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A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with environmentalist and theologian Martin Palmer.

Judaism – God in all life

The Hebrew Bible confronts us with two powerful images of our relationship with God and the rest of Nature. Psalm 8 says:

what is humanity that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
You have made them a little lower than the angels
and crowned them with glory and honor.
You made them rulers over the works of your hands

Yet in Job Chapter 38 God says:
Who is this that obscures my plans
with words without knowledge?
Brace yourself;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.
Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?

That God is the Master of the Universe is beyond question. But what are we in God’s Great plan? Are we Masters of the Earth or are we upstarts? Judaism has wrestled with this question in the light of the environmental crisis and created environmental movements which have focused for example on food production that is ethical, organic and healthy for all species involved, at its heart showing our affinity with all Creation. This is captured in the prayer of the 18th century Rabbi Nachman of Breslov:

Master of the Universe: Grant me the ability to be alone; may it be my custom to go outdoors each day among the trees and grass - among all growing things and there may I be alone, and enter into prayer, to talk with the One to whom I belong. May I express there everything in my heart, and may all the foliage of the field - all grasses, trees, and plants - awake at my coming. Send the powers of their life into the words of my prayer so that my prayer and speech are made whole through the life and spirit of all growing things, which are made as one by their transcendent Source.