At Home on the Earth

Erev Rosh Hashana Sermon 5780

            In the nottoo distant future, the news is announced – the environmental apocalypse ishere.  In 3 days, every continent onplanet earth will be underwater. Religious leaders from around the world address their followers,offering words of guidance and solace to face this cataclysmic moment.

            The Popespeaks – “Catholics of the world.  Wehave 3 days to pray and repent, to turn toward salvation, ready forJudgement Day.”

            The greatestImam of the time speaks – “Muslims of the world.  We have 3 days to fast, pray andrepent, to surrender to Allah, ready for Judgement Day.”

            The greatestRabbi of the time speaks – “Jews of the world. We have 3 days to learn how to breathe under water!”  

            The joke isfunny and not funny.  I remember hearingthat joke as a kid, I think it was in shul, and the possibility of the earthbeing submerged under water was utterly remote to us – an absurd set up for agood punchline.  Today we know that it isnot at all funny as we have been witnessing rising sea levels, flooding andextreme weather that has taken lives and destroyed villages, cities andecosystems. 

            The joke isfunny and not funny.  Aside from thesimplistic portrayals of the Catholics and Muslims, that are there as a foilfor the Jewish swimmers, the joke points to something importantly true andimportantly distorted about a Jewish response to threat and survival.  I remember hearing that punch line – “we have3 days to learn how to breathe under water.” I was not a strong swimmer and actually remember feeling frightened thatI wouldn’t survive.  My survival wassomething I thought about a lot as a Jewish child, but I also believed, andpart of me still believes, that if we needed to, Jews could figure out how tobreathe under water if our survival depended on it.

            The Jewishpeople has a complicated relationship with survival and adaptability.  The Jewish people has a complicatedrelationship with place and our place on this earth.  Throughout our history, largely in responseto anti-Semitism, the Jewish people has learned to be incredibly adaptive.  Scattered throughout the world, in everycountry and culture, Jews have learned how to breathe under whatever water weare in – adapting, reinterpreting and changing, religiously and culturally, inorder to survive and to thrive.        

            But when itcomes to the environmental emergency that we are in, a Jewish response cannotbe one of adapting to a world that is drowning, or holding a belief,even if it’s not entirely conscious, that there is always somewhere else we cango. 

            It isstriking that the Jewish community as a whole has been slow to engage with theenvironmental movement, despite the fact that Jews have been at the forefrontof almost every other movement for social change – civil rights, feminism, thelabour movement, LGBTQ liberation and combatting white supremacy.

            It iscertainly challenging for all people to face the realities of theclimate disaster that we humans have set in motion.  For all of us, it can feel distant andconceptual.  It can feel overwhelming andhopeless.  For Jews, there are specificobstacles that we need to examine – beliefs and behaviours that we haveabsorbed through our historical experiences and narratives, habits of heart andmind that we inherited, that are as familiar as the water we swim in, but thatlimit us from becoming fully engaged participants, leaders, partners andchange-agents, in the work of saving our planet and all life on it.  I want to look at the ways we have been separatedfrom land and I want to remember the ways we have been, and the ways we are,deeply connected to it. 

            Myexperience is as an Ashkenazi Jew, so I’ll speak from that perspective, but Iwant to name that for Sephardic, Mizrachi, Arab and Ethiopian Jews there aresimilar and different stories to tell and to weave into our picture. 

            So, let’sjump all the way back to the biblical period. Picture the Mediterranean sun, lots of sandals and the Israelite peopleliving in the flow of seasons and agricultural cycles.  The calendar of festivals took the directexperiences of planting and harvesting, the lifecycles of trees and of flocksand herds, and linked these to the historic-mythic narratives of the Israelites– our slavery, liberation, desert wandering and Torah revelation.  So our collective story as a people, with ourintegrated rituals and ethical practices, lived in alignment with the earth’sunfolding story.  All of it was framed assacred and evoked from the people a sense of humility, gratitude and awe,responsibility and partnership.  Practicewas centered in the Temple in Jerusalem as the home of Divine presence and ofholy service, and the Land of Israel was home and homeland.   

            Now jump tothe the year 70 CE.  The world as we knewit was burned to the ground.  The Romansdestroyed the Temple and took over Jerusalem. They tortured and slaughtered thousands, and exiled the Jewishpopulation from our home.  The Israelitebeliefs about God, about reward and punishment and the nature of evil andsuffering, also lay in ruins.  But ratherthan dying in the rubble of Jerusalem, Judaism underwent a radicaltransformation. 

            Rabbinicleadership rose up.  The power ofinterpretation ignited.  And from acentralized, place-centered, priest-led practice, Judaism transformed into areligion that could be practiced anywhere and by everyone.  The Temple became a metaphor – with visionsof an ideal in the future to yearn for, and images of sacred centre that couldbe established right now – in our homes and hearts, at our synagogues andhouses of study, and through our actions. This portable Judaism became a religion and culture that, in many ways,hovered above the earth. 

            There is astory in the Talmud (Shabbat 33b) that describes Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai andhis son Rabbi Elazar hiding from the Romans in a cave for 12 years.  They spend their days buried up to theirnecks in sand so their clothes don’t wear out, studying Torah.  The rabbinic imagination created a formativenarrative that elevated the mind and soul above a body too vulnerable to dwellin, existing from the neck up in the safety and seclusion of a cave, butthriving in study, prayer and mystical insights.

