Birth and Birthdays (Erev RH 2015)
Shanah Tovah, I feel blessed to stand before you this
evening and celebrate the New Year with you.
It is an amazing thing to be given the gift of another year of
life. It is an amazing thing to hold a
newborn baby in your arms, as Uzi and I had the privileged of doing just two
months ago. They are such symbols of
hope and they are our future. It is that future that I want to talk with you
about today – a future that concerns me as much as it concerns all of us.
We read in the Psalms:
“The Earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; The
world, and they that dwell therein. For
He hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods.” (Psalm
24)
But how much do we think about the Earth as belonging to God?
It is easy for us to forget who owns it especially when we think about
ourselves at the top of the proverbial ‘food chain.’
As a student at Hebrew Union College, one of my joys was
visiting the rare book room in the library.
It had the most interesting books, including a Talmud covered in pig
skin from the Middle Ages. (The set
belonged to a Christian scholar of sacred text.) You could see inside of several books, on
their title page, the various owners inscribed their names. If you were curious you could get a pair of
white gloves, examine the book and learn about its journey around Ashkenazi
Europe.
For me this thought is symbolic for the story of all human
possessions. All of our belongings
travel and we only have a lease on them for a short while. Take a moment to think about your possessions. How many of you have pieces which belonged to
a family member or maybe even many family members before it ended up into your possession? Then think about what you want to pass on to
the next generation.
Today, I wonder if we remember that we are only short play
actors on the world’s stage.
When I watch shows like “Buried Alive” on TLC about people
who are hoarders, I see people whose stuff has taken over their lives. When I watch HGTV and see people redesigning
their homes so that it has their design aesthetic and they throw away working
appliances I start to wonder - who is controlling who? When I see closet organization ideas to store
all of the stuff that we accumulate and listen to complaints about the lack of
storage in old houses - I really start to wonder.
Why do we have so many more things than our parents did? Do
we really need them? And what is their actual cost to our lives? Our community?
What is the cost of owning all of this stuff?
When we open the Bible, the first thing we read is that the
author must have been a naturalist. The descriptions
of all of the plant life are wonderful.
God did not begin by describing life up a mountain or inside of a
Temple, but among fruit trees, shade trees, bushes, shrubs and flowers. The description of the Garden of Eden was
designed to make us feel and think of a lush paradise full of natural beauties
and abundance. While we were expelled
from the actual garden, that growing splendor was always a part of our
world. It sustains the spirit. Just think about how refreshed you feel after
a walk in nature. Even as our scientific
knowledge grows I find the intricate web of life described from the valued
insects, dead leaves and soil under our feet allow for such amazing green
growth above and around us.
The Bible offers us a history of creation by defining the
good, beautiful, radiant Garden of Eden.
We are supposed to be reminded of that amazing place so that perhaps we
can nostalgically think back and treasure it - perhaps even to reestablish it
in the present world.
“Believe in the future, but do not scorn the past. Out of what is good in yesterday, build your
tomorrow.” ((The Bible says))
Let us think about our past.
What has been good that we may need to restore? What old way of creating can we learn from
and items can we treasure? What can we look at and recreate as our joy today? Does living a more simplistic life free our
spirit?
While the relationship of humanity to nature began when the
world was created, and is something that we honor on Rosh Hashanah, it is
something which is becoming more and more strained. We seem to be destroying the lush garden
around us in greedy pursuit of quick wealth.
We tore apart the forest which took thousands of years to create, we
stripped below the soil for coal and now we go even further as we mine shale
for gas.
Our quest for cheap product is striping the Earth around us
of valuable resources. Our oceans are
becoming more acidic as we pollute the air around us, over fill our landfills
and fail to act as stewards of the Earth.
The cost of our greed and materialism seems to be our own destruction.
As we start to think about who we are this Rosh Hashanah, we
are told that we must judge and purify ourselves in the light of God’s
standards. The prayers teach us of the
birthday of the world, the celebration of the rebirth to something better. We are described in the Book of Genesis as
individuals in a covenant with God.
