Seeds of Eden: how to create a Jewish garden

Ours are primarily textual gardens, still growing, but on paper as the leaves and flowers that have decorated Hebrew illuminated manuscripts, medical herbals and ketubot.

It is not that Jews don’t make gardens. The tradition makes plenty of reference to practical gardening. Many of the blessings we make and the halachot we observe are gardening-related. And now, in a time of climate crisis, our gardening is also often informed by broader Jewish ecological norms and values.

So it is not that an expressively Jewish garden can’t be actualised. One that comes to mind was opened in Germany in 2021, in a park of Gardens of the World. The designers of the Jewish Garden filled it with plants referred to in Jewish scripture and literature. Its network of meandering paths was laid out to evoke a diasporic horticulture profoundly interconnected with the Land of Israel and with the history of gardens throughout the Abrahamic world.

But perhaps it’s not the design, planting or technique of a garden that is distinctively Jewish, but its underlying theology. Let’s not forget that by the second chapter of Genesis, God the creator has become God the gardener, commissioning humanity to tend a garden designed and planted out by no less than God himself.

We are a nation of gardeners long before we are a nation of priests and scholars. Male and female alike, we garden in the image of God as a gardener.

And it is in a garden that God first goes in search of the human. When God, walking through Eden in the cool of the day, asks Adam, “Where are you?”, he is asking as complex a question of us as “Who are you?”. In some ways it is the same question. Now in turn, in modernity, we might do well to return to our gardens in search of God and an answer to that first question of our moral and existential accountability.

For in the last 200 years or so of industrialised production and destruction, the crisis has been not so much God’s expulsion of humanity from Eden, as humanity’s expulsion of God.

It is we, or more precisely, the human gods created by hubristic science, geopolitics and industrialisation, who have banished God from the walled sanctuary that was Eden, His first dwelling place on earth, and left it desolated by flood, drought, wildfire and war.

But all is not lost. For, irrespective of its expense or size, when a Jewish gardener labours to create an Edenic sanctuary, theirs is, very Jewishly, at once a real and an imagined garden. It is a messianic garden, where love bears fruit.

Here, the seeds of Eden’s aesthetic and relational harmony, carried on however stormy winds, can find new places to take root. Like the Torah itself, planted by God to be a tree of life, a Jewish garden breaks cracks, as it were, in modernity’s concrete and lets life back in.

Whether scruffy or manicured, the glory of a messianic sanctuary garden is in being an open refuge where human, insect, animal guests can find refreshment and scented shade from the glare of climate crisis, war, homelessness and exhaustion of all kinds.

In such gardens, whether within Jewish communities or beyond them, the created and the redeemed world are revealed as one and the same place. In the Sefer Habahir, Rabbi Amorai asks: “Where is the garden of Eden?” He replies: “It is on earth.”

Eden, the prototypical Jewish garden, is still and can yet be, all around you. That being so, in the words of the Song of Songs (4: 16): “Awake, north wind, and come, south wind! Blow on my garden, that its fragrance may spread everywhere.”

Melissa Raphael is Professor Emerita in Jewish theology at the University of Gloucestershire. This article is an extract from her podcast for Leo Baeck College’s newly launched Lehrhaus series, lbc.ac.uk/lehrhaus-in-podcast