Earth Day 2012

Below is the talk I had the privilege of delivering today at the Maryland Presbyterian Church on Providence Road, in honor of Earth Day.

Hope you all are celebrating - the earth is, with all this wonderful rain. 

“Midrash” is the ancient rabbinic technique of taking tantalizing verses in the Bible and creatively unfolding and reshaping them, tucking them a bit here and tweaking them a bit there, until voila, a new meaning emerges that is deftly applied to the author’s rhetorical purpose.

The text this morning comes from such a midrash on Ecclesiastes  7:13.

“Consider all that God has done: Who can make straight what he has made crooked?”

The text’s meaning is clear. It proclaims: How powerful God is! No one and nothing can countermand his word. Yet, along came a rabbi of old who decided that he could tweak the verse just a touch – changing the meaning of just one word – and thus teach an important lesson. In doing so, he created the midrash that has become the anthem of the Jewish environmental movement today.

Why, this anonymous rabbi-of-old asked, would the God of goodness make something crooked, twisted, broken?

Rather, the verse must be referring at the end not to God, but to man: “Consider all that God has done: who will be able to straighten again that which he – mankind - makes crooked?” 

With this one change in mind, from “he” meaning “God”, to “he”  meaning man, the rabbi creates the following story:

"When the Holy One, blessed be He, created the first human, He took him by the hand and led him around the garden, showing him all the trees. 

God said to the human, 'See all my works, how good and beautiful they are? Know that all I have created, I created for you. But be mindful that you do not spoil and destroy My world - for if you do, there will be no one after you to set it right."

This is a stunning sixth-century rabbinic warning that teaches us that as big and magnificent and divinely-wrought as the natural world is, it is not indestructible, not immune to degradation by human hands.

The midrash teaches us that all creation, in all its detail, in all its particularity, is God’s work, glorious but vulnerable. Like a proud artist giving a tour of their studio, God took the human by the hand and showed him each and every tree and animal and stream and hill and the ways they all fit together.

And the human was told, all this is for you! All this I did for you! Remember, it is not impervious to harm, or steeled against ruin. It is the work that I love. Be sure to treat it well.

Note that the midrash notably and I would argue intentionally does not say: “All this I give to you.”  It rather says: “All this I made for you.” This world is here for us to cherish, and use, and even improve. The human is to acknowledge it, admire it, be humbled and grateful and awed by it. It is ours to live fully with, but it is not ours to possess.

As big and magnificent and important as we humans are, we need to be humble about our place in creation. We have been given great power, and great latitude in how we use that power. We need to be mindful and deliberate and discerning so that we use our knowledge, our appetites, our curiosity, and our power for good and not for evil, for growth and not destruction. 

Along with this message, it seems to me that this story is pointing to yet something a bit deeper: that in the biblical imagination, nature is not just a gift, or commodity, or necessary accessory to the good life.   It is the very currency, the language, that God uses to speak with humanity. And therefore, it is the currency and language that we should use to speak back to God.

In the Bible – if we are good and God is pleased, the rains are soft and timely and come in just the right amount. If we are good and God is pleased, the land is blessed and giving; the harvests are bountiful and filling.

If we are not good and God is not pleased, the rain is hard and damaging, or sparse or absent; the land is parched and unyielding; the harvests are meager.

Deuteronomy 11 says:

 ¹³ If you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today—to love the LORD your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul— ¹⁴ then I will send rain on your land in its season, both autumn and spring rains, so that you may gather in your grain, new wine and olive oil. ¹⁵ I will provide grass in the fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied.

But if not, if ¹⁶ … you will be enticed to turn away and worship other gods and bow down to them. ¹⁷ Then the LORD’s anger will burn against you, and he will shut up the heavens so that it will not rain and the ground will yield no produce, and you will soon perish from the good land the LORD is giving you. ¹⁸

We  tend to dismiss these words as quaint, outdated theological beliefs of cause and affect.  After all, we moderns don’t believe as the ancients did – we know droughts and floods, extreme weather and climate change don’t come as punishment from God in response to our bad moral behavior.

Perhaps not. But it is true that our behaviors affect the natural world, that how we manage and manipulate the environment determines the abundance, availability, health and distribution of the goodness of the natural world.

