This past summer, smoke from forest fires raging in Western Canada blanketed much of the eastern portion of the North American continent. In particular, you may remember that, for several days in June, a dense wall of smoke emanating from these fires turned the skies of northeastern American cities a ghastly, opaque orange, and rendered air hazardous to breathe. Millions of children, elderly, and those with preexisting health conditions, suffered from smoke inhalation. Some even died.
New York City got hit particularly hard by this smoke cloud, with the worst day being Wednesday, June 7. I know, because I was there. I was in the City to participate in a Rabbinical Assembly strategic planning retreat, and on that day, a couple of colleagues and I made plans to grab lunch at one of my favorite pizza joints – the kind that sells jumbo slices as big as your head. Being a typical New York hole-in-the-wall, the restaurant’s only seating was outdoors. Despite hearing about air quality warnings, the weather seemed ok, so we decided to dine al fresco. However, not long after we started eating, the skies began to darken and it became increasingly difficult to see things that were more than a block away. Our throats started to feel scratchy, our eyes teary, and our breathing more labored. Smarter people, ones who take their health and wellbeing seriously, would have taken their food to go and continued lunch indoors. But since we are here on Yom Kippur I will confess to you that your rabbi and his colleagues are clearly not particularly smart, and we made the extremely unwise choice to sit and schmooze for well over an hour, pretending that it did not look and feel like the apocalypse was unfolding all around us. We just kept eating pizza while the world burned; or, to borrow a phrase from my teacher, Rabbi Sharon Brous, we were lunching “at the edge of the abyss.”
In coining that phrase, Rabbi Brous was referring to a passage from the Book of Genesis, in which Jacob’s sons grab their younger brother, Joseph, strip him of his technicolor dreamcoat and cast him into an empty pit. After perpetrating this violent crime, the older brothers sit down together to enjoy a meal (Gen. 37:25).
Lunching at the edge of the abyss means going about your life as if everything’s fine when nothing is fine. It’s about ignoring injustices because you’re doing alright and pretending something is not broken because it would be too disruptive to your comfortable status quo to do something about it.
Indeed, it only occurred to me much later just how fortunate we were to be in a position to make our (admittedly stupid) choice to continue eating pizza while the world burned. My colleagues and I are relatively young and otherwise healthy, so breathing the air was less immediately risky for us. We could have easily moved to a safer, air-conditioned and filtered, spot comfortably indoors, unlike New York’s thousands of unhoused people.
When many of us think about climate change, the images that likely come to mind are of melting glaciers and vanishing polar bears. Of course, we should care about those things. Our tradition calls upon us to be stewards of creation, which includes obligations to preserve biological diversity, care about the wellbeing of living creatures, conserve precious resources, and maintain a habitable environment for all life (Stephen Jurovics, Hospitable Planet, 71-72).
Today, we must confess and atone for the fact that we have collectively failed to uphold these obligations. The scientific community is virtually unanimous that the radical changes we are experiencing in our climate are caused by human activity. The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere when we burn fossil fuels traps heat and causes temperatures to rise, just as a greenhouse holds in heat. You probably noticed that this summer was extremely hot. As climate journalist David Wallace-Wells recently reported, “This June was the hottest June on record. July was the hottest July on record. In Phoenix, all but one day in July crossed 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The city’s burn units were filling up with people who had fainted on the street and been burned by the asphalt, which measured as hot as 180 degrees.”
Indeed, more than disappearing ice and animal welfare, it is the impact of human-caused global warming on human life that ought to arouse our Jewish conscience. Above all, our tradition obligates us to preserve and protect human life, guarantee equal rights for all, and pursue a just society.
And that’s precisely what’s at stake in the climate crisis. Humans, like all living beings, are only capable of surviving in a certain range of climates — the “Goldilocks Zone,” as scientists call it, between temperatures that are either too cold or too hot to sustain human life. Heat waves aren’t just uncomfortable, they can be deadly. As of today, extreme heat kills half a million people annually. If current trends continue, it is estimated that in less than 50 years, extreme heat will be the norm for over 2 billion people around the world, with yearly death tolls in the millions (Jeff Goodell, The Heat Will Kill You First, 10, 66). And, as always, the poorest and most vulnerable will be on the front lines of these trends.
