Re-Branding Shemittah - Bereshit 5775

Ladies and gentlemen, we have just begun 5775, which just happens to be a year of shemittah, the sabbatical year in which the Torah commands us not to sow or tend crops in the land of Israel (Lev. 25:1-7), but rather to let the land lie fallow. The Torah does not say this explicitly, but this seventh year of rest, this Shabbat for the land was likely instituted to avoid depleting the soil of its nutrients.

Long before the Jews were metropolitan residents, we were an agricultural people, and we were much more in touch with the land. We grew our own food, and when there was not enough rain or the soil was exhausted, we would starve. And hence the need for the shemittah. (BTW, it’s worth pointing out that the seventh of every unit in Jewish time has significance: the seventh day is Shabbat, the seventh month, Tishrei, contains the cycle of holidays we have just completed, and the seventh year is the shemittah.)

The shemittah made a whole lot of sense to our ancestors. Today, we mostly ignore it; it presents a few halakhic challenges to those who pay close attention to where our food comes from. But for the most part, shemittah flies under the radar of the vast majority of the Jewish world.

One of our tasks as contemporary Jews is to consider how seemingly inapplicable ancient customs and rituals can be re-appropriated for today’s world. Jews have always done this.  That’s how each of the three pilgrimage festivals (Pesah, Shavuot, Sukkot) became associated with key aspects of the Exodus story, and how Rosh Hashanah came to be about the new year, and Shemini Atzeret came to be redefined by Simhat Torah (which is not mentioned in the Torah at all), and so forth.

But shemittah - what on Earth do we do with that? (Heh heh.)

I’ll come back to that in a moment. Meanwhile, a brief note from the Torah:

When God creates the world in the first chapters of Bereshit / Genesis, God offers (in the second Creation story, Gen. 2:4b ff.) the following instruction to the man who has just been fashioned from the dust of the Earth (Gen. 2:15):

וַיִּקַּח ה' אֱ-לֹהִים, אֶת-הָאָדָם; וַיַּנִּחֵהוּ בְגַן-עֵדֶן, לְעָבְדָהּ וּלְשָׁמְרָהּ.

The Lord God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden, to till it and tend it.

Our responsibility, suggests the Torah, is to take care of God’s Creation, even while we use it for our own benefit. A midrash from Kohelet Rabbah (7:13) expands on this to say: “Beware lest you spoil and destroy My world, for if you will spoil it, there is no one to repair it after you." (Shimon Peres quoted this in Israel’s statement at the 2002 World Summit for Sustainable Development, and it was repeated at the summit last month by Israel’s current minister of environmental protection, Amir Peretz.)

How should we understand this (“to till it and tend it”) today? That God has given us permission to plant crops, but not to deplete the soil so that it is unusable. That we may raise animals for food (actually only explicitly permitted after the Flood) but not to create huge lagoons of manure that cause tremendous floods of poop, polluting rivers and streams and fields. That God has allowed us to process crude oil from the ground to heat our homes and get us from place to place, but not to the extent that we affect our atmosphere so much that the climate is irreparably changed. (Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas; see the manure lagoons above.)

Is this how we tend Creation?

We also read today about the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the fruit of which was forbidden to Adam and Eve, but that they ultimately tasted. The 15th-century Portuguese Torah commentator Don Yitzhaq Abravanel saw this episode as an allegory for indulgence. Everything that the first couple needed was provided in the Garden, and so they were free to contemplate God and holy activities. But by indulging in the forbidden fruit, they chose instead material pursuits, the desire to manipulate the world not only to provide for their own needs, but also to produce many non-essential items, indulging their desires. From this, says Abravanel, only “spiritual death” will ensue.

Abravanel was surely not thinking about the climate in the 15th century. But it is not such a leap to see how what he sees as the human choice to pursue our own physical necessities (i.e. the good) and non-necessities (the evil over-indulgences) has led to an unholy imbalance in Creation. You might say that in the Garden, Adam and Eve lived sustainably, taking from all the available fruit trees only as needed. But once they tasted the forbidden fruit, they became subject to the whims of want, and we have been struggling with how to balance our lifestyles with the unintended consequences of desire and human ingenuity ever since.

There are two essential problems that the Earth is facing. The first is that there are already 7.3 billion people on this planet, and that number grows a wee bit each day. The second is that much of the world wants to live the way that we do in the West - to eat rich foods every day, to drive personal cars, to select from a nearly-limitless pile of wonderful, “essential” merchandise with which to fill our homes and our lives, to travel regularly to distant places for vacations and for work.

And all of these activities have a cost - a cost in energy, in resources. That cost is effectively invisible. And, speaking on a per-individual basis, it is insignificant.

But multiply that cost by seven billion - that is, a seven with nine zeroes after it - and it becomes much more significant. Now not all 7 billion live this way today.  But it is obvious that it would be impossible for everybody on the planet to live according to the American standard. Does it make sense that only those of us who got here first should be allowed to do so?

The results are that, among other things, the average temperature of the planet has risen by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 100 years, and is expected to rise another 2 degrees by the end of this century. Now that may not sound like much, but the effects on worldwide climate - including floods and droughts and other unusual weather events - will be profound.

