By Rabbi Arthur Waskow

This past Shabbat, in the same mail–delivery to my door,  there arrived both a copy of Rabbi David Seidenberg’s magnum opus Kabbalah & Ecology (published by Cambridge University Press), and the in-print Fall 2015 issue of Tikkun magazine, including an article of mine  on “Prayer as if the Earth Really Matters. ”  

My article encodes into liturgy an explicitly unconventional eco-Jewish theology. It joins a series of articles in that issue of Tikkun that are a kind of anthology of eco-theologies in various traditions: Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and several strands of spiritually open secular thought. 

Rabbi Seidenberg’s book  and my article (a distillation of much of my own eco-theology) present two new theologies, both rooted in Torah, looking at different aspects of Torah yet both reframing the relation of God to Earth and human earthlings.

David’s work, as his title announces, draws chiefly on Kabbalah and addresses its way of understanding tzelem elohim, the Image of God. He brilliantly shows that many Kabbalists extended the sense of the Image not only to the human species but to the universe as a whole and therefore all the beings within it. And he wonderfully explores the implications of this finding — intellectual, spiritual, scientific.

 My work is much more rooted in Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible — as the spiritual explorations of an indigenous people of shepherds & farmers

who are close to the land. To understand God at the heart of this, I hear— literally hear —  YHWH as YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh – the Breathing/ Interbreathing Spirit of the world –  ruach ha’olam – and I hear the shmei rabbah / Great Name of the Kaddish as a Rabbinic continuation of this outlook — weaving together all the names of all beings, including galaxies and quarks, rabbis and rabbits.

So it felt utterly fitting that on the day that they arrived in my mailbox was not only Shabbat but also the 8th day of Passover, Its fervently messianic Prophetic reading – “The wolf shall lie down with the lamb; in all my holy mountain nothing vile or evil shall be done; the intimate knowing of the Breath of Life shall fill the Earth as the waters cover the sea””) gives it the name of “the Passover of the Future.”.

My outlook begins with the spiritual findings, parables, and teachings rooted in one people’s experience of one sliver of a multi-ecosystem land on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean,  and I midrashically extrapolate from there/then to the planet as a whole in an era when what we extract and consume from the Earth is no longer only edible food but also burnable fossil fuels.

 Whereas the Image of God that draws David comes from the first Creation story, I focus on a crucial thread of Torah starting from the second Creation story –– adam birthed from adamah, and YHWH breathing life into the newborn human species as a midwife breathes life into the newborn human individual. (“Earthling” and “Earth” are the closest we can get in English to the richness of “adam and adamah” in Hebrew.)

 From there I see a crucial thread of concern for Earth-earthling relationship that runs through Tanakh — beginning with a parable of the disaster of failed adam/ adamah relationship in Eden, and then yearning toward a series of  sacred efforts to repair the disaster: the parable of bountiful Manna that comes with restful Shabbat; the attempt to make shared bounty practical through the Sabbatical/ Shmita Year and its hope of  the Jubilee/ Homebringing Year; and ultimately the vision of the Song of Songs  –  Eden once again, this time for a grown-up race of human earthlings and our well-beloved Earth.

I am delighted that both these new Jewish theologies are emerging in response to the planetary crisis we are in. Indeed, they both point to the ways in which the world we actually live in, and the policies and practices we develop to address it, call us to re-imagine God –-  that is, to create new theologies.

I had time on this past  Shabbos/ Yontif & Maimouna to begin perusing David’s book– which I had not been able to do in any thorough way via electrons. (My eye-brain connections still live in the 20^th century.)

I’m very impressed indeed.   Extraordinary breadth of scholarship, both in Jewish texts and in ancillary readings on e.g. evolution and other related fields. And a strong thread of Akiba’s “Study is greater ––  if it leads to action.”

I was especially tickled to see David’s comments on the Great Chain of Being. (The “Great Chain of Being” is a theory of the world as a hierarchy from “inanimate objects” like rocks up to the Divine King and Lord.)

In my Tikkun article I explicitly took on the GCB thus –

It is both factually and theologically notable that this liturgical song [“We Have the Whole World in Our Hands”] transforms an older hymn in which the refrain was, “He has the whole world in His hands.”

That assertion — He is in charge of the world —  is closely related to a major traditional metaphor in most Jewish, Christian, and Muslim prayer. In that metaphor,  God is King, Lord, Judge —  above and beyond the human beings who are praying.  In regard to the Earth, this metaphor crowned a series of hierarchies:

The “Great Chain of Being” is a theory of the world as a hierarchy from rocks and rivers up to vegetation, thence up to animals and then to human beings and finally up to the Divine King and Lord. 

Today we know that the relationship between the human species and the Earth is ill described by these metaphors of hierarchy.  Not only do we know that what we breathe in depends upon what the trees and grasses breathe out; now we know that within our own guts are myriads of microscopic creatures that occasionally make us sick but far more often keep us alive and healthy.

…  So  those metaphors of ordered hierarchy are no longer truthful, viable, or useful to us as tools of spiritual enlightenment.

If we are to seek spiritual depth and height, the whole framework of prayer must be transformed.

I hope that many of us will read both David’s book and the whole issue of Tikkun. My own essay is also at  –

 <https://theshalomcenter.org/content/prayer-if-earth-really-matters>. And the Introduction to David’s book is posted at <neohasid.org/KAE>, together with instructions on how to order it.

 From our different perspectives, David and I are both especially interested in efforts to synthesize ancient wisdom with post-modern science. 

 For him, the question is how Kabbalah and modern Science (especially an ecological-scientific frame of mind) may track each other.

 From my different focus on the Tanakh, I am interested in –

• connecting the warnings of Lev 26 with modern ecological predictions;
• connecting YHWH as  Interbreath of Life with the Oxygen/CO2 interchange so that the “climate crisis” – resulting from a catastrophic overdose of CO2 –  can be seen as a crisis in “YHWH” Itself – a crisis in God’s Name;
• seeing paragraph 2 of the Sh’ma as a  proto-scientific statement about the relationship between idolatry (“carving out” only a part of the Breath/Flow/ Great Name to worship as ultimate) and eco-catastrophes;
• seeing Pharaoh, enslavement,  and the Plagues as a teaching affirmed by modern political/ economic science that top-down arrogant power oppresses both human beings and the Earth, requiring struggle for eco-social  justice. (So for me, eco-theology flows smoothly into political activism.)

In short, I bring “social science” and “political science” and biological/ climatological/ ecological science into relationship with the early “science” of shepherds and farmers observing their own relationship with the Earth, making systemic theory from their observations  — and treating that relationship itself as sacred and our understanding of that relationship as Torah.

I take great joy in the simultaneous emergence of two eco-theologies – one that begins with the Image of God in the first Creation story, and another that begins with the Earth/ earthling relationship in the second Creation story. (David’s work does not ignore the second story, but his focus on the Image and on Kabbalah draw him in a different direction.)

May we be able to weave the two stories together as does our earliest Torah!

As we enter the Shmita / Sabbatical Year, we may be asking what its content might be. We can begin, just a few days before Rosh Hashanah, joining the several dozen Jewish organizations that will take part in the People’s Climate March in New York City, Sunday Septembr 21, beginning at 11:30 am.

Then on Rosh Hashanah (which can mean “New Year” or “Start of Transformation”), we might celebrate what the tradition sees as the birthday of the world, or of the human species (adam) as we emerged from Mother Earth (adamah). On Yom Kippur, we might enrich the Avodah service by prostrating ourselves on the grass of Mother Earth as our forebears did at the Temple in Jerusalem, murmuring to ourselves the sacred name of YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh by simply breathing, as the High Priest did on that day when he emerged from the Holy of Holies.

And on Sukkot, the Festival of fullness (Full Moon of the sabbatical/ seventh month, the harvest time of full abundance), we might draw on a powerful line from our evening prayers: “Spread over all of us a sukkah of Your peace.”

What is a “sukkah”? It is a fragile hut, fragile in time and space. Its leafy, leaky roof must be open to the stars and the rain. It stands for only a week –– a festival week called by its name, Sukkot, to celebrate the harvest, to pray for the rain that will make the next harvest possible, and to implore God’s bounty not for Jews alone but for all the nations of the world.

This is our proposal for active hope, hopeful activism: On the Sunday and (Columbus Day holiday) Monday that fall during Sukkot this year — October 12 and 13 — let Jews invite into their sukkot, those leafy, leaky, vulnerable huts, the actual people and the explicit intent of celebrating peace, welcoming all peoples, and healing the Earth.

That intent calls us to merge the joy of Sukkot – which is called “The Festival,” “the season of our joy” – with determination to end the militarization of our lives and the extreme, quasi-military, exploitation of our Earth.

Examples of this militarization abound, but for Jewcology let us focus on :

• The quasi-military destruction of mountains, the creation of asthma epidemics, and the overheating of our planet for the sake of profit-hungry Big Coal.
• The quasi-military fracking and poisoning of our water, the burning of towns along the railroad tracks, the despoiling of land along the pipelines, and the overheating of our planet for the sake of profit-hungry Big Oil.
• The quasi-military forcefulness of global scorching that imposes on the Earth and on the human community – especially on the poor – the droughts that make for famine, turning poverty into hunger and hunger into starvation, and the superstorms and rising sea levels that flood our cities and our homes.

How do we make the sukkah into both a joyful affirmation of peace and a challenge to purveyors of such violence?

To begin with, why does the prayer not call for a Temple of peace, a Palace of peace, a Fortress of peace, even a House of peace — but instead for the most vulnerable of all dwellings, a Sukkah of peace? Precisely because it isvulnerable. The sukkah is in itself a teaching that peace cannot be achieved with steel walls, lead bullets, fiery bombs –- but only with a sense of welcome, of compassion, and of shared vulnerability

In fact, as the attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11 showed, despite all our efforts to storm Heaven by building towers to scrape the sky, we all actually do live in sukkot, vulnerable to attack unless we turn our enemies into friends.

But that implicit quality of the sukkah is not sufficient to challenge the explicit forces of destruction that we face.

So — Jews who honor the traditions of Sukkot could invite those who are likeliest to be the targets and victims of this attack against the Earth — African-Americans, Hispanic immigrants, Appalachian poor whites — to join in sukkot on October 12 and 13 to sing, dance, tell each other stories of our different lives, pray, discuss the needs we all have for sustainable sustenance and equal justice, and make sure that we all vote in the elections that will come a few weeks later.

Besides hundreds of such peacemaking sukkot across our country and the world, perhaps a sukkah should be built during those days in Lafayette Park across from the White House, in the USA; in Independence Park, in Jerusalem.There we could challenge the US government –

• to end the heating and poisoning of our country and all Earth by Big Carbon,
• and to seek peace and pursue it in a myriad other contexts – our cities and our neighbors overseas.

And so may we ourselves “spread over all of us the sukkah of shalom, salaam, paz, peace”!

What might these seven be?

Already nominated: bread (like challah for Shabbat, should this be a “woven” bread? round, for the cycles, as is a traditional Rosh Hashanah challah? how about woven into seven spirals?), an apple, honey, wine, pomegranates.

What might the others be, and why?

I would add to this Shmita Seder plate charoset, on the grounds (as I have previously suggested) that it is the embodiment of Shir HaShirim which bears the recipe for charoset — nuts, apples, wine, apricots, spices.

I suggest that the whirling spirals of Shabbat => Seventh moonth/Tishrei => Shabbat shabbaton (Shmita) => Yovel, each one a whirl in the spiral of healing, are all aiming toward Shir HaShirim and its embodiment, charoset.

