What Will We Leave Wild?

I recently bought this piece of artwork for my office with a quote by Henry David Thoreau:

In Wildness is the preservation of the world.

We live less than a twenty-minute drive from Walden Pond, where Thoreau spent two years living close to nature and wrote Walden. Although our area is hardly wilderness, there is so much nature all around us. It is not hard for me to imagine how this landscape might have looked before all the roads, bridges, and buildings were here.

When the world was created, all was wilderness.

Wilderness holds the echoes of creation, a beautiful stage in our planet’s evolution. What appears chaotic sustains countless forms of life. It may not appear orderly, but it follows the deeper patterns of nature, creating the ultimate space for the interconnected web of life on Earth.

SPNI is a large organization doing many important things, but at the heart of its work is a simple belief: Israel’s wild open spaces are worth being preserved and protected. Its founders, and all who have led it since, have understood what Thoreau was speaking about.

From the outset, SPNI embraced a revolutionary idea: that people and wilderness do not have to exist in opposition to one another. Instead, people should be able to step into nature, experience its beauty and wonder, and emerge with a deeper commitment to protecting it. Eco-tourism has long been part of that vision, helping safeguard open spaces by creating meaningful connections between people and the land.

Through its guides, educational programs, and field experiences, SPNI gives people knowledge, but even more importantly, it nurtures a sense of care. What strikes me most is how often I meet supporters who still speak about an SPNI trip into the wilderness as one of the most profound experiences of their lives. They may not remember the names of every plant or animal, but they remember how they felt. They remember the awe, the sense of connection, and the bond they formed with the natural world. Decades later, that feeling remains with you, inspiring you to protect the places that touched you so deeply.

Wilderness is the essential and authentic expression of life on our planet, what the Earth produced on its own, without human design or interference. It is our source. Without it, humanity would become untethered, disconnected from something profoundly honest and real.

Yet today, wilderness means something different than it did hundreds of years ago when humans battled the wilderness to survive. They retreated from the wildness that they feared and it became remote from our civilized lives.

In highly developed societies, wilderness often exists not because humans are incapable of reaching it, but because we consciously choose not to. Every protected habitat, every nature reserve, every undeveloped valley represents a collective decision that not every place should become something else.

In Jewish thought, there is a concept called tzimtzum: before creation, the Divine presence filled everything, and God withdrew enough to make space for a world beyond. Whether understood literally or metaphorically, it offers a powerful lesson. Sometimes the most meaningful act is not to fill every space available to us. Sometimes to make room for the existence of other things, humanity has to intentionally express restraint.

Perhaps that is what conservation asks of us.

Perhaps wisdom is not demonstrated by how much we build, but by knowing where not to build.

Perhaps true intelligence is not humanity’s ability to dominate the natural world, but our ability to leave room for it.

This Rosh Hashanah, as we begin a new year, I invite you to reflect on the concept of wilderness and its value.

Are humanity’s greatest achievements necessarily the ones that replaced wilderness with something new?

Is there value in setting limits on our own development, in practicing a kind of collective tzimtzum, leaving room for all the other forms of life with whom we share this planet?

Can we use our remarkable intelligence not only to build, but to protect; not only to develop, but to restore; not only to consume, but to rewild places that have been lost?

I cannot fathom the idea of a world devoid of wild places; places that are full of life, just not the human kind; places that follow the laws of nature rather than the preferences of humanity.

It is deeply important  that the wild and beautiful world we inherited remains wild and beautiful for those who come after us, so that they too can experience an authentic connection to the living Earth.

It is for this reason that we do this work, and why we support it financially as well.

Our natural world is one of our most valuable assets, and we must preserve and protect it.

That small corner of the world that we call Israel, at the intersection of three continents, is our responsibility. Thank you for joining me in this work.

In preserving wilderness in Israel, we participate in the preservation of the world.

Shanah Tovah u’Metukah,