July/August 2001

And the Earth is Filled with the
Breath of Life

by Arthur Waskow

"...recent American politics has shown that the enemy of the owls and the enemy of the timber workers is the same institution. And the enemy is the institutions that see it as their task to gobble up the planet."

One of the great Hassidic Rebbes, the Rebbe of Chernobyl, about two hundred years ago taught, "What is the world? The world is God, wrapped in robes of God so as to appear to be material. And who are we? We are God wrapped in robes of God and our task is to unwrap the robes and to discover, uncover, that we and all the world are God."

So, think of the earth as one aspect of God, and think what it would mean for us to pray with that Hassidic understanding. We get a hint what that could mean from another Hassid who transformed himself into being also an American activist. As Rabbenu ("Our teacher") Abraham Joshua Heschel said when he came back from the great civil rights march in Selma, Alabama: "I felt that my legs were praying."

What would it mean for us to pray not only with our mouths but also with our arms and legs? Not just by dancing -- every Hassid knew that truth -- but by marching for social change?

Or to put it another way: If earth is Spirit, then politics may be the deepest prayer, and prayer the deepest politics. We must realize that we are always choosing between a politics that may be prayers to idols, mere carved-out pieces of the Whole, things of partial value that we elevate to ultimates, and a politics that we may shape with such deep caring that it becomes prayer to the One.

Suppose we learn Torah simply because it was written down once upon a time, a matter of "religion" that teaches only about prayer and ceremonial. And suppose we learn science by going to a university department; politics and public policy from yet another university department or from the mass media. Then what do these three have to do with each other? Nothing, or very little.

But that's not in fact what Torah was. It was a celebration of the great unity, and therefore it was politics, and therefore it was science, the best science that was available to every generation of Jews who were encoded into the process. So, when the Jubilee chapter of Leviticus (Lev. 25) says, "Hey, some guy with a master's degree in Business Administration is going to say to you, "If you let the fields lie fallow on the seventh year what do you think we are going to eat?" the Torah says, "Hang on! You will have more to eat, I promise you, if you let the earth rest every seventh year than if you try to work it to death." Of course this is religion. And of course it is also science, the science that knows that the fields are more fruitful if they have a chance to lie fallow. It is not something separate from science. It affirms what is holy in the world, and what is holy includes knowledgeable science.

"Much of what the human race is doing to the planet will have its worst effects on the planet thirty, forty, fifty years from now. It will be our children who will have to live in what we have created." And this process did not stop with the Torah, or the biblical period. The Rabbis of the Talmud proclaimed that no one should herd "small cattle" -- that is, goats and sheep -- in the Land of Israel. Why? Because they destroy trees and grass. The Rabbis say this even though they know perfectly well that our forebears -- Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah -- were shepherds and goat-herders.

Why do they make such an amazing departure from tradition? Because their experience, and their science, have taught them something new. Their deep sense that our relationship with the earth is sacred causes them to oppose what was normal for the early Torah period. The basic values continue; how to affirm them changes in accord with new scientific information.

Today, we might imagine saying to ourselves: "Our Torah (Deut. 20:19) forbids us to cut down fruit trees, even the trees of the enemy in time of war. Today we know that every tree gives oxygen to the web of life, and great forests are crucial to the life of the entire planet. Does that mean that we may cut down any tree only if it is possible to replace its fruitful supply of oxygen? That we may not cut down great forests at all? That this is now Torah because we understand the science of trees in ways our forebears did not, and we uphold the values that they held?"

Today our most dangerous addictive substances are not heroin, not even nicotine, not even alcohol. They are plutonium and petroleum. These are social addictions, not individual ones. I do not mainline oil or gasoline into my own body's veins, but America mainlines gasoline into our society's veins. What is addiction? It is feeling unable to control or limit a behavior, especially using a substance -- even one that in some limited uses may be beneficial -- and therefore to keep using it in such a way as to give immediate pleasure at the high risk of long-run disease and death. And that describes America's relationship to gasoline.

