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New! Sacred Monsters and The Challenge of Creation!
Sacred Monsters Man and Beast The Challenge Of Creation
The Science of Torah Mysterious Creatures
The Camel, The Hare, & The Hyrax Nature's Song Seasons of LifeThe Torah Encyclopedia of the Animal Kingdom
Article: The Jewish Observer – “Gam Zoo LeTovah”
Article: Jewish Action – “Zoo Torateinu”
The Torah Encyclopedia of the Animal Kingdom is a milestone in Jewish publishing. Complete with stunning, full-color graphics, the final work is expected to run to three or four volumes. The Torah Encyclopedia of the Animal Kingdom includes:
* Entries on every mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian, insect and fish found in the Torah, Prophets and Writings;
* All scriptural citations, and a vast range of sources from the Talmud and Midrash;
* Detailed analyses of the identities of these animals, based on classical Torah sources and contemporary zoology;
* The symbolism of these animals in Jewish thought throughout the ages;
* Zoological information about these animals and fascinating facts;
* Comprehensive studies of man's relationship with animals in Torah philosophy and law;
* Lessons that the Torah derives from these animals for us to use in our own daily lives;
* Laws relating to the various different animals.
This is an essential reference work that will one day be commonplace in every home and educational institution. The first volume, Chayos - Wild Animals is due for release in 2009.
(Available only from the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo. To order from the U.S., please send $15.00 to Sigalit Dvir, The Tisch Family Zoological Gardens, POB 898, Jerusalem 91008)
Jewish Action, Fall 2000
How did I get myself into such a situation? The answer is that several years ago, I began researching, writing and teaching about the interplay between Torah and the natural world. However, the most powerful way of presenting such information is neither through books nor synagogue lectures, but rather through directly experiencing the real thing. Which is why I started teaching in a zoo.
One of the most beautiful places in Jerusalem is the Tisch Family Zoological Gardens, also known as the Biblical Zoo. It places special emphasis on displaying animals from the lands of the Bible – Syrian bears, leopards, oryx, and so on. It had always occurred to me that it would be a wonderful place to teach people about the synthesis of Torah with the natural world, but there didn't seem to be any obvious way of translating that idea into reality.
Then, a few years ago, I found out about a volunteer training course at the zoo, which I duly attended. At the beginning of the course, the director stated that he was keen to enhance the unique Biblical aspect of the zoo. He also mentioned that he hoped that the zoo would be able to cater to the diversity of Jerusalem's inhabitants, including Arabs and the ultra-Orthodox.
This set the stage for my proposal to the zoo director that I work on Biblical-zoological education at the zoo, to which he enthusiastically agreed. The idea was that rather than just placing a notice on the hippopotamus enclosure citing the verse from Job that mentions the hippo, there should be an explanation of the significance of this – namely, that the description of the tremendous power of the hippo is intended to humble Job and put him in his place regarding his queries about God. Or consider the Biblical perspective on the bear. The mother bear, bereft of her cubs, is constantly used in the Bible as a symbol of anger, because bear cubs are so tiny at birth and the mother has to put so much effort into raising them that she forges an especially close bond with them and is one of the angriest of animals if they are taken away – a true Jewish mother. And thus the Zoo Torah program was born.
This was a program that was originally developed as an outreach effort, taking student groups from outreach yeshivos on guided tours of the zoo combined with short shiurim. Many secular people have very stereotyped and narrow perceptions of the ultra-Orthodox, and I have found no more powerful way of dispelling such notions than giving a lecture wearing a hat, jacket, and boa constrictor. Rabbis don't usually wear boa constrictors.
The other advantage of such a program for outreach is that it demonstrates how the Torah is no outdated relic, but rather a powerful system for appreciating and understanding the world around us. The zoologist sees the lion as Panthera Leo , the chemist sees it as collection of molecules, the environmentalist sees it as a niche in the food chain, but the Torah Jew has the enhanced perspective of seeing it as the aryeh , manifestation of the attribute of gevurah , power (and not merely because the words share the same gematriya ). Which is doubly enhanced when he learns that the true power is the power of self-control, and that this is specifically a feature of the lion; despite it being naturally aggressive like all predators, it differs from all other big cats in that it is able to somewhat control this aggression and live in groups.