But are we really honoring that covenant by our actions?
Are we acting with righteousness? Am I being useful to my
family, to my community and to society?
Am I honoring my obligations?
When we read the creation story in the Book of Genesis, God
tells humanity to fill the Earth and ‘master it’. We have mastered it. We may have taken that commandment
literarily.
Rachel Carson’s famous book “The Silent Spring” describes
the over use of poison insecticides which are able to destroy entire food
chains from small insects, to fish, to birds to shrubs and instead leave wide
areas of destruction. The destruction
led ultimately to the decline of the song bird population, leaving our garden
paradise silent. The book written from
1958-1962 ignited the environmental movement, took on the chemical industry and
asked important questions.
Rachel Carson went on to tell a congregational subcommittee,
a year after the book was published: “Our heedless and destructive acts enter
the vast cycles of the earth and in time return to bring hazard to ourselves.” The amazing thing that Rachel Carson did was
question the amazement of modernity by examining its impacts on the natural
world. She wrote that: “We are rightly
appalled by the genetic effects of radiation, how then, can we be indifferent
to the same effect in chemicals that we disseminate widely in our environment?”
Before congress, Rachel Carson made a valuable comment: “If
the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against
lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public
officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their
considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.” We want to trust that the products around us
are manufactured in a safe and sustainable way.
But instead of being allowed to self-examine and self-reflect our
response to such questions as a society shuts down the possibility of that
important act.
Not long after Carson published her book, she was attacked
by the chemical companies and accused of being a communist, a crazy spinster
with too many cats and made to look looney.
Yet she was able to hold her own before congress, on CBS in a special
hour long interview and whenever questioned.
Her science was thought to be forward thinking and accurate.
What we now see is that same type of attack from those same
types of companies against people who question them. The book, “Silent Spring” was so effective,
was because it was the first book of
its type to argue so eloquently the issues of environmentalism. Since that time, the issue of
environmentalism has become politicized and now there is a partisan reaction to
a topic which effects everyone a topic which should not be open for partisan
debate. Even today, Rachel Carson is accused of using “soft science” and blamed
for malaria around the world. Though
leading scientist agree that after time DDT looses its effectiveness and would
not have worked against fighting malaria vindicating her. There are still websites denying the accuracy
of what she represented.
When we left the Garden of Eden, God asked Adam a powerful
question: Acha? Where are you now?
Where are we now? Are we choosing to be in denial about
something we know to be true? Are we focused on greed? Are we choosing to be in
denial and look at the topic as partisan?
Are you labeling me as the liberal rabbi from the north for even
bringing this topic forward on Rosh Hashanah?
Regardless of where we are, we must live with the
consequence of our actions.
Again, I look to the book of Genesis, to find insight into
understanding that very consequence of human progression and denial.
We can learn four
specific truths according to Nehama Leibowitz –
We read in Genesis from the creation of humanity which
gradually unfolded by “the deeds and habits of man, his inmost thoughts and
secrets intrigues and true motives of his actions,” to the repudiation of the
sovereignty of God.
The first sin was committed by Adam. It was not that he simply ate from a tree of
knowledge. There were many trees in the
Garden. He was specifically told not to
eat one tree. In this we see that Adam’s
true test was a test of discipline and his true acceptance of the yoke of
heaven. Adam’s transgression was that he
chose to do as he chose as if he was master of all and failed to obey God.
The second sin of humanity was homicide. The Torah does not explicitly state the
reason that Cain killed his brother Abel.
The rabbis offered several midrashim
as to why this tragedy happened. In one
specific story they focus on an argument that the brothers had about how the
world was divided. One said the clothing
was his and the other said the land was his.
This specific midrash continues
by offering another reason that what they were fighting. They were arguing
about where the Temple should be built and what materials the Temple should be
made from. The last option was that the
brothers were really fighting over Eve.
