Sleep at the tree's root, where the night is spun…
Listen to the winds, the tides, and the night's harmonies
Earth sends a mother's love after her exiled son…
(Gates of Prayer)

On one wall in my campus office, there is an array of photographs that I took during a backpacking trip in Yosemite some 40 years ago. There is a picture of "Half Dome" at dusk, one of a waterfall, one of a river's bend with a redwood tree that seems more like a painting than a 35mm picture, and another with some jagged rocks enveloped in a stream's mist.  I am not a photographer of any merit (boxes of mediocre pictures over the years will attest); and at the time I was just learning how to use an SLR camera. But there was something about Yosemite ~ or perhaps the experience of being in Yosemite ~ that I believe must account for the enduring quality of those photographs.

I thought about those pictures a few weeks ago, when our local public television station aired an encore presentation of the Ken Burns' series, "The National Parks."  In the segment on Yosemite, John Muir's journal entry describes a night he camped among the Sequoia trees with President Theodore Roosevelt: "The night was clear; and in the darkening isles of the Sequoia groves, the majestic trunks, beautiful in color and symmetry, rose around us like the pillars of a mightier cathedral than ever was conceived… " [John Muir, 1903].

I couldn't agree more with those observations. The experience that one can derive from nature ~ indeed from Muir's "gentle wilderness" ~ can be profound. Indeed, this has also been a consistent theme throughout our traditional and mystical literature. Jacob's perception of the divine at Beth-El ~ his dream of the ladder ~ occurred under the night sky. Moses' encounters with God were in the desert and on the top of a mountain. The early mystic Shimon bar Yochai retreated to caves near Meron. Isaac Luria, father of contemporary Kabbalah, sought his inspiration on the banks of the Nile. And the Ba'al Shem Tov, founder of the Hassidic movement, devoted much of his time for spiritual contemplation in the Carpathian Mountains. 

Each of these settings, beyond their inherent beauty, offered a place of retreat from the journey, a place for personal reflection and spiritual inquiry. Away from the demands of everyday life, these thinkers and mystics of our tradition found their moments of solitude. Here, in these places, they realized their most creative potential, and they were refreshed. 

And yet over the generations ~ by all practical measure ~ Jewish worship has moved indoors.  It is true that there are traditional blessings that one can recite on seeing a rainbow or viewing an ocean for the first time. A few traditional rituals (e.g., tashlich) are also performed outdoors.  Yet the banks of the streams and the contours of the hills have essentially given way to the architectural lines of the bima, the ark, and our linear seating.  And our prayer books, with their relatively fixed and extended liturgy, would seem to compete at times, for time, with the spontaneous stirrings of soul.

There are practical reasons for this change. Nature, simply stated, is not always "gentle," nor is it predictable or conducive enough for Torah reading or the study of open texts.  Moreover, there has always been a warning in our tradition against "nature worship" ~ the tendency to feel awe, for example, in presence of a spectacular landscape or of a striking sunset, while not recognizing behind these natural phenomena the Creator of the Universe.   So we have become used to the sanctuary surrounded by the structure of our houses of worship.

The tension between outdoors and indoors is noticeable in our literature. Esau was known as a wild man of the field, while Jacob was one who dwelt in tents. Judaism is partial to indoors. I too am generally more comfortable inside. Still, I can't help feeling that we have lost an important dimension of the connections we seek by making Judaism primarily an indoor experience, one that is perhaps far less profound.  Is it so that somewhere in our past, as we humans learned how to tame nature, our sense of proportion shifted from that of our ancestors? that in this shift, we became exiled from nature? Did we grow ever so larger in our own minds, just as the sunsets, the rivers, and the mountains became just a bit smaller? In my office, indeed, these natural wonders have been condensed onto photographs within picture frames on a wall. And yet I still need those photographs. The picture-images inside these frames still contain 40-year old memories of some of the most spiritually memorable moments in my life. 

Rabbi Michael Herzbrun