Accommodate the Environment - A Sermon for Second Day Rosh Hashanah 5784

The choice of subject was easy. I wanted to talk about the environment today, partly because it’s possibly the most significant area of our lives where we, as humanity, owe a responsibility to our Creator and our fellow human beings to change. And partly because it’s proving so difficult for us, as humanity, to make that change. We’re stuck.

There’s an old joke that feels less funny every time I hear it. A man is taking shelter in a storm. And an announcement comes over the radio that everyone should evacuate. But the man reflects that since he’s a decent person, God will take care of him. So he stays put.

And when the waters start to rise and a storm marshall comes, knocking door-to-door, telling everyone to evacuate, the man protests his decency, assures the marshall God will take care of him and stays put.

And when the waters rise higher, and the man escapes to the roof of his house, a helicopter comes whirring by, and the pilot, through the loudhailer, tells the man to hang onto a rope and be winched aboard, and the man protests his decency and refuses to leave.

And when the man drowns in the flood, he insists on a private meeting with God, “How, God, could you do this to as decent a man as myself.” And God responds, “Who do you think sent the marshal and the helicopter?”

I did warn you, it’s not as funny as it used to be.

I’m not going to do the facts, I think we all have enough of a sense of the facts.

The problem is the link between the input of the facts and the output of a transformed relationship with our natural environment.

I’ve been thinking about an idea attributed to the great Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget.

Piaget’s thought we deal with new destabilising knowledge in two ways; we assimilate and we accommodate. When we assimilate new knowledge, says Piaget, we add the incoming knowledge to the sense of the world we have in place without having to alter anything, without having to alter our schema.

The example of a dog will do. Let’s say, our parent shows us, as a child, a picture of a four-legged, furry creature and tells us that this is a dog – dog, got it. We go to the park, and there’s a four-legged, furry creature that, suddenly, barks. And we don’t know what to do with this new knowledge, but, hopefully, someone confirms to us that, despite our concerns, this is nonetheless a dog, and we assimilate into our schema of ‘dog’ that dogs bark.

But what if, having been shown a picture of a four-legged, furry dog, we go to the park and see a four-legged, furry creature that miaows. Again, we are going to be thrown a bit, but, hopefully, someone confirms to us that this is not a dog, but a cat. And we accommodate our schema, we create a new way of understanding that four-legged furry creatures that miaow are NOT dogs, but instead a cat.

So assimilation – there’s new information out there, and it momentarily destabilises us, but we assimilate that information into our existing schema, and we go on with our lives unchanged.

And accommodation – there’s new information out there and we are destabilised to the extent that we change our schema, and change our understanding of the world.

The issue, I think, with our relationship with the environment, is that we keep assimilating new pieces of information into our existing schema. And don’t accommodate our schema to change.

We encounter a bit of information that suggests our actions are destroying the planet and we will ourselves into a belief the science isn’t clear, or that it isn’t not going to affect us, or that we can’t do anything about it or any one of a litany of different emotional responses that allow us to carry on regardless, or with just enough of a response that we kid ourselves we have greenwashed over an ecological sin. Ahhh the human psyche.

I hope this helps, just naming and calling the difference between an assimilating response to destabilising information and an accommodating response. I hope it can help us accommodate, and change.

But I want to share three other ideas, religious ideas, Jewish ideas that, I hope, can help us accommodate to the environmental challenge, in this year to come.

The first has something to do with the way we treat eco-warriors, or doomsayers, or extinction rebellion protestors or … those sorts of people.

Prophets Are There to Help, But It’s a Tough Job – So Be Nice

When God tells Moses to stand before Pharoah, Moses doesn’t want to do it. He’s convinced no-one will believe him. When God tells Isaiah to instruct the Children of Israel to change their ways, Isaiah says, and this is the original Hebrew, Oy. When Jonah is told to prophecy destruction, he thinks he’s more likely to be killed than change the ways of the people of Nineveh.

