Nourishing the Spiritual Roots of the Climate Crisis

Originally delivered as a Rosh Hashana sermon at the Princeton Jewish Center on September 30, 2019 (5780)

Fourteen months ago, a 30-year old poet named Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner rose up early in the morning. Kathy is Marshallese, a native of the cluster of small coral atolls in the middle of the Pacific Ocean known as the Marshall Islands.

That morning Kathy was on her way to the airport. She was flying from her tiny warm island near the equator to a massive frozen island in the middle of the Arctic, a place we call Greenland. Once she arrived, Kathy met a young local Inuk poet named Aka Niviâna.

Kathy, the poet from the Marshall Islands, and Aka, the poet from Greenland, then traveled together — by plane, boat, and even on foot — until they arrived at the edge of a huge glacier named Qaterlait. They were on what we might call a poetry expedition.

As they stood at the edge of the massive glacier, Kathy and Aka recited a poem. Kathy began: “Sister of ice and snow, I’m coming to you from the land my ancestors chose… [the] Marshall Islands, a country more sea than land.” Aka replied: “Sister of ocean and sand, I welcome you to…Greenland, the biggest island on earth.”

The average height above sea level across the Marshall Islands is seven feet, about 11 inches taller than me. So if the sheet of ice that covers Greenland were to melt, which it has started to do, causing the world’s oceans to rise more than twenty feet, Kathy’s home will lie thirteen feet underwater. The drops of ice water dripping into the ocean from the glaciers of Greenland spell disaster 7,000 miles away for the Marshall Islands.

At various times in my life I have been part of the environmental movement. I have looked at the challenges facing our planet from the perspectives of both an engineer and an activist. But today, on Rosh Hashana, the birthday of the world, I want to address the challenge from the perspective of a rabbi. I want to explore the environmental crisis as a spiritual challenge.

In Houston, where I grew up, space travel was part of local culture. Years before Apollo 13 astronauts Swigert and Lovell transmitted, “Okay Houston, we’ve had a problem here” — yes, those were the original words that were later simplified into a meme — the year was 1962, President Kennedy came to my alma mater, Rice University, to announce that America would put a human on the moon. As a child, I visited the NASA campus in Clear Lake more times than I can remember, wandering the buildings and control rooms that made possible bringing humans to the moon and back. This summer, many of us re-lived our own memories of the American space age when we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

The astronauts who travel into space, most of whom are engineers and scientists and pilots, bring back with them great spiritual insight. When you go into space, you think that you are going to learn about planets, moons, and stars. But if you listen to those who have actually been in space, you learn that what changes most is their perspective on planet Earth. While those of us on Earth look up at the night sky to stargaze, the astronauts in orbit are spending every moment of their free time looking down at us, earth-gazing. Space is dark, bleak, void. Against the vast nothingness, the image of the Earth — vivid, gorgeous, and bright — grabs an astronaut’s attention. The oceans and the rivers, the deserts and the mountains. The shockingly thin atmosphere. The fragility of it all. The uniqueness of it all.

In the 1980’s, Frank White, a writer about space topics, published a book called the Overview Effect. He set out to describe and analyze the radical impact that seeing Earth from space has on astronauts. The Overview Effect, White writes, is “a shift in perception” in which we “move from identifying with parts of the Earth to identifying with the whole system.” Apollo 9 astronaut Ruty Schweickart described it this way: “When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing…That makes a change…it comes through to you so powerfully that you’re the sensing element for Man.” Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell put it more colorfully and forcefully: “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it…From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”

As much as I love Mitchell’s idea of sending politicians into space to see Earth from a distance, the costs and dangers of space travel make the idea impractical. But the Overview Effect is still accessible to all of us, in the images space travelers bring back, and in the words they use to describe the awe, majesty, and beauty of being in space.

In the Musaf service this morning, we will recite a special piyyut known as Hayom harat olam. Three times, once for each for the three special sections, Malkhuyot, Zichronot, and Shofarot, immediately after the shofar blows: Hayom harat olam — today the world is born. We often tell young Jews that Rosh Hashana is the birthday of the world, but if you take a closer look, it would be more accurate to say that Rosh Hashana is not the birth-day of the world, but rather the conception-day of the world. Hayom harat olam — that second word, Hara — has a meaning closer to conception than birth. The unknown author of Hayom Harat Olam may have been riffing off the theme of conception that appeared twice in our Torah service today. At the start of the Torah reading, Sarah conceived — va-tahar — and then gave birth to Isaac (Gen 21:2), and then again in the Haftarah, Channah conceived — va’tahar — and then gave birth to Shmuel (1 Sam 1:20).[1]

If Rosh Hashana is the day of the conception of the world, it makes sense that on this day we should think about how we conceive of the world. And based on the planet-level environmental challenges we are facing, it is clear that the way we conceive of the world needs to shift.

Seeing anew is actually a tremendous spiritual challenge, something much easier said than done.

We learned this lesson in today’s Torah reading, in the narrative of Hagar and Ishmael. Soon after Hagar and Ishmael are sent into the wilderness, they run out of water. When Ishmael is about to die of thirst, Hagar leaves him under a bush, thinking to herself, “Let me not look on as the child dies.” Then God hears Ishmael’s cry, sends a messenger, and opens Hagar’s eyes so she can see a well of water.

