We Are the Weather

 

And then it was the water.

In these strange times, as we lurch from pandemic to climate catastrophe to military invasions to …. oh the next thing, I wasn’t expecting to hear the news about the water companies this week.

I knew a bit about the privatisation of state utilities under the Thatcher Government. I wrote school projects about the privatisation of British Gas when I was, Avery, just about your age – anyone else remembers the ads ‘Tell Sid’? And I wrote essays about privatisation for my A-Level economics.

The plans all sounded perfectly sensible to my 13-year-old self. Everyone would win, we were told. But it’s now turned out that Thames Water is on the brink of collapse, having borrowed billions which have been used to pay dividends rather than fix the pipes. I caught a new, to me, phrase in one report that suggested the water company I pay a fortune to is ‘environmentally insolvent’ because they can’t afford to pay for cleaning up their own spilt sewage. ‘Environmentally insolvent’ – has a very contemporary ring to it.

I imagine Moses would have had some sympathy for contemporary political leaders. He also is in the midst of a run of catastrophes, from arguments over meat – we read that story three weeks ago, to two full-on insurrections – the story of the spies two weeks ago and the rebellion of Korach last week. And now there’s no water in the wilderness wandering of the Children of Israel.

“The community was without water, and they protested against Moses and Aaron saying ‘If only we had perished [before now] why did you make us leave Egypt to bring us to this wretched place. There is not even water to drink.’”

For thirty-eight years, at this point, the Children of Israel have been wandering through the wilderness sustained by manna, a miraculous food that was just there for them and water that, in the eyes of the Rabbis came from a spring that followed them around so they never realised they shouldn’t take it for granted. And now, as the water suddenly dries up, they realise the things they thought they could rely on, they ain’t necessarily so.

It’s fascinating that this run of complaints and failings of the Children of Israel beings with a complaint about food, and ends – this week – with a complaint about water.

Jonathan Safran Foer, in his book, We Are the Weather (I’ll come back to that phrase later) suggests that “the problem with the planetary crisis is that it runs up against a number of built-in “apathy biases.” [And that despite] many of climate change’s accompanying calamities – extreme weather, floods, wildfires and resource scarcity among them – are vivid and suggesting of a worsening situation, they don’t feel that way. They feel,” [Safran Foer writes] “abstract, distant and isolated.”

It's food and water that feel so much more immediate. Perhaps it’s the food and the water that will break us out of our apathy biases. We’re not very good at noticing the Amazon rainforest is disappearing or sea levels are rising, but we’ve certainly noticed how much more expensive food is getting. And we’ll notice the uptick in water charges too. Here’s hoping we can connect one to the other.

Environment; weather, food and water, tend to work in one of two ways, in the Hebrew Bible.

In the first way, God flicks switches and it is so. There goes light. There goes darkness, or seas, or grasses or fruit trees and it is so. A little later, God brings plagues; infestations, crop devastation and the like, as a way of ensuring the Egyptians know just who is really in control of the world – it’s God, not some jumped up Pharoah. And, by the time we get to the book of Job, the weather – the storms and the earthquakes and terrors of the deep are part of how we – or Job at least – is supposed to understand our place on this planet. We’re not in control. It’s a way of thinking about the environment that has, or at least had, great appeal, right up until the dawn of the industrial revolution. But I’ll come back to that.

Devorah Baum, friend of the community, talked about this modality of our relationship with the environment in a speech that features in the brand-new eco-documentary, ‘My Extinction.’ The doc is great, I recommend it heartily. Watching it is the reason I’m giving this sermon today. She noted the verses in Ecclesiastes, “There is a time for everything, a time to plant and a time to uproot,” is dangerous. It tells us that everything is cyclical. It suggests that if today is a little too hot, tomorrow will be cooler. The dominant voice of the book of Ecclesiastes is, you probably aren’t as powerful as you think, don’t get so worked up, and don’t get carried away with your own power. And there are certainly times when that’s a good message to hear, but it’s not going to fix the environment. It’s a dangerous way to think about our relationship with the environment.

And then there is a second modality of how the environment works. We read the most famous Biblical verses in the middle paragraph of the Shema. If you are good, it says in the book of Deuteronomy, “There will be rain in its season, both at the beginning and the end of the harvest period. You will gather in grain and wine and oil” But if you are not good, “God will shut up the skies so there will be no rain and the ground will not yield its produce and you will soon perish from the good land God is giving you.”

Or, later in the Book of Deuteronomy, just before Moses passes away, he repeats the idea. If you do well, God will open for you the bounteous store of the heavens to provide rain for your land and bless you.” But if you do not do well, “God will strike you, scorching heat and drought and blight and mildew, the skies above your head shall be copper and the earth under you iron.”

