Rabbi Ellen Bernstein, Who Saw Ecology as God’s Work, Dies at 70

Ellen Bernstein, a river guide turned rabbi who blazed a spiritual trail in the environmental movement by undergirding it with the Hebrew Bible’s veneration of nature, died on Feb. 27 in Philadelphia. She was 70.

Her husband, Steven J. Tenenbaum, said the cause of her death, in a hospital, was colon cancer.

In 1988, when she was 34, Rabbi Bernstein founded Shomrei Adamah — the name is Hebrew for Keepers of the Earth — which she described as the first national Jewish environmental organization.

“The Creation story, Jewish law, the cycle of holidays, prayers, mitzvot (good deeds) and neighborly relations all reflect a reverence for land and a viable practice of stewardship,” Rabbi Bernstein wrote in “Ecology & the Jewish Spirit: Where Nature & the Sacred Meet” (2000).

She developed curriculums 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. Her work gave a new dimension to the words “holy land” and to the synergy between heaven and earth.

“The first step toward ecological repair,” Rabbi Bernstein wrote in “Toward a Holy Ecology: Reading the Song of Songs in the Age of Climate Crisis” (2024), “is to love and identify with the natural world.”

With help from her friend Shira Dicker, she wrote “The Promise of the Land” (2020), an ecological version of the Haggadah, the text recited on Passover, to remind Seder participants that Passover — like the other harvest celebrations Shavuot and Sukkot — had links to nature.