It’s true that hording and wasting, taking too much and returning too little, poisoning and trashing our waters, our land and our air upsets the ebb and flow of nature and the very systems we depend on.

So, while the Bible speaks of the necessity living in good relation to God, we can extrapolate that to mean living in good relation to God’s world. That is what the midrash is teaching. Whether through theology or natural law, failure to respect the vibrancy, integrity and moral laws of nature will bring havoc to the earth and all its inhabitants. And it is we humans who will be held responsible. And, as the midrash says, there will be no one after us to set it right. And it is in the way we treat nature that our devotion to God is measured and weighed.

The midrash continues with a haunting vision:

To what might this be likened, it asks:

To a woman who is pregnant and gives birth in jail. The child is raised in jail; grows up in jail, and his mother dies in jail.  One day, the king was travelling by the jail, and as he passed by the son shouts out to him and says: Oh King: it was in this prison that I was born, and it is here that I was raised, and here I live: but I ask you, by what sin have I earned this punishment of being here? And the King answers, Because your mother gave birth to you here.”

If we destroy the world, if we create out of it a prison of destruction, we curse our children with living in that destruction. That is something we cannot do.

How do we avoid it? In the very first chapters of the Bible, we read a phrase, a formula, that helps guide us in the task of living well with God’s gift, and of avoiding the fate we dare not bring about.

In Chapter Two of Genesis, in the story of the creation of Adam, the Bible tells us that:

“The LORD God took the man he had made and put him in the Garden of Eden “to work it and care for it.” 

It is in this pairing of verbs, this yin/yang of purpose, this balance of consumer and protector; manipulator and preserver, that the vision of how humans should and must relate to the earth is revealed and measured.

L’ovdah ul’shomrah. To till and to tend; to work and protect. These are not to be seen as two separate, sequential tasks, doing one now and the other later: mountaintop removal here and preserving the Tetons there. Our agriculture, manufacturing, energy production, recycling, waste disposal all must be a piece of preserving and not just consuming. That is the message of living right in the Bible. That is the message we in the faith community must know and speak.

This, then, is the task of the faith community:

·      To live in sync with the flow and pulse and patterns of the world

·      To live humbly and joyously with God’s awesome gift

·      To advance and preserve the work of creation

·      To be witness to the truth that living our lives this way is a most blessed and purposeful way to be.

·      And to teach the lessons of the midrash to our neighbors and children, our businessmen and politicians, our farmers and bankers, and to ourselves, saying:

'See all God’s work, how good and beautiful it is? Know that all God created, he created for us. But we must be mindful that we do not spoil and destroy it - for if we do, there will be no one after us to set it right."

Rethinking Hametz

We often hear that hametz - the puffed up, leavened food that we banish from our homes on Passover - represents the less attractive parts of being, our puffed up egos that slowly bloat the boundaries of self and ooze onto the protected space of others. Or the encrusted coating of pride or psychological armor that builds up over time to protect our wounded, vulnerable inner core but that needs to be periodically scraped away so that our souls can breathe and be restored once more.

I like that view and have taught that in years past.

But I am thinking of hametz in a slightly different way this year. What if we thought of hametz not as bad, but as "dirt"?

Mary Douglas, the eminent anthropologist (of Purity and Danger fame), taught that "dirt" was not a thing but a concept, not an essence but an attribution. Dirt is not something that can be scientifically catalogued the way pathogens or bacteria are. You cannot put something under a microscope to see if it is "dirt" or not.

"Dirt" is stuff out of place, something existing where somebody thinks it shouldn't. Just as a weed is a plant growing where you don't want it, so dirt is something being where you don't want it.

This explains a lot. It explains why, for example, when there are clothes all over your son's bedroom floor, you may think the place is "dirty" while he thinks the clothes are just arrayed on the biggest shelf in the room. Or why a child's hair-clippings found in a mother's keepsake box are precious whereas that same hair found on the bathroom floor is a mess.

Which helps me - and challenges me - when I think of hametz.

What is the right place, and time, for things? Why are things that were perfectly good for us yesterday forbidden to us today? How did this thing that is a staple of life on other occasions become so virulent on Passover that it must be totally banished, or at least nullified and transformed?