That, I suggest, is the fruitful fulfillment of all history, Gan Eden for grown-ups and a grown-up human race. No “mashiach” needed for these messianic days because we all, adam and adamah, women and men, anoint each other.

Shabbat first comes into human practice with manna. Why? I think, because the misdeed of Eden was about eating — gobbling up the Earth’s abundance without any self-restraint. (“From one tree you shall not eat….”) . This misdeed brings about the end of the abundance: “Every day of your life you shall toil with the sweat pouring down your face to barely eat, because the Earth will bring forth thorns and thistles. And women will be subordinated to men.”)

Shabbat comes with Manna precisely to begin the first stages of the reversal of the post-Edenic disaster. This food comes freely from YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh, the Interbreath of Life. It can only come after Pharaoh has been overthrown and slavery — the worst version of endless toil — has been dissolved.

And this manna comes with an intrinsic limit on over-eating — if you gather too much, the extra rots — and it comes with a built-in “operant conditioning” that you can’t work for it on Shabbat and don’t need to, because extra comes on the sixth day, it does not rot, and none comes on Shabbat. Abundance flowers again, and this time self-restraint is built in. The first step in reversing the post-Eden disaster.

The second step is the seventh moonth, in which we celebrate four festivals, one at each phase of the moon. The third and fourth steps are Shmita and Yovel. And then we glimpse Pardes, the free and joyful Garden of Shir HaShirim, in which we are playfully loving with and in the Earth, in which a woman leads the story and is not subordinate to men, and in which the Erotic — sexuality — is not shameful as in the adolescent Eden, but playful and joyful.

In Eden for grown-ups, the Parental God of Eden does not need to appear because we have grown up to spiritual maturity. Even “YHWH,” the Breath of Life, does not need to be specifically named, because the whole Song is the Name of God.

So this whole spiral of Shabbat => Tishrei => Shmita => Yovel aims toward => the Pardes of Yom sheh-Kulo Shabbat (the day that is fully Shabbat) == Shir HaShirim.

Charoset makes six on the Shmita Seder plate. We might say it is really the seventh, but if so it leaves open the question — What, dear chevra, might be the sixth?

This year, this summer, we are in the “sixth year” of the cycle, “Friday afternoon” of the week, yearning toward Shabbat. Perhaps we are experiencing the torments of that time, the frantic rush that so many of us experience as we try to be ready for Shabbat. For Shabbat shabbaton.

Shabbat shabbaton shalom,
Arthur

• Mourning the murders of three young men 50 years ago;

• Celebrating a Mississippi that today is very different;

• Facing the truth that Earth and human communities –– especially, still, those of color and of poverty –- are being deeply wounded by the Carbon Pharaohs’ exploitation and oppression;

• Talking/ working toward a future of joyful community in which Mother Earth and her human children can live in peace with each other in the embrace of One Breath.
  

And then, a few days later, came the news of the murders of three young men just weeks ago –- three Israeli youngsters, their bodies, like those of Mickey Schwerner, Andy Goodman, and James Earl Chaney, hidden while the search went forward for them.

But not only them. The violent deaths of young Palestinian boys/men as well, during the Israeli Army crack-down on the West Bank. Their mothers also mourning. As the New York Times reported the day before the three Israeli bodies were discovered:

“Most Israelis see the missing teenagers as innocent civilians captured on their way home from school, and the Palestinians who were killed as having provoked soldiers. Palestinians, though, see the very act of attending yeshiva in a West Bank settlement as provocation, and complain that the crackdown is collective punishment against a people under illegal occupation.”

Is there a danger of “moral relativism” in mentioning these deaths together? Is the cold-blooded murder of three hitchhiking youngsters morally equivalent to killings carried out by angry, frightened soldiers faced with a protesting mob? At the individual level, No.

But at the level of public policy, there is also no moral equivalence between a cold-blooded military occupation and the impotent rage of the occupied.

Above all, there is no “relativism” in the tears of mothers.

Some Israelis and some Palestinians have joined their sorrow over the killings of their own children to work in the Circle of Bereaved Families for a peace that would end the killing. (See <http://www.theparentscircle.com/>.)

Others –-including some Israeli cabinet ministers in the last day — have defined their deaths as the warrant for more killing.

But Mississippi did not change through threats like that. It changed because an aroused American citizenry from outside Mississippi allied itself with the oppressed community inside Mississippi to demand – through nonviolent direct action and through passing laws — that an oppressed population of black folk be freed to achieve some measure of political power.

As a result of that arousal, the deaths 50 years ago have made a visible difference. Fifty years ago, a scant few black Mississippians had been allowed to register to vote. As the “Freedom Summer + 50” gathering opened last week, thousands of black Mississippians who are devoted to the Democratic Party intervened in a Republican primary to prevent the nomination and for-sure election of a far-right Tea Party candidate.

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, no sufficiently powerful outside energy has made the commitment to bring all its lawful, nonviolent power to bear to achieve a two-state peace. So the violence worsens in a downward spiral of injustice.

What the gathering in Mississippi showed was that even when change is still necessary, even when injustice still continues, there can be an upward spiral, growing from past transformations into future ones.

For the gathering at Tougaloo College addressed the future as much as the past. The memory of youthful deaths so many years ago –- we recited their names, we sang their songs, we welcomed their families — became the celebration of youthful courage that had led to serious change. So not only many veterans of 1964 were there, but also many many young activists, come to learn and be inspired.

So we addressed the injustices that persist, and we took up some levels of injustice that fifty years ago were not on anyone’s agenda. Even Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962, did not envision a massive disruption of the planetary climate system and the web of life it has nurtured for millions of years.

So there was a confluence of issues almost unimaginable in 1964 when Jacqueline Patterson of the NAACP staff brought together two excellent workshops on ”climate justice.” They were the first climate–action settings I have ever seen in which people of color — Black and Hispanic and Asian and Native — were at least half of those present.

Many spoke of two clear cases in their own region when the fossil-fuel Pharaohs had shattered the lives of poor communities of color even worse than they had damaged prosperous whites:

• How Hurricane Katrina (which was greatly worsened by the oil rigs that chopped up marshy wetlands that used to absorb much of the energy of hurricanes when they hit land) had most damaged the poor folk who were living closer to the river (because houses were cheaper there).
• And how poor folk also were the slowest and still the least served by relief and reconstruction efforts after the BP Oil blow-out in the Gulf.
  

And we learned as well how on a global level the overheating of our planet was hurting and killing the poor even worse than others: How droughts in California, the US corn-belt, central Africa, and Russia had raised the price of staple foods so badly that those who were teetering on the edge in poverty fell into hunger, and those who had been hungry faced starvation. And some who were starving fought civil wars to get their hands on food.

We discussed alternatives for climate activism. Some of us talked about the model of the “Freedom Schools” that emerged in 1964, teaching where the impulses to learn and teach were deeply interwoven with the impulse to heal the world. Those Freedom Schools helped give birth to the Teach-Ins against the Vietnam War that flowered in the spring of ’65.

Could we create new Freedom Schools, new Teach-Ins, to fuse the science of climate and the facts of Corporate Carbon domination with the strategies of change? Was our gathering itself a kind of Freedom School, a Teach-In, with the young and the old teaching each other?

And Freedom Summer inspired co-ops, the redirection of our money from feeding bloated corporate power to nourishing the seeds of a grass-roots economic democracy. In that spirit, I shared The Shalom Center’s campaign to Move Our Money/Protect Our Planet (MOM/POP) and handed out copies of our “Action Handbook” on specific steps for how to Move Our Money. See <https://theshalomcenter.org/treasury/209>

All of us learned more deeply how important it is to recognize and act on the true linkage of what we might call
eco-social justice.

And we learned that what happened fifty years ago in Mississippi sowed the seeds of our ability to recognize and resist new depredations of today. We saw how deeply the nonviolent movement of fifty years before had, even when some of its activists were killed, given continuing birth to nonviolent responses to make more necessary change.

I ended one of those workshops by invoking the spirit of Vincent Harding. If he had not died just a month ago, I said, he would have been deeply pleased by our intergenerational learning, and he would have brought his own deep listening and the quiet with which he surrounded his own wise words.

And most of all, he would have brought his willingness to invest his life in the effort to use nonviolence to expand democracy, to win justice for those who have been oppressed.

And now, in the wake of the news from Palestine and Israel, his ghostly, powerful presence actually reminds me of the Unity of that long effort. For just two summers ago, Brother Vincent took part in a delegation of American Jews and Blacks to visit the occupied West Bank and bring hope to Palestinians committed to nonviolence.

Brother Vincent would have wept over the deaths of the young men of both peoples. As do I.

May the tears we shed become the wellsprings not of revenge but of transformation — as they did in Mississippi.

And may we teach the intertwinement of eco-social justice, learning anew from Freedom Summer’s creativity to go beyond our forebears — as they did.

Shalom, salaam, paz, peace! — Arthur

We — Rabbis, Cantors, and other Jewish spiritual leaders —
call upon Jewish households, congregations, seminaries,
communal and denominational bodies, and other institutions:
Move Our Money to Protect Our Planet.

In the ancient tradition from Sinai, naaseh v’nishma: Let us act, and as we do let us listen and learn.

Let us act:

To Move Our Money and Protect Our Planet, we call on the Jewish community to:

• Move Our Money (household and congregational) away from purchasing oil and coal-based energy and moving instead, wherever possible, to buy energy from wind and solar sources.
• Move Our Money (household and congregational) away from savings and checking accounts in banks that are investing our money in Big Carbon, moving it instead to community banks and credit unions;
• Move Our Money (household, congregational, communal, and denominational) away from actual investments in the stocks and bonds of death-dealing Big Oil, Big Coal, and Big Unnatural Gas, and move it instead to investments in stable, profitable solar and wind-energy companies and in community-based enterprises that help those who suffer from asthma and other diseases caused by Big Carbon;
• Organize our congregants and members to insist that local and state governments similarly Move Our Money – often in large pension funds — from investments in death to investments in life.
• Insist that Congress Move Our Money — money we pay in taxes — away from subsidies to Big Oil, Big Coal, and Big Unnatural Gas, and instead to supporting research, development, and production of life-giving renewable energy.
  

Let us learn:

We are a world people who still bear the wisdom of indigenous farmers and shepherds, meditators and sages, cooks and city planners:

• Our festivals dance with the rhythms of Earth, Moon, and Sun;
• Our Shabbat points the way toward a sustainable rhythm of work and rest;
• Our kashrut points the way toward sacred limits and practices in consuming not only food but other gifts of Mother Earth;
• Our long long history of resistance to the pharaohs that oppress human beings, lift up idols to worship, and bring plagues upon the Earth gives us a reservoir of commitment and clarity in political action.
  

And when as a world/indigenous people we join words and foods in the Pesach Seder, we find twin powerful passages of the Haggadah:

In every generation, some new versions of “pharaoh” arise to endanger us.
In every generation, we ourselves must act to win our freedom from destruction.

In our generation, these Pharaohs are global corporations of Big Carbon that are bringing the Plagues of climate crisis upon all life-forms on Planet Earth — a crisis of a breadth and depth unprecedented in the history of the human species.

And in our generation, we can resist these new pharaohs by moving our money to places where it will serve life and heal our wounded Earth.

Moving from what is deadly to what is life-giving echoes the deepest transformation of our history: In the very process of freeing ourselves from Pharaoh, we learned to shape a new kind of society — Beyond the Red Sea, we moved to Shabbat and Sinai.

Half a century ago, the American Jewish community joined with other religious communities to challenge racism, and together we were crucial in taking a great step toward healing America. Today the Holy One and the Earth need us again to join with other religious, spiritual, and ethical communities to make ourselves a crucial part of the movement to heal our planetary climate.