            Over thenext 2000 years of diaspora existence, the Jews experienced repeated exiles,being uprooted and evicted from one place in the world to another.  Occasionally we were able to move by choice,in search of better conditions.  In eachnew culture, we skillfully adopted and adapted local languages, philosophies,religious practices, recipes, music and so on – generating an elastic andevolving Judaism and Jewish people that let us integrate into new surroundingsand in many cases, facilitated economic, social and artistic relationships withour new neighbours. 

            In placesand times where our neighbours were hostile to us and issued laws thatprohibited Jewish practice, ownership of land or social integration, we learnedto live our Jewish lives more protectively behind ghetto walls or underground,in caves and basements – these places that were separated from a broaderconnection to place and to the people who lived there. 

            When thedoors of citizenship opened in Western Europe beginning with the Enlightenment,and generations later, when North America allowed larger numbers of Jews ontoits shores, for better and for worse, many of us learned ways to assimilate sothat we could be accepted, often shedding Judaism of its “parochial” ritualsand shedding our bodies of signifiers that made us recognizable as Jews –changing our clothes, changing our names, getting nose jobs and straighteningour hair.  Many of us assimilated tovarying extents and we became good Germans. We became good Americans.  Webelonged and were at home, until we weren’t, until anti-Semitism targeted us asalien again.

            Because of this history of exile and genocide, Jews carrythe wound of having been separated from the land and from place. So it is no wonder that fighting for theearth’s wellbeing and sustainability has not been claimed by so many of us as afight that is ours.

            Becausewe know how to recognize existential threats as immediate danger and violence,as being singled out and blamed, it is not surprising that for so many Jews,the global threat that does not feel like a threat to our existence.  It doesn’t sound the usual alarm bells and ithasn’t mobilized the Jewish community in the ways that swastikas in the streetsdo.

            Wecarry a wound of having been separated from land.  We have been a people yearning so deeply forhome and adapting to create home wherever we can.  This wound, the residue of these experiences,inherited and passed through generations, is expressed in us in obvious and insubtle ways that keep us from deeply knowing this planet as our home.  It leads us to often struggle with belonging,often feeling unwelcome or unwanted.  Itdrives our reactivity, being quick to feel panicked and urgent, with habits ofaccommodating or rigidly controlling, becoming insular or assimilating.  And you thought this was just your crazy mishpoche(family)! 

            Inorder to not only worry about our own survival, in order to become totallyinvested in the climate movement in deep partnership and collaboration,advocating for change, we have the core task of recognizing the habits andobstacles in our way and releasing their grip on us.

            Essentialto this project is reclaiming Jewish narratives of connection to place thathave been forgotten or diminished, seeds of our story to gather, and throughthem, to re-grow a deep relationship with the earth.

            Ithink of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov in Ukraine who urged his Hasidic followers topray every day among the trees and flowers as the best place to pour out one’sheart to God.

            Ithink of the 800 year period in Russia when we were peasants and farmers and inrelated trades before the czar’s expulsion. And the Yurkanski clan of Eishyshok in the 1890’s who would gather theirchildren on Shabbat afternoons and walk the fields that once belonged to them –retaining their ancestors’ love of the countryside.  One of the children writes about  remembering being taken to walk among thefields at harvest time and watching his mother borrow a sickle from one of theGentile reapers in order to display the skills she had learned as a Jewish farmgirl many years before.* 

            Ithink of the early halutzim (pioneers) in Israel, for whom the return tothe land was not only a return to ancient national roots but was a coming hometo our bodies and to being naturalized citizens of the earth, farming andbuilding agrarian and communal lives there.  

            Ithink of the achingly beautiful song Esta Montagne, that tells of the yearningfor the jasmine tree back in Spain, planted in the soil of that home, carryingit into exile through melody and yearning.  

            AndI think of the rural Yiddishist socialist summer communities and Jewishchildren’s camps built beside Canadian lakes and forests.

            Whatis your family’s legacy in the natural world? What are your own memories of hiking in wilderness or strolling in urban parks, at cottages or under afavourite tree?

            Itrequires conscious intention to allow ourselves to deeply belong to theselandscapes, to claim them as dear and cherished and worth fighting for.  The truth is that Jews, like all humanbeings, have a relationship with land, with the natural world.  We are of the earth and we belong to thisearth.  And we belong to every otherpeople on this planet – many of whom have also experienced uprootedness and dislocation.  No historic hurts can rob us of the abilityto consciously re-grow these connections. 

            Theshofar sounds and we are called to wake up – to awaken to what is unconsciousand wounded and asleep within.  To awakento the alarm of this climate crisis and respond as a Jewish community with teshuvah,tefillah and tzedakah – with repentance and healing, with prayer anduplifted voices, with collaborative responsibility and care.  Let’s not learn how to breath underwater.  Let’s celebrate the rebirth ofthe earth by dwelling on this planet as in a temple and fighting for the survivalof the earth under our feet as home.

 *Thank you to Prof. Billy Yalowitz for sharing this narrative and for his thoughtful research and work recovering Jewish history and relationship to place.