In this, other, way of thinking about our relationship with the environment, we are the weather. We are the reason it rains or doesn’t or rains as and when it should, or floods and destroys when it shouldn’t. It is our doing and it is our fault.

And here’s the strange thing about this second way – let me give it the fancy name they use in universities – this Deuteronomistic way of thinking. It’s so easy to disprove. The Deuteronomistic claim feels so obviously absurd when we know – as Moses is imagined testing God – that Tzadik v’Ra Lo, Rasha v’Tov Lo – there are good people who suffer and wicked people who do well. And for three thousand years theologians have argued and pontificated and prevaricated and attempted to explain a Deuteronomistic way of thinking about the world when it feels so obviously untrue.

And then along comes climate catastrophe.

And now, suddenly, the Deuteronomistic way of thinking about the environment feels obviously, transparently, true. If you cut down all the trees, and if you don’t take care of the ecosystems and if you don’t … and if you don’t … then you are the weather.

And it turns out that the way to solve the absurdity of how to make sense of the Deuteronomistic way of thinking was to think about the environment. The Deuteronomistic way of thinking about the world might not line up perfectly today, but give it a couple of decades, let the industrial revolution run unfettered through the planet for 250 years or so and we’ll absolutely get copper skies and iron earth because of our awful mistreatment of this beautiful planet. Give it a couple of decades and it will come to pass, right as Moses always said it would. We are the weather.

Here's the good news.

If we are the weather as we turn the skies copper, we can be the weather in healing some of the scars we’ve inflicted. We know there are things that can work and maybe, maybe even whisper it, are already starting to work.

We are powerful, if we can unite and organise and, perhaps most especially, if we can be prepared to put up with inconveniences today so we don’t mess things up too badly tomorrow. I urge us to try.

It will take a willingness to pay attention to the things we don’t find easy to see and it will take sacrifices we would rather not make. We need to fly a lot less. We need to eat a lot less animal products. And do a bunch of things that are inconvenient, but desperately obviously necessary. Perhaps most of all, we need to be more willing to speak up about our role in determining the weather. We need to get over our misgivings about sounding all prophetic and warning of the copper skies – I need to give more sermons like this. We all need to talk more about our ability to influence the weather with people we encounter in our everyday lives. We need to ensure that those we encounter know that it’s normal, sensible, decent people like us, like them, who are making changes and fighting for changes, and taking responsibility for the weather.

It's not that we don’t know what to do. It’s that we feel a little embarrassed, or it’s a little uncomfortable, or we retreat behind “apathy biases,” but we can take these piddling oppositions on, can’t we? We are, after all, the weather.

Shabbat Shalom

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How To Bend the World Towards Love - Parshat Shelach

 It’s exam season, here’s a little physics, for those of us who still shudder at the thought of spending these weeks desperately trying to remember Newton’s First Law of Motion, or some such.

An object, Newton articulated, will remain in uniform motion, in a straight line unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force.

I’m not, you are probably relieved to hear, going to give a sermon on exam stresses, or Physics. But I am interested in the way in which we travel – in uniform motion or in a changed state – through our lives.

I am interested in the way in which once set in motion, we continue – which is fine if we were set in motion running directly alongside every other human being in the world, each of us set in motion exactly in unison, so we can all travel together in this lonely world.

But what if, for whatever reason, we weren’t set into the world in such perfect alignment with our fellows? What if, what with us all being unique and individual and even deliberately created unique and individual, we were created in diversity – different attitudes, different abilities, different goals, different loves and different hates. If that is the case, then the straight lines go off in opposition.

I mean, if that is the case, and I think that really is the case, then the journey through life would be one of increasingly discovering one’s aloneness, one’s opposition and the loss of fellow travellers. And it really can, in this strange world in which we live, too often feel as if we are increasingly siloed and at odds and in opposition.

If that is the case, then surely the single most important lesson we could imagine, the single most important thing to discover is how to be, as Newton put it, an external force that can pull us away from our straight lines, bend us towards one another, align us, rather than leave us to our lonely straight lines of uninterrupted wandering.

I want to look at Moses, Moshe Rabeinu, in this context, and in particular, the remarkable moment in the heart of the story we read today.

The spies go off. They come back with a bad report – dibat ha-aretz. And the dibah, the Torah tells us, spreads through the camp, vyotziu dibat Haaretz - and soon everyone is heading off in their own directions of mistrust and fear and opposition. And the unity of the people is falling apart.

And it gets worse. When the report of these revolting spies reaches God, God decides God has had enough, “How long will this people despise me [says God,] I will smite them with pestilence and destroy them.” And here we have our scene, of the people heading off in their varying directions of diba – bad-mouthing the land and the leadership, and God, God, heading off in a direction of destruction.

