Rabbi Leora's Rosh Hashanah D'var Torah |
Making It Intimate: Facing the Climate Crisis in Community
Last night, I told a story about my nephew Jesse, and the moment he walked on grass for the first time. A moment of surprise and wonder for him, a moment of discovery and pleasure.
As I thought about Jesse meeting the earth, meeting the grass, for the first time, I thought about his future encounters with the natural world, which I hope he will learn to love. I imagined him feeling the wet sand fall away beneath his feet as a powerful wave rushes back out to sea. I imagined him climbing Mt Abraham in Vermont, four-thousand-feet up, gazing across field and farm, mountain and lake, cloud-filled sky. And I prayed that he would experience each with the same curiosity, the same open heart, the same reverence and joy, with which he experienced grass on his feet for the first time.
And then I imagined forests on fire; beaches and dunes washed away; trees cut down, mountains blown apart. Jesse just turned two. By the year 2050, he will be just about the age I am now. That’s the year scientists predict things will become, as they say, “truly serious.” I imagined one-third of the earth turned to uninhabitable desert.
In our liturgy this morning, we sang, today the world is born. Hayom harat olam. What does this powerful mythic claim evoke in our imagination? It gives us the opportunity to celebrate, give thanks for, and honor our extraordinary, beautiful world. It gives us the opportunity to remember that our world wasn’t always here - and to imagine that it may not always be here.
To be honest, I didn’t want to talk about the climate crisis this morning. But that’s kind of the point - no one wants to talk about the climate crisis, and that’s how we got here. And so it felt incumbent upon me - the day demands it of us. Today the world is born, hayom harat olam.
It’s hard to talk about the climate crisis, in part, because the fossil fuel industries have, for decades, waged a highly successful campaign of misinformation, distraction and cover-up. But it’s also hard spiritually and psychologically, and to change public discourse about it, we have to start with ourselves and our communities.
The writer Zadie Smith notes, “there is the scientific and ideological language for what is happening to the weather, but there are hardly any intimate words.” Smith goes on to imagine a future grandchild, thirty years from now, asking her why a mass mobilization against the fossil fuel industry took so long to emerge. “In the end,” she imagines herself saying, “the only thing that could create the necessary traction in our minds was the intimate loss of the things we loved.”
I think she is right - and I wonder if we can do the spiritual work of imagining that loss now, to gain some traction before it is too late. To do that we have to start by imagining the things we love; and then contemplate what our lives would be like without them. Confronting what is most important to us and daring to imagine its loss is unbelievably challenging spiritual work. It is guaranteed to engender in us other spiritual and psychological responses: fear, guilt, shame. Discouragement and despair. Shut down.
I wondered about a responsible way to give this dvar Torah. How I could invite you into a profoundly fraught and destabilizing emotional space without being emotionally manipulative? I’m trying to be transparent here, by inviting you to go where your mind does not want to go. Have you thought about who you won’t be able to visit when flying becomes reserved only for the super wealthy? Have you thought about what foods you will miss when they can no longer be grown and transported? I’m going to really miss olive oil. Have you thought about which coastlines you’ll be devastated to see disappear, or how different your life will feel when simple pleasures like long showers and new clothes are no longer an option?
These losses are both too distant and too painful to imagine for most of us.
I’m going to pause for a moment. I invite you to notice what’s going on for you. Maybe your jaw is starting to clench, or you are starting to shut down and check out, or you are building a defensive wall in your mind of the reasons the science could be wrong and none of these things are really going to happen. These are all totally natural responses.
But they are the beginning of the conversation, not the end. All of the good and valid reasons we have for not talking about the climate crisis must not actually keep us from talking about it.
The truth is, these responses to climate crisis are so natural, so essentially human, that our ancient rabbis, in Talmud and midrash, described them with surprising accuracy. They were not anticipating this future moment, but rather reflecting on the story of Noah and the flood - a story about human beings approaching imminent environmental collapse.
In Genesis chapter 6, we read:
The LORD saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time. And the LORD regretted that He had made man on earth, and His heart was saddened.”
A few verses after expressing this regret: “God said to Noah, “I have decided to put an end to all flesh, for the earth is filled with lawlessness because of them: I am about to destroy them with the earth. Make yourself an ark of gopher wood; make it an ark with compartments, and cover it inside and out with pitch.”
