My Ridiculous and Amazing Idea

I simultaneously feel excited and foolish

Recently I had an idea - one of the most amazing and important ideas I've ever had in my life. But I can't be proud of myself, because it's an idea that in retrospect is ridiculously obvious, and I cannot remotely justify why it took me so long to think of it.

The idea is that I should write a book about animals and Torah.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Didn't I already spend much of my life doing exactly that? Didn't I publish The Torah Encyclopedia of the Animal Kingdom, a monumental work that took me fourteen years to write?

Yes, I did. But one drawback is precisely because it's a monumental work. It’s a comprehensive discussion of every single reference to animals in Torah literature, a very long and intricate reference work, not a book which is particularly "readable." Most people just look at the pictures. And being very heavy on analyzing rabbinic sources, it’s not an especially accessible read for non-Jews.

Furthermore, there's a lot of things that my encyclopedia doesn't discuss. First of all, I've only published the first volume, on wild animals. The second volume, discussing birds and reptiles and amphibians and insects and fish, is still very far from completion. Meanwhile, there are important stories to tell about creatures in the latter categories, stories which I am ready to relate and which shouldn't have to wait for a comprehensive treatment which, realistically speaking, may never even materialize.

But more significantly, as I've realized over the past ten years of developing the Biblical Museum of Natural History, there are different ways to relate to the topic of animals. My encyclopedia is organized by species, rather than by the larger themes connecting various animals. The lion, leopard and gazelle are discussed separately in the encyclopedia, but in the museum, they are grouped together with the griffon vulture in a single exhibit about the Mishnah in Pirkei Avot where all four are mentioned. And the historic illustrations of this Mishnah, featuring mistaken identifications of these species, is a fascinating and extremely significant story about how Jews lost familiarity with the animals of the Torah, yet retained a cultural connection to them.

This in turn is part of a much larger story about the connection of the Jewish People with the Land of Israel and how this was affected by Jewish history. And this has evolved as one of the museum's main messages. It relates to such animals as snails and whales, ibex and hyraxes, mole-rats and locusts. It would be a pity for the stories involved in this message to only be available to museum visitors as part of a guided tour, when they could be made available to everyone in book form. Furthermore, there are additional stories that are part of this message which even museum visitors do not receive, because there just isn’t time on the tour. These additional stories relate to plants such as olives, date palms and pine trees, as well as to mineralogy and astronomy.

And with the recent international attack on Israel's very legitimacy, strengthened by academia's new obsession with Jews being European "settler colonialists" in Palestine, this message has never been more important. It has many aspects, including how the flora and fauna of Eretz Yisrael are part of our cultural heritage, how conservation in Israel has sought to preserve the Biblical landscape, and the problems with various academic attacks on Israel which focus on its relationship with wildlife. I’ve already written much of this material in various online publications or internal museum material, but I’ve never organized it together.

As soon as the idea to write this book occurred to me, I immediately plunged into compiling the material at a ferocious rate, and it’s already complete! It’s much more readable than my other books, and it is as accessible for a non-Jewish audience as for a Jewish audience. It will be accompanied with a fascinating array of illustrations and photographs. I’m hoping and expecting that it will receive wide attention, at a time when there is so much focus internationally on our right to be in our homeland. The book is tentatively titled Animal Vegetable Biblical, with the subtitle Biblical Natural History and the Jewish Connection to Israel.

Meanwhile, the one thing that I’m struggling with is the cover design. I like to design my own book covers, and with all my previous books, I always had a very clear idea of what they should look like. But with this one, I’m stuck. I asked an AI program to come up with a design for a picture involving a lion, ibex, Israel and the Bible, and you can see the result above. Not exactly satisfactory, and I would prefer a design that incorporates the title. So if anyone has any ideas, please share!

On another note, there are still a few seats left for our Feast of Legends from the Sea in just over two weeks, and we will be closing registration soon, so book now!