On a related note, a recent study by the World Wildlife Fund indicated that populations of “mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish around the globe dropped 52 percent” today as compared with 1970, the year I was born. This is a much steeper decline than had been previously supposed.

We have come a long way since Gan Eden / the Garden of Eden. But all the more so, since this shemittah year calls to mind our duty to use our resources wisely and respectfully, to honor God and Creation by giving the land a Shabbat, should we not use this year to commit ourselves more forcefully to changing our current trajectory?

And although there are many ways to consider sustainable use of God’s gift to us, the biggest challenge that we are now facing is global warming. Ladies and gentlemen, the time to act on this was ten years ago.

A few weeks back, my daughter and I attended the Climate March in New York, along with along with Temple Israel Board member Veronica Bisek Lurvey and her son, our Executive Director, Leon Silverberg and his adult daughter, and some 300,000 other concerned Americans. The attendance far exceeded expectations.

It was a tremendous show of support in advance of the UN Climate Summit, at which pledges were made, commitments were given, speeches were delivered. We shall see if the nations that made pledges, particularly the US and the other big polluters, will follow through.

Meanwhile, perhaps we can take this shemittah year to consider wiser use of our resources on a macro level, and on a personal level. I suggest that we consider making a personal shemittah pledge: Use less. Drive less. Buy less. Throw away less.

We have to start small, but we have to be thinking big as well. Very small actions, performed by many, many people, can yield a significant result.  How many grains of sand does it take to make a beach?

But greater than that, perhaps now is the time to exhort our leaders directly for greater action. The United States made a modest pledge at the climate summit, to “bolster resilience efforts” (and frankly, I have no idea what that means).

Not much has changed in the seven years that I have been discussing these issues in this space. Where are the extensive solar arrays (solar panels have come down 50% in price since 2010)? Where are the wind farms? Where is the cap and trade system? We in Great Neck are seeing a few all-electric Teslas on our streets, but where is the all-electric Chevy?

Germany is now producing 30% of its energy from wind, biogas, and the sun. They have spent tens of billions of dollars on this infrastructure, and in 2010 there were 370,000 Germans employed in this sector. Germany pledged last month that by 2020 they would reduce their carbon emissions by 40% over 1990 levels. Why are we not doing this here?

God gave us this earth to till it and to tend it, with all the implications of that statement. And although we opted to leave Gan Eden and pursue the less-spiritual path, we are still bound to the obligation to protect and honor Creation through wise use. Let’s take this shemittah year to rededicate ourselves to personal and global consideration of the Earth, because it’s the only one we have.

Shabbat shalom.


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, 10/18/2014.)

Climbing the Sefirotic Tree: God, Climate Change, and Sandy

This Shabbat is Global Hunger Shabbat, an annual program hosted by the American Jewish World Service. Temple Israel is officially participating in Global Hunger Shabbat for the third year running.  I was planning to speak this morning about hunger, and to study with you some texts from Jewish tradition about world hunger and about the challenges raised in bringing aid to those who are hungry around the world.

And then came the storm. As I began to write this sermon on Tuesday evening, 90% of Long Island households were without electricity, seven tunnels leading to Manhattan were filled with water, members of this community and had been forced to leave their uninhabitable homes, and the world was still reeling from news of Hurricane / Superstorm Sandy’s devastation. 

So as important as it is for us to speak about hunger, the aftermath of the storm and its implications in a Jewish context are more pressing at the moment.

Ladies and gentlemen, whenever there is a natural disaster such as this, when people lose their homes and livelihoods and even their lives, we look for answers. Many of us naturally turn to God, and there will always be preachers -- rabbis, ministers, priests, imams -- who will cite our violation of God’s word as the reason behind the disaster.  For example, some blamed the Haitian earthquake on the depravity of the citizens of Haiti, or Hurricane Katrina on the homosexual community of New Orleans. A quick Google search will reveal that there are already online statements by religious folks pointing to similar reasons for Sandy. (For example, Rabbi Noson Leiter of “Torah Jews for Decency.”)

I am not that kind of rabbi. I don’t believe in that kind of God. My God is a good God, a source of blessing, who bestows upon us daily miracles of life and love and stability in times of trouble. My God is the God that works through us, that enables us to help others and ourselves. My God is a positive force for all that makes this world function: the laws of physics that ensure that, for example, the Earth continues to rotate on its axis, and that the sun continues to provide us with energy, and that all of the biological principles that allow us to function as individuals as well as part of the larger ecosystem continue to apply.

And most importantly, God gives us the ability to raise ourselves up through our intellect.

God gave us the power to understand the laws of science that make this both an orderly and a chaotic world. As humanity moves forward in its understanding of the natural forces that make, more to the point, hazardous tropical storms unleash their dangerous winds on big population centers, we gain a greater understanding of God’s Creation. And as the amassed scientific knowledge of humanity increases, we grow, in some sense, closer to the God who gave us this ability.

The medieval kabbalists envisioned God as a tree of ten sefirot / spheres of Divine emanation, arrayed in a pattern similar to a hopscotch course. 

