Posts Tagged ‘Environment’
I’m dreaming of a green Chanukah
- Certain environmentalists want us to curtail our chanukah observances to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. They have calculated an impressive environmental impact to be achieved by reducing our lighting by one candle each.
- Much of secular conservation theory is at variance with Jewish thought. In particular, the idea that human beings should restrict themselves to sustainable uses of the planet’s resources, so that we do nothing that would prevent the world from existing indefinitely, ignores the Jewish belief that the world is not intended to last for ever. The Talmud sees the world as intended as a relatively short-term project intended to last no more than a few millenia – different precise lengths according to different rabbinic opinions.
- But we share with environmentalists the idea that while the world exists we should use it sensibly. In particular, we have a number of environmental laws, such as, for example, town planning restrictions designed to prevent one interest group from polluting the environment for another.
- To reduce our chanukah lighting by one candle per night would make no sense halachically. But it might make halachic sense to go much further than that. While there are different opinions about the optimal number of lights to be lit, everyone agrees that just one light per person per night would satisfy the basic halachic requirement. The Jewish world has opted to exceed this, as a hiddur mitzvah – a beautification of the mitzvah. But it is no beautification to upset others or to add to their ecological difficulties.
- It may be that the chemical global effect of the Jewish community resolving to return to the basic requirement of one light per person per night would be minimal, or even nugatory, as a reduction of emissions. But the spiritual effect could be explosive. It could demonstrate a real concern for our fellow human beings, and a real desire to do whatever we can to show sensitivity and a desire to avoid causing offence or discomfort. As a practical exercise in loving our fellow human beings and showing respect for their concerns and desires, it could kindle an eternal spiritual light of which we could be truly proud.
Environmental distruption
- In news reports of natural disasters or of changes in the world (hurricanes, drought, flood, soil erosion, species-extinction and the increasing incidence of asthma and allergies, to name a random selection) it is frequently suggested that the disaster or change – or its severity, rate or impact – is partly a result of the way humans are using the planet and its resources. Some of these suggestions may be unfounded, but probably not all of them. Certainly, there seems little doubt that we are increasingly feeling the effects in numerous ways of courses of action begun decades ago; effects that were to some extent at least wholly unpredictable at the beginning of the process.
- An aspect of the Torah approach to the protection of our natural environment emerges from a technical law in yesterday’s parashah about the construction of the altar in the Tabernacle.
- In Devorim 27:5-6 the Torah says “You shall build a stone altar for God there, without using iron on the stones. Build the altar for God with whole stones …” Apart from the internal redundancy within that passage, the entire passage is a repetition of the law already given in Shemos 20:22. If it is repeated here in Devorim we can look for a message for a people making the transition from living under miraculous divine protection in the desert to managing and using the natural resources of a fertile and inhabitable land.
- When the law against using iron to hew the altar stones is given the first time, Rashi brings an explanation from the Mishnah in Middos (3:4): iron was created to shorten life, and the altar was created to prolong life. The obvious difficulty with this is that iron has potential for construction as well as for destruction, and the same is true of stone. Moreover, the Mishnah goes on to record (3:5) that some of the fittings of the altar were required to be made from iron.
- But one important difference in the environmental impact of iron and stone as building materials is suggested by the way in which the law against using iron to hew the altar stones is expressed the second time around. The Netziv analyses the internal redundancies of the verses and concludes that we are first obliged to choose stones that are without irregularities that might tempt us to cut them with iron, and secondly we are prohibited from using iron on those stones at any stage in the building process.
- The result was, as the Mishnah in Middos records, that the builders went to Beit Kerem and dug for stones, selecting only those of precisely the required size and shape, rather than quarrying large quantities of rock from the nearest place, cutting to size and discarding the waste. They used a more laborious process, slower and more expensive, but one that was less environmentally disruptive; searching for existing resources that suit the task rather than violently forcing the natural resources to conform to our requirements. That is a choice that was relevant only in the context of the use of stone. When it comes to the use of iron and other metals, one has no choice but to interfere considerably with the natural world – and with potentially far-reaching and unpredictable consequences – in order to extract the metal and adapt it for use.
- The picture that emerges is this: the Torah certainly allows and encourages us to use the whole range of the world’s resources for our purposes. When iron is required for fittings of the altar that have to be stronger and more flexible than stone, we should use iron. But when there is a choice of technique and one is less environmentally disruptive than the other, we should use the less disruptive process, even if more demanding or less advantageous in other ways.