The story of Noah and his ark brings with it, for me, a cognitive dissonance, because when I think of it, I think of a children’s story. I think of children’s songs about the animals marching in two by two. I always imagined the ark as a cozy place, Noah and his family and the animals curled up inside together.
As a child, I never imagined the floodwaters rising, the fear of people, animals, birds, and insects as they tried to flee, the flattening of trees as whole mountains were swallowed up by water. I never imagined that the entire world could be destroyed as a consequence of human behavior. I think we usually leave that part out in the children’s story version. In fact, maybe part of the reason we love to tell it as a children’s story is so that we can leave out the scary part. The terrifying part.
We don’t usually include, in our telling, the rabbinic midrash that says God told Noah to build an ark because God knew it would take 120 years to build it, and hoped that people would see Noah building it, ask what it was for, learn about the coming catastrophe, and change their behavior. God hoped the flood could be averted, but dire predictions, and ever-looming deadlines, did not compel the people to change. Sound familiar? The rising sea levels and collapse of ecosystems that we are facing aren’t punishment for our behavior, but they are consequences of it.
We tend to tell the flood as a story about sweet Noah, our hero, who saves the animals (not to mention humanity) from going extinct. Yet despite Noah’s impressive resume, the rabbinic tradition is famously hard on him.
The Torah says, Noah was righteous in his generation - b’dorotav. It reads as a compliment, but the rabbis take it to mean that had he been born in another generation - in Abraham’s generation, say - he wouldn’t have been considered righteous at all. It was only in comparison to the lousy, corrupt other people of his era that he had merit.
Noah, they say, was in fact of little faith. The Torah says Noah and his family went into the Ark after the flood had already begun, “because of the waters of the flood.” Even Noah didn’t believe the flood would actually happen; only when he felt the waves lapping at his ankles did he finally enter into the ark.
But the most important reason the rabbis are ambivalent about Noah is because he was, it seems, too obedient. The Torah says, “Noah walked with God.” But Abraham, it says, walked before God. When God told Noah that God was preparing to destroy the world and needed Noah to save the species, Noah, well, obeyed. In contrast, when God told Abraham that God was preparing to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham argued, tried to convince God not to do it. It is a strikingly different orientation. Where Noah seemed to practice acceptance, offering rescue, Abraham practiced resistance, offering transformation.
We are invited to see ourselves in their light. Will we be like Noah, offering what rescue and refuge we can, following the lead of those more powerful than we are? Or will we be like Abraham, and fight with all we have to try to see a different reality come to fruition?
I have a lot of compassion for Noah. His task was immense and honestly, he did a really good job. And I think it is easier to accept and adapt, rather than resist and transform. But it isn’t going to be enough for us.
So what will we do to find the intimate words for what is happening to the weather? What spiritual practices and ritual containers will help us confront what is most important to us and dare to imagine its loss? To make real in our imaginations a world - a world which is already all too real in so many places today - where our children and grandchildren can’t breathe, can’t drink the water, cannot walk outside?
Rabbi Arthur Green, who founded my rabbinical school, suggests that each morning, we read the Torah verses about that day of creation, taking ourselves back to that first mythic week. A ritual of reconnecting to the divine source of creativity, remembering our place in creation, and focusing on gratitude for our existence.
Joanna Macy, an elder in the environmental movement, encourages the spiritual work of honestly facing our pain, holding the unspeakable truth of what we are doing to ourselves, the world, and each other. Doing so takes us out of a cycle of acceptance and apathy. It activates our empathy but also our agency. It disrupts the story that the corporate industrial powers want us to follow, that we aren’t really hurting the planet and each other and even if we are, it’s not that bad, and even if it is that bad, there is nothing we can do about it. Macy teaches that honoring our pain in community is “a doorway we go through to see the immensity of who we really are. If I have the capacity to suffer with my world,” she teaches, “then I am huge, and nothing can stop me.”
Indigenous teachers and activists have been offering wisdom and frameworks for a sustainable relationship with the earth for generations. Next week on Yom Kippur, I’ll be sharing some ideas from one of these elders and proposing another orientation for spiritual transformation, related to our relationship with land.
Judaism has always evolved to respond to the urgent issues of each historical era; in this era, we must find the ritual containers and spiritual practices that one, prepare us for the tremendous changes that will occur in our generation and our children’s generation, and two, prepare us to do the principled, strategic, long-term activism that is necessary for our survival.