But such material was not only useful for outreach purposes. I later found that such programs are also valuable for the religious community; not only because of the innate educational value of the lessons involved, but also because it enhances confidence and Jewish pride in demonstrating how we have our own wonderful approach to the natural world. These Torah zoo tours are very positive experiences. Everyone enjoys a visit to the zoo. There's an unfortunate prevalent attitude that zoos are just for kids – probably because many adults are too emotionally numb to appreciate them – but making it into a sophisticated educational experience legitimizes the excitement of watching exotic animals and takes it to new depths. With the zoo's cooperation, some of the material has now been published under the title In Noah's Footsteps: Biblical Perspectives on the Zoo .
San Diego is home to one of the finest zoos in the world, displaying several thousand creatures from pandas to komodo dragons. It is also home to a wonderful Jewish community. Recently, I was flown out there, and my assignment, as the “Zoo Rabbi from Jerusalem,” was to take the local Jewish community to their beloved zoo and show it to them in a new light. The three-week program was arranged by Rabbi Simcha Weiser, headmaster of the dynamic Soille San Diego Hebrew Day School. It benefited from the extremely generous cooperation of the world-famous zoo, which by good fortune is sister to the Jerusalem zoo. The zoo is so vast that a full tour was out of the question, and so we based the first tour in the new Ituri Forest of Africa exhibit and entitled the program Ituri Torah (after the classical Jewish work of that name!).
This tour was for the adults of the community, with high-level material. For example, two facing enclosures contained colobus monkeys and bonobo chimpanzees. “Colobus” means “mutilated” and refers to their not possessing thumbs. This increases the efficiency of their hands as limbs for locomotion, enabling them to grasp and release branches quickly and easily. Bonobo chimpanzees, on the other hand, have thumbs that are almost as opposable as those of human beings, which enables them to manipulate tools effectively, such as the twigs that they peel and poke into termite mounds to extract a tasty snack. Rav Hirsch explains that the word for “thumb” in the Torah, bahein , is related to the word “ binah ,” “understanding,” because the thumb enables the translation of intelligence into dexterous manipulation.
Chimpanzees are so emotionally intelligent that the suffering which they endure in circuses and unnecessary medical experimentation is a real tragedy. An unfortunate solution being worked on by a group of animal rights activists and lawyers is for a chimpanzee to use sign language in court to request basic human rights. This conjures up the vision of a frightening future scenario in which your daughter tells you that she's met the guy of her dreams, and he's dark and strong and works in medical research, but you discover that he's not a Jewish doctor. From a Torah perspective, on the other hand, the problem of animal suffering is not to be solved through establishing animal rights, but rather by enforcing human responsibilities.
A different type of program had to be devised for the schoolchildren, and a three-day course was the result. For the first day's activities, held at the school, we rented some animal parts from the zoo – lion and bear paws, giraffe and zebra hooves, llama and peccary skulls, and so on. The younger children loved handling these artifacts as they learned about the features of kosher animals and some of the insights behind these laws. With the older children, we engaged in discussion on the different types of interplay between Torah and the animal kingdom – learning attributes from animals, studying the laws of kosher animals, understanding stories in the Torah about animals, clarifying man's relationship and responsibilities towards the animal kingdom, and identifying animals in the Torah.
The following day, several of the classes were taken to the zoo. In order to make it a more involving experience, they received sheets listing the names of some animals from the Torah, such as the tzvi, behemoth , namer , shafan and tachash , together with all the clues from the Chumash, Gemara and Midrash as to their identity. Through studying the clues, observing the animals at the zoo, and listening carefully to the Torah explanations that were given by each exhibit, the students had to give their best guess as to the animal's identity – which is gazelle, hippopotamus, leopard, hyrax, and giraffe, respectively. (The giraffe is a tricky one; the tachash is identified as a large and beautiful kosher non-domesticated animal with a single horn in its forehead – many giraffes do possess a single horn on their forehead in addition to the two on top.) Although the school has both a strong Torah education and a strong education in the natural sciences, this was the first time that the students learned to see the latter in the light of the former.
