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.

***********************************************************

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/