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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