Rabbi's
Sermons
Rosh HaShanah
Day One
September 23, 2006
Breaking news from early this week: A warm-water Atlantic triple fin fish has, for the first time, been caught off the coast of Britain. I bring you this exciting news not to whet your appetite for a new exotic fish species now that Sea Bass is almost extinct, but to inform you of yet another sign of species migrating north as global temperatures rise.
You see the triple fin fish is usually found off the coasts of Africa, South America and the Mediterranean, but was caught by a fisherman in the Bristol Channel, where he was hoping to catch salmon and sea trout.
Scientists have known about global warming since the late 1980s. They've written hundreds of papers about its causes. Humankind is burning fossil fuels, producing greenhouse gases that trap more of the sun's energy. And they've detailed its effects and implications: Warmer oceans. Higher sea levels. Stronger hurricanes. More common heat waves. Warm climate flora and fauna moving north.
The rest of us haven't quite gotten it. But recently it seems not only the earth has reached a tipping point so has public perception of the debate. Rob Davis, a reporter for the San Diego Voice newspaper writes, “Some scientists and environmentalists say historians will reflect on 2006 as the seminal year in the debate. The year the Republican governor of California agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The year that millions saw Al Gore's definitive global warming movie. The year that a heat wave killed 140 across California. (The year those who question global warming were no longer referred to as skeptics but as denialists, like those in the medieval world who refused to give up the precious notion that the sun and planets revolved around the earth).
Two-thousand-and-six. The moment the tide turned on global warming. The moment we realized: Climate change is real.”
This is what global warming means for those not keeping up to date: Carbon dioxide and other gases warm the surface of the planet naturally by trapping solar heat in the atmosphere. This is a good thing because it keeps our planet habitable. However, by burning fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil and clearing forests we have dramatically increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere and temperatures are rising. Glaciers at the poles have been melting raising water levels. Water temperatures rise as well.
Time magazine ran a cover story featuring a polar bear precariously floating on thin ice and warned: “Be worried. Be very worried. Global Warming Isn't Just Some Vague Future Problem.” The cover story by Jeffrey Kluger reported that despite concerns over global warming and glacial melting most scientists felt that if there was any consolation, it was that the glacial pace of nature would give us decades or even centuries to sort out the problem.
But glaciers, it turns out, can move with surprising speed, and so can nature. What few people reckoned on was that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse. Pump enough CO2 into the sky, and that last part per million of greenhouse gas behaves like the 212th degree Fahrenheit that turns a pot of hot water into a plume of billowing steam. Melt enough Greenland ice, and you reach the point at which you're not simply dripping meltwater into the sea but dumping whole glaciers. By one recent measure, several Greenland ice sheets have doubled their rate of slide, and recently the journal Science published a study suggesting that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to an eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft.
"Things are happening a lot faster than anyone predicted," says a chief scientist for the advocacy group Environmental Defense. "The last 12 months have been alarming."
Today is Rosh HaShanah. When the Shofar is heard on Rosh HaShanah it sounds an alarm to us that the day of Judgment has arrived. Today is Rosh HaShanah - Yom Harat Olam. The day of the birth of the world. Since today is Shabbat we do not sound the alarm. But for too long we have refused to hear the Shofar warning us of impending global disaster.
The reality of global warming and the looming environmental catastrophe is an issue that will become more and more prominent to our American way of life. This summer while the war in Israel was raging Nicholas Kristof wrote an op ed piece for the New York Times about small but meaningful efforts by the municipal leadership of Portland, OR to curb their community’s carbon emissions which is the leading cause of global warming. He wrote, “I almost didn’t write this column, because with the Middle East in flames it’s obvious that climate change is not the most important topic of the day. But it could be the most important issue of this century.” (In fact it would nice if Kristof would stop writing about the Middle East altogether and focus exclusively on the environment.)
But on this Rosh Hashanah, 5767 we Jews need to grasp that concern for the environment is not also a Jewish issue, it may even be the pre-eminent Jewish issue.
Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook one of the foremost religious thinkers of the 20th century, scholar mystic, chief rabbi of Palestine before the creation of the state wrote a poem called the “Four Fold Song” in which he described four levels of increasing holiness and devekut, closeness to God. The first level begins with one who sings the song of his own life, and in himself finds full spiritual satisfaction. The next level is one who sings the song of his people stretching his ability to love the whole community of Israel. A further level is achieved by one who sings a song that reaches beyond the boundary of Israel to sing the song of humanity. And finally there is one who rises toward wider horizons, until he links himself with all existence, with all God's creatures, with all worlds, and he sings his song with all of them. According to Rav Kook, this is the highest rung, to be able to link oneself with the totality of God’s creation. From the inception of the holy Torah we learn that humanity’s status as the pinnacle of creation brought tremendous responsibility with it.
A verse in Ecclesiastes states,
Eccl. 7:13 Behold God’s creation, who is able to fix that which has been corrupted? The Sages sermonized that at the moment Adam’s creation, God took him on a tour of the Garden of Eden and said to him, “behold my creations, how beautiful they are. And all that I created, I created for your behalf. Reflect on this and do not corrupt or destroy my world. For if you do, there will be no one to repair it after you.”
Rabbi David Gordis, in one of the study articles in the back of our Etz Hayim Humash, writes that the Bible conditions the Jew to three R’s in relation to nature and ecology: reverence, restraint and responsibility. Through its narratives, legal sections and poetry we are encouraged to feel reverence and awe to the diversity and complexity of creation, to enjoin restraint in the exploitation of natural resources for human needs, and to act on the principle of human responsibility for faithful trusteeship over the natural world.
These three Rs - Reverence, restraint and responsibility – we shall see also find a parallel in the way the individual on Rosh Hashanah prepares to do teshuvah, helping us to disavow the behaviors we wish to remove and to live up to the highest level of our ability.
The opening chapter of the book of Genesis is marked as we all know with the repeated emphasis of God’s judgment, “And God saw that this was good.” Note that each of these Divine reflections are made before human beings are created. Torah teaches us that the created world has its own integrity apart from humanity. The natural world is good in and of itself and we humans must respect that goodness.
Listen to how the psalmist in psalm 104 values the structured beauty of God’s world:
Bless the Lord, O my soul; O Lord, my God, You are very great; … He established the earth on its foundations, so that it shall never totter. You made the deep cover it as a garment; the waters stood above the mountains. …You make springs gush forth in torrents; they make their way between the hills, giving drink to all the wild beasts... The birds of the sky dwell beside them and sing among the foliage. You water the mountains from Your lofts; the earth is sated from the fruit of Your work. You make the grass grow for the cattle, and herbage for man’s labor that he may get food out of the earth …How many are the things You have made, O Lord; You have made them all with wisdom; the earth is full of Your creations…”
The Bible enlightens us that our world without human interference would operate quite successfully.
True the Torah gives mankind sovereignty over the world: “Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it”. However Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra, a 12th century
Bible commentator clarified this, “The meaning of God giving sovereignty over the earth to humanity is that humanity is God’s steward over the earth and must do everything according to God’s word.”
To confirm Ibn Ezra’s teaching one can find many examples in Torah of restraint on human exploitation of nature. Rabbi Saul Berman points to a classic example of such restraint– the Sabbath. He writes, “one of the most essential religious institutions of Jewish civilization is the Sabbath. The central character of the Jewish Sabbath is formed by the biblical proscription against melacha (usually translated as "work") on the Sabbath day. Jewish tradition insists that … the prohibition is … to prevent the productive transformation of objects, whether natural or man-made. … The point is that the essence of the prohibition against melacha (productive work) [on Shabbat ] is to teach that the productive manipulation of the environment is not an absolute right.”
Of course, human beings are not only restrained from this environmental manipulation on a weekly basis but also regarding the land itself. The world belongs to God; people are its trustees not its proprietors. This principle underlies the biblical laws relating to the jubilee and the sabbatical years.
“Six years you may sow your field and six years you may prune your vineyard and gather in the yield. But in the seventh year the land shall have a sabbath of complete rest, a sabbath of the Lord: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard….. But the land must not be sold beyond reclaim, for the land is Mine; you are but strangers resident with Me.”
Kashrut is another example of the Torah’s attempt to keep in check our human impulse to exploit nature for our exclusive benefit. The principle of restraint is established through the various regulations of what animals can be eaten and how they may be slaughtered.