Addictions are to a great extent a spiritual problem -- what in ancient Jewish language was called idolatry; carving out a small part of the great Flow of Life and worshipping that small part. Letting it take over our lives. So today a serious Jewish community must see these social addictions as idolatries, and we must work out ways of infusing our use of oil, coal, paper, and all the rest with holiness. We must eat them in an eco-kosher way.

"Today our most dangerous addictive substances are not heroin, not even nicotine, not even alcohol. They are plutonium and petroleum. These are social addictions, not individual ones. I do not mainline oil or gasoline into my own body's veins, but America mainlines gasoline into our society's veins." By using this hybrid word "eco-kosher" I am suggesting that we adopt as a Jewish commitment, a Jewish covenant, a Jewish way of affirming the sacred relationship we have with earth, that this will be our life-path. Is it eco-kosher to eat vegetables and fruit that have been grown by drenching the soil with insecticides?

Is it eco-kosher to drink the wine of Shabbat blessing from throw-away non-biodegradable plastic cups? Or would it be eco-kosher to share ceramic cups; to begin each kiddush (blessing) with the kavvanah, the intentional focus, that we are using these cups to heal the earth; and to end each meal with the sacred act of washing these cups so as to heal the earth? Is it eco-kosher to use electricity generated by nuclear power plants that create waste products that will remain poisonous for 50,000 years? Is it eco-kosher to ignore the insulation or lack of it in our homes, our synagogues and Jewish community centers and nursing homes, so that we burn far more fuel than necessary and drunkenly pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, there to accelerate the heating of our globe?

Is it eco-kosher to use one hundred percent unrecycled office paper and newsprint in our homes, our synagogues, our community newspapers? Might it be eco-kosher to insist on ten percent recycled paper this year, and thirty percent in two years, and eighty percent in five years?

Indeed, I want to suggest that what makes a life-practice eco-kosher may not be a single standard, an on-off, black-white barricade like "Pork is treyf" (that is, forbidden), as in the traditional kosher life-path. Those who practice that traditional path can keep doing so -- and add to it a constantly moving standard in which the test is: Are we constantly doing what is more respectful, less damaging to the earth than what we did last year?

What would it mean to evolve a code of daily Jewish practice for how we consume, how we eat all these things that come from adamah? What would it mean for each Hillel, each congregation, each Jewish Community Center and nursing home, to review what kind of paper, what kind of energy it uses? Does it invest its money in industries that destroy the earth, or industries that heal the earth?

Most of the Jewish community is not asking those questions yet. What must we do, then, to begin creating an eco-kosher life-path?

Not that this will be enough. The Jewish community, acting on its own, cannot heal the world. Jewish households can't, and even Jewish communities as a whole can't. I could say to myself all day and all night, "Hey, every time you drive the car you are polluting the planet and bringing on global warming" -- and yet if my society is set up so that the only way I can get from where I live to where I work is to drive, and there are no bike paths so that if I tried taking a bike I would probably get killed, and mass transit is disgusting, rare, run down, expensive, a mess -- then I am going to feel guilty but I am going to drive the car.

It does not much help the planet that I am feeling guilty.

At that point I have to take a deep breath and say that I have to act with other peoples and other communities, to shape a society where we can walk from where we work to where we sleep, or we can bike, or at worst we can take mass transit that is far more efficient and less wasteful, and less likely to damage the atmosphere.

So we have to act in the larger way. And we have to draw on the energy, the clout, of the Jewish people, our new ability in the Diaspora to make a difference in the societies we are a part of.

I want to say a little bit more about that, as we face it now in our society. One of the notions that has arisen in American society in the last twenty years is the idea that acting to heal the earth means acting to damage the people, that there is a war between owls and timber workers, and any law advancing the owls hurts the timber workers.

Well, recent American politics has shown that the enemy of the owls and the enemy of the timber workers is the same institution. And the enemy is the institutions that see it as their task to gobble up the planet. To gobble it up biologically, to gobble it up culturally by destroying small communities that just don't fit, and to gobble up local and regional economies that just don't fit into the global market economy. To gobble up the kinds of enterprises where owners and workers felt responsible to each other, where even in the midst of struggles between them, management and labor unions felt some kind of responsibility, a sense of limits of what profits could be, a sense of limits on whether you can fire tens of thousands of people in a prosperous, profitable company. The new corporations of Modernity Amok destroy such companies: their profits could be bigger. So regional and local economies are shattered along with local cultures and local bioregions, ecosystems.

Gobbling the globe means chewing up living creatures, thousands of species. It means chewing up small, odd cultures: the Jews of Eastern Europe, the natives of the Amazon Valley, the Shoshone. It means chewing up the local factory neighborhoods in Philadelphia, even the IBM towns ofÊ upstate New York. It means chewing up the family in all its forms.

The institution of Global Gobble is the global corporation, and its mentality -- its Torah -- is that producing is what human life is all about.

Producing and of course consuming, which is not the opposite of producing, it is only the other side of the coin (and I do mean coin). In the Torah of the global corporation, resting, celebrating, reflecting, loving, being there, are all a waste of time, literally. Shabbat, a waste of time! Think what you could be making if you were not resting!

That attitude toward the earth becomes also an attitude toward human beings. So we have created a technology which pushes people in two directions: either being disemployed because the technology is better, more efficient, so who needs those workers, or Okay, keep the job, but match your life to the speed of the machine. Overwork.

So people who keep their jobs don't work eight-hour days, but ten, twelve, or even fourteen-hour days. And people who lose their jobs scrabble together two, three, even four jobs in order barely to hold on by their finger tips.

So we've got community dying. The community is divided between the disemployed and the overworked. The overworked have no time for family or neighborhood or religious life or grassroots politics. Some of the disemployed -- those who end up on the streets with no work at all or in prison because they get desperate, crazy, drugged, alcoholic -- these folks get a perverse form of leisure, but they also cannot use it for family, neighborhood, religious life, or politics.

Neither the overworked nor the disemployed can bring their beings together for the shaping of a decent society. In their families, neither the desperate disemployed nor the exhausted overworked can shape a loving family. Nor in their neighborhoods, where the only thing you have the energy to do after a twelve-hour day is to sit in front of the television set, which takes your depressed and exhausted self and re-awakens it with jolts of your own adrenaline. A fire! A murder! That will wake you up!

And then since you are feeling jangled from being awakened that way, the TV calms you down by saying, "Hey, here's something wonderful to buy. Look at this picture of a wonderful forest: You can get there by driving this wonderful car. So buy the car. Are you worrying that the fumes from the car are killing the forest, the planet? Buy! You'll feel better! Who needs the actual forest anyway? -- You can have the wonderful TV picture!"

That's the rhythm of the TV; so if you're exhausted or desperate you don't create PTA's, neighborhoods, synagogues, churches, political parties. There is a wonderful and now famous study by Robert Putnam called "Bowling Alone." The bowling leagues are disappearing; people still bowl but they bowl alone, because they don't have the energy anymore even to organize a bowling league. And if this seems so unimportant as to be ridiculous even to mention, the point is that the seedbed of democracy, as De Tocqueville taught, is all those networks of local organizations.

So I think we need to be serious about addressing both the issues of what we call the economy and what we call the environment. They are deeply intertwined. An economy is the way in which earthlings and the earth fit together. Economy and ecology: it is no accident that they both begin with the Greek word for household, they are both about the same processes of the human relationship with the earth.

Indeed, in Hebrew the word for "earth" is adamah and the word for "human" is adam. Listen to them: distinct but intertwined. Earth and earthling, human and humus.

And at this moment in American history, we must also understand the institutional structure that is damaging the earth and that is also damaging our society. To act on either, we must act on both.

I suggest we act in four dimensions that mirror the Four Worlds of reality that are postulated by the Jewish mystics. First, Spirit: what we call ritual, ceremony, prayer, celebration, the direct ways of getting in touch with that sense of unity, of mystery, of allness in the world. Second, Knowledge: the kind of education that intertwines our ancient tradition with the constantly growing edges of tradition, intertwined with knowledge in all the spheres of relationship between human beings and the earth. Third, Relationship: reaching out to other communities and societies everywhere to join with us to heal the wounded earth. And fourth, Doing: the daily eco-kosher practice of our own self, of our own households, and our own community organizations.

Yet finally, these four need to be treated not as four separate parts but as aspects of the One. When they are split apart, very little happens. In most synagogues today, if issues of the earth are dealt with at all they are broken up in separate spheres. Issues of the earth and ritual are discussed within the ritual committee; issues of the earth and knowledge are discussed within the education committee; issues of the earth in relationship, by the social action committee; everyday practice, by the house committee that decides what paper is bought or who comes in to check the insulation.

But on each of those committees, the issue of how to deal with the relationship to the earth is probably third or fourth or fifth on the list of priorities. Perhaps on one committee the issue of the earth will come forward, but on the next front where the issue must be addressed, the specific committee is not interested, and the question molders.

We should not let this happen. The issue of the earth is such that in a unique way, all these in fact are intertwined. So I think perhaps the crucial strategic switch in any Jewish community, congregation, or organization comes when that community decides to create an Adam-and-Adamah committee, whatever it may be called. Even if it has to be called the Committee on the Environment.

(This word constantly gives me the heebie-jeebies because it means "It's out there, round about us, in the "environs," something else, somewhere else; whereas Adam-and-Adamah says, "Hey, we ain't identical but we sure are closely intertwined.") So, we may be stuck with the word in English, at least for a while, but let us always be conscious of what the truth underlying the word always is; that we are earthlings intertwined with earth.

But whatever we name the committee, I think the crucial change in any Jewish community or organization may be when the single adam-and-adamah body is created that has responsibility for all of those four dimensions, to report on them to the community as a whole.

From then on (judging from the places I know where this has already happened) things are different. From then on the community can begin to imagine itself as a piece of a broader movement to heal the earth. Can begin to imagine that that is a major aspect of what Judaism is all about.

Reframing Judaism in this way can evoke passionate commitment from the next generation of Jews, in ways that few other things can. That makes total sense to me. Much of what the human race is doing to the planet will have its worst effects on the planet thirty, forty, fifty years from now. It will be our children who will have to live in what we have created. So, it makes total sense to me that a Judaism which addresses the future of the earth will evoke passion, and energy and excitement, and intelligence, and commitment, and spirit from that generation of Jews. And that conversely a Judaism which says, "Hey, what's this earth stuff got to do with us?" won't fly.

The passionate engagement that comes from a sense of larger purpose, a sense that we fit into the great Unity, is itself at the most profound level necessary if the human race is to decide to stop gobbling up the earth. For those who are spiritually starving will need to fill their bellies with something -- and they will try to fill themselves by gobbling the earth. Intense song, dance, Torah-study, "drashodrama," the engagement of the whole body, the full involvement of both women and men in shaping spiritual practice -- all this spiritual intensity is crucial to a recovering addict. Spiritual vitality is necessary if we are to heal the planet.

So, I encourage any of you people who talk with any of those people who talk of Jewish continuity to say, "Continuity? What is its content? Because if its content is a real, alive, down-to-earth Judaism then I'm ready to put my passion into this. And if not, I will put my passion elsewhere or perhaps I will cynically give up, and put my passion nowhere. For this is a question of life and death to me, a question of the life and death of my children who are not yet in this world. If you're not interested in my life or death, then I am not interested whether the empty Judaism you speak for lives or dies. Its continuity means nothing."

It does not have to be that way. Together we can create a Judaism that has a purpose for its continuity, a Judaism that answers the question, "What for?" What for? For the Breath of Life Who fills the universe. For the web of life that is the universe. To renew that web of life, to bless that Breath of Life, can renew the Jewish people. And to renew the Jewish people can help to heal that web, can breathe new energy into that Breath.

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