Dai’eynu – What is Enough?

Rosh Hashana Sermon 5780

This sermon was greatly inspired by and draws from We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer.

            Ready?  Dai-dai-ey’nu…

            Don’tworry.  I’m not confused.  I know it’s not Pesach.  But these words that we sing out with glee atthe Pesach seder – “Dai’eynu – it would have been enough for us” – arevery much on my mind today.  Today, wecelebrate the birthday of the world – the sacred and awesome creative unfoldingof the vast cosmos; the wondrous, sublime rebirth of the earth and the renewalof all Life with humanity as an essential and integrated part of itswholeness. 

            With thesweetness of a new year for ourselves and for the planet, today we arecelebrating enormous, sighing redwoods, the eyelashes of elephants, the marvelof the Northern Lights, the flight patterns of monarch butterflies, and thevery molecules that we breathe – the same molecules breathed by your greatgrandparents and by the ancient Israelites and by the first homosapiens.

            Today I amalso thinking about last week’s UN Climate Summit and the IPCC Report thatpaints a picture of our earth hurtling toward irreversible damage to theecosystems that support life.  I amtrying to get my head around the extent to which human consumption and oursociety’s addiction to convenience and idolatry of greed, have made us enemiesof everything we are celebrating today. 

            In his book,We Are the Weather, Jonathan Safran Foer so sharply asks, how do I“square my own gratitude for life with behaviour that suggests an indifferenceto it” (p.24).  I want us to square ourcelebration of life and a world reborn with the behaviour that will sustainit.  I want us to be inspired andpropelled by our Jewish practices and teachings to make us aware, sensitive andresponsive, and thereby worthy of the planet we are celebrating.  So I want to bring dai’eynu to RoshHashana as a probing question and a climate call-to-action.  I want to ask – what actually is dai’eynu– what is enough for us?     

            1) Whatenables us to say – Enough! – protesting against environmentallydestructive practices, and demanding limits, accountability and change?  

            2) What doesit mean to have enough – enough food and clothing, what is owningenough, using enough, enough profit margin, enough shareholder growth?  What should be our scale of enough? 

            And 3) Whatdoes it mean to be enough – to replace to pull of wanting andgrasping with being rooted in wholeness, interconnection and our most enlivenedcapacities.

            In order toreverse the climate catastrophe that we have set in motion, what shouldbe dai’eynu? 

            First,saying “Enough” – The global climate strikes of this past week broughtseveral  million young people and adultsworldwide out onto the streets, sounding the alarm of climate crisis andvoicing firmly and clearly that we do not consent to companies and governmentsclearcutting and extracting and burning and polluting with impunity, destroyingour planet.  Many of you were among thethousands gathered here in Toronto calling for climate justice and boldaction. 

            It has takentime for the cry of “Enough” to become a large-scale movement.  It is clear that facts aren’t enough to moveus into action.  We have known the factsfor a long time.  Before Greta Thunberg,there was “An Inconvenient Truth”; there were other scientific reports; therehave been countless other activists and other protests.  Safran Foer writes about the differencebetween knowing and believing, between having information, on the one hand, andon the other hand, stretching our minds to grasp what has previously beenunthinkable and awakening our hearts to face the suffering that has previouslybeen unimaginable.  It takes effort tolet the information sink in, to absorb it and to be affected by it.  Being shocked, he says, rarely changes ourbehaviour. 

            Reb MenachemMendel of Kotzk, the great Hasidic master, taught that the first step towardsfreedom for the enslaved Israelites was the willingness to rebel againstslavery.  Before they could leave Egypt,they had to take hold of the gift of freedom from their savlanut –fromtheir tolerance to their slavery. He says, this liberation from tolerance, is the ultimatefoundation for ge’ula/redemption. Dai’eynu is thedeclaration of intolerance toward the status quo that we have participated inand have largely tolerated up until now. 

            Theseclimate strikes are powerful and moving because there is joy and vitality insaying No to all that is harmful and stands in opposition to Life, while beingenveloped in a sea of human aliveness. When we are together as a Dai’eynu movement, we have theresilience to face the most frightening realities and not be paralyzed by thembecause, in saying “Enough,” in asserting limits and refusing to toleratebusiness as usual, we are already embodying and living into new economic,social, moral and spiritual possibilities. Knowing becomes believing which becomes action.

            It isimportant for us to figure out how saying “Enough” becomes a lasting commitmentthat translates into lasting action.  Wehave to ensure that going to a protest isn’t just something that makes us feelgood, the ways that recycling or driving a hybrid car can make us feel good.  These are important and good things to do,but feeling good must not replace doing good, as Safran Foer puts it.  Our Dai’eynu has to be a call to endexcess, to interrupt the chain of destruction and to live in alignment with ourvalues.

