VaYeitzei - The Changing Earth

by Rabbi Katy Z. Allen

I just came back from the Israel Ride, a bicycle ride across Israel that is a fundraising event for the Arava Institute (www.arava.org) and Hazon (www.hazon.org). Water was much a part of the ride, in terms of seeing, and learning, and awareness. Many thoughts and images of water remain in my mind:

* the much-needed heavy rains and wind that greeted my arrival in Israel;
* visiting the Hula Nature Preserve, and learning how the drainage of the Hula Valley swamps for farming led to the extinctions of several bird species that stopped on their migrations and did not produce the rich farmland that had been expected;
* the beauty of early morning sunlight streaming through sprays of irrigation, bringing food to Israel; from where is the water coming?
* sunset over the Mediterranean Sea;
* riding through the Negev, sparse and many shades of brown, and not a drop of water to be seen; faucets and showers running freely in the hotels and kibbutzim where we stayed;
* learning about efforts to grow plants with low-water needs at the Arava Institute;
* hearing about the Dead-Red canal, which the Jordanians now plan to build without the cooperation of Israel and the Palestinian Authority because they need the water desperately; the consequences to the environment remain to be seen.

In this week’s parashah, Jacob meets Rachel beside a well, and – after various twists and turns in the plot – the future of the Jewish people is insured.

Would that every encounter involving water were as positive! In last week’s parashah, Avimelech’s servants stopped up the wells that had been dug in the time of Abraham, a statement that "this water is MINE," and a clear act of aggression, especially in water-hungry country such as ancient Israel.

At the Arava Institute, the motto is "the land knows know borders," and it is a theme that carries through all of their work, both educationally and in terms of research. Israelis – both Jewish and Arab, Palestinians, and Jordanians study together; through honoring the land, they come to know and honor each other.

Many indigenous people honor the land in ways that we have forgotten how to do, including by listening to the Earth, and to the animals and to the plants. They do not listen in a figurative or a metaphoric way, but in a very real way, trying to hear and to understand what the other parts of the natural world are telling them. Listening in this manner requires that we listen with more than just our ears; we must listen with our entire body and with our heart and our soul. Only then can we hear the deep sounds beyond the wind and the calls of the birds.

The land changes, in large ways and small, from small rivulets of running water that carry sediment, to the movement of huge tectonic plates of the Earth's crust. The Earth changes, and we can change as well, in small ways and large ways, both personally and as a community. We can change in terms of how we hear and honor and treat the land.

The use of water in the United States dropped by 30% from a peak in per capita water usage in 1975 until 2005.* In large part this was due to changes in agricultural uses, from flood irrigation to sprinkler irrigation, to drip irrigation, each of which uses less water than the one before. Reductions took place in industry due in large part to laws regarding waste water - it was easier to become more water efficient and produce less waste. Laws regarding water efficiency in homes have also made a difference. We can change.

We are far from at a sustainable level of water usage. But, whether here in the U.S. or in the Middle East, as a society and as individuals we can change. We can change in physical ways by honoring and respecting the water, each drop of which has existed since the origin of the Earth, and by using it more efficiently. We can change in spiritual ways that are just as deep. We can bring forth water from our physical and spiritual wells in ways that can provide for all of Rachel's flock and can ensure our own personal spiritual future and the future of humankind as well.

If the Earth can change, so can we.



* http://www.pacinst.org/press_center/usgs/New_Data_Shows_Water_Use_Drop.pdf

Noach - A Covenant with the Earth

Parashat Noach

by Rabbi Katy Z. Allen

G!d made a brit – a covenant – with Noah, and the Divine side of the compact was never again to destroy the Earth as G!d did with the flood long ago.

With whom or what do you feel that you have some kind of covenant – some kind of two-way commitment? With a life partner? With a child? With a parent? With a sibling? With a friend? With a vision-of-the-future partner? With a school? With some other institution? With a community? With the world? With the Earth?

In many places throughout the Torah, we are told to walk in G!d’s ways, to be like G!d. In terms of the story of Noah, one way to read that would be to say that, we, too, can bring on a flood, just as G!d did. And we may have done that in our lives. If you feel like you have caused some kind of destruction in the world during your life, you are definitely not alone. But as we think of the destruction we may have brought about, the next step is to think about the changes or healing that we have brought into the world since that time, and the changes we now have the capacity to bring about, since we have been through that transformative time of “flood.”

G!d did not promise to keep the world intact until after almost destroying it. Can we also promise to keep the world – the world in which we live, from the most casual relationship of the day to the relationships that endure beyond the grave, including our relationship with the Earth – can we promise to keep that world intact, as G!d promised so long ago? Can we bring a rainbow – a sign of our promise, our brit – into our own personal world?

This Shabbat is Shabbat Noach, the week that we read the story of Noah. It is also the International Day of Climate Action. Scientists tell us that 350 parts per million CO₂ in the atmosphere is the safe limit for humanity and that we are close to 390 ppm. This Saturday, October 24, and throughout the weekend, actions will take place around the globe to acknowledge and inform about this fact, and to work to change the pace of climate change. In conjunction with this, Rabbi Arthur Waskow through the Shalom Center is calling for a "Climate Healing Shabbat" for Shabbat Noach.