Now, some of us might say, “That’s too bad for them. But my family and I have air-conditioning, so we’ll be fine!”
Our tradition actually has us confront this callous mentality on Yom Kippur. This afternoon, we’ll read the story of Jonah. You remember Jonah, right? The reluctant prophet who gets swallowed by a giant fish? Well, that story, in essence, is about God’s concern for the welfare of all people, including even the sinful citizens of the capital city of ancient Israel’s greatest enemy, in contrast to Jonah’s disregard for the lives of the Ninevites. We don’t get to consider our wellbeing as more important than others’, that our lives matter more than others’. Rather, we must act in ways that are consistent with our faith’s core principle that all human life is infinitely and equally precious. Since our tradition insists that all human beings are created in God’s image, we all have an equally inalienable right to life on a hospitable planet – and a responsibility to secure that, not only for ourselves, but for each other. And we are reminded of Jonah’s moral failure on today of all days as if to emphasize that, in so many ways, the bedrock value of human equality and its attendant obligation to ensure one another’s well being are the whole ballgame in Judaism.
In any case, while our air-conditioning might enable some of us to survive the heat itself, at least for now, ultimately none of us is safe from extreme and extraordinary weather events that rising temperatures are increasingly precipitating, like this summer’s fire that utterly destroyed the town of Lahaina, Hawaii, killing more than 100 people, or the recent hurricane-caused floods in Eastern Libya that washed away entire communities, resulting in well over 20,000 deaths. Rising temperatures make storms more intense and less predictable, cause extreme droughts and severe water shortages, and fuel the creation of novel pathogens, spreading diseases and exacerbating pandemics.
For more than a century, scientists have warned us about how human industry is destroying our climate, and what we can do to create a more sustainable future. But because saving ourselves from climate disaster means having to make sacrifices – inconvenient and possibly painful or even pizza-related ones – many of us choose to deny reality in order to continue our environmentally disastrous activities. We don’t want our comfortable status quo disrupted. So instead, we lunch at the edge of the abyss, going about our lives as if everything’s fine.
The slow and incremental process of global warming facilitates this illusion. This summer may have been hotter than last summer, but for many of us the difference wasn’t thatnoticeable. And it’s easy to mistake extreme weather as random. But avoiding thinking or talking about an uncomfortable truth doesn’t negate the reality that millions upon millions are already hurting, and dying, because of what we’ve done, or at least allowed to be done, to our climate. And the consequences of our actions will eventually catch up with all of us, or at least our children and grandchildren. If we don’t deal with reality, sooner or later, in one way or another, reality will deal with us – all of us. For all these reasons, I think it should be painfully clear that climate denialism is inconsistent with Jewish values.
On the other hand, confronting and acknowledging the reality of human-caused climate change too often leads to pessimism. Many of us look at the problem and conclude that we’re already too far gone, or the scale and scope of what is needed to transform our society from one that relies on fossil fuels is far beyond what any existing political system on the planet is capable of accomplishing. I admit that I have personally felt this way at times and used it as an excuse for my own inaction. After all, if you believe that we are inevitably doomed by global warming, why bother even trying to stop it?
But our tradition doesn’t allow us to see a problem and act as if it doesn’t exist. Lo tukhal l’hitalem, instructs the Torah. Lo ta’amod al dam re’ekha. You may not look away (Deut. 22:3). You may not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor (Lev. 19:16).
I understand why the formidable magnitude of the climate crisis can make us feel pessimistic. Nevertheless, because pessimism, like denialism, leads to inaction, it is a response our tradition would demand we resist.
So, then, what’s left, beyond denialism and pessimism? Should we all become climate optimists?
