I love nature documentaries, particularly those shown on the Public Broadcasting Service television stations. This past weekend, I happened to tune in on a show about which animals are surviving in the modern world and which are in danger of extinction, and why. One point the program made was that diversity of diet can be crucial.
The panda, for example, eats only bamboo leaves. If it can’t get them, it refuses anything else and starves to death. Moreover, because of the peculiarities of the panda digestive system, individual pandas have to eat a lot of bamboo leaves, rapidly consuming the plants; and when they use up one grove, they have to find another. This puts the panda in danger of extinction. Humans are encroaching on its environment, reducing the number of bamboo groves available and preventing the pandas from being able to travel between the ones that remain.
Animals that have broad diets, however, are thriving. The show said the black bear is an evolutionary-genetic relative of the panda; but while panda numbers are dwindling, as many black bears live in North America today as did a century or more ago. This is partly because black bears can eat many things: meat, vegetation and fruits; and they don’t care whether any of them are fresh or rotting. Therefore, black bears can scavenge garbage dumps, turning human encroachment into a new opportunity.
I wonder whether one can draw a reasonable analogy between animal physical nourishment and a human community’s intellectual and spiritual nourishment.
Recently, Milwaukee’s Jewish community was treated to a Day of Discovery, a full-Sunday’s worth of Jewish learning on a huge array of Jewish topics, religious to political to cultural. Last week’s Chronicle reported on the concluding discussion between local Orthodox, Reform and Conservative rabbis of different ideas about the Torah’s authorship.
The rabbis presented a wide, though not complete, range of views on the subject, from the insistence that the Torah and its Oral Law interpretations were revealed by God at Mount Sinai to the view that they are of human creation but still worthy of reverence. Some 200 people attended, and they broke into applause when one participant, Rabbi David Fine of Lake Park Synagogue (Orthodox) said that “At the end of the day, there is more that we agree about than disagree about.”
Could such a diversity of intellectual-spiritual views be as essential to the Jewish community’s survival today as a diversity of diet is for some animals? Within the wide spectrum of ideologies from haredi Orthodoxy to Humanistic Judaism, Jews of any intellectual or spiritual bent can find a home within the community.
While some of these “diets” may seem like trash to some members of the community, they prove very digestible and nourishing to others. And having this diversity enables more Jews to stay within the community, something the Day of Discovery audience perhaps implicitly acknowledged: at the end of the day, we all remain Jews, just as black bears are black bears whether they relish fresh salmon or discarded hamburgers.
Moreover, we should neither allow nor insist that our whole community become a big “panda” with only one intellectual-spiritual diet of whatever content. If we do, those that can’t stomach that diet will leave and find their nourishment elsewhere, eroding the community.
I wouldn’t want to push this analogy too far into the realm of “social Darwinism” or the problematic notion that “whatever is ‘natural’ is right.” Still, the documentary showed that flexibility, diversity and having options, in diets and in other ways, can be key to survival in nature; and at least in some ways, “human nature” ultimately is not all that different.
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