What the rabbis were describing was not simply the specific case of Cain
and Abel, but understanding the motivations that we have to commit such a
crime. The midrash therefore offers
three considerations as to why we resolve to violence. The first is economic considerations, they
quarrel over material possessions. The
second reason is bloodshed is over ideological grounds – where and how the
Temple should be built. The last view is
over sexual passions – they were fighting over Eve.
The third major unfolding is of Lemech, a descendent of
Cain. Lemech and his son Tuval Cain were
forgers of brass and iron instruments.
We read that Lemech boasted: “For I have slain a man for wounding me,
and a young man for bruising me.” (Genesis 4:23-24). What is it that he was boasting? That he had
created more powerful weapons that he was able to lord over his fellows and
commit indiscriminate murder even for a small offense of causing a bruise to
form.
The last group of sins in the first bit of Genesis is the
verse: “And they took for themselves wives whomsoever they chose.” Thus we moved from having domain over the
vegetable and animal worlds to domain over each other. Rabbi David Kimhi points out in the Hebrew
that Elohim and ish are used to describe the nobility, while adam alludes to the oppressed class.
We therefore see that the moral standards decline as
material development and civilizations progress forgoing to take into account God.
Yet even if we achieve great and amazing things, then we
have achieved nothing if what is left behind is destruction. The next event in Genesis is the flood and we
read that all of Cain’s descendants aside from Noah die. That is a devastating consequence for
committing sin.
Even though our society is urbanized, with amazing
technological resources we are dependent upon the Earth. Peter Goldmark, the former Rockefeller
Foundation president, puts it well: “The death of our civilization is no longer
a theory or an academic possibility; it is the road we are on.”
Why do we discuss this topic? I am not speaking for the perspective of
politics, but of spirituality. We are
stewards of the world around us. We need
to take that stewardship seriously.
I have hope that this situation can be turned around. That we can limit desertification by soil erosion,
over use of our water tables, over population,
Following the destruction at Pearl Harbor, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt turned the country from a peaceful economy to a war based
economy. He planned on the production of
45,000 tanks, 60,000 planes and several thousand ships. By 1944 the US had made 60,000 war planes,
2229,600 aircraft, and 5,000 ships. It
was a huge shift from a peacetime economy to a wartime economy. It did not take restructuring in decades, it
was able to do it in a matter of months.
I believe that when we hit a tipping point we will
ultimately start to change our environmental policy. We will work at a grassroots level and
encourage our government to create policies that will save our planet. Whether it is the issue of tax restructuring
to create an honest marketplace, enhance the recycling program here in
Huntsville to include glass, work to support family planning programs to shrink
the population or encourage TVA to get its power from sustainable sources over
coal we can make a difference.
You may look and say that this is impossible. Change is too hard to effect.
When we form a sacred community, we do so based on
trust. When we look around the world and
see so many people whose motivation is cheap, intentions are dubious and
actions make us sick we have to look no further than our sacred community to
counter that. One of the things that is
amazing about a sacred community is that in its simplicity and beauty of those
around us, we find people who we can trust, putting our hearts in their
hands. I pray that God guard us against
the feelings of cynicism and instead remind us by gazing up them, that they
have created a little Garden of Eden here.
That if we can do it here, we can do it around us as well.
Our world is not a safe world. We are poisoning the land, air and sea. We are under threat of terrorism and violence
where disillusionment of the good of humanity is dominate. We pause now and wish for a new kind of
year.
Just as we pray in the morning blessings: “Praise to You Adonai, our God and Universal Ruler, who
– in partnership with Wisdom – formed and created crevices and channels within
humankind; it is shown and known in front of Your honorable throne that if one
of them were to be [inappropriately] opened or closed, it would be impossible
to continue facing You, even for a single hour.
Praise to You Adonai, Healer
of Flesh, inspiring in what You can do.”
Please inspire us to be able to find the power to work to reopen
crevices and channels both in our soul and in the world around us to heal and
perfect it.