As I’ve wrestled internally with this issue over the past few years, I’ve come to the conclusion that our tradition’s response to the climate crisis is not optimism, but hope-timism.
What’s hope-timism? As the term suggests, hope-timism is about hope. Hope is about being perennially discontented with present reality, and stubbornly, defiantly refusing to see it as unchangeable. That’s different from optimism. An optimist minimizes what is broken by choosing to look on the bright side. or believing things will inevitably get better. A hope-timist, on the other hand, recognizes the full extent of the brokenness and refuses to be reconciled with it. And while a hope-timist doesn’t believe that a better future is inevitable, it is always possible, regardless of how improbable it might seem in the present. To the hope-timist, what seems to be impossible now is just a thing that hasn’t happened yet. The apparent limitations of our present reality can be overcome and a new dawn can rise (Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 16-17). To be a climate hope-timist is to recognize that, yes, things are bad now; and, yes, there is a lot of hard work to do, both as individuals and as a society. But it is also to insist that difficult is not the same as impossible, and we can bring about a radical new reality if we dream it audaciously and pursue it ambitiously (Eileen Lindner, Thus Far on the Way, 69).
Our worship today provides us a roadmap for hope-timism. In a few moments, we will recite a prayer known as U-Netaneh Tokef, a liturgical poem found toward the beginning of the repetition of the musaf Amidah. On the surface, at least until the last stanza, U-Netaneh Tokef is pretty terrifying. It declares, “B’Rosh Hashanah yikateivun,” on Rosh Hashanah our fates are written, “Uv’yom tzom Kippur yehateimun,” and on Yom Kippur, our fates are sealed. And its list of what might befall us once our fates are finally sealed focuses overwhelmingly on punishments, including, notably, many different ways we might be killed by a harsh climate: “Who by fire, and who by flood? Who by famine, and who by drought? Who by wild beasts, and who by plague?” These are the very phenomena that we are currently making more common and intense through global warming. The prayer is clear-eyed about our reality: some of us, unfortunately, will perish due to climate catastrophe. Yet the poem also asserts that who, and how many, among us will meet this evil fate is ultimately in our hands, not God’s.
The poem’s last stanza declares:
תשוָּבה וְּתִּפָלה וְּצָדָקה ַמֲעִּביִּרין ֶּאת ֹּרַע ַהְגֵׂזָרה, //Repentance, prayer, and justice overturn
the severity of the decree.”
Before I explain what this line is saying, let me first explain what it is not saying: it is notsaying that if you repent wholeheartedly enough, or that if you pray sincerely enough, or that if you do enough good deeds, that God will spare your life.
Rather, it’s saying that repentance, prayer, and righteousness enable us to overturn the severity of what might currently appear to be inevitable. By engaging in those three acts, by living lives dominated by those deeds, we can transcend despair, pessimism, andoptimism.
Let’s start with prayer. We often think of prayer as trying to persuade a powerful God out there to come down here to help us out. While we do have prayers like that, that’s not by and large how our tradition views prayer. The Hebrew word for prayer is tefillah, more accurately defined as self-assessment, or introspection. Prayer is about reminding ourselves of our values and evaluating how we’re doing with respect to them.
In the context of the climate crisis, prayer can help us identify how we, as individuals and as a society, have contributed to and are complicit in the problem; remind us of our values and responsibility for each other and for the world; and enable us to discern how we can play a role in advancing a future distinct from our present. In other words, prayer is hope-timistic, reinforcing a belief that things can change and reminding us of our capability and responsibility to effect that change.
In this sense, prayer is the indispensable companion of repentance. The Hebrew term usually translated as repentance, teshuvah, more literally means to turn. It involves recognizing how we have gone astray and returning to our responsibility to pursue justice and repair the world. Like prayer, repentance is hope-timistic. It is predicated on the notion that our future is not dictated by our past or present, or even predetermined on high; it is up to us, dependent on the choices we make. We can’t change the past, and the present is what it is. But by engaging in the process of repentance – recognizing our role in climate change, acknowledging how we have brought ourselves to where we are now, identifying what we can and should do next in order to make a better tomorrow, and committing to doing the work – we can advance a different future. And, according to our tradition, it’s never too late to start. We are never too far gone to change course and get back on track.