As Rabbi Akiba taught, facing the dangerous Caesars of his day: “Which is greater, study or action? Study, if it leads to action.” (Kiddushin 40b)

So we — Rabbis, Cantors, other Jewish spiritual leaders, and students in these sacred callings — not only join in this Call but also undertake a campaign to bring this life-giving vision of Torah into the hills and rivers, streets and forests, newspapers and videos, homes and campuses, neighborhoods and synagogues, of our generation.

By April 30, 2014, more than 70 Rabbis and other Jewish spiritual leaders have signed this Call.
The Initiating Signers are below; to see the full list of signers, please click to
<https://theshalomcenter.org/content/rabbinic-call-move-our-money-protect-our-planet >

Now we appeal to all members of the Jewish community to join in this effort. To do so, please click to:
<https://theshalomcenter.org/civicrm/petition/sign?sid=11&reset=1>

Initiating Signers:

Rabbi Katy Allen
Rabbi Phyllis Berman
Spiritual Dir Barbara Breitman
Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin
Rabbi Howard Cohen

Rabbi Elliot Dorff
Rabbi Nancy Flam
Rabbi Everett Gendler
Rabbi Marc Gopin
Rabbi Arthur Green
Rabbi Lori Klein
Rabbi Michael Lerner
Rabbi Mordechai Liebling
Rabbi Jan Salzman
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
Kohenet Holly Taya Shere
Rabbi Sidney Schwarz
Rabbi David Shneyer
Rabbi Ariana Silverman
Rabbi Ed Stafman
Rabbi Margot Stein
Rabbi Susan Talve
Rabbi Lawrence Troster
Rabbi Arthur Waskow
Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg
Cantor Greg Yaroslow
Rabbi Shawn Zevit

___ Please add my name as a signer of this Call:
Sign online at <https://theshalomcenter.org/civicrm/petition/sign?sid=11&reset=1>

Maybe the first such story. Maybe even the story that inspired many of the higgledy-piggledy Boston blacksmiths and Pennsylvania farmers who thought they could defeat the world’s greatest Empire. It certainly inspired Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.

But to Jewish tradition the Book is not known as “Yetziat Mitzrayyim, the Exodus from the Narrow Place / Egypt.” It is known instead as “Sefer Shemot –- the Book of Names.”

Early in the Book of Names, God goes through a change of Name.

This is no minor side-slip. Think of the furor when Cassius Clay changed his name to Muhammed Ali; think of the political and personal transformation when David Gruen changed his name to Ben-Gurion.

And these were merely mortal heroes. For the Eternal Holy One Who suffuses all the universe to change The Name is seismic. Cosmic.

It happens first at the Burning Bush. As Moses faces the unquenchable Voice Who is sending him on a mission to end slavery under Pharaoh, he warns the Voice that the people will challenge him: “Sez who?”

And the Holy One, the Wholly One, answers: “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, I Will Be Who I Will Be” –- a fitting Name for a universe in which the powerless poor can be empowered and the pharaoh’s power can dissolve like powder into the Sea of Reeds. Then God adds, “But that’s a mouthful. You can use just ‘Ehyeh, I Will Be,’ as my nickname, if you like.”

“And oh yes, you can also call me ‘YHWH.’ “

But we actually can’t. There’s no way to “pronounce” those letters, with no vowels. And for a couple of millennia, Jews have been strictly taught not even to try pronouncing it but instead to say “Adonai, Lord.”

Now why do we think that God’s Name has changed? Maybe it has been these mysterious Names all along?

But God, and Torah say: Not so. The second time the voice tells Moses that the new Name is “YHWH” is in Exodus 6: 2-3. Moses is in Egypt, and his first try at liberation and at organizing “Brickmakers Union, Local #1” has miserably failed. This time the Voice explicitly says that the Name by which He/She/ It was known to the forebears — El Shaddai, the Breasted God, the God of Nourishment and Nurture, is no longer the Name for use in the liberation process.

Why this second Voicing of the new Name?

I suggest that Moses has, since the Bush and during his first effort in Egypt, been careless about using the new Name. He has often used the old one on the warm-hearted assumption that his listeners would be more comfortable with it.

But the old Name cannot inspire a new sense of reality. That’s why Moses has failed, the Brickmakers Union has collapsed. So this time the Voice makes it absolutely clear: “Stop already! I am YHWH, not El Shaddai, even though your forebears knew me that way.”

And that is why I have been urging us to know, grok, God in our own generation through “pronouncing” the Unpronounceable Name by simply breathing — YHWH with no vowels, as the Interbreath of Life, the ONE that keeps all life alive, that intertwines, interbreathes, the trees and grasses and ourselves.

We breathe in what the trees breathe out;
The trees breathe in what we breathe out:
We breathe each other into life:
YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh.

What we call the “climate crisis” is a radical disturbance in the balance of what we breathe out and what the trees breathe out — the balance of CO2 and oxygen.

And therefore what we call the “climate crisis” is a crisis in the Interbreathing Name of God.

“Science” and “religion” fuse into a single truth.

If we are to do as Torah demands, heal our deeply wounded planet from impending disaster, I think we must do as Moses learned to do and ReName God.

I think we must rid ourselves of the old Name — Adonai, Lord, King, dominating Dominus – and address Divine Reality as the Interbreathing Of All Life. That is the Truth, and we are Called to say it.

With a sacred but outdated Name, an outdated way of understanding our world, we will, like Moses, fail at the task before us.

For years, I have encouraged prayer communities to breathe the Name as YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh and then to use “Yahhh” instead of “Adonai.” And then I have said that anyone who feels deeply God-connected through the use of the “Adonai” which they have recited, chanted, sung a thousand times should — for God’s sake! –- keep on using what connects them.

But I have come to think this is an inadequate teaching. I am now intending to say all this, and then to add my understanding of why Moses failed at first. And why the Voice had to insist on the new Name. And I will invite people to keep that challenge in mind as they voice their own response to the Voice.

Interbreathing, not OverLordship, is how our world now works. How our world Is and becomes.

The Hebrew word “dibbur” can mean either “word” or “deed.” If we can conceive of God and Universe through a new word, a new name, we can also act far more effectively to bring about the changes that our planet needs.

For Moses, the new Name made possible both resisting Pharaoh and shaping a new kind of society.

For us, it means both resisting the modern Carbon Pharaohs that are bringing new Plagues upon our planet; and shaping a new society in which we are constantly aware that all life is Interbreathing, that we are interwoven with the eco-systems within which we live – that indeed, YHWH, the Breath of Life, is ONE.

And the religious and spiritual communities of our planet have the wisdoms and the tools to do the healing.

Judaism is especially relevant because, unlike most world religions, we preserve the teachings of an indigenous people in the biblical tradition –- the spiritual wisdom of shepherds and farmers. And yet as a world people, we can now apply the earthiness of our origins to the Whole Earth.

That does not mean simply repeating the ancient practices. For instance, the ancient code of kosher food does not take into account that we now “eat” coal and oil and crucial minerals like lithium. Is there an “eco-kosher” way of eating them, as well as caring for vegetables and fruit and kosher animals in ways traditional kashrut did not? Can we shape our ways of celebrating Sukkot and Passover and Tu B’Shvat and life-cycle ceremonies so that they embody social action as an aspect of spiritual deepening?

For The Shalom Center, this transformation in our reality calls for action in four aspects of reality:

1. Spiritually, the creation of new forms of prayer meditation, and celebration that draw us into fuller awareness of the interweaving of all life: for instance, “pronouncing” and understanding the Sacred God-Name “YHWH” as YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh, the Interbreathing of all life – rather than Lord or King. Ruach ha'olam, rather than melech ha'olam.

2. Intellectually, the absorption of ecological science into what we teach and learn as sacred Torah, just as Maimonides integrated the best science and philosophy of his day into Torah. Ecology takes seriously both each distinctive niche of each life form and the flow that connects them. It does what Kabbalah yearns toward: reintegrating the two Trees of Eden — the Tree of Flowing Life and the Tree of Distinction-making — into One.

3. Relationally, our recognition of the varied ethical, religious, and spiritual life-paths as necessary and valuable unfoldings of the varied “organs” of human civilization and planetary life – as different from each other and as equally necessary to each other as the brain, liver, heart, and lungs in a single body. To heal our planet in the present crisis, we will need to draw on the wisdom and commitment of every human culture. So we need to move beyond interfaith dialogue into the pursuit of interrelational work among the different communities.

4. Vigorous action to confront the modern Carbon Pharaohs that are bringing plagues of drought, flood, war, and famine on the Earth and all Humanity – action that might include lobbying, voting, rallies, vigils, nonviolent civil disobedience, organizing counter-institutions like coops, organic farms, etc., and economic action to Move Our Money/Protect Our Planet (MOM/POP) – moving our money from corporate investments and banks that endanger Mother Earth to companies, banks, coops, etc. that protect and heal her.

As we move forward in all these aspects of the world, we create a Judaism that heals and transforms itself in order to heal and transform the world. We learn anew what ancient Torah teaches: – “Sh’sh’sh’shma! Hush’sh’sh’sh and Hear, all you who wrestle with the Ultimate — Hear the still small sound of almost-silent breathing: the Breath of Life is ONE

And the religious and spiritual communities of our planet have the wisdoms and the tools to do the healing.

Judaism is especially relevant because, unlike most world religions, we preserve the teachings of an indigenous people in the biblical tradition –- the spiritual wisdom of shepherds and farmers. And yet as a world people, we can now apply the earthiness of our origins to the Whole Earth.

That does not mean simply repeating the ancient practices. For instance, the ancient code of kosher food does not take into account that we now “eat” coal and oil and crucial minerals like lithium. Is there an “eco-kosher” way of eating them, as well as caring for vegetables and fruit and kosher animals in ways traditional kashrut did not? Can we shape our ceremonial ways of celebrating Sukkot and Pesach and Tu B’Shvat and life-cycle ceremonies so that they embody social action to heal our wounded Earth as an aspect of spiritual deepening?

For The Shalom Center (see https://www.theshalomcenter.org ), this transformation in our reality calls for action in four aspects of reality:

1. Spiritually, the creation of new forms of prayer, meditation, and celebration that draw us into fuller awareness of the interweaving of all life: for instance, “pronouncing” and understanding the Sacred God-Name “YHWH” as YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh, the Interbreathing of all life – Ruach Ha'Olam — rather than Lord or King, Melech Ha'Olam.

2. Intellectually, the absorption of ecological science into what we teach and learn as sacred Torah, just as Maimonides absorbed the best science and philosophy of his day into Torah. Ecology takes seriously both each distinctive niche of each life form and the flow that connects them into an ecosystem. It does what Kabbalah yearns toward: reintegrating what seem to be the two Trees of Eden — the Tree of Flowing Life and the Tree of Distinction-making — into One.

3. Relationally, our recognition of the varied ethical, religious, and spiritual life-paths as necessary and valuable unfoldings of the varied “organs” of human civilization and planetary life – as different from each other and as equally necessary to each other as the brain, liver, heart, and lungs in a single body. Just as the bodily organs not only “dialogue” with each other but actually work together, we need to move beyond interfaith dialogue into the pursuit of interrelational work among the different communities.

4. Vigorous action to confront the modern Carbon Pharaohs that are bringing plagues of drought, flood, war, and famine on the Earth and all Humanity – action that might include lobbying, voting, rallies, vigils, nonviolent civil disobedience, organizing counter-institutions like coops, organic farms, etc., and economic action to Move Our Money/Protect Our Planet (MOM/POP) – moving our money from corporate investments and banks that endanger Mother Earth to companies, banks, coops, etc. that protect and heal her.