And then along comes this external force, a force that succeeds in changing the will of God, and bending the straight lines from opposition and conflagration into something more hopeful.

Moses starts with a brilliant ploy – God, if you destroy the Children of Israel now, all the other nations will think it’s because you weren’t able to bring them into the Land as you promised.

It’s an appeal to God’s sense of self – God wants to be seen to be powerful. The Children of Israel don’t see that, so God is ready to destroy them, but wait, Moses says, if you do, everyone else will think you are lacking in power.

There’s a lovely comment on this in the Talmud Brachot.

“What,” the Rabbis imagine God responding to Moses (brachot 32a), “what do you mean the people won’t think I’m powerful, didn’t they see the miracles I wrought when the Children of Israel crossed the sea?” “Ah,” they imagine Moses responding, “they’ll think it was just that you were more powerful than that bumpkin Pharoah.” The Talmud doesn’t use the term ‘bumpkin.’

The way to change the will of God, the way to bend disparate and disparating forces in the world is to meet them where they are, and persuade them it is in their interests to bend, persuade them that the bigger truths of who they wish to be are only available if they change course. That takes guts and sophistication and a particular kind of emotional intelligence. All of which Moses possess.

But this opening salvo is just the warmup. Moses returns with one of the most remarkable speeches in all of the Torah.

"Now may God’s strength be made greater, just as you have declared: The LORD is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.' In accordance with your great love, forgive the sin of these people, just as you have pardoned them from the time they left Egypt until now."

And God changes.

God replies, I will forgive them, as they request. We use that phrasing still, right through Yom Kippur – Vesalachti Kidvarecha. Moses saves the children of Israel, Moses bends the will of God towards compassion and great love, away from anger – justifiable as it may be – and destructiveness.

Again, the rabbis capture and amplify what is quite so remarkable about this brief speech.

Make great – they ask in Midrash Yelamdeinu – how is it great for God to let the children of Israel off the punishment that is their definite due? The answer comes - Make your aspect of mercy greater than your aspect of strict judgement.

There is even, in some scrolls, a tradition of writing one of the letters of ‘Make great’  supersize in our Torah scrolls. It’s the letter Yud of Yigdal – the letter that makes the word ‘great’ – Gadol – into a verb in the imperfect, incompleted form – you are not quite at your greatest yet, Moses is saying to God, you need to get even greater, and the way to do that is to develop the ability to forgive and show a capacity to forgive that, frankly, God has failed to show before;

And what a list of characteristics Moses reminds God are utterly essential to the way in which God wishes to be, even if they are not the way God has just said God will respond.

Slow to anger?

Forgiving sin and rebellion?

Sure God will punish the evildoers, but Moses allows God to find a place of softness, and Moses allows God to find the ability to define God’s self from that place of softness.

And Moses saves a future for the people of Israel.

Again, there’s a lovely Rabbinic moment – in Sanhedrin 110 a-b - when the Rabbis imagine Moses and God on the mountain, and God is giving dictation to Moses. I’m going to be slow to anger, God says, “Really?” Says Moses, “even to the wicked,” “Trust me,” says God, “You’re going to need it when they rebel.”

I love this kind of rabbinic interplay – sharpening and heightening the relationship between Moses and God. One leans into the other, and the other leans back.

God lift Moses up, higher than any human, and in return Moses pulls God higher, higher, even than God aspired to be.

This is how we can bend in towards one another, in a world where, without empathy, seeking out points of contact and calling each of us towards the person we wish to be – rather than that which we become when our tempers fray and our patience is tested.

This is how the world can be healed.

May we all be merited to find such encounters in our own lives – may we have people who can bend us towards better versions of ourselves.
And may we all have the courage to bend others, to lift them too towards their better selves so we may all live in a world less lonely and more united in love.

 

Shabbat Shalom

Welcoming Expressions of Interest in a Textile Commission for New London Synagogue

Our community is looking to commission some new textiles suitable for our Grade II Listed building.

The heart of our sanctuary is the reading table from which prayers are led and the Torah is read. The original cloth used on that table is now looking tired and we have the opportunity to create something new – and more interesting - in memory of a remarkable, sadly recently deceased, member of the community, the art historian Shulamith Behr (Courtauld Institute, author of Women Artists in Expressionism: From Empire to Emancipation). We are looking to replace the cloth visible below. And also commission a second version of the cloth that would be used for the High Holydays, when the Synagogue ‘changes its clothes’ to wear white. We would expect also to replace the light-shades also visible in photo below both for year-round and High Holyday use.

Rough measurements are per the photos below.

We would welcome expressions of interest at this time. Please contact Rabbi Jeremy Gordon, rabbi@newlondon.org.uk with some examples of work and any initial thoughts.