Other articles from this issue | Version in English | Version in French

From Moses to Moses
Edward P. Echlin

Tiberias in Israel sits on the west shore of Lake Galilee ten miles from Jesus' home at Capharnaum.

After the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE the Jewish rabbis made Tiberias a spiritual centre. When Rabbi Akiba encouraged his followers to support Bar Kokhba's revolt in 135 CE the Romans skinned him alive. Akiba is still there. His tomb on the hillside still dominates Tiberias today.

Another tomb popular with pilgrims to Tiberias is that of Rabbi Moses Maimonides, known affectionately in Tiberias as Rambam. Maimonides never settled in Tiberias while he was alive. But when he and his family visited the town in 1165 he encouraged the Jews to bathe in its curative mineral springs even on the sabbath. After his death in Egypt in 1205 his body was brought to Tiberias for burial next to his father. Of Maimonides the rabbis say, not without humour, "From Moses to Moses there was none like Moses." His tumulus describes him as an eagle of a rabbi, learned in medicine as well as torah, who healed kings as well as other mortals, bodies as well as spirits.

My principal reason for spending some weeks in Tiberias was to have a base from which to learn about the impact of the natural environment in Galilee on Christ. But I have visited Rambam's grave many times. By drifting apart Jews and Christians have deprived themselves of each others light. The environmental crisis is bringing them together again. Ecology knows no borders. Maimonides and other Jewish scholars, past and present, have a lot in their holistic tradition to enlighten Christians about. Two questions have long troubled me: how did Christians acquiesce for so long in the human assault on the integrity of creation? and, what do we have in our heritage to offer the green movement?

In the Torah all God's creatures are connected. Animals, plants and habitats find their places in rabbinical teaching that derives spiritually from the first Moses. Maimonides wishes all urban dwellers, and not just Levites, to have an open space to plant fruit so that every man in Micah's famous expression can "dwell under his own vine and under his own fig tree." Maimonides explained why an animal and its offspring should never be killed in each other's presence. His sensitivity is relevant during the virtual holocaust of other living creatures that goes on today under the guise of "creating" wealth.

The pain of animals under such circumstances is very great. There is no difference in this case between the pain of man and the pain of other living beings, since the love and tenderness of the mother for her young one is not produced by reasoning but by feeling and this faculty exists not only in man but in mast living things. (Moreh Nevukhim 3:48)

From near Maimonides' tomb one can see across the lake to Capharnaum, Gennesaret and Bethsaida where Jesus observed the trees and shrubs, birds and wild flowers. "Rabbi, where are you staying?" asked the disciples of John the Baptist. He invited them to come and see.
In Galilee since Jesus' time the climate has altered little until very recently. Not surprisingly therefore current investigations of the sediment beneath the lake show that most of the wildlife species of today's Galilee were here when Jesus taught in the Synagogues, the fields along the ways and by the shore. I planted one of them myself, an Aleppo pine, on an eroded hillside near Nazareth maintained by Karen Kayemet, an international tree planting fund. Despite deforestation, erosion and the impact of expanding human population Galilee's fertility still merits the encomium of its first century governor Josephus. "Galilee", he said, "is nature's ambition".

Israel, it is true, enjoys a Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI) with 50,000 members and branches in London and New York. SPNI describes itself as "the only mass participation environmental movement in the Middle East". But in Eretz Yisrael environmental awareness has barely begun. Israel, like most other urbanizing nations, needs to refocus its vision and regain its connection with nature. "The Jewish vision of cities", writes Yosef Hakohen, "combines our need for social, economic, and spiritual centres with our need to be connected to the earth and its harvest."

Israelis, especially those who live near his tomb in Tiberias, rejoice in the teaching, the memory and the burial place of Moses Maimonides. "From Moses to Moses there was none like Moses". Christian pilgrims can also learn from Rambam and the rabbis as they profess their own faith "in that prophet like unto Moses raised up by God" (cf. Deut.18:15).