As we move forward in all these aspects of the world, we create a Judaism that heals and transforms itself in order to heal and transform the world. We learn anew what ancient Torah teaches: – “Sh’sh’sh’shma! Hush’sh’sh’sh and Hear, all you who wrestle with the Ultimate — Hear the still small voice of almost-silent breathing: the Breath of Life is ONE!

Configure

Those words were chanted by more than 200 people in a vigorous protest I took part in on Aug 12, 2013, at the State Department in Washington, DC, against the Tar Sands Pipeline. The action was organized by CREDO Action, the Rain Forest Action Network , and The Other 98%. The Shalom Center and Interfaith Moral Action on Climate (IMAC) endorsed the protest, and our readiness to risk arrest.

We ranged in age from 18 to 79 – students, grandparents, clergy, former Obama volunteers, farmers – among whom were 60 of us who sat down, blocking the main entrance of the State Department. We were protesting its profoundly mistaken affirmation that the Pipeline is no danger, and asking Secretary of State Kerry and President Obama to rule the Pipeline out.

We expected to be arrested, but the police were under orders: No arrests. After two hours of sit-in, during which the organizer staff were told there would be none, we marched to a side entrance. On the way, I asked a leading officer, “What would we have had to do to be arrested?” Stolidly, he answered: “Not today.”

I think the unwillingness to arrest us was already a measure of our growing power. The President’s words and tone about the Pipeline have markedly changed in the last three months, as opposition has grown. More than 70,000 people have signed a Pledge to Resist with nonviolent civil disobedience if the Pipeline is approved, and this action was “early warning” of our readiness to carry out that commitment.

Each of the 60 who risked arrest carried a sign saying, “Another —- Against the Pipeline,” and we called out our reasons, one at a time. My sign (as you can see in the photo above) read, “Another Rabbi Against the Pipeline,” and I explained I had two reasons to oppose it:

“One from the past – 3,000 years of clear religious wisdom that it is a sacred obligation of humanity to honor, protect, and heal the Earth of which we are a part – and one from the future: I have five grandchildren. I love them, and I would love them to grow up in a world that’s as healthy, as beautiful, as abundant as the one I grew up in.”

I think because I was speaking as a Rabbi, several of the many reporters present interviewed me, including the Huffington Post. Its article today (see across the page on our website) does quote me.

Among the chants that shook the air around the building were:

“Hey Obama —-
We don’t want no pipeline drama.”

“We are unstoppable:
Another world is possible!”

At the very end, I spoke directly to the police with words of respect for their commitment to uphold the law, and pointed out – “The Pipeline is a much worse crime than anything we might have done today – because it will poison the Earth and endanger the human future. You are parents & grandparents. – So to prevent that crime and to protect your kids, we welcome you to join with us in building an even broader movement.”

That is the welcome we should be offering all our neighbors: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.” (A. Lincoln)

And with “the fierce urgency of Now.” (M. L. King) Knowing that time is short — for the God Whose many Names all point to the Interbreathing Spirit of all life is already choking, choking, on the flood of CO2 that we have allowed to be loosed upon our planet.

Torah warns against overworking the earth, as well as overworking ourselves and each other. It provides that not only every seventh day but every seventh year is to be a time to pause from working. The seventh year is to be Shabbat Shabbaton, Restfulness to the exponential power of Restfulness. (Lev. 25).

The passage calls special attention to its teaching by beginning “B’Har, On the Mountain” — uniquely going out of its way to say this is revelation from Sinai.

In that seventh year, all regular agricultural work would pause; the community would eat from stores of food that had been previously laid aside, and from the freely given fruitfulness of the land, not shaped by organized sowing, harvesting, and pruning.

And the Torah goes on to say that if human society does not allow the land to rest each seventh year, it will rest anyway – through drought, famine, exile. (Lev. 26.) Indeed, the land — for each year its Restfulness was robbed — will be repaid by a year in which it gets to Rest because the community that made it work suffers a year of Exile. (See also II Chron 36: 20-21, at the very end of the Hebrew Scriptures.)

The Restful Year is not merely a nicety: It is like the Law of Gravity.

This practice, says the Torah, is to renew the understanding that no human beings “owns” the land; only YHWH, YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh the Interbreath of all life, can be said to own the land, the Earth.

In Deuteronomy, the Torah adds that in this seventh year, all debts are to be annulled. This is to be a year of Shmitah — Release, Non-attachment — in which no human boss or banker can subjugate another human being, just as the human community as a whole cannot oppress the Earth. Sh’ma: Listen, you Godwrestlers: We all breathe together, and our breath – YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh – is One. That’s God.

Today our scientists have learned that the sense of Interbreathing as the root of all life is not only rich metaphor but factual truth: We breathe in what the trees breathe out, and the trees breathe in what we breathe out. The resulting balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen in our atmosphere keeps all life in balance – and it is the disturbance of this balance by human action, the overburning of fossil fuels, that we call the “climate crisis.”

For the shepherds and farmers of the indigenous land-rooted community in which the Torah emerged, it was obvious that this Restful teaching applied to their own land, and to agriculture.

But does this mean there is wisdom in the Teaching only for the tiny sliver of land on the Eastern edge of the Mediterranean, not for the great round Earth at large? And even if it does apply throughout the world, does it bear wisdom only in the sphere of agriculture, or can it also teach us how to behave in an industrial/ information economy — lest we also find our earth ruined by drought and flood, famine and the Death Marches of millions of exiled refugees from every land and culture?

I believe the “climate crisis” and other aspects of human over-reach to over-control the Earth teach us that the ancient Torah teaching does apply world-wide: indeed, it is exactly what ecologists are saying in our own generation. And I believe it applies not only to farm, food, and forest, but – all the more! — to all the much more intrusive technologies we use today.

Then what might it mean to apply the Year of Restfulness to our own society?

Could we shut down almost our whole economy (preserving only life-protective medicine — since pikuach nefesh, saving life, trumps Shabbat)?

Hard to imagine?

OK. We might explore something one step less all-embracing: What it would mean to give all our engineers and techies, and all scientists not working directly on life-threatening diseases, a year off from their regular work, every seventh year? A year for them to spend the year reflecting on and reevaluating their own work and the whole direction of modern technology..

Their regular work is what not just carries out but speeds up our present race to go over the precipice into planetary disaster. Not because technology is inherently destructive, but because technology created with no Shabbat, no Shmita, IS inherently destructive. (See Leviticus 26.)

Suppose they all had a paid year off from even being allowed to create new technology, and during that year were paid instead to rethink and reshare the values technology should be enabling, and to work out how to make sure technology does in fact support humane and life-affirming sacred values?

A year of “Don’t just do something, sit there!

That might be one example of an industrial Shmita.

Or imagine requiring an environmental-impact assessment before the introduction of any new product — mechanical, electrical, biological, digital, or chemical: a new automobile model, a new vacuum cleaner, a new soap, a new computer program. That would not fit the “seven-year” pattern of Shmita, but it would address some of the same concerns the Torah expresses.

An even broader application of Shmita to our society – and this could draw on the seven-year cycle – would be to enact something like the proposal from Rabbi Michael Lerner/ Tikkun/ Network of Spiritual Progressives for an Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the US Constitution. Their proposal calls for a review every five years – I would make it seven – of the operational license of every corporation over a certain size, to see whether it is operating with care toward not only its stockholders and executives but to its customers, its geographic neighbors (human and ecological), its workers, and the Earth.

This whole approach sees the Torah provisions for Shmitah /Shabbat Shabbaton, as a seed of wisdom that in our own society can sprout into new creativity. Who among us will gently tend these seeds into their growing?

The US and the world are struggling with both economic and ecological crises –- and most people see them as unconnected. In the secular “social justice” world, many organizations ignore ecological issues. In the secular “environmental” world, many organizations ignore issues like unemployment or income inequality.

In the religious world, the most audible voices in American Christianity affirm an economics of minimal regulation of private property and competition, and minimal protection for the Earth from human exploitation.

Yet the Bible sees economics and ecologics as intimately intertwined, and calls for a practice of strong, spiritually rooted regulation of both.

That key passage of Torah (Lev. 25 & 26, which appear in the pattern of Jewish Torah reading on May 4) calls for an entire year of rest for the land and its workers, every seventh year. Deuteronomy adds that in that year, everyone’s debts are annulled. (Deut. 15: 1-3).

Leviticus calls this year a Shabbat Shabbaton – restfulness to the exponential power of Restfulness, an echo and expansion of the restful seventh day. Deuteronomy calls the year “shmitah” — “release” or “non-attachment.”

And Leviticus 25 goes even farther — in the year that is 7 x 7 + 1=50, all land must be redistributed into functionally equal amounts to each family and clan, so that the rich give up their surplus and the poor come into their own.

Why all this? Because, says YHWH, YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh, The Interbreathing of all life, “The earth is Mine. You are but sojourners, temporary visiting-settlers, with Me.” (Lev 25: 23)

If we understand YHWH not as a Lord, a King, in the sky but as the Interbreathing that connects all life, this is literally and scientifically true. None of us “owns” where we live, what we eat. It is the weave of life — we breathe in what the trees breathe out, the trees breathe in what we breathe out –- that keeps us alive. Not only life on the “outside” but the myriad bacteria that live inside our own guts keep us alive.

And this is not only a scientific fact but a spiritual truth. It calls us to behave toward each other with respect, concern, love –- because we cannot exist without each other.

It is also a political commitment. Because the Holy One owns all “property,” says the Bible, every landholder is obligated not only to surrender surplus land once a generation and to free the land from being worked every seventh year and to annul debts owed to the lenders in that year. –- Still more: in every year all along, each landholder must allow the landless to glean grain, olives, and grapes from their fields and orchards; and each must pay tithes –- an income tax of 10% — to support the poor and the Levites, who had no land.

Recently an American politician called taxes “robbery” from private property. That worldview assumes each one of us has “private property” and that someone is stealing “our” property if we agree as a community to insist that the affluent share some of their abundance for the common good. That decision to share for the common good, agreed on democratically, is what we call “taxes.” Calling such taxes “robbery” is exactly the opposite of the Biblical teaching.

And the sense that all “property” is really shared not only with other human beings but also with the soil, the seed, the rain, the rivers, the myriad sorts of animals and plants and microbes — with YHWH, the Breath that connects us all – is actually to be affirmed and made a practical practice by the rhythm of restfulness, through the sacred seventh day, seventh month, seventh year, fiftieth year.

Torah warns with horrifying images that if the people refuse to allow these pulsations of restfulness, the land will rest anyway – through famine, drought, plague, exile. (Lev 26:, esp 13-16, 33-35, 43-44.)

So Torah calls for neither unending “economic growth” nor economic stagnation — but for what might be called a “pulsating economy.” A sustainable society. Internally sustainable, since the rage of the poor and the arrogance of the rich are both replaced with sharing. “Externally” sustainable, since the arrogance of human beings (adam) and the exhaustion of the Earth (adamah) are both replaced by sharing.

Industrial modernity rejected this whole model of society. Whether it called itself “capitalist” or “socialist,” it focused on unending economic “growth,” purchased by burning fossil fuels and by taking over more and more territory for human beings in ways that have led to the speed-up extinction of other life forms. For about 300 years, larger and larger, deeper and deeper parts of the Earth have been allowed no Shabbat. Indeed, Shabbat itself has come to seem a waste of time. A waste of time that could have been put into more intense production.

We have taken great pride in the achievements of industrial technology: cures for diseases, swift global communication, the production of so much food as to make possible the reproduction of seven billion humans (going on nine).