            2) Havingenough – Safran Foer writes, “We live in a culture of historically unprecedentedacquisition, which so often asks us and enables us to attain.  We are prompted to define ourselves by whatwe have: possessions, dollars, views and likes. But we are revealed by what we release” (p.71).

            We know thatthose of us who are not struggling with poverty and basic needs have toprofoundly alter our scale of what it means to have enough – not measuring whatwe have or use compared to the norms of our social circles and neighbourhoodsbut within the context of our global community and the resources of thisplanet.  Our scale of what is sufficientwill need to take into account a real understanding of what we have and use andits impact – to understand the relationship between the burger on my plate; thefactory farm it came from; the CO2-absorbing forest that was clear-cut to buildthe factory farm; the methane, nitrous oxide and CO2 emissions that the cowsrelease into the atmosphere and heat; the melting of the white, sun-reflectingice and its replacement with dark, heat-absorbing water raising the globe’stemperature; and creating rising water levels, flooding and extreme weatherthat most destructively hits parts of the world least responsible for theseemissions.

            I know Iwould rather not think about these truths. I know I have the impulse not to learn about them, so that I don’t haveto give up the things I enjoy, or feel guilty when I don’t.  I’m going to guess that most of us strugglewith this.

            Animportant antidote to this resistance is a different framing of what it meansto have at all.  The Talmud (Berachot35a), as it often does, points to a contradiction between two different versesin Psalms.  One verse states “The landand its fullness belong to Adonai; the world and those who dwell in it (Psalm24:1).  While another verse states,“The heavens are the heavens of Adonai, but theearth, God gave to human beings (Psalm 115:17).”  So which is it- asks thatTalmud?  Does this earth belong to God orto us?  The Sages respond, as they oftendo, that the two verses don’t contradict each other.  The first verse, in which the earth belongsto God, describes the world before we say a blessing.  The second verse, in which the earth is givenover to human beings, describes the world after we say a blessing. 

            The starting point is that the worldbelongs to the Divine.  To say that itbelongs to God is to say that the world participates in unlimited sacred worth,that its value, first and foremost, is not in its utility or as a commodity.  It reveals wonders and mysteries, with eachfinite and separate part pointing beyond itself to an infinite unity. 

            A blessing is not meant to be aformula we simply utter.  A simpleblessing meant to unite and elevate the hungers and desires of the body with aspiritual event that feeds awareness, that practices self-restraint in theconscious pause before biting in, and recognizes the generosity of earth’sgifts, to enable our eating.  It awakensrelationship with where the food came from, with different blessings for theharvest of a tree or the ground, for grains or vines, and in that awareness wecan trace gratitude and awe for the fruit and flower and the seed, for themarvelous conspiracy of rain, soil, sun and seasons, for the inconceivablemystery of Life moving through trees and leaves, pollinating bees, throughcycles of dying and renewal, through tree roots planted in the ground, the sameground that holds every tree on the planet, and the Divine, that is notseparate from any of it, and is all of it. 

            In this framing, it is only inoffering a blessing of gratitude, touching awe, that we earn the right toconsume.  In fact, this section of Talmudalso states that one who enjoys anything of this world without firstsaying a blessing, steals from the Holy One! 

            And it is in the practice of gratitudeand humility that our consumption changes. How might engaging in this practice shift our experience of wanting, ofgrasping, of taking – when instead of starting from a position of what we havethe right to have, blessing becomes an exchange that understands that we comeinto this world fundamentally in debt and we are perpetually receivinggifts?  Dai’eynu – The world isnot ours for the taking.  We can not keepfunctioning as if we deserve everything that we want. 

            3) To beenough –  Many of us feel like we’renot enough.  So often, we don’t actbecause we feel we couldn’t possibly do enough. But right now, feeling like we are not enough is a luxury we don’thave.  And it is also not true. 

Each of us is enough – a childof Divine Oneness, tasked with doing more than we think we can and outfittedwith the capacity to rise and meet the challenge.  I love that one of the names for God in Torahis El Shaddai – the God of enough. El She-dai – Divine enough-ness. 

            Radicalindividualism, extreme materialism and the sleep of indifference are drivesthat are cut off from the Life Force.  Weare called upon to live in intimate connection with Divine enoughness – in thefullness of Being, in the More of life – not more in the number of our days butin the precious, zestful, awake connection with all Life and the courage tofight on its behalf.  This is what RoshHashana is about.  Inscribing us all forLife.  Choosing Life.  Let us work to become strong enough,connected enough, clear enough and in love with life enough to do what isneeded. 

Dai’eynu.

*If you are interested in joining the DJC’s Climate Action Initiative, please contact the Social Justice Committee at djcSocialJustice@gmail.com