- We are becoming increasingly aware both that the ecological impact of our actions is unpredictable and also that in many ways we may have progressed too far wholly to avoid undesirable effects of actions long past. But in so far as the future of the planet lies in our hands, we can learn from the Torah laws of the stone for the altar the importance of wherever possible adopting an attitude of humility, so that in harnessing natural resources we interfere with the world as little as possible.
- The practical implications of this philosophy could be immense. They might point, for example, to maximising opportunities to harness natural sources of sustainable power-generation rather than relying almost entirely on the oil, gas and nuclear power. It could also be relevant to choices between expensive and laborious irrigation systems to tackle third-world drought and the use of genetic modification to produce greater quantities of food in the developed world that can then be transported to areas of famine. And in smaller ways too, this approach may suggest actions of all kinds, including personal contributions to environmental sensitivity such as recycling – in which context, what a great blessing and opportunity for kiddush hashem it is that the London Borough of Hackney have now appointed two members of the Jewish community to act as community recycling officers.
- At a more abstract level, adjusting our view of the world along these lines could lead to a general desire to adapt more to the environment around us, to curb our desires to control and change, and generally to approach the new year in an attitude of greater humility and sensitivity.
The end of the world may – or may not – be nigh
1. A common objective of environmental campaigns is sustainability. That is to say, a test frequently applied in determining the propriety of a use of natural resources is whether it is sustainable itself (as in the case of forestation and irrigation) or whether it threatens the sustainability of all or part of the ecological system (as in the case of the emission of greenhouse gases or the hunting of a species). However, this assumes either that the world ought to be allowed to last forever or, at least, that it is improper for us to do anything that threatens to shorten its likely span of existence.2. Jewish thinking has traditionally neither expected nor desired this world to last forever.
3. Midrashic tradition posits this world as the seventh in a series (based on the number of words in the first verse of the Bible), each of the first six of which was destroyed (based on the rabbinic understanding of the word “sohu” as not meaning “null”, as sometimes translated, but as referring to desolate destruction) (incidentally providing one of the many possible rabbinic explanations of dinosaur fossils).
4. Each world, according to this tradition, is a time-limited experiment created by God to produce some kind of spiritual force, of the nature of which we can comprehend only a very shadowy picture. In the case of this world, the rabbinic construction of the behaviour of Adam (“Adam sinned for the sake of Heaven”) suggests the creation of a world in which man descended from an angelic state, in which he obeys God as an automaton without choice, to a state of tension between a selfish animalism and an altruistic holiness. When human altruism finally triumphs over bestial selfishness through an exertion of free will, the product is a kiddush hashem of unequalled proportions, justifying the creation of the world and rendering its continued existence, at any rate in this form, unnecessary.
5. Hence the difference between the Messianic Era and the World to Come. The former is still “business as usual” so far as nature is concerned (at least according to Maimonides – others differ to a greater or lesser extent) while the latter is the end of this world as we know it. This is why the description “the world to come” is used to describe the state attained by those who die now, as well as the state attained by everyone as a culmination of the perfection of the natural order known as the Messianic Era.
6. For the Jew, therefore, the continuation of this world is not, in itself, an aim at all. For me personally, I aim at the attainment of a state of wholly spiritual existence after death known as my personal world to come. For the world, I aim to participate in producing an environment which proclaims the existence and kingship of Hashem. With this in mind, the rabbis have often predicted different periods for the life of this world. A number are discussed in Gemara Sanhedrin 97. One that focuses our minds is that of 6,000 years, which on the basis of our traditional numbering would give the world a little over two centuries to go.
7. Nor does that necessarily seem unreasonable to the modern mind. The world seems tired. Its resources, whatever environmental decisions are taken, will become more than a little stretched in the next couple of hundred years even if the human family increases at a slower rate than at present. And, of course, increasingly sophisticated techniques of astronomical observation have made it possible in recent years for scientists to observe the number of near misses that the world has had in the matter of meteoric collisions and to speculate how long it will be before we sustain a direct hit.
8. Although much of Jewish law tells us to respect the world and its resources and to use them with care, the prospect of using them solely in order to achieve perpetual sustainability is not one which commends itself. For one thing, we have always believed in the precariousness of the world’s existence, and the constant reliance on Hashem’s chessed in keeping us alive, which scientists are now beginning to conclude for themselves. For another, it has always seemed to us to be more important to ensure that we arrive at the next world in a fit spiritual state than that we prolong this world, or our miniscule share in it, to a particular length.
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