By training us to revere God’s wondrous world and to restrain our exploitation of it, the Bible encourages us to act responsibly as stewards of the earth.
“The Lord God took the human and placed him in the garden of Eden, to till it and tend it.
Jewish tradition found a crucial verse about the meaning of ecological stewardship in a parasha about behavior during war time. "When you besiege a city for a long time, fighting against it to conquer it, you shall not destroy the trees thereof by wielding an axe against them; for you may eat of them, and you may not cut them down, for is the tree of the field a person that it should be besieged by you? Only trees which you know not to be fruit bearing trees, may you destroy and cut down; and you may build bulwarks against the city that wars against you, until it is subdued."
In deriving halacha from this verse, the great Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides insists that this prohibition does not only apply to fruit bearing trees, but to all objects which either exist in nature, or which have been manufactured by human beings. This is the mitzvah of Bal Tashchit - One shall not waste anything. Other rabbinic traditions lessened the severity of Maimonides’ understanding. But nevertheless the message of the Bible seems quite clear. As stewards of the earth, a sacred responsibility to care for and to tend it, has been handed to us and we are obliged to act.
Today this means we Jews are required to support environmental efforts at sustainability. COEJL, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, have been leaders in the Jewish community at informing and educating Jews about our responsibilities to the earth. In January this year and array of Jewish religious leaders, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist signed a document Wonder and Restraint: A Rabbinic Call to Environmental Action. In it they called on the Jewish community to commit to :
• the pursuit of low environmental impact practices in our own households, workplaces, synagogues, and other Jewish institutions (e.g., reduce, reuse, recycle, conserve energy and water);
• the encouragement of sound and positive environmental business policies through our expenditures and our investments;
• the incorporation of environmental considerations, particularly the urgency of global warming and biodiversity loss, in the formulation of political, religious and cultural Jewish communal policies, and a heightened emphasis on environmental justice and wholeness in our public policy statements and activities;
• the integration of nature-oriented activities and Creation concerns in our observances of holy days, our Jewish education for children and adults, our liturgies, and our life-cycle ceremonies.
Reverence, restraint, responsibility. This three fold action plan towards renewing our relationship with the world parallels the process of doing teshuvah, repentance in order to renew our relationship with God.
In the Malchuyot section of the Rosh Hashanah Musaf service, we recite the prayer we know as the Aleinu. This was the origin of its composition. We state, “It is incumbent upon us to praise the Lord of all, to give greatness to the Creator of the world… For God stretched forth the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth… Truly God is our sovereign there is none besides God.” Rosh HaShanah obliges us to begin our journey to spiritual wholeness with recognition that there is indeed a Higher Power in the universe who created it and engages it still. Recognition that we are judged compels us to restrain our desires and behaviors in the face of others for we are all equal in relationship to God. Moshe Haim Luzzato calls this the ethical characteristic of Zehirut. Controlling our desires in order to channel them to do good. This is followed by Zerizut – a passionate desire to act on the good. This is the third ‘R’ – responsibility. We act on our changed nature. We sense the Divine wonder, we control our behavior and we respond positively by lifting ourselves up to God. Reverence, restraint, responsibility. It is the Jewish way outward towards the global environment and it is the Jewish way in to our soul’s environment.
Psalm 104 ends, “I will sing to the Lord as long as I live; all my life I will chant hymns to my God. May my prayer be pleasing to Him; I will rejoice in the Lord.
If we listen closely, this song still may be heard.
Rabbi Aryeh Levin, the "tzaddik of Jerusalem" (1885-1969), told how he once was walking in the fields with his mentor, Rav Avraham Yitzhak Kook. In the course of their Torah discussion, Rabbi Levin picked a flower. At this, Rav Kook remarked, "All my days I have been careful never to pluck a blade of grass or a flower needlessly, when it had the ability to grow or blossom. You know the teaching of our sages that not a single blade of grass grows here on Earth that does not have an angel above it, commanding it to grow. Every sprout and leaf says something meaningful, every stone whispers some hidden message in the silence, every creation sings its song."
"These words of our great master," Rabbi Levin concluded, "spoken from a pure and holy heart, engraved themselves deeply in my heart. From that day on, I began to feel a strong sense of compassion for all things."
May this coming year instill within us a compassion for all things, for ourselves for humanity for our global environment.