If prayer is about knowing the way and evaluating our place on the path, and repentance is about getting back on track when we’ve gone astray, then justice, or tzedakah, is about what we do next. Often, tzedakah is translated as charity. But tzedakah is derived from the word tzedek, meaning justice, fairness, or equity. In our tradition, tzedakah is about leveling our society’s playing field. Whereas charity is about giving a meal to a hungry person, justice is about creating a society in which nobody goes hungry. In the context of the climate crisis, charity is an individual switching to an electric car; justice is enacting policies that make electric cars as affordable as conventional ones, ensuring charging stations are conveniently accessible for all, transitioning to a clean energy infrastructure to power them, and, perhaps even better, expanding access to cheaper, cleaner public transportation.
Climate tzedakah is about systemic social, economic, and political change. And one of the main ways we can affect the kind of changes we need is by supporting organizations and causes that are in the trenches advocating for them, whether by donating our money or volunteering our time. On the local level, I encourage you to speak with our friend Avi Calhoun about the important advocacy work of Virginia Interfaith Power and Light. And I also encourage you to speak with our friend Gary Goldberg about Dayenu: A Jewish Call to Climate Action, which aims to mobilize Jews to confront the climate crisis on the national level.
Of course, not all of us have the capacity or the inclination for advocacy work. But we all at the very least can and, I think Jewish tradition would say, must, support environmentally-friendly policies and political candidates – because politics is the process through which we accomplish the things that are bigger than any one of us can deliver on our own, and ultimately fashion a society that reflects our values.
Indeed, the scope and “scale of what needs to happen” in order to avert climate catastrophe “is so massive” that it can only be solved through collective action (Claire Dederer, Monsters, 239-240). We unfortunately will never be able to make enough of a difference as individuals acting alone. And thinking that we can turns more and more of us into climate pessimists every year., What is actually effective is working together. For example, experts agree that eating a plant-based diet reduces our carbon footprint. On my own, I could never eat enough kale to fix the climate crisis. But if many of us decided together to stop eating hamburgers, we would collectively prevent gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions. Similarly, an individual advocating for change may not have much of an impact. But when people organize and advocate together, their voices become amplified, and their power magnified. As Wallace-Wells points out, “the world is [now] decarbonizing faster than anyone anticipated a decade ago,” and “clean energy is now cheaper than fossil fuel energy in most parts of the world.” None of those positive developments could have happened without regular people organizing and advocating for them (Goodell, 310). Therefore, in the year ahead, I want to charge us to organize and champion the systemic solutions necessary to combat the climate crisis – not only as individuals but moreover as a congregation. If you are interested in getting involved in a congregational climate initiative, please be in touch.
U-netaneh tokef asks, “Who by fire, and who by flood?” If we continue on our current course, the answer to that question will, tragically, be all of us, sooner or later. But the poem also reminds us that doom is not inevitable. “B’Rosh Hashanah yikateivun, Uv’yom tzom Kippur yehateimun,” our fates may be written now, but the decree is not final; our doom is not yet sealed. Yom Kippur reminds us that a better future is possible, but whether it comes about is, in many crucial ways, up to each of us individually, and all of us collectively.
But what we can no longer afford to do is eat pizza while pretending our world isn’t burning. Our present is filled with peril. Our world is still warming. People are still dying. There is much work yet to be done, and the road ahead will be long, hard, and halting. But our hope is not yet lost. Repentance, prayer, and justice can yet change our destiny. What may today seem impossible is just a thing that hasn’t happened yet.
In the year to come, let us then embrace hope-timism.
Let us be resolute in our refusal to accept climate disaster as our destiny.
Let us be bold in our belief that a better future is possible.
And let us be determined to do all we can to transform possibility into reality.
Ken Yehi Ratzon, so may it be Your will. Amen.
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