I haven’t spoken about what that activism might look like. If there were a simple ask - a single thing or series of things everyone could do to solve the problem, we would know that, and we would be doing it. It is clear that we need a collective response. We must be working at the local level, in our communities, to become less dependent on fossil fuels, so that we are prepared for when they are no longer available. We must also be supporting a strong, intersectional, political movement, led by those on the frontlines of the crisis, made up of people across all political spectrums.
Noah was the only righteous person in his generation - he was alone. He had no community with whom to mourn, and no community with whom to act. None of us will act alone. Each of us must decide for ourselves where to invest our energy and resources, but none of us should be limiting our behavior to individual action. The one ask I do want to make of you is this: get clearer about what collective action you are going to participate in this year. Get clearer, and make a commitment here and now, in this community of accountability and practice.
On Rosh Hashana, we confront our mortality by asking, “who will live and who will die in the coming year?” a question which is, more broadly, a confrontation of our uncertainty about the future. But not being able to predict the future has never let us off the hook for our behavior: in the same prayer, we acknowledge how significant our own behavior is. Only by living aligned with our values, taking care of our relationships, giving generously, and tending to our inner selves can we hope to find meaning within uncertainty, can we hope to be well in an unpredictable world.
If there is anything Judaism teaches, it’s that what you do matters. There is no other life. We are choosing, right here, right now, every moment, between life and death: between living in a way that affirms life - through reciprocity, justice, hospitality - and in a way that affirms death - through extraction, greed, and indifference. Our tradition teaches that the world is always balanced between life and death. Every moment offers the possibility that the smallest mitzvah could tip the scales.
The story of Noah and the flood ends with a rainbow, a sign of God’s everlasting covenant with all of humanity, and the whole earth, a promise to never unleash the floodwaters again. “So long as the earth endures,” God promises, “seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease.” I so long for a rainbow. I so long for the UN or another climate scientist or Greta Thunberg to say: oh guess what? We figured it out. Here’s what we have to do; here is why it is going to be OK.
But in Greta’s words, “the one thing we need more than hope is action. Once we start to act, hope is everywhere. So instead of looking for hope, look for action. Then, and only then, hope will come.” And so - knowing there will be no rainbow, the next best thing is a community within which I can strengthen my gratitude; face my fear; share my pain for the world; and stand together in principled, strategic, long-term action.
Let us be that for each other.
Last night, I told a story about my nephew Jesse, and the moment he walked on grass for the first time. A moment of surprise and wonder for him, a moment of discovery and pleasure.
As I thought about Jesse meeting the earth, meeting the grass, for the first time, I thought about his future encounters with the natural world, which I hope he will learn to love. I imagined him feeling the wet sand fall away beneath his feet as a powerful wave rushes back out to sea. I imagined him climbing Mt Abraham in Vermont, four-thousand-feet up, gazing across field and farm, mountain and lake, cloud-filled sky. And I prayed that he would experience each with the same curiosity, the same open heart, the same reverence and joy, with which he experienced grass on his feet for the first time.
And then I imagined forests on fire; beaches and dunes washed away; trees cut down, mountains blown apart. Jesse just turned two. By the year 2050, he will be just about the age I am now. That’s the year scientists predict things will become, as they say, “truly serious.” I imagined one-third of the earth turned to uninhabitable desert.
In our liturgy this morning, we sang, today the world is born. Hayom harat olam. What does this powerful mythic claim evoke in our imagination? It gives us the opportunity to celebrate, give thanks for, and honor our extraordinary, beautiful world. It gives us the opportunity to remember that our world wasn’t always here - and to imagine that it may not always be here.
To be honest, I didn’t want to talk about the climate crisis this morning. But that’s kind of the point - no one wants to talk about the climate crisis, and that’s how we got here. And so it felt incumbent upon me - the day demands it of us. Today the world is born, hayom harat olam.
It’s hard to talk about the climate crisis, in part, because the fossil fuel industries have, for decades, waged a highly successful campaign of misinformation, distraction and cover-up. But it’s also hard spiritually and psychologically, and to change public discourse about it, we have to start with ourselves and our communities.
The writer Zadie Smith notes, “there is the scientific and ideological language for what is happening to the weather, but there are hardly any intimate words.” Smith goes on to imagine a future grandchild, thirty years from now, asking her why a mass mobilization against the fossil fuel industry took so long to emerge. “In the end,” she imagines herself saying, “the only thing that could create the necessary traction in our minds was the intimate loss of the things we loved.”