The third day's activities were back at the school. With those students that had been to the zoo, I discussed their answers regarding animal identification as well as further ideas of how to learn important lessons both from and about the animal kingdom. For the other students, we rented some animals to bring into the school for handling – giant tortoises, scorpions, a Burmese python, and so on. These children were probably too young to grasp the Torah thoughts that I shared with them, and their attention was undoubtedly distracted by the enormous python sliding around their feet. Nevertheless, I believe that it is valuable for them to see that Orthodox Jews can also be conversant with the natural world.
Full advantage was taken of San Diego's magnificent resources. The Wild Animal Park, located in the countryside, is a 2000 acre reserve for large herds of exotic animals, most of which can only be seen by taking a fifty minute four-mile narrated monorail tour – the “Wgasa Bush Line Railway.” The Park (which is under the same administration as the zoo) generously allowed us to rent an entire train for our own group tour, during which we were able to use the loudspeaker system for a Biblical tour of the reserves. The Wild Animal Park is an extraordinary attempt to simulate the savannahs of Africa; having been to Africa, I was able to notice where it failed in this regard – such as that the real Africa is full of Israelis – and also where it succeeded.
The Wild Animal Park resembles Africa in terms of the relative proportions of predators and prey – 3% versus 97%. If one chooses to measure success with a more scientific definition, not in terms of numbers of individual animals but in terms of number of species, prey animals also greatly exceed predatory animals. In the greater survival success of prey animals, we can perhaps see a fulfillment of the principle of “God seeks the pursued” (Koheles 3:15). The intent was mainly on human beings, but it is a principle that applies on all levels, even to the system of the natural world. In the proliferation of herbivorous animals, we see a fulfillment of the Biblical prophecy that “the meek shall inherit the earth” (Tehillim 37:11).
On the other hand, one effort by the Park to closer simulate the wilds of Africa actually achieved the reverse. A model of a buffalo carcass in the middle of one of the reserves, with a troop of vultures sitting on it, was an excellent launching point for explaining why Perek Shirah , the ancient text that lists the lessons to learn from the natural world, attaches the blessing of Baruch hatov vehameitiv to the wild animals. This blessing was instituted in Birchas haMazon on the occasion of Rome finally allowing the victims of the massacre at Beitar to be given a respectable burial. But honor for the deceased is also granted by God to the animals of the wild. The natural system works such that a dead animal disappears with days; the detritus left by the scavengers fertilizes the ground, causing plant growth to rise up and cover whatever remains of the deceased animal, which is why one almost never sees a dead animal in the wild. The fake buffalo carcass, constructed to provide realism, actually detracts from it! Thus, the lesson to learn from the wild animals is Baruch hatov vehameitiv , the testimony that God ensures that even animal remains disappear from view.
At the time of my stay, the San Diego Natural History Museum was hosting a special traveling exhibit: The Dinosaurs of Jurassic Park. I took advantage of this to give a lecture, at the museum, to the Jewish community, entitled Jurassic and Jew . The goal was to explain how to reconcile dinosaurs with the age of the world given in the Torah, and also to suggest certain lessons to learn from the dinosaurs. But most important of all, the mere fact of there being a religious Jewish lecture at a dinosaurs exhibit in the museum was a wonderful boost to the confidence of the Jewish community by demonstrating that we are not completely terrified and incapable of confronting such topics, as is commonly assumed, and that we can do so intelligently.
By the time that my stay was concluded, at the very least, the community had learned to see the zoo in a new light, and to understand that Torah does not end when one leaves the synagogue. There would be no more misunderstandings of the sort that took place on my very first morning in San Diego. At that time, someone greeted me in shul with customary Californian friendliness and asked me, “What brings you to San Diego?"
“I've been brought here to do some educational work for the Jewish community at the zoo,” I replied.
He looked at me skeptically, and replied, “But there is no Jewish community at the zoo!”