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A Joyous Connection with All that Lives
By Steven Greenberg
The planet is under siege, or so
environmentalists tell us. The forests
of the world are being razed, threatening the planets biodiversity and jeopardizing
the life-sustaining capacity of the atmosphere. Global
warming, caused by the depletion of rain forests and the burning of fossil fuels, is
melting the earths ice caps and raising water levels, threatening massive flooding
around the world. The ozone layer is being
depleted by chlorofluorocarbons, methyl bromide, and methyl chloroform that are released
into the air by various industries. Pesticides
have contaminated our fresh waters and are beginning to undermine our seas. Environmental scientists and attentive
citizens are sounding the alarm about these threats, but most politicians and the public
at large seem apathetic and seem to discount the magnitude of the threat. Short-term thinking and a focus on what is close
at hand in space collude to keep us from attending to problems that are global in nature
and require that we take the long view. The
costs of inaction today, we are told, will be nothing less than disastrous tomorrow or the
day after. This is the language of ecology
today. It is a rhetoric of complaint
and dread, a moralizing harangue that cries out against our self-indulgent consumption and
our shortsighted self-destructiveness. The
thrust of this rhetoric is negative and it seeks to motivate action by engendering fear
and anxiety. And yet, while fear can motivate us to act, it does so effectively only when
the dangers that threaten us are experienced as real and immediate. Accordingly, those who would urge us to act from
fear must persuade us that the danger we face is indeed present and pressing. But the efficacy of such fear-inducing rhetoric is
quite limited in the case of the environmental threat because environmental science does
not typically indicate that we will personally suffer from our continued inaction. Rather it is our children or more certainly our
grandchildren or the children or grandchildren of someone living in a far corner of
the globe who will bear the consequences of our failure to act. The danger to the
present generation is apparently minimal. Consequently,
those who employ the rhetoric of fear are drawn to exaggerate the present danger, hoping
that the fear they induce thereby will increase our propensity to act on behalf of the
environment. I found myself thinking about all of
this last Friday while attending Hoshana Rabba services at the Carlebach Synagogue
on 79th Street in Manhattan, where two hundred people packed tightly into the
tiny sanctuary for a service that lasted from 10:00 am till 3:00 pm. Hoshana Rabba is the last day of prayer and
supplication in the month of prayer that begins on Rosh Hashana. Because it is not a full-fledged biblical holiday,
there is no prohibition on using electricity or playing musical instruments. The lulav and etrog are waved in the
midst of psalms of praise and thanksgiving that are sung exuberantly to an instrumental
accompaniment. Hoshana Rabba comes at the end
of the holiday of Sukkot, a holiday whose rituals and themes are rich with
ecological significance. On Sukkot we
are commanded to dwell in temporary huts that remind us of lifes fragility, that
teach us that our safety is not secured by buildings but by the depth of our relationships
and by our trust in the protective canopy or the heavens that can be seen through the roof
of the sukkah. On the holiday we join
four plant species together and worship with them for the week, waving and shaking them in
a choreographed fashion in prayers of thanksgiving and in petitions for Gods love
and care. During Hoshana Rabba this
year, I had an experience that awakened me to planet Earth in a new way. The prayer service that day includes a common
prayer recited on all Sabbaths and holidays: The
soul of every living being shall bless your Name, Lord our God. I have said this prayer countless times before,
but this day something extraordinary happened. This
time the words of the prayer carried me to a vantage point from which I was able to see
the planet differently than I ever had before. Were our mouth as full
of song as the sea, and our tongue as full of joyous singing as the myriad of waves, and
our lips as full of praise as the breadth of the heavens, and our eyes as brilliant as the
sun and the moon, and our hands as outspread as eagles of the sky and our feet as swift as
deerwe still could not thank you enough
. The words, the music, the voices, the
palm fronds and citrons, all combined to deliver me to place where I felt the most
incredible exultation. The psalmist perceives
the waves of the oceans, the celestial bodies in the heavens, the eagles in flight and the
sprinting deer as living embodiments of exultant praise.
Carried aloft by the words of the prayer, the limits of my body
dissolved as I became an eagle in flight, looking down upon the earth with the eyes of the
moon, and hearing the crash of waves upon the shore as the oceans song of praise
I experienced all the cosmos as exultant before God. At that moment, from that standpoint,
the prayers words of praise felt neither forced nor imposed as tribute to an
egotistical god. Instead, for me, they
expressed the utter rapture of existence aware of itself in its manifold oneness. At once it was clear to me that the animal world
is not further from, but closer to, God. It
is only human beings who can fall out of sync with the natural harmony of earth and waters
and sky. Late in the Hoshana Rabba
service, there comes a moment in which all the congregation waves palm fronds in unison.
In that instant it seemed as if my lulav had become an extension of my body and the
minyan was transformed into trees dancing together in a storm. At the end of the
service, an ancient prayer for rain is recited, accompanied by the beating of willows upon
the ground. Caught up in the power of the
ritual, I became a willow tree in the midst of a rainstorm, lashing my branches against
the earth, inaugurating a year of plentiful rain. Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav was once
asked whether it is preferable to pray in a synagogue or in a field of grass. He responded that it is better to pray in a field
of grass because, whereas in a synagogue one might be spiritually connected to a few of
the people with whom one is praying, one who prays in a field of grass is sure to be
connected to every blade of grass whose very existence is an expression of prayer. Reflecting on my Hoshana Rabba
encounter with the exultant and prayerful depths of nature, it seems to me that what is
missing in the rhetoric and sensibility of the environmental movement is this very sense
of the exultant and prayerful existence of the earthly.
Might it not be that what opens us up to our connection with all the life on
the planet is not fear, but joy and praise? Disconnected
from Gaia and her music, our healing cannot proceed. A positive environmentalism must be
rooted in the pleasure that comes from an ecstatic and imaginative reconnection with the
whole of nature. Our fears for the planet are well
founded, and the dangers that threaten it surely demand our attention. The usual jeremiads clearly have an important role
to play in waking people to these dangers. But if we want to engage peoples best
energies, we must also strive to awaken them to a soulful reconnection with the earth. To
this end, we must invite our fellow earthlings to join with us to dance as dizzily as whirling dervishes in the unity of it
all. This is what is most needed if we want to fuel our efforts to restore our planet, our
home. (Rabbi Steve
Greenberg will be scholar-in-residence at the Pre-Ride Shabbaton (at Camp Sprout Lake near
Poughkeepsie, NY, October 11-12, 2002) of this year's New York Jewish Environmental
Bike Ride, in which 140 riders from across the denominational spectrum (from the
Orthodox to the unaffiliated) will ride over 100 miles in two days to raise environmental
awareness in the Jewish community. The bike ride is a project of HAZON.
For more information see www.hazon.org
or info@hazon.org.) To read additional articles by Steven Greenberg, click
here.
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