I think many of the great, and not so great, ecological prophets of our time would absolutely understand how they felt.

But were it not for Moses, or Isaiah or Jonah …

I’m reminded of the Talmudic account of how Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai saved Judaism. The Jews of Jerusalem had barricaded themselves inside the city and the Biryoni, the Jewish leadership inside the city, threaten to kill anyone who even suggests negotiating with the Romans. It took Yochanan Ben Zakkai’s remarkable leadership to see that the path followed by the Biryoni was self-destructive, and it took bravery, even a foolhardy bravery to do something about it.

The prophetic voices are there, in our faith and beyond. They have warned us of exactly what has already happened and they are still warning us of what is to happen. We have to stop barricading ourselves in and shooting the messengers.

Responsibility over Rights

There’s a remarkable line in the Talmud that suggests that a person who doesn’t make a blessing before and after eating is a thief. It’s thieving from God, and blessing is how we seek permission. Because the food we eat, it’s not really ours, not even if we planted it, or paid for it with our earned wages. The same goes for, well, everything. The clothes we wear, the roof over our heads, even the very breath in our lungs. Consumption is not a right, but a responsibility, in Hebrew a Chovah, literally a debit. We are stewards of our possessions, there is only one Master in the Universe and we were placed on earth LOvdah UleShomrah – to serve and tend, not as a god ourselves.

Laws of Shabbat, sabbatical and on and on the list goes can be understood as an attempt to inculcate in us a sense, as it says in the Leviticus that gerim v’toshavim atem imadi – we are strangers and temporary dwellers on God’s property. It’s not ours, even if we are temporarily in possession.

We are not a better or a worse person because we have more, or less, of one thing or another, but we because of how we steward that temporarily in our hands. It’s a remarkably freeing idea. It should free us from the suffering Buddhists articulate so well – that our cravings for temporal material objects bring pain.

But it’s a salutary idea too. Freed of the notion that accumulation is important, we should find it easier to understand that many of the things we chase, we do not genuinely need, we could genuinely do without and, for sake of the planet, we must learn to do without. There are radical changes we need to make to our lives. And, of course, that will feel scary. But we, as a nation, as a species, we’ve made dramatic changes before. Once upon a time, smoking was a fine thing to do, drink driving was fine, human slavery was fine. We’ve changed before, we can change again. We can cut down on our use of petro-carbons, plastics, air miles, it’s not that hard.

I think that seeing the resources of the world as our responsibility, not our right, will help.

We Are the Weather

And finally this. Here are some of the most significant verses in our faith – they come from the second paragraph of the Shema, we recited them last night, and this morning. If you are good, it says in the book of Deuteronomy, “there will be rain in its season. 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 bless you.” But if you do not do well, “God will strike you, scorching heat and drought; the skies above your head shall be copper and the earth under you, iron.”

Some 3,000 years ago, Moses suggested 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 at one level, this Deuteronomistic way of thinking is so easy to disprove. It feels so obviously absurd when we know there are good people who suffer drought and wicked people who experience plenty. And for three thousand years theologians have argued and pontificated and struggled to explain these seemingly absurd verses.

And then along comes climate catastrophe.

And now, suddenly, this 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.

It turns out that the way to solve the absurdity of how to make sense of these verses was to think about the environment. Let greed and wanton consumption run unfettered through the planet for 250 years or so and we’ll absolutely get copper skies and iron earth. It will all come to pass, just as Moses always said it would.

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.

We need to listen to the prophets. We need to recalibrate our relationship to stuff to make sure we treat consumption as a responsibility not a right, and we need to take seriously that we are the weather.

It's not that we don’t know what to do. It’s that we have allowed ourselves to assimilate the greatest challenge of our times into something that doesn’t require our attention. In this year to come, for all our sakes, and the sake of our human future on this planet, may we learn to do differently.

And may that bring us the year of sweetness and joy that we wish for ourselves.

Shannah Tovah