Rabbi Norman Lamm
Rabbi Norman Lamm, Ph.D., served more than a quarter of a century as President of Yeshiva University and of its Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. He is the author of The <i>Shema: Spirituality and Law in Judaism</i> and <i>Seventy Faces: Articles of Faith.</i>
Articles by Rabbi Norman Lamm
Wasteful Destruction
Judaism possesses the values on which an ecological morality may be grounded.
Humans as Co-Creators
People cannot be proprietors over nature--they are not even absolute masters of their own creations.
Bal Tashchit: The Torah Prohibits Wasteful Destruction
Fruit trees cannot be destroyed in war, and the Jewish legal tradition takes this to be a paradigm for any act of despoliation.
Humans as Co-creators: Co-owners as Well?
A Talmudic legal parable illustrates that, although they may have improved the natural world, humans do not own it. We may transcend nature, but we are also part of it.