A brit is a two-way relationship. G!d made a promise not to destroy the Earth. Can we do the same? Can we do it with all of our relationships? I invite you to sit down this Shabbat with someone with whom you feel you have a covenantal relationship of some kind to discuss this question. What can you do to preserve and improve all of your relationships, including with the Earth? Say it to each other. Write it down in your personal “torah” – teaching. And then, as the weeks go forward, see what you can do to hold onto your side of the relationship, and to keep your promise. See what you can do to walk in G!d’s ways.

To help you along the way, you may want to check out http://www.350.org/ to find an action event near you, and participate in it. One of those listed is Ma’yan Tikvah’s Shabbat in Nature service. Join us for a discussion of how we can help to impact climate change in a positive way. We will meet at 10:00 AM at Greenways Conservation Area at the end of Green Way in Wayland, MA (http://www.wayland.ma.us/conservation/greenways.html). We will walk, take notice of the Earth, pray, and have a discussion about Noah and climate change. In case of rain, we will meet at the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge on Weir Road in Sudbury, (http://www.fws.gov/northeast/greatmeadows/).

Bereshit - Let There Be Light

Parashat Bereshit

by Lisa Greber

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth; and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said: Let there be light; and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good. (Genesis 1:1-4)

With these words a week ago Sunday we lit an Israeli oil lamp to open a half-day conference for religious organizations on energy, faith, and justice. The conference covered the “nuts and bolts” of energy conservation and production for religious organizations – how to track energy use on utility bills, how to obtain blower door tests to determine a building’s air leakage, how to work with organizational boards or vestry committees to seek funding for needed improvements. Representatives from at least seven congregations on Cape Cod attended; environmental concerns that ten years ago might have seemed less pertinent to religious life are becoming far more so for ecological, economic, and social justice reasons as many traditions embrace a mantle of “stewardship.” Our host was the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Falmouth, who had recently celebrated the one-year anniversary of their solar panels. The panels themselves modestly said nothing throughout the day, quietly absorbing sunlight and transmitting it back to us in the form of electricity to keep our sandwiches, grown at a nearby farm, cold until dinnertime.

Let there be light.

The farm itself, Coonamessett Farm, grows green beans, tomatoes, a variety of squash, and other delicacies that you can pick for yourself or buy at the farm stand café. Chickens and a few strutting roosters squawk just below the parking lot. There is a farm education program for children. What I have learned recently is that geological regions have a characteristic isotopic signature for certain elements – the ratio of oxygen isotopes, for example, differs between New England and the Rocky Mountain states – and if we eat the food grown from our local region, sunlight transmitted back to us in the form of arugula or rhubarb, this signature is slowly recorded into our bones.

Let there be light.

These are challenging times for the earth, and for those of us who dwell here. Many of the ecosystems we depend on have been pushed near or beyond the breaking point; we feel this in our bones, in our own breaking points, in our own despairs. We can feel the formlessness and void of not knowing a way forward. I am wondering, however, if it may be that this formlessness is the necessary undoing – both within ourselves and within human institutions that are no longer workable – to begin to walk a new way. What pulls me out of my own despair is a bite of the crab apples from the trees lining the harborwalk in Dorchester Bay where I work, of myself becoming again part of this very particular land, of the sense of all of us in Joanna Macy’s words “coming back to life” – of shochenet, indwelling, within the sacred earth.

These divrei earth that we are beginning here at Ma'yan Tikvah are part of this communal coming back to life, of re-embedding our full selves, including our spiritual and religious backgrounds and traditions, into the web of life. We welcome your words and thoughts on this journey.

The oil lamp, tear-drop shape and terra-cotta-colored pottery reminiscent of its ancestors centuries ago, burned throughout the conference, using only a fraction of the olive oil available to it. Let there be light. And let there be that place, deep and without form and void, out of which the light of our intention, through whatever name we use for God, can call into being the new forms we and this earth so desperately need.

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Lisa Greber has modeled paths to sustainability for policy makers, worked in energy conservation, led nature writing programs for people who are poor or homeless, and taught science to middle school students. She has lived on the boundaries between the scientific and spiritual communities, working with the Coalition on Environment and Jewish Life, InterFASE (International Faith and Science Exchange), Massachusetts Interfaith Environmental Network, the Tikkun Institute, and Earthrite. She is currently continuing this work as a doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts / Boston in the Environmental Earth and Ocean Sciences Department (EEOS), where she can usually be found researching her local Malibu beach.

With special thanks to all those who made the above conference possible, including in particular Rev. Robert F. Murphy, Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Falmouth, Joan Muller, Waquoit Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve (WBNERR), my 2007- 2009 NOAA/NERR Social Science Graduate Research Fellowship, and Anamarija Frankic and the Green Boston Harbor Project at UMass Boston.

Resources:

For more information on geochemical isotopic signatures, please see Darrah, T.H. Inorganic Trace Element Composition of Modern Human Bones: Relation to Bone Pathology and Geographical Provenance. University of Rochester Phd Thesis 0402009 (2009). (Thanks, Tom!)

Coalition on Environment and Jewish Life http://www.coejl.org/

Green Boston Harbor Project http://umb.edu/index.php/gbhp/home/

Macy, Joanna. Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World (NSP, 1998).

Massachusetts Interfaith Power & Light http://www.mipandl.org/

National Estuarine Research Reserve System http://www.nerrs.noaa.gov/

NSF's Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education Report: Transitions and Tipping Points in Complex Environmental Systems (Sept. 2009) Available for download at http://www.nsf.gov/geo/ere/ereweb/advisory.cfm

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Falmouth http://www.uuffm.org/

Waquoit Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve http://www.waquoitbayreserve.org/