 

The lowest sefirot are the ones that we are most familiar with - the Shekhinah, God’s presence, is the one that is said to have dwelt in the Temple in Jerusalem when it was standing, 2,000 years ago.  The sefirot at the top, like the elusive Keter, just below the infinite Ein Sof, are so far removed from us that we are unable to discern anything about them.

And yet, as the collected body of human knowledge of science grows, as our awareness of the principles that guide God’s creation increases, we ascend in our understanding of God.  We “climb,” as it were, that sefirotic tree and are better able to grasp God’s higher, more spiritual aspects.  We will never reach the top, but we continue to move upwards toward Keter, the crown of God’s glory.

Those preachers who like to pin storms on God are in effect denying that God gave us the ability to discern between natural and metaphysical forces, denying that the pursuit of scientific knowledge and climatic patterns and modeling is a Divine gift. They are not giving the credit that humanity deserves in reaching higher, toward the more elusive sefirot.

Aha! you might say. What about what the Torah teaches us about Sodom and Gomorrah? What about the story of Jonah? What about the second paragraph of the Shema, which we read this morning, the one that says that if you fulfill the mitzvot / God’s commandments, you will receive blessings and that if you don’t, you will be cursed?

Yes, those stories and black-and-white ideologies appealed to our ancestors. But we are blessed with a much more thorough and nuanced understanding of how our world works. Yes, in our daily tefillot / prayers between Sukkot and Pesah we say after the first paragraph of the Amidah,

 מַשִּׁיב הָרוּחַ וּמורִיד הַגָּשֶּׁם

Mashiv haruah umorid hagashem
You, God, are the one who causes the wind to blow and the rain to fall.

And yet, at the same time, we concede that wind and rain are both meteorological phenomena that are the result of weather patterns that can be (somewhat) predicted by computer models. So why should we continue to say mashiv haruah umorid hagashem?

Tefillah is not meant to be understood literally. It is a poetic blueprint for the ideal, for what could be. We pray to remind ourselves that we should strive to create the world that is more perfect, even though we know that life is itself imperfect.

Likewise, during birkat hamazon / the blessings after eating, when we say, 

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יי. הַזָּן אֶת הַכּל

Barukh atah Adonai, hazan et hakol.
Praised are You, God, who feeds everybody.

we seem to be stating that there is food for all.  And yet we all know that we live in an imperfect world, in which food is not evenly distributed. (And, by the way, a new book by Frederick Kaufman reveals that there is, in fact, more than enough food to feed the world; people starve because they cannot afford it, not due to shortages. Hence the need for Global Hunger Shabbat.)

Back to Sandy. This storm must be seen in the context of the growing number of natural disasters around the world, storms that are increasing in frequency and intensity.

Ladies and gentlemen, when Gov. Andrew Cuomo held a press conference on Tuesday in the storm’s wake, he recalled his days as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, when he visited multiple disaster sites, and went on to say that “we have a 100-year flood every two years now.” And he also said this:

“There have been a series of extreme weather events. That is not a political statement; that is a factual statement. Anyone who says there is not a change in weather patterns is denying reality.”

The governor did not use the words “climate change” or “global warming,” but he did concede that we are facing a new meteorological reality, one in which it is not unreasonable to expect that New York’s subway tunnels will flood, that the power will be out for a week, and that lives will be lost more frequently.

Nobody can deny that the Earth’s temperature has risen 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century, a substantially greater and faster rise than has historically occurred, and that this is causing havoc with our meteorological patterns. There is no denying that ocean levels have risen 9"-10" in the last 100 years. There is no denying that these catastrophic storms and floods are happening more often. There is no denying that the polar ice caps are melting. And there is no denying that we humans are playing a role in these events: by favoring cars over public transit; by eating far more meat and dairy than we need to (methane produced by animal farming accounts for 70% of global warming effects); by being generally profligate with our energy consumption.

Of course, no climatologist will state conclusively that any single weather event is the direct result of climate change. This can only be demonstrated within the context of years of careful research. (There was a New York Times post on their “Green” blog about this). But that is what makes them scientists and not charlatans. The principles of academic rigor prevent such statements. But all of the trends I just listed are unimpeachable.

Meanwhile, there is a way out. The Talmud teaches us that among the first mitzvot that a rabbi should teach a convert to Judaism about are the obligations to leave sections of your fields un-harvested, so that hungry people with no resources can come and take food for themselves. We learn from this that one of the essential teachings of Judaism is that we are all responsible for the welfare of our fellow people, regardless of their status.

Climate change, and the more frequent large storms that it has yielded, is not God’s work. It is ours. We got ourselves into this, and we can get ourselves out. And ultimately the only way to do so will be by working together - by taking responsibility for the mess that we have created.

We will continue to climb the sefirotic tree, learning more and more about Creation and how to manipulate it for our benefit. But until we put our God-given intellect into cooperating for the betterment of all humanity, the ideal blueprint that we invoke when we step into a synagogue to join our voices together in prayer will remain only a blueprint, and not reality.


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson