifkin first started with tours for “outreach” yeshivot for newly religious men and women. Now, he tailors it to various types of groups, including secular and religious, young and old, all with the common goal of boosting Jewish pride by showing that Jewish sources have a sophisticated approach to the natural world. More Christian groups are asking for the zoo tours, too.
Animals have been a “tremendous source of Jewish inspiration for me,” says Slifkin, a teacher at Yeshivat Ohr Sameach. Among the courses he teaches there, he began a class last year called “Torah from the Zoo." It quickly became popular, not only because students figure they'll get free trips to the zoo, but because the topic helps many newly-religious men – the yeshiva has a large contingent of newly-religious Anglos – connect to Judaism.
Growing up in Manchester, England, Slifkin owned dozens of pets ranging from tarantulas to iguanas. Ever since he can remember, he wanted to work in a zoo. People used to laugh at him. “Good Jewish boys in England grew up to be doctors, lawyers, or accountants, not zookeepers,” he says. When he came to study at yeshiva in Jerusalem after making aliya in 1993, he missed animals terribly. He had given away all his pets before coming to Israel, and the few he bought in Israel and was allowed to keep in his dorm room in yeshiva (including an iguana) weren't enough to satisfy his obsession.
“It then occurred to me to look into animal references in the Torah,” he says. He volunteered at the zoo for a while until he began giving his Zoo Torah tours. He wrote a guidebook for the zoo called “In Noah's Footsteps: Biblical Perspectives on the Zoo,” which explains the biblical lessons of each animal. It was largely extracted from a book he wrote several years ago, “Seasons of Life: The Reflection of the Jewish Year in the Natural World."
Now, he's writing a book on Perek Shirah, the ancient Midrash that lists the philosophical and ethical lessons of the natural world. He also aims to enhance the zoo's existing placards of biblical references to animals.
Of course, many animals, such as those originating in North and South America, Australia and the polar caps, aren't mentioned in the Bible – so Slifkin admits he often has to “be creative.” But most species are mentioned, so he can relate to specific animals in broader terms.
Last spring, as a guest of a Jewish day school in San Diego, he spent three weeks giving his “Zoo Torah” tours and lectures at the San Diego Zoo to groups of adults and children, and at the nearby Wild Animal Park in San Pasqual. He has done the same for groups of Israelis in Kenya, his only Hebrew tours so far, as he gives his Jerusalem tours only in English.
“I wouldn't call myself an animal lover,” Slifkin says. That's because he feels that term has the connotation of an animal rights activist, who tends to see animals as having equal rights as humans. He feels quite the opposite, as the Torah holds that humans are the custodians of the natural world.
Take the most famous animal story in the Bible, the story of Noah's Ark, in which God gives Noah the task of preventing animals of the earth from being wiped out in a flood. With the gift of being deemed the world's custodian, comes a responsibility for kindness. One biblical passage, for instance, states that a person must not plow a field using two different animal species, because, as different species have different physical capabilities, the weaker one will be forced to work beyond its capabilities. So when Slifkin is asked on his tours, as he often is, how Judaism views zoos, his answer is: “Zoos are 'kosher' only if the people managing the animals treat them well.”
The Torah relates to animals in regard to their characteristics, he says. That is, every creature embodies a particular trait that also exists in humans, who should integrate these traits in their own nature. Lions, which are referred to in the Bible more than any creature, have aggressive dispositions but also have an innate ability to control their power. Similarly, gazelles embody swiftness, their only form of self-protection, and the Torah features the gazelle in the story of the Jews' exile from Egypt to show that God used this attribute to redeem His people.
In his lessons and tours, Slifkin relates to particular lessons of various animals as well as larger themes relating to the natural world. On species conservation, he explains the scientific, ecological view that even the ugliest or the most seemingly unnecessary creatures – such as mosquitoes and other insects, for instance – are important because they are part of the balance of nature.
The Jewish take on nature is really no different. In contrast to the pagan view that the world consists of competing forces, or competing gods, the Jewish view is that everything is interconnected and interdependent, and that there is an order and reason to everything, even if it is not obvious. Other subjects include how the Torah views hunting: It's frowned upon if it's for the purpose of sport, but acceptable if it's for food.
And Slifkin analyzes the ecological and biblical explanations for the laws of kashrut: Based on the principle “you are what you eat,” the law forbids the eating of carnivorous animals because they are seen as “aggressive” (if you eat something aggressive, you yourself will absorb something of that trait).
And even if one develops a new sympathy for reptiles on a Zoo Torah tour, this fact will never change: No matter what, snakes aren't kosher.