The grandeur and scale of the natural world signal to me that I am safe, with no need to worry whether I am going to damage the forest, the lake or the ocean. No matter how clumsy or destructive I am, I. can’t. break. nature. In my smallness, in nature’s bigness, I feel safe, free and expansive, beyond anything else I know, and it is beautiful.
But with the global population exceeding 8 billion and the temperature of the Arctic topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and with 19 of the 20 hottest years on record all happening since 2001 and with scientists telling us that we’re really, actually, truly on the clock when it comes to our global climate crisis, while I alone might not be able to break nature, together, we certainly can do some damage.
Because Jews have believed that the natural world is a manifestation of the Source of All Life, nature could not be separated from God.
And we certainly have done significant damage. Many scientists have designated ours as a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene (the first new epoch since the last glacial period ended 10,000 years ago), in order to adequately describe the destructive influence that humans have had on the natural world in just a couple of centuries. It is clearly past time to rethink our relationship to nature.
Teva
The Hebrew word for nature is teva. But the first time the word teva appears in Jewish text with the meaning of “nature” isn’t until the 12th century C.E. How could it be that for some 2,000 years, Jews had no word for “nature” when ours is a religion that is unequivocally and undeniably rooted in the natural world? Judaism is a land-based and earth-based tradition!
The answer is as straightforward as it is startling. Traditionally, for Jews, everything, including nature, is part of God. Ein od milvado, the Hasidim taught. There is nothing other than God, Godself. And so with this intuition unquestioned, there was no need to distinguish between God and the natural world. Because they believed that the natural world was a manifestation of the Source of All Life, an aspect of Divine mystery made corporeal through the unbounded diversity and beauty of God’s creation, nature could not be separated from God or distinguished from God. Because there was no nature without God, there was no need, or even possibility, for a specific word that would have to try to contain the bountiful and majestic proliferation of the Eternal.
There is nothing other than God
Rather, all is one. The Jewish liturgy is centered around the declaration: Shema Yisrael Adonai eloheinu adonai ekhad. Listen, really listen, all who wrestle with God, the infinite one: Our God, the Breath of Life, is infinite oneness.
If this is all true, then how we treat nature is also a direct reflection of how we treat God. If God and nature cannot be separated, then every toxic fume puffed into the air, fills God’s lungs with smoke. Every leaky oil line, buried deep within our planet’s water and soil, poison the veins that coarse through the body of the Infinite One.
We haven’t always practiced this truth, but we Jews, it seems, have always known it. Just read the book of Deuteronomy: If we obey the commandments that God gives — to love and serve Divinity with everything we’ve got — then the rains will fall in their season. Our harvests will be abundant. Our cattle will have ample food to eat.
And we shall be sated. But if we stray and profane and forget what is most sacred in this world, the rain of our land will be dust, and sand shall drop on us from the sky, until we. are. wiped. out.
This is not God punishing us for straying. Rather, these lines are descriptive — the natural result of our own careless and callous actions. It reads much like warnings from the latest U.N. Climate Report. When we live outside of right relationship with the natural world, and puff toxic fumes and spew deadly toxins and etch earth with oil, we curse ourselves.
Is this not what it means to take God’s name in vain in a 21st-century context? And when we hurt nature, like the Deuteronomy text makes clear, not only are we hurting God, but we are also hurting ourselves.
Earth and Earthlings
The first human, we’re told in Genesis, is created from the earth: “God formed the first human, adam (in Hebrew), from the dust of the earth, adamah (in Hebrew). Our very substance is Earth.
The Earth acts as a kind of mirror for us. What we do to it, we do to ourselves. Our values, our norms and our health as a human society is reflected back to us in the wellness or unwellness of the natural world.
A few years ago, I visited The Ohio State University met a couple who for decades, have gathered ice samples from around the globe. They extract long, narrow cylinders of ice, known as “cores,” which they then transport back to their labs in Ohio for testing. The most interesting finding for someone like me, who lives in Detroit, was that by looking at ice core samples from Greenland throughout the 1900s, they could tell precisely when the auto industry began in Detroit. As automobile production developed, wind and weather patterns carried the residual output of industry — pollution, smoke, toxins and the like — through the air, across the Atlantic and over the skies of Greenland, where the ice inhaled and captured in its core the particulate refuse spewed by the auto makers and their suppliers. It’s as if they are developing film of sociological phenomena, their lab like a “dark room,” in which pictures of history, embedded in these Artic time capsules, come into focus.
In a connected world, our actions do indeed have a far-reaching impact.
Caring for the most vulnerable
How might we harvest this tragic reminder for good? When the coronavirus struck in 2020, we were not only reminded of the beauty our interconnectedness. We saw that precisely because our actions have an impact on each other, this interconnectedness demands that we care for all of us, deeply, starting with those who have the least and are the most at risk, while all the while, prioritizing the sustainability of the earth. The faceless virus was actually not an equalizer. It laid bare the devastating impact of structural and environmental racism in this country.
