Hi all!
Just this past Saturday, we (Jews all over the world) read the weekly Shabbat/Sabbath Torah reading (
http://www.jewfaq.org/readings.htm) of Genesis 1:1-6:8. This coming Shabbat/Saturday, we'll read Genesis 6:9-11:32.
In Genesis 1:24-28, we read:
And God said: 'Let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after its kind' And it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after its kind, and the cattle after their kind, and every thing that creeps upon the ground after its kind; and God saw that it was good. And God said: 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth'. And God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them. And Gpd blessed them; and God said unto them: 'Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that creeps upon the earth'.
Thus we see that: 1) We and the animals are linked; we were created on the same day; 2) God pronounced animal life to be good; thus animals have inherent, Divine worth; and 3) we are to have dominion over animal life.
But notice God's admonition to Noah in Genesis 9:1-2:
'Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, and upon all wherewith the ground teemeth, and upon all the fishes of the sea: into your hand are they delivered.'
Note the difference. Note the inclusion of a new element in our relationship with the animals: fear. Also note that whereas we previously had a general, "dominion," over animalkind, now the latter are explicitly delivered into our hand. The late Prof. Nechama Leibowitz (
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/nleib.html) writes in her
Studies in Bereshit/Genesis:
...the descendants of Noah are seemingly entrusted with wider powers over the animal kingdom than that of their anti-deluvian forbears. Fear and dread succeed the goodwill that was to have reigned between man and his animal subjects in accordance with the blessing to Adam. Adam...was to administer and regulate within the framework of a harmonious kingdom rather than dominate and intimidate. In place of this we have in the blessing to Noah the ingredient of fear and dread, the world being divided into two hostile camps in which one intimidates the other.
The animal kingdom does well to fear us.
I watched a half-hour episode of a documentary series on the National Geographic Channel Monday night. This series is about extinct species. It uses amazing computer-generated animation and is very good. Monday night's episode was about the Great Auk (see
http://www.rom.on.ca/biodiversity/auk/aukhist.html). The Great Auk is unique, not only because its extinction was solely & exclusively the result of deliberate human butchery (like the Steller Sea Cow), but because we know the
exact date on which the Great Auk became extinct, June 3 1844 (see
http://www.rom.on.ca/biodiversity/auk/aukhist.html#Extinction). I find this so sad; I got all teary-eyed watching the documentary Monday night (prompting our 4 year-old to run to my wife saying, "Mommy, Daddy's crying.")
I found this
Extinction - 1844
One of the last refuges of the Great Auk was on the Island of Eldey, off Iceland. It was here that the Auks took their last stand after the Geirfuglasker Skerries were submerged by volcanic activity in 1830. The last two adult birds and their egg were destroyed by an expedition of fourteen (14) men on June 3, 1844. Symington Grieve reported from his correspondence with Professor Steenstrup (another historian of the Garefowl) that this expedition was led by a Vilhjהlmur Hakonarsson, but only three (3) men landed on the island: Sigurצr Islefsson, Ketil Ketilson and Jףn Brandsson. They had been hired by an Icelandic bird collector named Carl Siemsen, who wanted auk specimens.
'As the men clambered up they saw two Garefowl [Great Auks] sitting among numberless other rock-birds (Uria troille and Alca torda) and at once gave chase. The Garefowl showed not the slightest disposition to repel the invaders, but immediately ran along under the high cliff, their heads erect, their wings somewhat extended. They uttered no cry of alarm, and moved, with their short steps, about as quickly as a man could walk. Jףn (Brandsson), with outstretched arms, drove one into a corner, where he soon had it fast. Sigurצr (Islefsson) and Ketil pursued the second, and the former seized it close to the edge of the rock, here risen to a precipice some fathoms high, the water being directly below it. Ketil (Ketilsson) then returned to the sloping shelf whence the birds had started, and saw an egg lying on the lava slab, which he knew to be a Garefowl's. He took it up but finding it broken put it down again. Whether there was not another egg is uncertain. All this took place in much less time than it takes to tell.'
The egg was finally sold to an apothecary in Reykjavik for £9 in 1844. Hakonarsson returned to Eldey in 1846 and again in 1860 looking for Great Auks but none were seen. This marked the end of the species and only unsubstantiated sightings follow in the past century and a half.
to be chilling. I thought of that broken egg, juxtaposed to its butchered parents, and immediately thought of Ecclesiastes 4:2-3 and 6:3-5 (We read the Book of Ecclesiastes during morning prayers on Saturday October 22, the Sabbath of the intermediate days of our week-long holyday of Sukkot (
http://www.jewfaq.org/holiday5.htm; Ecclesiastes is my favorite book of the Bible, so I've been thinking about it alot lately):
Wherefore I praised the dead that are already dead more than the living that are yet alive; but better than they both is he that has not yet been, who has not seen the evil work that is done under the sun...I say, that an untimely birth is better than he; for it comes in vanity, and departs in darkness, and the name thereof is covered with darkness; moreover it has not seen the sun nor known it; this has gratification rather than the other...
Now, I am
not some PETA or Animal Liberation Front nutjob, I'm not even a vegetarian. But we have slaughtered whole species! What delirium of arrogance and vanity possesses us that we do such monstrous things (not just once or twice or a hundred times but again and again and again
ad nauseum) that we destroy the work, not of our hands, but of God's? And for what? For our vanity!
In Leviticus 25:23 God says:
And the land shall not be sold in perpetuity; for the land is Mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with Me.
I know I'm taking this verse out of its specific context, but if we, who are but, "strangers and sojourners," with God, are not to sell the land in perpetuity because the land is His, then how is it that we wipe out whole species, which are also His?
Our Sages note the precise wording of God's rebuke of Cain in Genesis 4:10:
And He said: 'What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood cries unto Me from the ground.
In the original Hebrew, "your brother's blood" is
kol damei achicha, literally, "the voice of your brother's
bloods, i.e. it's in the plural. Our Sages comment on this and teach that the voices of all of Abel's future descendants, who would never be born and never exist in this world, cried out to God. I fear that all the Great Auks and Steller Sea Cows and Dodos and Passenger Pigeons and Tasmanian Marsupial Wolves who will not be born and who will never exist in this world, because of our cruelty and vanity and ignorance and selfishness, are crying out to God, and that we will be collectively held to account for the outrages we have inflicted on the earth (which belongs to who?), including the extinction (used here as a transitive verb, as in "to extinct" something) of whole species. I cannot believe that it was for this that God appoined us to be stewards of His world.
Be well!
ssv