A Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Day 5768/2007

by Gil Friend

     
This drash is dedicated to the memory of my father Chaim ben Dovid Yeshaya v'Tzivyah, alav hashalom, who died four months ago on Yom Yerushalayim, and who fired and inspired my curiosity, and so much more.

 For 35 years I've worked to bridge the schism between environmental health and economic well-being. Now on the brink of 5768, we are indeed on the brink -- of climate change that looks, with each report, more potentially disastrous; of a tipping point in awareness about ecological urgencies and opportunities; and of leadership from unexpected quarters – even unexpected as the dread Wal-Mart (which is one of the main drivers of business sustainability in the US today).

 But that's not what I'll talk about today.

 David, the Rabbi, talked eloquently last night about science. This morning I, the scientist, will talk about Torah -- about the teaching and guidance I find in our tradition for the work I do and the challenge we all face. These are things I never learned as a yeshiva bokher, nor as a teenage socialist-zionist camp-goer, not even when I began regular Torah study nearly ten years ago

 One of my favorite cartoons depicts two cave men sitting at a fire, when one says: "I’ve got a great idea! Let's cut the earth up in little squares and sell them!"

 It's a funny take on commodity capitalism, and how disconnected we are from the web of life that sustains not only our physical existence but our economic life as well.

 We live in a time when that disconnectedness brings great risk. Perhaps it always did, but today the consequences are huge.

 It flies in the face of the physical reality of the living earth, which is devoid of the fragmentation, compartmentalization and specialization that moderns seem to impose on everything. It flies in the face of the repeated admonitions of "native" peoples that one can no more sell the earth than one can sell one's mother.

 It also flies in the face of the message of Torah: “The earth is mine,” says the Infinite Source.

 It turns out that Judaism is a deeply ecological path -- one of the many jewels long lost to those of us who grew up identified with the urban intellectual culture that was so dominant among the European Jews who formed the majority of the US Jewish community (if not urban before they got here, the certainly urban once they settled).

 We see it in the creation story in Genesis -- so misunderstood that Lynn White’s influential paper on "The Historical Roots of the Ecological Crisis" ascribed much of the blame to the so-called "Judeo-Christian" theology and philosophy of linear time and the domination of nature.

 But White suffered from an ailment common to most Christians (and, sadly, most contemporary Jews): his encounter with scripture is through translations, which try as they might fail to capture the intent and deeper meanings of the original Hebrew. And he has been rather selective in his choice of proof texts -- omitting, for example, such instructions as this from the Book of Job: “[A]sk the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth and it will teach you; the fish of the sea, they will inform you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Eternal has done this?”

 In fact the language of Genesis lends itself to richer alternate meanings, as Hebrew so often does. “U’r’du b’dgat hayam, u’v’ohf hashamayim, u’v’chol chaya haromeset al ha’aretz” is commonly translated as “dominate the fish of the sea, and the birds of the sky, and every living thing that move on the earth.” But the root radah, RDH, usually translated as "domination", also applies to the husbandry of a beekeeper – a very different image of nurture and care.

 "Fill the earth and subdue it" - "meeloo et ha'aretz v'kivshuhah" - holds different connotations as well. As Rabbi Gershon Winkler observes, “…while the word kevush is indeed quite commonly used in literal contexts of ‘violation,’ ‘suppression,’ ‘oppression,’ ‘conquest.’ ‘force,’ and ‘restraint,’ it is also used to connote ‘honoring,’ as in: ‘When the sages gather for discussion, (v’nikveshin eylu l’eylu) and humble themselves [in respect] for one another, God participates.’…. If we choose to read v’kivshuho as responsibility to care for the earth, she is more likely to nurture us in turn; if we choose to read v’kivshuho as license to subdue the earth, we are more apt to destroy her.”

 Even the most familiar phrase in the Bible -- "B'reisheet barah Elokim et hashamayim v'et ha'aretz" -- doesn't necessarily mean "in the beginning g-d created the heavens and the earth", but something more like "When G!d began creating the heavens and the earth"... which evokes a radically different - and even more mysterious - cosmology and process of creation.

 And what of the moment when Creator says "Na'aseh et ha'adam b'tsalmeynu"? Our sages struggled with the plural, and envisioned a king speaking the royal we, or addressing a council of angels. Well, the story tells of the creation of lights, earth, plants and aninmal, not of angels. Rabbi Winkler suggests that is who Creator is addressing -- that we are formed “in the image” of all that stuff, living and non-living, that came before us in the evolutionary unfolding of billions of years, encapsulated in the six metaphoric days of biblical creation. And that all aspects of creation -- the silent beings, the domem, the stones; the sprouting beings, the tsomeyach, the plants; the living beings, the khaya, the animals-- are the teachers of the speaking beings, the m'daber. That is, us

 To Rabbi David's observation that B’reisheet Aleph and Bet offer different environmental ethics – “dominate Creation” or “tend the garden” -- it's telling to see that our tradition has dealt with that by consistently leaning in the direction of stewardship. (At least until the nascent Israel got caught up in the enthusiasms of industrial modernity.) According to the Tosefta, for example, “Man may not taste anything until he has recited a blessing, as it is written, ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness therefor” (Psalm 24:1). Anyone who derives benefit from this world without a (prior) blessing is guilty of misappropriating sacred property.’” In other words, our tradition teaches that anything in this world – at least anything that gives benefit – is considered sacred. Which puts us about as far from Lynn White as one might imagine.

 Hafoch v'hafoch - hakol bo," the Sages tell us. "Turn it and turn it, all is within in." So what if we look deeply into our Pastoral, even Aboriginal, tradition that we carry -- even as the human population on earth becomes majority urban, as we did last year? What does Torah -- which I translate not as "The Law" but as "The Teaching" -- teach us?

 To be mindful. To be grateful. To be responsible - which is to say, to be present to the consequences of each our actions. To be present to the mystery that, in the words of the Ha’Meir prayer, "renews in each moment, continuously, the works of Creation."

 What does this perspective offer us on Rosh Hashana - which Rabbi Winkler translates not as "New Year" but as "the beginning of the transformation"?

 This offers the opportunity to be present to the fact that we each live in a specific place with its own distinct resources and rhythms -- and that we live different lives when we acknowledge that is true, than when we pretend in our ultimately futile ways that it is not.

 At a larger scale, my teacher Buckminster Fuller observed, we live on an 8000 mile diameter ball of rock hurtling through space, in a film of life thinner, by proportion, than the skin of an apple, thinner than the fog your breath would make on a 12 inch diameter stainless steel sphere.

 At a smaller scale, it's a simple as knowing where everything comes from, and where everything goes. Like our water. Or our children’s toys.