As a resident of Detroit, it was clear that however bad Covid was going to get generally, Detroit would be hit harder than most. The residents of Detroit, the largest majority-Black city in the country, like the residents of many other industrial Rust Belt cities and urban communities all across the country have seen their neighborhoods systematically neglected for well over 50 years, beginning with White Flight in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
Residents have been left severely lacking what many of us probably assume are basic services. If before, we had been able to ignore the fact that residents’ lifespans are significantly lower than people who do not live in inner cities, it became more difficult to do so during the pandemic. Although it has the 24th-highest population of any city in the country, Detroit initially suffered the third most Covid-related deaths of any city in the country. A beloved clergyperson with whom my organization partners lost 14 family members to the virus in just the first few months.
Privileging profits over people
Soon after Adam, the first human in the book of Genesis, is formed from the Earth itself, a new generation challenges God’s supremacy. The generation of Babel arrogantly builds a Tower that stretches from the ground below up to the heavens above, into God’s domain.
How tall was this tower? According to one ancient commentary, it was of such great height that it took a person a full year to climb from the base to the top. Every brick that was baked on the ground and carried to the uppermost turret of the Tower was therefore considered extremely valuable. It represented a huge investment of time and energy.
It’s not a sin to build. It’s a sin to build towards any vision other than the holiness of life and the celebration of the sacred.
Imagine the working conditions. What must it have been like for a loved one to set off on a year-long journey to the summit in order to add to the height of this sky-scraping phenomenon? As the Tower grew taller, the midrash continues, its builders began to regard the bricks as more precious than the people. “If a person fell and died,” the midrash says, “the people paid no attention. But if a single brick fell, the people wept, saying, ‘Woe upon us! Where will we get another brick to replace it?’”
Somewhere along the way, the builders lost touch with the fundamental truth that human life is pure, that all of life is created in the infinite and precious image of the Divine. It’s not a sin to build. It’s a sin to build towards any vision other than the holiness of life and the celebration of the sacred.
This midrash absolutely breaks my heart because this midrash is still our reality. Our sin is the sin of Babel. Our reality is the inevitable outcome of a society that was founded on the premise that the brick is more valuable than the person. The new invention is prioritized over the Earth. This country was established with the genocide of Native people. It was built by the hands and ingenuity of Black people, who were taken from their homeland and brutally exploited as property. We know that racism and the pursuit of profit are as fundamental to America as any flag, any ideal or any principle that we’re taught in history books. And while the circumstances have changed over the years, the structural underpinnings of our society have not.
Tamara Toles O’Loughlin is a Black woman who is a leader with 350.org, an organization working to end the reign of the fossil-fuel industry. In an article titled, “If you care about the planet, you must dismantle white supremacy,” she wrote:
The reality is that the communities being battered by both the coronavirus and climate are also epicenters of over-policing, incarceration and state-sanctioned violence.
In every aspect of our lives, starting in our mothers’ wombs, we are systematically devalued. Black communities face the long-term effects of environmental racism, intentionally zoned into neighborhoods surrounded by factories, highways, pipelines, and compressor stations. Systemic exposure to toxic fumes has caused higher rates of asthma and disease in Black communities, making us more vulnerable to the coronavirus.
This adds a grim familiarity to the death-throw pleas of “I can’t breathe,” made by both George Floyd and Eric Garner while they were choked to death by police in Minneapolis and Staten Island, respectively. Those pleas are the latest in a long line of unmet calls for a shared sense of humanity in the face of white-supremacist violence that has been built into the system itself.
Racism is deeply embedded in the business model of the fossil-fuel industry. In order to extract resources, there are always “sacrifice zones,” usually Black, Indigenous or other communities of color that are put in harm’s way and plunged into a violent and multigenerational cycle of economic disinvestment. The history of devastation and the disproportionate impacts of the climate crisis on people of color are well known.
In the years ahead, we will be called upon to be hospice caretakers of the old world and the old structures, and midwives of the new one.
The future of our planet demands that we recognize inequity and defend our communities against compound injustice. In this moment of grief, we are reminded that the system is not broken, but rather operating as designed, which begs the questions: Are you willing to hold accountable all of the systems built off white supremacy — from the fossil fuel industry to racist policing to the prison industrial complex —in defense of the planet? Are you willing to interrogate your complicity in the systems built on white supremacy and commit to dismantling it?
A decade ago, I was present when a rabbi and teacher told a full room that in the years ahead, we would be called upon to be hospice caretakers of the old world and the old structures, and midwives of the new one.
What we need now, in the words of Dr. King, is “a revolution of values.” A radical call to put sustainability — environmental, economic and social/cultural — before profit. A society-wide commitment
- to living lighter on this planet,
- to living in more right relationship with each other and the earth,
- and to overthrowing the systems that seek to make that impossible.
What we need now is a jubilee. A tikkun adam/a healing of spirit and a tikkun adamah/healing of soil. We will prioritize, once and for all, populace over productivity, person over brick. We will learn what it means to really take care of one another, what we’re truly capable of, and what exactly is demanded of us by being alive in just this moment.
And then, together, with that song on our tongues, following the leaders of this moment, we will help midwife the future that we know is already on its way. Because for many, life has qualified as a “crisis” since before birth. And because for us all, we are far too many decades into this global climate crisis, which will almost certainly outpace our current global health crisis in severity and scope, while disproportionately causing violence and harm to those already most marginalized.
It will require that we soften our hearts enough to emphatically, collectively and resolutely execute judgment on the futile false gods that plague this society and embrace a new way of being in relationship with each other and with the more-than-human world, prioritizing people and planet.
[Based on a 2020 talk delivered to the Chautauqua Society.]
