Ellen Bernstein, a river guide turned rabbi who blazed a spiritual trail in the environmental movement by tying nature worship to the Hebrew Bible, died Feb. 27 in Philadelphia. He is 70.
Her husband, Steven J. Tenenbaum, said the cause of her death, at a hospital, was colon cancer.
In 1988, when he was 34, Rabbi Bernstein founded Shomrei Adamah — the name is Hebrew for Keepers of the Earth — which he described as the first national Jewish environmental organization.
“The story of Creation, Jewish law, the cycle of holidays, prayers, mitzvot (good deeds) and fellowship demonstrate a respect for the land and a practical practice of stewardship,” wrote Rabbi Bernstein in “Ecology & the Jewish Spirit: Where Nature and the Sacred Encounter” (2000).
He developed curricula for students and teachers, organized conferences, and wrote scholarly articles and books to spread a gospel that resonated in progressive congregations and on college campuses. His work gave new meaning to the words “holy land” and to the unity between heaven and earth.
“The first step toward ecological repair,” writes Rabbi Bernstein in “Toward a Holy Ecology: Reading the Song of Songs in the Age of Climate Crisis” (2024), “is to love and recognize the natural world .”
With the help of her friend Shira Dicker, she wrote “The Promise of the Land” (2020), an ecological version of the Haggadah, the text recited at Passover, to remind Seder participants that Passover — like others harvest festivals Shavuot and Sukkot — had links to nature.
In his writing, including another book, “The Splendor of Creation: A Biblical Ecology” (2005), Rabbi Bernstein calls God’s creation in the Garden of Eden and his vision of the promised land as evidence of biblical environmentalism.
“Through his work with Shomrei Adamah, he illuminated and made accessible the ecological roots of the Jewish tradition and built a foundation for Jewish ecological thought and practice,” said Mary Evelyn Tucker, a director of the Yale University Forum on Religion and Ecology, in an email.
Ruth W. Messinger, the longtime New York Democratic politician who is now global ambassador for the American Jewish World Service, said in an email that Rabbi Bernstein used his writings “to push the Jewish community to think about about our obligation to protect the planet and invest for future generations.”
And Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a theology teacher and leader of the progressive Jewish Renewal movement, said by phone: “It’s clear if you read the Hebrew Bible that whoever lives in the land has a responsibility to take care of it. What he has done is make it clear to people what their own love on earth is, and how to express it.”
Ellen Sue Bernstein was born on July 22, 1953, in Newburyport, Mass., about 45 miles north of Boston, the granddaughter of shoemakers who built a factory there. He was raised in Haverhill, Mass., about 15 miles west, on the New Hampshire border. His mother, Etta (Feigenbaum) Bernstein, ran the household. His father, Fred, was a leather salesman.
“During the summer,” writes Rabbi Bernstein on his website“I despair that the adult world is flattening the landscape for housing developments, polluting the environment in an effort to produce more and more goods for our consumption, and destroying the our waterways.”
Inspired by a high school ecology course, he enrolled in a pioneering environmental science program at the University of California, Berkeley. He led summer wilderness trips as a river guide in Northern California and taught high school biology. But in his mid-20s he began to search for a vehicle that could connect his spiritual passion, which ignited the Aquarian Minyan, a Jewish Renewal congregation in Berkeley, and his ecological agenda.
He received a teaching credential in life sciences from San Francisco State University, a master’s in biology from Southern Oregon State University and a master’s in Jewish education from Hebrew College in Newton, Mass. He was ordained as a rabbi in 2012 by the Academy for Jewish Religion in Yonkers, NY
Rabbi Bernstein married Mr. Tenenbaum, a clinical social worker and psychotherapist, in 2005, and the couple moved to Amherst, Mass., where he became a spiritual counselor at Hampshire College. In 2020, he and his wife moved to the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia.
In addition to Mr. Tenenbaum, she is survived by her brother Larry Bernstein, and her stepchildren, Tatyana and Ezra Tenenbaum.
Writing about the Song of Songs in “Toward a Divine Ecology,” Rabbi Bernstein said that although it is usually interpreted as an allegory about the relationship between God and the Israelites, he was struck by its vivid description of the garden where lovers meet. .
“Although the Judaism of my childhood never spoke to me, these words from the Bible opened my heart,” he wrote about these verses:
Let’s go! My beloved, my beauty.
get out!
By now the winter has passed,
the rain is over and gone.
Scarlet flowers glow in the land,
the time of the songbird has come
the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.
New figs appeared,
the flowers of the vine emit their sweet fragrance.
Let’s go! my beloved, my beauty; get out!
“While reading the Psalm, I felt the flow of my blood; I longed to get up and run away with her,” Rabbi Bernstein wrote. “Any divinity that I know seems to be tied to this bodily experience of spring — of color, smell and sound — of this flow of energy and this love of the earth. That the Song could say something I didn’t have the language for — those words mine Tradition can be meaningful — it comforts and makes me happy.”
“You have to feed the people,” he said to Jewish Women’s Archive in 2020. “And that comes from showing them beauty in the world and beauty in nature, from nurturing love for the world, and from nurturing inspiration, possibility and creativity. This is important in keeping people engaged and motivated. The search for beauty has been central to all my work.”