I think she is right - and I wonder if we can do the spiritual work of imagining that loss now, to gain some traction before it is too late. To do that we have to start by imagining the things we love; and then contemplate what our lives would be like without them. Confronting what is most important to us and daring to imagine its loss is unbelievably challenging spiritual work. It is guaranteed to engender in us other spiritual and psychological responses: fear, guilt, shame. Discouragement and despair. Shut down.
I wondered about a responsible way to give this dvar Torah. How I could invite you into a profoundly fraught and destabilizing emotional space without being emotionally manipulative? I’m trying to be transparent here, by inviting you to go where your mind does not want to go. Have you thought about who you won’t be able to visit when flying becomes reserved only for the super wealthy? Have you thought about what foods you will miss when they can no longer be grown and transported? I’m going to really miss olive oil. Have you thought about which coastlines you’ll be devastated to see disappear, or how different your life will feel when simple pleasures like long showers and new clothes are no longer an option?
These losses are both too distant and too painful to imagine for most of us.
I’m going to pause for a moment. I invite you to notice what’s going on for you. Maybe your jaw is starting to clench, or you are starting to shut down and check out, or you are building a defensive wall in your mind of the reasons the science could be wrong and none of these things are really going to happen. These are all totally natural responses.
But they are the beginning of the conversation, not the end. All of the good and valid reasons we have for not talking about the climate crisis must not actually keep us from talking about it.
The truth is, these responses to climate crisis are so natural, so essentially human, that our ancient rabbis, in Talmud and midrash, described them with surprising accuracy. They were not anticipating this future moment, but rather reflecting on the story of Noah and the flood - a story about human beings approaching imminent environmental collapse.
In Genesis chapter 6, we read:
The LORD saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time. And the LORD regretted that He had made man on earth, and His heart was saddened.”
A few verses after expressing this regret: “God said to Noah, “I have decided to put an end to all flesh, for the earth is filled with lawlessness because of them: I am about to destroy them with the earth. Make yourself an ark of gopher wood; make it an ark with compartments, and cover it inside and out with pitch.”
The story of Noah and his ark brings with it, for me, a cognitive dissonance, because when I think of it, I think of a children’s story. I think of children’s songs about the animals marching in two by two. I always imagined the ark as a cozy place, Noah and his family and the animals curled up inside together.
As a child, I never imagined the floodwaters rising, the fear of people, animals, birds, and insects as they tried to flee, the flattening of trees as whole mountains were swallowed up by water. I never imagined that the entire world could be destroyed as a consequence of human behavior. I think we usually leave that part out in the children’s story version. In fact, maybe part of the reason we love to tell it as a children’s story is so that we can leave out the scary part. The terrifying part.
We don’t usually include, in our telling, the rabbinic midrash that says God told Noah to build an ark because God knew it would take 120 years to build it, and hoped that people would see Noah building it, ask what it was for, learn about the coming catastrophe, and change their behavior. God hoped the flood could be averted, but dire predictions, and ever-looming deadlines, did not compel the people to change. Sound familiar? The rising sea levels and collapse of ecosystems that we are facing aren’t punishment for our behavior, but they are consequences of it.
We tend to tell the flood as a story about sweet Noah, our hero, who saves the animals (not to mention humanity) from going extinct. Yet despite Noah’s impressive resume, the rabbinic tradition is famously hard on him.
The Torah says, Noah was righteous in his generation - b’dorotav. It reads as a compliment, but the rabbis take it to mean that had he been born in another generation - in Abraham’s generation, say - he wouldn’t have been considered righteous at all. It was only in comparison to the lousy, corrupt other people of his era that he had merit.
Noah, they say, was in fact of little faith. The Torah says Noah and his family went into the Ark after the flood had already begun, “because of the waters of the flood.” Even Noah didn’t believe the flood would actually happen; only when he felt the waves lapping at his ankles did he finally enter into the ark.
But the most important reason the rabbis are ambivalent about Noah is because he was, it seems, too obedient. The Torah says, “Noah walked with God.” But Abraham, it says, walked before God. When God told Noah that God was preparing to destroy the world and needed Noah to save the species, Noah, well, obeyed. In contrast, when God told Abraham that God was preparing to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham argued, tried to convince God not to do it. It is a strikingly different orientation. Where Noah seemed to practice acceptance, offering rescue, Abraham practiced resistance, offering transformation.