Perhaps, as Avram suggests, it is a matter of degree. A bit of pride, a bit of ambition, a bit of selfishness is not bad. They are even essential. How else do we build and discover and push beyond contemporary limits without the urgings of ambition or pride, or genuine curiosity? But what dangers lie, as well, in uncontrolled pride, greed and voyeurism? And where do we draw the lines?

Perhaps Pesah is that annual season of line-drawing, re-setting the boundaries, of cleaning out the expanding, crusty accretions of too much pride, too much desire. Perhaps Pesah should be seen as a radical reboot, a cleansing that offers a stark exercise trimming back the excess and re-evaluating the value that guides these impulses. What, Pesah might be asking us, are all those urgings for? What service should we properly put them to?

Perhaps that, too, is why Pesah is a week long. We could not bear to strip ourselves of our protective coatings, rid ourselves of the armor of pride, and return, so exposed, to the unchanged rigors and dangers of the world. We need a week to live in this pristine world of the wilderness, in the company of each other, in a taste of a place where all is in balance, where manna comes with the dew, where the world protects us. We need a week to take in this gift of freedom, to bask unafraid in the presence of each other, to understand where - when we return to the world of hametz - we should direct the power of our urgings.

And then, with that as our armor, return to tangle, or tango, with hametz.

The spirituality of rain

Passover is when the rain stops. It is the close of winter in the Mediterranean climate of Israel, the end of the wet season, and the time when we usher in the summer. It is the time our prayers shift from gratitude for the seasonal bursts of rain to the appreciation of the miraculous morning dew.

It seems like a perfect time to muse, for a moment, about the place of rain, geshem, in the rabbinic imagination, and how it morphed from the realm of physics to the world metaphysics. 

Gashmiut (from geshem) is how the medieval rabbis referred to life's "physicality," the earthy, material dimension of this created world. It is juxtaposed to Ruchniut, the non-corporeal, spiritual dimension.

You won't find Gashmiut in the Bible. You won't find it in the Talmud. It was a word formed by our medieval ancestors to encompass one half of their world-view divided into two: "stuff" on one side and "essence" on the other.

The choice of Ruchniut is clear. Ruach is wind, breath, the intangible but enduring essence of life as expressed in Genesis 1:2 "the ruach of God fluttered over the waters." It is a fine root for spirituality.

But the choice of geshem, rain, is curious. It seems the opposite of substance.  Episodic, fluid, impossible to hold, "raininess" hardly seems to convey the sense of sturdy "materiality".  A stronger candidate might have been "earth," adamah. Earthiness powerfully carries the meaning of physicality, groundedness, something solid and enduring.

"Even" or "tzur," stone and rock, could have conveyed an even better sense of sturdiness, physical presence. It was good enough to serve as a metaphor for the reality, presence and steadfastness of the Divine. And its hard substantiality contrasts nicely with spirituality.

But the medieval philosophers didn't choose those. They chose geshem, rain, instead. I haven't yet found a study that explains why, so I take the opportunity to muse. (I haven't nailed this one yet so your guidance and responses would be most welcome.)

What are the material dimensions of rain that the rabbis wished to emphasize as the essence of physical life? It is not possessiveness. Rain neither owns things nor can it be owned. It cannot be held long in the hand or carved or mined. And though we can gather it in cisterns and guide it through water races, we cannot possess the rain, only the pools in which it gathers. There is something, then, mercurial, evanescent, otherly and fragile about it.

Yet, rain is powerfully, desperately desired, but only at the right time and only in the right amounts. In its parts, it is insubstantial. Drop by drop it amounts to little. Single drops do not make rain; single drops do not bring life. It takes a cloudburst to make a rainfall. And it takes a rainfall to bring life. Too much, though, and life is destroyed.

Captured and horded, it can go stagnant and stink. It is through its flow, when it is shared among the land and trees and streams that it is vibrant and yields life.

Rain is, in the rabbinic imagination, the major currency between God and humans. It comes from the heavens and descends upon the earth. It is stored in the vaults on high and released in its time as blessing or curse. It captures the mystery and majesty of God's hold over all nature.

So, what does all this tell us about ourselves? What does this tell us about our bodies as material husks and our desires for material possessions and well-being?

What does it tell us about one and many, enough and not too much, having and sharing? And what, in the end, does it tell us about the rabbis' sense of purpose and the world's best way of being?

There is, as always, something ever more interesting in the curious than in the obvious.  I am eager to hear what you think.