Environmental historian Laura J. Martin, in her recent book Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration, distinguishes between three philosophies of managing wild areas–conservation, preservation, restoration:
Conservation… concerns the sustainable use of natural resources like trees, water, and fish. The goal is to extract, and perhaps actively replenish, economically valuable species and materials in a way that minimizes environmental damage and maintains resources availability into the future. In contrast, preservation is an effort to take wild species and wild places out of the human economy, to reserve them as “protected areas.” …
Since the early twentieth century, restorationists have offered a third way. … Restorationists, from the start, have grappled with the question of how to intervene in the lives of wild plants and animals while also retaining their “wildness.” Indeed, ecological restoration challenges the idea that a place is either untamed or managed, wild or designed. … It asserts that human care can help to undo some forms of human-caused environmental damage, while also respecting the autonomy of other species. Ecological restorationists strive to enable other species to thrive while, ideally, minimizing human intervention. (pp. 6-8)
Martin provides the whooping crane as a prime example of restoration. At one time, there were 10,000-15,000 whooping cranes in the US; in 1941, that number fell all the way down to 15, in one small flock in Texas, due to overhunting and habitat loss. Scientists spent vast amounts of time and money to revive the species, including breeding them and training them to fly on desired routes. Now their numbers are back up to around 1,000, their range has increased greatly, and while they are still listed as “endangered,” their future looks secure. This type of intervention is characteristic of restoration, which believes that humans play an important role in protecting, strengthening and improving natural ecosystems. Preservationists would likely have chosen not to intervene; conservationists would have focused more on species that serve as human food and game.
These categories brought to mind the role of a Jewish educator. Like vast natural systems, Jewish culture, our “ecosystems,” has been ravaged and changed by forces in the modern world over recent centuries: from the Holocaust to mass migration, anti-Semitism, assimilation and other forces that have exerted profound change. So much of modern Jewish history might be seen through the lenses of these philosophies. Some communities have sought to escape from the larger society in order to “preserve” a community lived in a vision of “natural” Judaism, “as it is meant to be.” Others have striven to make changes that would help the Jewish community adapt and thrive under different circumstances. A third falls somewhere between, intervening to modify and transform practices in line with a healthy, “sustainable” vision of the Jewish future.
One fascinating example is the revival of Hebrew as our national language. The effort to restore Hebrew as our spoken, everyday language was enormous and took place slowly over decades. It was not necessarily an obvious choice; at the time it was established in the late 19th-early 20th centuries, far more Jews spoke Yiddish or Ladino. Indeed, these languages needed to be “culled,” cleared away like invasive species, for Hebrew to take root again in its native soil. Even in 1913, the board of the new university in Haifa first decided to call it the Technikum and hold instruction in German, the international language of academic and high culture, before being persuaded to change their minds the next year.
The decision to “restore” Hebrew to its ancient glory could be seen as a radical break in Jewish history, requiring massive efforts to update the language with the vocabulary and flexibility, even the unified pronunciation, needed for modern expression. (And slang!) The Va’ad Halashon, charged with creating new words and expressions, established by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in 1890, might be thought of as the linguistic equivalent of the Army Corps of Engineers, in charge of maintaining the structures of dams and other systems to preserve waterways, protect wildlife and guard cities from flooding. After 2,000 years of exile, Hebrew had become a somewhat abandoned, overgrown field, used for timeless religious functions but not kept pruned, up-to-date for modern life.
Jewish education is often conceived of as “transmission,” a kind of aqueduct bearing the vast waters of our past into the future. Perhaps it would be more accurate to think of our role as gardeners or forest rangers, not just carrying forward our heritage but shaping it according to our philosophy and vision. Our education bears the stamp of our understanding of what Judaism is today, what it has been in the past, what it should be in the future, and how our students can take us there.