Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on New Age Judaism as it presses for changes of religious ways of living in the world and advocates a new form of “spiritual ecology”. It will ethnographically be shown, how times of socio-ecological uncertainity are thus turned into moments of radical renewal and empowerment.

Paper long abstract:

For religious worldviews and practices nature is a revealing context for orienting humans to the enduring questions regarding the cosmological origins of the universe, the meaning of the emergence of life, and the responsible role of humans in relation to life processes. In the context of current debates on climate change, on biodiversity loss and threatening mass extinction, however, theological answers become increasingly uncertain and thus religious groups and protagonists press more than before for fundamentally redefining religious ways of thinking about and living in the world. Some religious protagonists advocate an intensified practice of a “spiritual ecology”. The paper will ethnographically follow the current process of negotiation of such an ecology. It draws close to the Jewish Renewal Movement (known as New Age Judaism) in Germany, one of the most active and radical religious branches within Western monotheism concerning ecological issues. The paper will less focus on religious environmental activism (Berry). Instead, it zooms into the day-to-day religious practice of the Berlin Jewish New Age group and tries to lay open the ways religious laws and convictions are intensely called into question. By a form of a (joyful) “practice peaching” (de Certeau) in religious and scientific worldviews likewise, those laws and convictions are remodeled into a “spiritual ecology” that goes well beyond environmental involvement. It permeates the whole way of Jewish life and its underlying theology, such as the all-encompassing law of Kashrut. Times of uncertainty are turned into “seeds of radical renewal” and thus into moments of empowerment.