But –- no Shabbat. And so at last, we have reached the point described in Leviticus 26:

§ Long long lives for some billions, wretched starvation and disease for other billions.

§ Unheard-of wealth for a tiny few.

§ Extinctions of species at a rate unknown in all of the existence of the human race –- indeed, since the Great Asteroid of 65 million years ago.

§ Extremely dangerous changes in the very chemistry and climate of the planet.

Can we, should we, out of devout commitment to the Bible “abolish” the industrial technology that has, unchecked, led us to the edge of the precipice? No!

Truly devout commitment to the Biblical vision calls us now to a profound question, perhaps the most profound in human history: Can industrial technology be reshaped to fit into the Bible’s vision of a sustainable society, a rhythm of restfulness, a pulsating economy, abundance shared by humans with each other and with our sister life-forms, a respectful ecological consciousness and conscience, a constant awareness of the Interbreathing of all life?

That is what Dr. Martin Luther King called the Beloved Community, extended beyond the human society on which he was focused, to all life.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

* Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Ph.D., is the founder (1983) and director of The Shalom Center <http://www.theshalomcenter.org>. Along with about 22 books on Jewish practice and public policy, he is also the author of an essay on Jewish environmental ethics in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics and Morality (Jonathan K. Crane and Elliot N. Dorff, eds; Oxford University Press, 2013). He also writes for The Shalom Report, a weekly blog from The Shalom Center, and will continue to explore these issues and their ramifications. For example: Can we actually create a real “sabbatical year” for the USA? How are overwork and disemployment related, and what would a society of “rhythmic rest” be like? What kind of eco-advocacy would unite the means we use with the ends we seek to achieve? To subscribe to this blog, please click to https://theshalomcenter.org/civicrm/mailing/subscribe

For a fuller unfolding of these ideas from an earlier moment of American and planetary history, see a chapter from his book Godwrestling — Round 2 (Jewish Lights, 1986)– called “Toward a Jubilee Economy & Ecology in the Modern World,” at <https://theshalomcenter.org/node/1396>

For a guide to study and action in response to the Torah of shmitah, see http://www.hazon.org/resource/behar-week-of-shmita-study-action/

For an intensely text-focused analysis of the Biblical tradition of shmitah, Jubilee, and the Eden story, see Rabbi David Seidenberg’s writing at

http://www.jewcology.com/resource/Genesis-Covenant-Jubilee-Shmitah-and-the-Land-Ethic

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Yesterday (March 21, 2013), along with 14 other religious folk, clergy and committed “laity,” I was arrested for standing at the White House with Bitter Herb and Matzah, signs and songs, reciting the names of more than 100 people who had been killed by one result of the climate crisis: Superstorm Sandy.

The action was organized by Interfaith Moral Action on Climate, of which The Shalom Center is a vigorously active member. We were calling on the president to act swiftly to heal our Mother Earth from the climate crisis, from the plagues that modern Pharaohs — Big Oil, Big Coal, Unnatural Gas — have brought upon us.

Among those arrested alongside me were Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, who teaches on social justice at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and is a member of The Shalom Center’s Board; Lynne Iser, a member of the Board of Isabella Freedman retreat center; and Freyda Black, a cantor, farmer and member of P’nai Or Fellowship in Philadelphia.

In a circle of 70 people in the midst of Pennsylvania Avenue, we had just completed a religious service. Rabbi David Shneyer had blown the shofar of warning and liberation. We had heard the Muslim call to prayer from the Quran, an invocation of the Four Winds in the spiritual tradition of the First Nations, and a Christian prayer.

Then I spoke about the Bitter Herb and recited the Ten Plagues of our own generation. In a traditional Passover Seder, we would pour wine from our cups ten times in order to express our grief over the ancient Ten Plagues. In the same vein, I invited the gathered community to call out “Sorrow” 10 times as we absorbed the grief brought on by the modern plagues.

We shared some matzah that I passed around the circle — the Bread of Affliction that on the night of Exodus became the Bread of Freedom because it was baked in haste and urgency. Just so, I said must we move with what Dr. King called “the fierce urgency of Now,” to heal our planet before its wounds overcome us.

After the Matzah, Rose Berger of Sojourners magazine shared Palm branches around the circle and with them, the meaning of Palm Sunday — commemorating Jesus’ entry in a protest march into Jerusalem, opposing the violent and deadly Roman Empire just before Passover — the appropriate and risky time of remembering the downfall of Imperial Pharaoh.

Then we shared amongst us a large Globe of Earth, carrying it and singing as we walked to the White House fence, “We have the whole world in our hands — rivers and mountains in our hands, all our children in our hands, the whole world in our hands.”

Our action was videotaped, and we hope to be able to share the scene with you early next week. (The Shalom Center will be closed for the first two days of Passover.)

These are the Ten Plagues I recited, and below them, Ten Healings that accompanied the blessing of our Globe.

Ten Plagues

• Undrinkable water poisoned by fracking. (Sorrow!)
• Asthma: Lungs suffering from coal dust and gasoline fumes. (Sorrow!)
• Suffering and death for fish, birds, vegetation and human beings from the oil upheaval in the Gulf of Mexico. (Sorrow!)
• Smashed mountains and dead coal-miners in the lovely hills of West Virginia. (Sorrow!)
• Unheard-of droughts in Africa, setting off hunger, starvation, civil wars and genocide. (Sorrow!)
• Drought in Russia, setting off peat-bog fires and scarcity of wheat. (Sorrow!)
• Summer-long intense heat wave in Europe, killing thousands of elders. (Sorrow!)
• Unheard-of floods in Pakistan, putting one-fifth of the country under water. (Sorrow!)
• Superstorm Sandy, killing hundreds in Haiti and America. (Sorrow!)
• Years of drought and fires in Australia. (Sorrow!)
• Parched corn fields and dead crops in the U.S. corn-belt. (Sorrow!)

Ten Healings

• Creating organic farms in countrysides and cities. (L’chayyim, To life!)
• Wind-based energy: Purchasing home and company electric power from wind-based suppliers. (L’chayyim, To life!)
• Hybrid or electric cars. Families buy them; convince cities, government agencies and businesses to switch their auto fleets. (L’chayyim, To life!)
• Use public transportation. (L’chayyim, To life!)
• Family and congregational education/action to heal the Earth: At Bat/Bar Mitzvah time and teen-age baptisms/confirmations, “turning hearts of children and parents to each other, lest the Earth be utterly destroyed” (Quote from last passage of Malachi, last of the classical Hebrew Prophets). (L’chayyim, To life!)
• Vigils, picketing, civil disobedience at sites of mountain destruction by coal companies. (L’chayyim, To life!)
• Prevent the Tar Sands Pipeline. (L’chayyim, To life!)
• End fracking: Insist on moratoriums or prohibitions. (L’chayyim, To life!)
• Divestment by colleges, pension funds, religious communities, etc., from investment in fossil-fuel companies, shifting investment to renewable, sustainable energy. (L’chayyim, To life!)
• Carbon pricing: Insisting that Members of Congress put prices on carbon-fuel production and pay dividends from the incoming fees to American families. (L’chayyim, To life!)

The Plagues and the Blessings are part of a Healing Seder for the Earth that you can find, with seven questions and the symbolic foods and blessings, on our website at

https://theshalomcenter.org/content/palms-passover-interfaith-healing-seder-earth

Feel free to use it either as a whole this coming week or by choosing passages from it to add to your own Seder.

We are inspired by the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who was among the leaders of a profoundly religious and spiritual movement to heal us from the great dangers of war and injustice in his day:

“We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. … Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late’.”

And we take note that even a leading secular journalist, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, has called for civil disobedience to insist on strong measures to heal the climate crisis.

If we go over the Climate Cliff now, experiencing Plagues in our own generation as the Bible describes the Ten Plagues — all eco-disasters — long ago, our grandchildren will live in misery and suffering.

Today’s Plagues endanger the web of life upon our planet, including the human race — and inflict the greatest harm on the poorest and most vulnerable among us. We are especially concerned by the effects on local communities and our planetary future of destructive, extreme energy extraction: mountaintop removal, fracking, Arctic and deep sea offshore oil drilling, and Tar Sands mining.

Out of our moral commitment to protect and heal God’s Creation, our religious communities need to be calling for a set of first-step changes that will sow the seeds of greater change, by committing the president and Congress to vigorous action.

As we undertookr civil disobedience at the White House, we addressed not only our government, but also religious communities throughout the country: In the name of Creator Spirit, Holy One of Being — JOIN US!

What were we urging that the president do to meet the needs of this critical hour in planetary time? He must take actions necessary to heal our communities and the Earth, such as these:

1. Permanently refuse permits for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, because tar-oil is among the most dangerous of the planet-heating forms of carbon.
2. Call now a National Summit Conference on the Climate Crisis to meet with the urgency that the crisis demands — including leaders of business, labor, academia, religious communities, governmental officialdom, science and other relevant bodies.
3. Publicly support and advocate for a carbon fee that will generate hundreds of billions of dollars, with provisions to ensure that working families and the poor are not harmed by higher carbon prices; for an end to subsidies to the coal, oil and gas industries; and for substantial subsidies for research, development, and use of renewable, sustainable and jobs-creating clean energy sources.

As we celebrate the Festival of Freedom, may we begin to think now what we need to do during this coming year to make it happen that hundreds of congregations join in the week before Pesach next year to face the Pyramids of Power of the Climate Pharaohs in our own communities, with or without civil disobedience.

Blessings of life, liberation, and healing for us all and for our Mother Earth, this Passover and Holy Week!

Dear Friends,

We are facing a Climate Cliff, and we are calling upon religious and spiritual leaders, other believers and all people of good will to join us to address its danger by participating in “A Pray-in for the Climate” in front of the White House on Tuesday, January 15, 2013.

Super-storm Sandy, the drastic droughts in our corn country, record-breaking Arctic ice melt, and unheard-of floods in Vermont, let alone disasters in Australia, Russia, Pakistan and Africa, all warn us: the disruption of our planet will not wait for our “normal” political paralysis to end.

We are inspired by the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose 84th birthday we celebrate on January 15th:

“We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now…. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ’Too late’.”

If we go over the Climate Cliff now, our grandchildren will live in misery and suffering.

Fifty years ago, our country faced a crisis of racial inequality in the USA that was a basic threat to justice and democracy. Religious communities and others acted, and we made a difference.

Today’s deepest crisis is the danger facing the web of life upon our planet, including the human race – especially the poorest and most vulnerable. We are especially concerned by the effects on local communities and our planetary future of destructive, extreme energy extraction: mountaintop removal, fracking, Arctic and deep sea offshore oil drilling and tar sands mining.

Out of our moral commitment to protect and heal God’s Creation, our religious communities need to be calling for a set of first-step changes that will sow the seeds of greater change, by committing the President and Congress to vigorous action. And we should pose those demands in such a way that we are addressing not only our government, but also religious communities throughout the country.

What can we do? When can we take the next careful steps back from the Cliff? One time and place will be mid-day on Tuesday, January 15th in front of the White House. Interfaith Moral Action on Climate (IMAC) is planning “A Pray-in for the Climate.”

IMAC is a collaborative initiative of religious leaders, groups and individuals that came together in 2011 in response to the pressing need for more visible, unified, prophetic action to address the climate crisis. As people of faith and spirituality, we feel compelled by our traditions and collective conscience to take action on this deeply moral challenge.

Please note that some participants may feel called to risk arrest by nonviolently disregarding the conventional regulations and assuming positions of prayer in the area near the White House fence.

We expect to be joined by survivors of Super-storm Sandy and their religious leaders from communities like the Rockaways and Staten Island in New York.

January 15th is close enough to Inauguration Day (January 21) to make the connection with what the President should be doing in his second term, and far enough away that the action won’t drown in the media swamp.

And, it is the actual birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The action will be carried out in the spirit of his work. We will gather at 11:00 am at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, a few blocks from the White House. At noon, we will walk there in a religious procession and join our voices in a prayerful vigil. We will be praying that President Obama and all of us find the strength and wisdom to lead our country and world away from the Climate Cliff.

What will we be urging that the President do to meet the needs of this critical hour in planetary time? He must break the silence by taking necessary actions, such as these:

1. Permanently refuse permits for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, because tar- oil is among the most dangerous of the planet-heating forms of carbon

2. Call a National Summit Conference on the Climate Crisis that includes leaders of business, labor, academia, religious communities, governmental officialdom, science, and other relevant bodies

3. Publicly support and advocate for a carbon fee that will generate hundreds of billions of dollars, with provisions to ensure that working families and the poor are not harmed by higher carbon prices; for an end to subsidies to the coal, oil and gas industries; and for substantial subsidies for research, development, and use of renewable, sustainable and jobs-creating clean energy sources.

We invite and urge you to join us on January 15th at the White House.

To our President and Congress we address the prophetic words of Dr. King spoken at another moment of crisis:

“This is a time to break the silence!”

With blessings of shalom, salaam, pax, paz, peace,

Members of the IMAC Steering Committee

Rev. Tom Carr, Senior Pastor, First Baptist Church, Hartford, CT, Interreligious Eco Justice Network, CT
Rev. Terry Ellen, Executive Director, Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice in the National Capital Region
Ted Glick, Chesapeake Climate Action Network
Cynthia Harris, Interfaith Moral Action on Climate
Dr. Mark Johnson, Fellowship of Reconciliation
Fr. Paul Mayer, Climate Crisis Coalition
Ibrahim Ramey, Muslim American Freedom Society
Karen Scott, Center for Liberty of Conscience
Lise Van Susteren, MD, Center for Health and the Global Environment, NWF
Rabbi Arthur Waskow, The Shalom Center, Philadelphia, Pa.

Questions? – Please contact The Shalom Center at Office@theshalomcenter.org, look at "Climate Policy" on http://www.theshalomcenter.org

Contact the IMAC Steering Committee through Cynthia Harris at cynthiaharris4930@gmail.com

IMAC has a major project under way that may be especially interesting to environmentally committed members of the Jewish community.

IMAC is planning a prayerful gathering the afternoon of January 15 at the White House to call on the President to take five steps on the climate crisis:

1. Permanently refuse permits for the XL Tar Sands pipeline, because tar-oil is among the most dangerous of the planet-heating forms of carbon.

2. Speak in a major national address on climate change as a crucial issue facing the US, the human race, and our planet.

5. Press Congress to set a fee on carbon, with proceeds to be shared to make sure that working families and the poor are not damaged by higher carbon prices.

January 15 is the actual birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the action will be carried out in the spirit of his work. It is also just 2 weeks after the 40th yohrzeit of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Dr. King's close co-worker, . and we will be honoring him as well. Some who gather at the White House will risk arrest by taking on a prayerful posture rooted in their own traditions (e.g. kneeling for some, an Amidah posture for others, etc.) that violates the conventional regulations covering the White House fence area. Others will provide a prayerful support presence.

We are open to input on the five points above and to participation in the process of organizing this event so that it is as large and effective as possible.

If you are interested in further information on this action, or in taking part, please write me at Awaskow@theshalomcenter.org

Shalom, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, director, The Shalom Center; member of the Stewardship Committee of the Green Hevra.

For more resources, click here

Tisha B'Av (the midsummer day of Jewish mourning for the ancient Temples in Jerusalem, and of hope for a transformed future) can be focused on the endangered Earth as today the Temple of all peoples, all life-forms.

What follows is the text of how such an Earth-centered prayerful process could have these themes: I. Celebration of the Earth; II Lament for the Earth; III. Action to Heal the Earth; IV Renewed Celebration of an Earth Renewed.

Although here at The Shalom Center we have put considerable energy into working this out, it is not carved in stone. We encourage communities to work out their own changes or additions.

After the text, you can find suggestions in more detail about using the liturgy or parts of it on Tisha B'Av itself or in creating an event on the Sunday before Tisha B'Av.

There follows –-

(1) CELEBRATION OF THE EARTH.

RECITE TOGETHER (Song of Songs 2:11-13, trans by Marcia Falk)
Come with me, my love, come away,
For the long chill months are past,
The rains have fed the earth
and left it bright with blossoms.
Birds wing in the low sky,
dove and songbird singing in the open air above.
Earth nourishing tree and vine,
green fig and tender grape,
green and tender fragrance.
Come with me my love, come away!
CHANT (by Rabbi Shefa Gold from Song of Songs) :
Kamti ani, liftoakh l'dodi; Kamti ani, liftoakh l'dodi;
I will open to you my beloved; Will you open, open to me?

(2) LAMENT FOR THE EARTH

An English-language Lament for the earth, woven from the underlying sense of the meaning of the Book of Lamentations/ Eicha, traditionally read on Tisha B'Av.
This Lament for the earth can be chanted according to the ancient wailing Lamentations melody.

Eichah / Lament for the Earth
By Tamara Cohen
(Barbara Bick Memorial Fellow of The Shalom Center)

Eicha: Alas, she sits in danger.
Earth, home to multitudes,
like a beloved, deep in distress.
Blue ocean, source of life –
Endangered and imprisoned.
Bitterly she weeps in the night
Her shorelines wet with tears.
Of all her friends, none to comfort her;
All her allies have betrayed her.
Checkerspot butterflies
flee their homes;
Polar bears
can find no rest.
Because our greed has heated Earth.
Whole communities destroyed
To pursue off-shore oil.
Lives and dreams have been narrowed.
Coastlines mourn for families,
lost homes and livelihoods.
Barrier islands lament, desolate.
Wetlands sigh without their song birds.
Estuaries grieve; the sea is embittered.
Earth’s children – now her enemies;
Despite destruction, we sleep at ease.
The Breath of Life grieves
our abundant transgressions.
Infants of every species,
captive to our conceit.
>> Hashivenu Yahh elecha v’nashuva, hadesh yameinu kekedem.
>> Let us return, help us repent,
>> You Who Breathe all Life;
>> Breathe us, Breathe us,
>> Breathe us into a new path–
>> Help us, Help us, ,
>> Help us Turn to a new way of living
>> Make–new, Make -new,
>> Our world of life intertwining –
>> Splendor, beauty, joy in our love for each life-form.
Gone from Appalachia -
her mountaintop glory;
mined by Massey Energy
without compassion.
Children sick from air and water,
stumble weak before King Coal.
All that was precious in the days of our youth,
Earth recalls in woe and sorrow.
Her creatures die with none to help them,
at the hands of Exxon, now BP.
World leaders shrug
and look on helpless.
We have sinned greatly,
and so are ailing.
Our people who respected life,
have come to defile it.
We have stripped Earth naked,
she shrinks back.
Oily waves slap the sand like a soiled hem;
we were heedless of the cost of our appetite.
We have sunk appallingly, there is no comfort.
See, Breath of Life, this misery; how our avarice jeers!
Greed has laid hands on all dear to us.
Your sanctuary plundered by multinationals
full of contempt for Your holy community.
The Earth’s poor cry out as they search for nourishment;
indigenous communities trade resources for food,
to keep themselves alive.

[Change melody to joyful] >>> Hashivenu Yahh elecha v
’nashuva, hadesh yameinu kekedem.
>>> Let us return, help us repent,
>>> You Who Breathe all Life;
>>> Breathe us, Breathe us,
>>> Breathe us into a new path–
>>> Help us, Help us, ,
>>> Help us Turn to a new way of living
>>> Make–new, Make -new,
>>> Our world of life intertwining –
>>> Splendor, beauty, joy in our love for each life-form.

Look, O Breath of Life, and behold,
what gluttons we have become.
Will we heed this warning, we who live as if unscathed –
Will we truly look and know this agony as ours own?
We are afflicted by angry consequence,
The elements push back against their abuse.
Forest fires reach down and spread like fury,
Sprawl and refuse trap our spirits.
Great storms hurl lives backwards, upside down
survivors are left forlorn, in constant misery.
For these things do we weep
Our eyes flow with tears.
How far from us is any comfort,
the possibility of change that might revive our Earth?
The children are forlorn for their future is bleak
unless we act with speed and wisdom.
Alas, humanity in our reckless living
have brought shame over all.
Can we remember the holiness of your creation,
Your footstool, green and fertile?
We have razed woodlands to the ground,
profaned the Kingdom of Earth and all its creatures.
In arrogance we slashed the mighty Redwoods,
will we cease hiding our power from ourselves and befriend our Earth?
How can we wrestle with God and bring justice to others
If we don’t quench the flaming fires,
and turn back from endless consumption?
Egrets and brown pelicans languish in salt marshes
From the depths, corals cry out.
“Where are the fish? Where are the clean waters?”
Languishing battle-wounded in the wetlands,
life runs out in ocean’s bosom.

>> Hashivenu Yahh elecha v’nashuva, hadesh yameinu kekedem.
>> Let us return, help us repent,
>> You Who Breathe all Life;
>> Breathe us, Breathe us,
>> Breathe us into a new path–
>> Help us, Help us, ,
>> Help us Turn to a new way of living
>> Make–new, Make -new,
>> Our world of life intertwining –
>> Splendor, beauty, joy in our love for each life-form.

Lead us, lead us, on a new path to Eden,
Teach us self-restraint in the very midst of abundance.
To "Ayeka/Where are you?"
We will answer Hineni.
We are here to honor boundaries, not to devour all.
Open, open –
Our eyes to see in each creature,
Tree, Ocean , Mountain –
the Presence of the One.

3. ACTION TO HEAL THE EARTH
(This part of the observance may include vigils, visits to official or business offices, letter-writing, etc):
We call on the peoples and the governments of the United States and of the world:
a. To forbid, now and forever, the drilling of new oil wells into the depths of Mother Ocean, the destruction of mountains for the sake of the coal within them, and the leveling of great forests that breathe their majesty throughout our planet.
b. To end all subsidies to producers of fossil fuels, and to provide as first priority throughout the world the support of the public in money and attention for conservation of energy and swift emplacement of responsible and sustainable energy sources; sun, wind, and earth-based geothermal.
c. To honor and affirm the Breath of Life by swiftly and strongly capping the emission of carbon dioxide, methane, and other heat-trapping gases.
d. To share the wealth of the world so that nations and regions, domestic and world-wide, that are trapped in poverty gain help from the rich in lessening the devastation of climate crisis already under way and in achieving economic development through a non-fossil-fuel path.

5. CELEBRATION:

End by reciting together Psalm 104 or 148 or a more recent poem of celebration of the Earth; by circle-dancing; and by chanting again from the Song of Songs:
Psalm 148: Hallelu-YAH! (trans by Rabbi Arthur Waskow )
Praise YHWH/Yahh the Breath of Life from the heavens,
Praise Yah in the heights,
Praise Yah, you messengers; Praise Yah, you multitudes!
Praise Yah, sun and moon
And all you light-filled stars!
Praise Yah, Heavens beyond the heavens.
Praise Yah, waters beneath the heavens.
Praise the Name of YHWH/ Yahh Breath of Life,
For through Its intertwining all comes to Be,
Each finds its place in the dance of All:
YHWH/ Yahh carves them a role that no one can erase.
So sing praise, all that is earthy and grounded,
All that flows in the deeps like the great sea-monsters,
Fire and hail, snow and fog,
Storm-winds blowing from the Mouth of God.
Lofty mountains, gentle hills,
Fruit trees and evergreens,
Roaring beasts and lowing herds,
Crawly bugs and soaring birds,
Powerful rulers and empowered peoples,
Prosecutors and public defenders,
Men and women sprouting promise,
Bearded elders bent by life and beardless youth not yet on path,
All sing praise to the Breath of Life –
For Yahh stands alone in radiance,
Filling with splendor earth and sky,
Making all peoples a horn of plenty.
For the sake of all who love Yahh
Or who come near through Wrestling God,
Let us praise the Breath of Life — Hallelu-YAH!