The story of God opening Hagar’s eyes is an allegory for addressing the spiritual challenge we are facing today. In that liminal moment when Ishmael is about to die of thirst, God opens Hagar’s eyes, vayifkach Elohim et eyneiha. Commenting on this verse, the Medieval French commentator Radak teaches, God expanded and improved Hagar’s range of vision, so that she could finally see the well of water that was there all along.

Perhaps God was opening our eyes, expanding our range of vision on December 24, 1968, when Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders, or maybe we should call him a malakh chalal, a space angel, took a photo of the Earth rising above the lunar landscape. That image, the view of Earth from the perspective of the moon, became one of the most reproduced images of all time. And not only that: Ander’s photograph, known as Earthrise, has been called “the most influential nature photograph ever taken.” The two years following the Apollo 8 mission saw the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the inaugural celebration of Earth Day. Alongside Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, the view of Earth from space, the Overview Effect, helped give birth to the modern environmental movement.

Like Hagar finally seeing the well in the wilderness, the view of Earth from space can spark a collective welling up of appreciation for our home planet, and cause a shift in perspective that will save our life.

As I prepared this sermon, I struggled to articulate the spiritual challenge we are facing as we overheat our home planet. But one concept from the field of psychology was helpful to me, the concept of maturity. In the field of psychology, maturity is not so much about our age, it’s about our “ability to respond to the environment…knowing when and how to act.”

We use the phrase “growing up” to refer to the process of maturing that an individual goes through. One way to understand the spiritual challenge we face is to ask, what can we do to help humanity go through a similar maturing process, not at the individual level, but at the societal level?

The shift from growing, to growing up has not been easy. As a society, we are like the parents of a growing child, doing everything we can to help our child grow and get bigger and stronger. We often believe, or are told to believe, that growth can solve the challenges we face.

American psychologist Jerome Bruner taught that for individual humans, there is a purpose to the period of immaturity: it is a time for experimental play without serious consequences. The years when we are immature allow us to test ourselves and try out new things, to be reckless, to act without thinking of the consequences on others.

But today, because of how many humans there are, and because of the technologies we have developed, the consequences to our play are not just serious, they threaten our very survival.

What does collective maturation look like? When we mature as an individual, we start to make commitments, choices. We commit to a particular life partner or a particular career or a particular community. At the species level, we can make a similar commitment: choosing a particular planet as our home.

Collective maturation, making a commitment to our home planet, means three things. First, it means realizing that there is no place to hide things. We can’t use language like “throw things away” because there is no “away” that is outside of our home. When we toss bread crumbs into the water later during tashlikh, imagining that we are getting rid of our sins, we must think about where those bread crumbs will ultimately end up, rather than thinking they will simply disappear. Second, Collective maturation means admitting that no matter what advances we may make in space exploration in the coming generations, there is no place like home. No matter how soon Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos start offering us rides in space, we must come to terms with the fact that there will never, ever, be a place anywhere in the universe as exquisitely friendly to human life as planet Earth. Third: if individual maturity means moving toward independence, collective maturity means moving toward interdependence. Choosing Planet Earth as our home means seeing every human society as essentially our roommates.

Rosh Hashanah is the conception day of the world. Let us celebrate this year by conceiving of the world anew. There is inspiration all around us: the poetry expedition that Kathy and Aka took to the glaciers of Greenland, sixteen year old Greta Thunberg and other children who are organizing climate strikes, Shir Shafran, a 27 year old Israeli student who convinced thirty religious Zionist rabbis last week to sign a letter discouraging the use of disposable plastic, the scientists and engineers who are finding ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

There is a spiritual root to this crisis, and as a spiritual people, we Jews have a role play in addressing it. Just as God opened Hagar’s eyes in time to see the well, God is opening our eyes just in time to see Earth as our shared planetary home.

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Postscript:

The Talmud records a midrash that Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai taught about Abraham. He said that Abraham wore a precious stone (even tovah) around his neck. Any sick person who looked at that stone that hung around Abraham’s neck would immediately be healed. When Abraham died, God took the healing stone from Abraham’s neck and hung it on the sun. From them on, the sun helped to heal: as the adage from centuries ago says, “As the day progresses, sickness is lifted” [B. Bava Batra 16b].

An early 20th century commentator, Rabbi Shmuel of Shinwa, taught that those who were healed by Abraham’s good stone did not suffer a physical illness, rather they suffered a spiritual illness. [2] When these spiritual sufferers came to Abraham, he would teach them and heal their spiritual problems. But after Abraham died, how would people address the crises in their spiritual health? Since the time when God hung Abraham’s healing stone on the sun, he taught, we can look up to the sky, at the sun and the planets and other stars, and by doing so, experience the awe and wonder of God. Each one of us, Rabbi Shmuel of Shinwa taught, has the capacity to experience awe by contemplating the heavenly bodies. We can take his teaching one small step further, to say that the healing stone hanging around the sun is transmitting to us the beautiful image of what the earth looks like from the perspective of the heavenly bodies. By contemplating the view of our planetary home from the perspective of the Sun, we can heal the collective spiritual challenge we are facing.

[1] I thank the author of this sermon for pointing me to this insight.

[2] Thanks to Rebbetzin Shoshana Tugendhaft (Hendon, UK) who directed me to this aggadah and Rabbi Shinwa’s commentary about it. Rabbi Shmuel of Shinwa comment is from רמתיים צופים, על תנא דבי אליהו .

Additional narrative background about the poetry expedition mentioned in the introduction to this sermon can be found in Bill McKibben’s book Falter.