By Dan Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — It’s summertime and in many parts of the Lower 48, it’s hot. In Alaska, it’s not so hot, and it rains and drizzles a lot, especially in Juneau.
But the summer of 2015 is going to go down as not just a very hot time but also as the summer of droughts, and not in just one place, and not for just one season or year. The climate is changing and we can see the evidence all around us — feel it, in fact.
With Pope Francis’ encyclical “Laudato Si” on the perils of climate change, the world has been put on edge. For Jewish leaders, there are also pressing issues to discuss in the summer of 2015 and for the next 100 years onward.
Last month, more than 350 North American rabbis issued an ”open letter” on global warming concerns, declaring that the time for action was at hand.
“The hope is that over and over in our history, when our country faced the need for profound change, it has been our communities of moral commitment, religious covenant and spiritual search that have arisen to meet the need,” the U.S. and Canadian rabbis declared. “So it was 50 years ago during the civil rights movement, and so it must be today.”
Edward Rubin is a law professor at Vanderbilt University who is about to publish a climate-themed novel titled The Heatstroke Line. He grew up in Brooklyn, he told me in a recent email, and as a Jewish-American has always been interested, passionately, in issues such as social justice and human rights, as well as the environment and law. At this point in his life, he said he wants to take some time as a novelist to explore the cultural role of novels and movies in reframing the debate over climate change.
When I asked Rubin what in his Jewish background tipped him this way, he told San Diego Jewish World: “The prophetic tradition, I think. I remember being impressed reading the Hebrew Scriptures with the enormous courage that Nathan shows when he accuses King David of murder, and that Jeremiah shows when he tells the Hebrew people that disaster is coming and that it is their own fault.”
Ari Philipps, writing an article in June about the rabbis’ open letter for Think Progress magazine, started off with this headline: “Rabbis: Scripture Says ‘If We Refuse To Let Earth Rest, It Will Rest Anyways’.”
The “Rabbinic Letter on the Climate Crisis” was initiated by seven rabbis from across the spectrum of Jewish faith and calls for “spiritual leadership of the Jewish people to speak to the Jewish people as a whole and to the world on this deep crisis in the history of the human species and of many other life-forms on our planet.”
They are praying for a “new sense of eco-social justice.”
Rabbi Arthur Waskow, director of the Shalom Center and one of the seven authors of the letter, told The Forward that the rabbis wanted to bring “unique Jewish wisdom” to the efforts to heal the world from climate change and to remind the Jewish community that the “relationship between humankind and the Earth is encoded in the Torah.” Waskow also said it is important to connect with the younger generation of Jews who are concerned about a damaged world they and their children will inherit.
“In Leviticus 26, the Torah warns us that if we refuse to let the Earth rest, it will ‘rest’ anyway, despite us and upon us — through drought and famine and exile that turn an entire people into [climate] refugees,” the letter states.
Waskow said that for time immemorial the attention of the Jewish community has focused on the ”repair of social injustice” as the Jewish people experienced such traumas in our own history of exile. Now, it’s time to focus on the deeper environmental crisis of which the Jewish tradition ”has always been aware.”
So the summer of 2015 might mark a turning point in the fight against global warming, before it is too late, if it is not already too late. With the Pope’s global shout-out, and the “Rabbinic Letter on the Climate Crisis,” we have all been warned and wake up call has been issued. The question is will we heed the Pope’s call and the rabbis’ letter, or will things return to business as usual come September?
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Bloom, based in Taiwan, is a freelance writer and a climate activist. You may comment to him via dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com, or your comment may be posted on this website provided that the comment is civil and that you identify yourself by your full name and by your city and state or residence.