CHANT: Verse from Isaiah 51:3, from one of the Haftarot of Consolation after Tisha B'Av (Chant melody for Hebrew by Rabbi Shefa Gold; same melody for English)
Vayasem midbarah k'eden (3x), v'arvatah k'gan Yahh;
Turn the barren place to Eden (3x); And the desert to a garden breathing Life.

##################

Further notes on conducting an Eichah for the Earth Service
By Tamara Cohen

Option 1: Choose a place for your gathering. (Things to think about: Do you want to meet at synagogue or community center? At a space that has been used for interfaith gathering? At a more public space in your community? At a riverside or lakeside outdoors? At a place denoting political power — e.g. a Senator's Home Office, a regional EPA headquarters, etc? By a gas station or power plant or other visible symbol of fossil fuel and dirty energy in your local community?)
When community is gathered, or in an invitation/ advertisement you may choose to use part of the following background information:
Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the month of Av, has historically been a day to mourn the Destruction of the First and Second Temples, centers of Israelite practice before the rise of Rabbinic Judaism (First Temple 975 BCE – 586 BCE; Second Temple 515 BCE – 70 CE) and the exiles that followed those destructions. Over the course of Jewish history this day of mourning and fasting has also come to commemorate many other tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people throughout history.
This year we are beginning a new tradition. We are suggesting that in addition to, or instead of (depending on the norms of your community and personal practice) the traditional observance of Tisha B’Av, the time has come to use this powerful day to mourn the ongoing destruction of the “temple” that is our Earth, a tragedy for all peoples, creatures and living things, but one that is not complete and thus, with sufficient will and action, is in part, reversible.

Although this approach may seem highly untraditional, there are some Jewish textual sources that lend themselves to make the leap from the Temple to the Earth:

• According to the Kabbalistic language of symbols, both the Temple and the Earth are embodiments of the Shechinah, the indwelling (feminine) presence of God.
• According to some Rabbinic texts, the Temple was the center of the Earth – thus the destruction of carries with it the threat of the destruction of the rest. Without its heart, the body of Earth is clearly threatened. So a day traditionally used to mourn the loss of that heart can become a day to mourn the ailing body of the whole earth.
• And the Temple offerings represented an effort to heal the spiritutal defects of all aspects of earth — mineral (salt), vegetation, animal life, and (through the songs of the Levites) the human community.
• In addition, we also draw on a midrash (rabbinic interpretation of a biblical text) about the first word of the Book of Lamentations/Eicha, the traditional text read on Tisha B’Av. This midrash (Midrash Eicha Rabbah, Proems IV) links this first word ‘Eicha’ (also the name of the book in its entirety) to the question asked by God to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden narrative.
• Both words are written with the same exact Hebrew letters and are only differentiated through their different vocalizations.

The Rabbis link these textual moments, the moment that God is searching for Adam and Eve after they have transgressed and eaten from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil with the opening “Alas” of Lamentations. By linking the exile of the Jews from Israel with the exile of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, the Rabbis link the particularistic story to the universalistic story, giving us the seeds to link what has been a holiday about the particular suffering of Jews with the need for a day of mourning for the universal suffering of the Earth and all its peoples and life forms.

The midrash, read in the context of a Tisha B’Av for the Earth, also focuses our attention on perhaps a new way to read the transgression of Adam and Eve, as a story about the difficulty the first humans, like humanity in our day, were not able to honor the boundaries set out for them about what of Eden’s bounty to enjoy and what to refrain from consuming.

If you plan to use our English readings as a supplement to the traditional Eicha, you can do that either by reading one section between each of the five chapters of Eicha, or by using the readings at the end or the beginning and end of your Eicha to frame or deepen the meaning of the reading. In this way, our Eicha joins the tradition of kinot (dirges sung after the chanting of Eicha that often focus on other times of destruction in addition to the destruction of the Temples.)

You might also choose to show a slide show of images of the BP oil disaster and other threats to the environment, during or after your Hebrew reading of Eichah. For an example, see the Shalom Center Youtube video.

The English can be read responsively or with each person reading one stanza and going around in a circle and the whole group joining together for the repeating refrain of “Hashiveinu.”

For groups that have generally gathered for a more traditional Tisha B’Av Service, have a discussion, before or after your chanting, about what it means to bring this new level of meaning to the observance of Tisha B’Av.

Some possible questions for your discussion:

a. Do we need a day of mourning for the Earth? If so, what do you think it should look like? What is the relationship between such a day and Earth Day? What are other contemporary resonances you see for Tisha B’Av? Can it work for you as a day about the Earth and about senseless hatred between Jews or is that too much for one day to hold?

b. It is said that the Messiah will be born on Tisha B’Av. While many of us do not believe in an actual human being who will come to save the world, we might still find inspiration in the idea of a messianic age –– a time very different from our current reality in which peace and justice reign. How do you think the seeds of such a time could be planted by you and your community on this Tisha B’Av? What would that look like?

c. The text of Eicha is full of language about “our enemies” who destroyed the Temple and Jerusalem. Historically the First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonian Empire and the Second Temple by the Roman Empire. Yet the Rabbis blame the destruction of the Temples on actions of the People Israel –- for the first Temple, according to the Rabbis the sins of idolatry, sexual immorality and bloodshed, and the Second Temple because of senseless hatred among Jews.

When it comes to thinking about “enemies” in the context of our current environmental crisis, we too can look outward at the visible big scale enemies like oil and coal companies causing destruction and we can also follow the Rabbinic impulse and look inward at the forces of which we are a part that have led to our current state of environmental destruction — or both.. What do you think? Is the language of “enemies” helpful or outdated? Should we focus our energy on changing ourselves and our communities or on fighting large companies and governmental policies? What is the right balance for you and your community?

Whatever you do, please let us at The Shalom Center, know what your plans are. Write us at Office@theshalomcenter.org We will use this information to help local people who are looking for a Tisha B’Av for the Earth in your area find you. It will also give all of us a sense of being part of a larger national, and perhaps even international community.

The Shalom Center has created a 40th Anniversary New Interfaith Freedom Seder for the Earth to help us free ourselves from the greatest dangers of our time: What are the Ten Plagues endangering the earth and human life today, and what are the Ten Blessings we ourselves can bring to heal the earth and our own societies?

If you want to use this text, or part of it, for an Earth Seder in your own community — perhaps a week before Pesach or for Earth Day on April 22, or the weekend before or after — please do so — and we ask you to make a contribution to The Shalom Center to help us do this and similar work. We suggest a donation of $18 plus $1 for each participant in your Seder. Click on the "Donate" headline near the top of the left-hand column at http://www.theshalomcenter.org/ to contribute, and please let us know what you are doing by writing Office@shalomctr.org.

Click just below to download a full pdf of the New Freedom Seder for the Earth.! (It includes an amazing full-color graphic cover by Avi Katz.) If you prefer to have a text copy that you can easily edit, click here.

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow

Bill McKibben and several other leaders of the USand world-wide movement to prevent climate disaster have called for a wave of nonviolent civil disobedience at the White House gates between August 20 and Labor Day.

The action will focus on convincing President Obama to withhold permits for the so-called ‘Keystone XLPipeline’ from Canada’s tar sands to flow to Texas refineries, thence to add enormously to planet-scorching CO2. Below you will find McKibben’s letter.

More than 1100 people have signed up already. I am intending (God willing & the creeks don’t rise, or even if they do!) to take part in the tar-sands nonviolent CDaction in DCin August. If you think you might want to be a part of this action, please sign up here: http:www.tarsandsaction.org/

And please forward this letter to your friends, co-workers, and co-congregants.

A multireligious contingent (to be trained late Sunday, Aug 28 and to take action on Monday, Aug 29) will express our spiritual commitment to the Earth and its human communities, and to focus the attention of the various faith communities on this issue and the larger climate crisis of which this is a part.

If you are interested in this multireligious aspect of the event, please drop a note to me at Awaskow@theshalomcenter.org, Tim Kumfer at telltheworddc@gmail.com, and Rose Berger at rberger@sojo.net to be added to the email list for this religious “affinity group.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^

From: Bill McKibben, 3 July 2011

Subject: Fwd: civil disobedience this summer

Dear Friends,

This will be a slightly longer letter than common for the internet age-it’s serious stuff.

The short version is we want you to consider doing something hard: coming to Washington in the hottest and stickiest weeks of the summer and engaging in civil disobedience that will quite possibly get you arrested.

The full version goes like this:

As you know, the planet is steadily warming: 2010 was the warmest year on record, and we’ve seen the resulting chaos in almost every corner of the earth.

And as you also know, our democracy is increasingly controlled by special interests interested only in their short-term profit.

These two trends collide this summer in Washington, where the State Department and the White House have to decide whether to grant a certificate of ‘national interest’ to some of the biggest fossil fuel players on earth. These corporations want to build the so-called ‘Keystone XLPipeline’ from Canada’s tar sands to Texas refineries.

To call this project a horror is serious understatement. The tar sands have wrecked huge parts of Alberta, disrupting ways of life in indigenous communities-First Nations communities in Canada, and tribes along the pipeline route in the U.S.have demanded the destruction cease.

The pipeline crosses crucial areas like the Oglalla Aquifer where a spill would be disastrous-and though the pipeline companies insist they are using ‘state of the art’ technologies that should leak only once every 7 years, the precursor pipeline and its pumping stations have leaked a dozen times in the past year. These local impacts alone would be cause enough to block such a plan.

But the Keystone Pipeline would also be a fifteen hundred mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent, a way to make it easier and faster to trigger the final overheating of our planet, the one place to which we are all indigenous.

How much carbon lies in the recoverable tar sands of Alberta? A recent calculation from some of our foremost scientists puts the figure at about 200 parts per million. Even with the new pipeline they won’t be able to burn that much overnight-but each development like this makes it easier to get more oil out.

As the climatologist Jim Hansen (one of the signatories to this letter) explained, if we have any chance of getting back to a stable climate “the principal requirement is that coal emissions must be phased out by 2030 and unconventional fossil fuels, such as tar sands, must be left in the ground.” In other words, he added, “if the tar sands are thrown into the mix it is essentially game over.”

The Keystone pipeline is an essential part of the game. “Unless we get increased market access, like with Keystone XL, we’re going to be stuck,” said Ralph Glass, an economist and vice-president at AJMPetroleum Consultants in Calgary, told a Canadian newspaper last week.

Given all that, you’d suspect that there’s no way the Obama administration would ever permit this pipeline. But in the last few months the administration has signed pieces of paper opening much of Alaska to oil drilling, and permitting coal-mining on federal land in Wyoming that will produce as much CO2as 300 powerplants operating at full bore.

And Secretary of State Clinton has already said she’s ‘inclined’ to recommend the pipeline go forward. Partly it’s because of the political commotion over high gas prices, though more tar sands oil would do nothing to change that picture.

But it’s also because of intense pressure from industry. The USChamber of Commerce-a bigger funder of political campaigns than the RNCand DNCcombined-has demanded that the administration “move quickly to approve the Keystone XLpipeline,” which is not so surprising-they’ve also told the U.S.EPAthat if the planet warms that will be okay because humans can ‘adapt their physiology’ to cope. The Koch Brothers, needless to say, are also backing the plan, and may reap huge profits from it.

So we’re pretty sure that without serious pressure the Keystone Pipeline will get its permit from Washington. A wonderful coalition of environmental groups has built a strong campaign across the continent — from Cree and Dene indigenous leaders to Nebraska farmers, they’ve spoken out strongly against the destruction of their land. We need to join them, and to say even if our own homes won’t be crossed by this pipeline, our joint home — the earth — will be wrecked by the carbon that pours down it.

And we need to say something else, too: it’s time to stop letting corporate power make the most important decisions our planet faces.We don’t have the money to compete with those corporations, but we do have our bodies, and beginning in mid August many of us will use them. We will, each day, march on the White House, risking arrest with our trespass. We will do it in dignified fashion, demonstrating that in this case we are the conservatives, and that our foes-who would change the composition of the atmosphere are dangerous radicals. Come dressed as if for a business meeting — this is, in fact, serious business

And another sartorial tip-if you wore an Obama button during the 2008 campaign, why not wear it again? We very much still want to believe in the promise of that young Senator who told us that with his election the ‘rise of the oceans would begin to slow and the planet start to heal.’ We don’t understand what combination of bureaucratic obstinacy and insider dealing has derailed those efforts, but we remember his request that his supporters continue on after the election to pressure his government for change. We’ll do what we can.

And one more thing: we don’t just want college kids to be the participants in this fight. They’ve led the way so far on climate change-10,000 came to DCfor the Powershift gathering earlier this spring. They’ve marched this month in West Virginia to protest mountaintop removal; a young man named Tim DeChristopher faces sentencing this summer in Utah for his creative protest.

Now it’s time for people who’ve spent their lives pouring carbon into the atmosphere to step up too, just as many of us did in earlier battles for civil rights or for peace. Most of us signing this letter are veterans of this work, and we think it’s past time for elders to behave like elders. One thing we don’t want is a smash up: if you can’t control your passions, this action is not for you.

This won’t be a one-shot day of action. We plan for it to continue for several weeks, till the administration understands we won’t go away.

Not all of us can actually get arrested-half the signatories to this letter live in Canada, and might well find our entry into the U.S.barred. But we will be making plans for sympathy demonstrations outside Canadian consulates in the U.S., and U.S.consulates in Canada-the decision-makers need to know they’re being watched.

Twenty years of patiently explaining the climate crisis to our leaders hasn’t worked. Maybe moral witness will help. You have to start somewhere, and we choose here and now.

If you think you might want to be a part of this action, we need you to sign up here.

As plans solidify, we’ll be in touch with you to arrange nonviolence training; our colleagues at a variety of environmental and democracy campaigns will be coordinating the actual arrangements.

We know we’re asking a lot. You should think long and hard on it, and pray if you’re the praying type. But to us, it’s as much privilege as burden to get to join this fight in the most serious possible way. We hope you’ll join us.

Maude Barlow – Chair, Council of Canadians

Wendell Berry – Author and Farmer

Tom Goldtooth – Director, Indigenous Environmental Network

Danny Glover – Actor

James Hansen – Climate Scientist

Wes Jackson – Agronomist, President of the Land Insitute

Naomi Klein – Author and Journalist

Bill McKibben – Writer and Environmentalist

George Poitras – Mikisew Cree Indigenous First Nation

Gus Speth – Environmental Lawyer and Activist

David Suzuki – Scientist, Environmentalist and Broadcaster

P.S.Please pass this message on to anyone else you think might be interested. We realize that what we’re asking isn’t easy, and we’re very grateful that you’re willing even to consider it. See you in Washington!

Bill McKibben

The Forward, the leading national Jewish weekly, on July 14, 2009, reported that four Jewish summer camps in Pennsylvania have signed leases with gas exploration companies to allow “fracking” –- the hydro-fracturing method of pouring tons of highly chemicalized water to smash shale rocks into releasing natural gas.

The four are Starlight’s Perlman Camp, which is owned and operated by B’nai B’rith; Camps Nesher and Shoshanim, which share a property in Lakewood and are owned and operated by the New Jersey Federation of YMHAand YWHA; and Camp Morasha, an independent camp in Lakewood.

The Forward reports that “Fracking of a single well creates more than 1 million gallons of wastewater awash in pollutants, including some radioactive materials. According to a February report in The New York Times, state and federal documents show that the wastewater is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water.”

The Shalom Center views it as a profound violation of Jewish wisdom and values for summer camps or other Jewish institutions to sell the rights to use their land in ways that will poison God’s and humanity’s earth, air, food, and water. See below for actions you can take to halt this.

Normal Federal protections for drinking water and clean air have been thwarted by the Halliburton Loophole pushed through Congress by former Vice-President Dick Cheney. It prevents application of these protective rules to drilling by the gas and oil industries. As a result, no one knows what chemicals are causing the dangers to water, food, and health that are appearing in fracking areas.

Fracking has turned the drinking water of farmers near well-heads into “water” that turns to flame when a match is lit at the kitchen faucets.

Fracking threatens the drinking water supply of the Philadelphia and New York City metropolitan areas, and has been charged with raising cancer rates in communities near fracking sites.

Fracking is also a planetary threat. Scientists at Cornell University have analyzed fracking and report that it leaks methane, a planet-heating gas much more powerful than CO2, at such a rate that “if you do an integration of 20 years following the development of the gas, [fracking] shale gas is worse than conventional gas and is, in fact, worse than coal and worse than oil.”

On September 7-8, the national commercial association of companies that are fracking shale rock regions will gather for a national convention in Philadelphia.

So environmental organizations are planning to face the “Fracking Association” with major demonstrations on September 7-8. The goal is at least 2500 demonstrators, with a rally, a march, a counter-conference, a “Blessing of the Waters,” and a free outdoor concert.

The Shalom Center has taken the lead in bringing together an interfaith planning committee to put together a “Blessing of the Waters” as part of the Sept 7-8 arrangements.

We invite religious folk, clergy and lay, who want to take part in these events to get in touch with us by writing Rabbi Arthur Waskow at Awaskow@theshalomcenter.org with “Interfaith Blessing Waters” in the subject line.

The two-day anti-fracking event will include: a large rally at the Philadelphia Convention Center from 8 am to noon, Wednesday September 7; a march through Philadelphia to Gov Corbett’s office that day; interfaith “Blessing of the Waters” at Penn’s Treaty Park on the Delaware River at 5 pm; an open-air free concert at 6 pm there; and on Thursday, an all-day conference to plan strategy to stop fracking.

Fracking is currently under a moratorium in New York, but Gov. Cuomo has indicated he may end the ban. New Jersey has just outlawed it, Wells have been drilled in parts of Pennsylvania. The Delaware River Port Authority has imposed a moratorium that may expire in September.

What you can do to stop fracking:

• Call your child’s summer camp to urge they NOTOKany leases or plans that might allow fracking.

• Call Daniel S. Mariaschin, Executive Vice President of B’nai Brith International, at (888) 388-4224 (toll-free) or 202-857-6600, about Camp Perlman, and Leonard Robinson, exec of the New Jersey Y Camps, who has decision-making power over those camps, at (570) 296-8596..

• Sign a petition for a national ban on fracking here.

• If you live in NYState, call Gov Cuomo at 518/ 474-8390 and tell him to ban fracking throughout New York State. In Pennsylvania, call Gov. Corbett at 717/ 787-2500 with the same demand.

• Call your members of Congress and tell them to pass the FRACAct to repeal the “Cheney-Halliburton” exemption for hydrofracking from environmental laws.

• Show the documentary film Gasland in your community. It documents the dangers of fracking. To get a DVDcopy, click here.

• Save the dates of September 7-8 to attend the interfaith events on fracking in Philadelphia. Click here for more information.

• See our article here for background.

• For the full Forward article, click here. :

Prepare to use Shabbat Noach, October 28-29, when Jews read the biblical story of the Flood, the Ark, and the Rainbow, as a time to address fracking and other threats to our planet, and act to heal our Earth in the spirit of the Rainbow.

I talked with Leonard Robinson, director of the New Jersey YH-YWHAsummer camps (which are located in Pennsylvania). He gave four arguments for the leases:

1) The issue is ”bigger than we are,” he said. This meant that whether the Delaware Bay and River authorities clamp down on fracking will make a difference, and the camp is essentially helpless.

2) Moreover, the camp’s neighbors were leasing their land and since the gas drilling/fracking may do damage beneath the earth’s surface horizontally across ownership lines, better they should make their own deal that might protect the camp’s land better than not leasing.

3) The camp made a lot of money from the lease.

4) The lease was agreed to two years ago, when the camp had much less information than it does now about the dangers of fracking. “Now, we can’t just cancel the lease.”

I responded thus:

Of course the issue is bigger than the camp. When big institutions are attacking Jewish values, the question is whether to surrender because they are more powerful or organize to stop them –— including, in this case, to reach out to the neighbors and work with them against the fracking companies.

I mentioned the San Francisco case where some people are organizing a referendum to outlaw circumcision of children. The official Jewish community could have decided the issue was “bigger” than they were – too big to fight – and surrender (even maybe having mohelim make a deal for a buy-off to replace their lost income) or instead, choose to fight. They chose to fight, because circumcision was seen as a core Jewish value. Are clean water, air, and food, and the healing of our climate crisis, the protection of God’s Creation, a core Jewish value or not? In the “Jewish identity-building” of campers, what are they taught about Jewish values and the Earth?

As for the inviolability of leases agreed to two years ago, I pointed out to Mr. Robinson that it MIGHTbe argued that if the fracking companies withheld information they had two years ago about the poisonous chemicals they are adding to the fracking water, and in other ways misled the camps and other lessees, that the leases might be voidable.

So I encourage you to call Mr. Robinson at (570) 296-8596, and urge him to take all necessary steps to void the existing leases, to make no new ones, to make protection of the Earth and of human health a clear Jewish value taught in his camps, and to join with The Shalom Center and others in the Jewish and broader American communities to convince state governments to outlaw fracking, as the State of New Jersey has just done.

My conversation with Mr.Robinson makes clear that this issue goes beyond the four camps that have already leased land for fracking. It raises the basic question whether Jewish camping, which is widely said to be intended to strengthen Jewish knowledge, practice, and values among young people, can actually enhance – instead of betraying — its unusual opportunity of making connections between Jewish values and the healing of relationships between adam and adamah, the earthy human race and the Earth itself.

There are hundreds of such camps, sponsored by the Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and various Orthodox denominations, by Habonim Labor Zionists and by Young Judea, by many Federations and other Jewish organizations. There is even a Foundation for Jewish Camp, 15 West 36th Street, 13th Floor, New York, NY10018 ; Phone: 646-278-4500, whose CEOis Jeremy J. Fingerman,, 646-278-4505 (Email: jeremy@jewishcamp.org)

Among these many camps, there is at least one, Eden Village Camp in Putnam Valley, NY(877) 397-EDEN(3336); http://edenvillagecamp.org/ which was founded explicitly to renew the Jewish connection with the Earth. Its program to do this is both extraordinary and exemplary.

The Shalom Center intends to pursue both our efforts to end any practices that subvert the Jewish value of healing God’s creation, and our efforts to strengthen those program that support that value as a core commitment of Judaism and the Jewish people. We will be in further touch with you about how to do this.

To read this article, please visit The Shalom Center's website at http://www.theshalomcenter.org/node/1282.

To read this article, please visit the The Shalom Center's website at http://www.theshalomcenter.org/node/1401.