We are invited to see ourselves in their light. Will we be like Noah, offering what rescue and refuge we can, following the lead of those more powerful than we are? Or will we be like Abraham, and fight with all we have to try to see a different reality come to fruition?
I have a lot of compassion for Noah. His task was immense and honestly, he did a really good job. And I think it is easier to accept and adapt, rather than resist and transform. But it isn’t going to be enough for us.
So what will we do to find the intimate words for what is happening to the weather? What spiritual practices and ritual containers will help us confront what is most important to us and dare to imagine its loss? To make real in our imaginations a world - a world which is already all too real in so many places today - where our children and grandchildren can’t breathe, can’t drink the water, cannot walk outside?
Rabbi Arthur Green, who founded my rabbinical school, suggests that each morning, we read the Torah verses about that day of creation, taking ourselves back to that first mythic week. A ritual of reconnecting to the divine source of creativity, remembering our place in creation, and focusing on gratitude for our existence.
Joanna Macy, an elder in the environmental movement, encourages the spiritual work of honestly facing our pain, holding the unspeakable truth of what we are doing to ourselves, the world, and each other. Doing so takes us out of a cycle of acceptance and apathy. It activates our empathy but also our agency. It disrupts the story that the corporate industrial powers want us to follow, that we aren’t really hurting the planet and each other and even if we are, it’s not that bad, and even if it is that bad, there is nothing we can do about it. Macy teaches that honoring our pain in community is “a doorway we go through to see the immensity of who we really are. If I have the capacity to suffer with my world,” she teaches, “then I am huge, and nothing can stop me.”
Indigenous teachers and activists have been offering wisdom and frameworks for a sustainable relationship with the earth for generations. Next week on Yom Kippur, I’ll be sharing some ideas from one of these elders and proposing another orientation for spiritual transformation, related to our relationship with land.
Judaism has always evolved to respond to the urgent issues of each historical era; in this era, we must find the ritual containers and spiritual practices that one, prepare us for the tremendous changes that will occur in our generation and our children’s generation, and two, prepare us to do the principled, strategic, long-term activism that is necessary for our survival.
I haven’t spoken about what that activism might look like. If there were a simple ask - a single thing or series of things everyone could do to solve the problem, we would know that, and we would be doing it. It is clear that we need a collective response. We must be working at the local level, in our communities, to become less dependent on fossil fuels, so that we are prepared for when they are no longer available. We must also be supporting a strong, intersectional, political movement, led by those on the frontlines of the crisis, made up of people across all political spectrums.
Noah was the only righteous person in his generation - he was alone. He had no community with whom to mourn, and no community with whom to act. None of us will act alone. Each of us must decide for ourselves where to invest our energy and resources, but none of us should be limiting our behavior to individual action. The one ask I do want to make of you is this: get clearer about what collective action you are going to participate in this year. Get clearer, and make a commitment here and now, in this community of accountability and practice.
On Rosh Hashana, we confront our mortality by asking, “who will live and who will die in the coming year?” a question which is, more broadly, a confrontation of our uncertainty about the future. But not being able to predict the future has never let us off the hook for our behavior: in the same prayer, we acknowledge how significant our own behavior is. Only by living aligned with our values, taking care of our relationships, giving generously, and tending to our inner selves can we hope to find meaning within uncertainty, can we hope to be well in an unpredictable world.
If there is anything Judaism teaches, it’s that what you do matters. There is no other life. We are choosing, right here, right now, every moment, between life and death: between living in a way that affirms life - through reciprocity, justice, hospitality - and in a way that affirms death - through extraction, greed, and indifference. Our tradition teaches that the world is always balanced between life and death. Every moment offers the possibility that the smallest mitzvah could tip the scales.
The story of Noah and the flood ends with a rainbow, a sign of God’s everlasting covenant with all of humanity, and the whole earth, a promise to never unleash the floodwaters again. “So long as the earth endures,” God promises, “seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease.” I so long for a rainbow. I so long for the UN or another climate scientist or Greta Thunberg to say: oh guess what? We figured it out. Here’s what we have to do; here is why it is going to be OK.
But in Greta’s words, “the one thing we need more than hope is action. Once we start to act, hope is everywhere. So instead of looking for hope, look for action. Then, and only then, hope will come.” And so - knowing there will be no rainbow, the next best thing is a community within which I can strengthen my gratitude; face my fear; share my pain for the world; and stand together in principled, strategic, long-term action.
Let us be that for each other.
