Nina's Blog

It's all in the story

2012-02-07T16:13:00.002-05:00

On Sunday, I had the pleasure of visiting Congregation B'nai Israel in Easton, MD. A gem of a shul, we celebrated a Tu B'shvat seder that was built around the kabbalistic symbols of four cups of wine whose color deepened from white to red as the seder progressed, and four kinds of fruit with edible and inedible centers and skins.

After the seder, I spoke about the need for us to imagine a new narrative, one that moves us from what-we-do to who-we-are; one that can transform our bundle environmental deeds into body of purpose.

Shabbat, it seems to me, is such a narrative. Our entire week (and hence our entire life) is framed by Shabbat. The rabbis tell us that just as a person cannot go three days without water, so we are never more than three days away from Shabbat.

We are told that the essence of Shabbat trails into the beginning of the week, that we can do havdalah, the ritual ending of Shabbat, as late as Tuesday. And on Wednesday, we begin preparing for the coming Shabbat.

Shabbat, then, is not just a day. It is the frame of our days and our lives.

And what is the essence of Shabbat? Abraham Joshua Heschel explains it this way: "There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord."

This vision of Shabbat the rabbis call: a taste of the world to come.

Shabbat is, in essence, the perfect world we seek, where there is no want, no possession, no lack. We rest on Shabbat not so much to recover from the week past or to prepare for the week to come - though those are blessed benefits of Shabbat. We rest on Shabbat for all is - symbolically - done. We have arrived - the fullness of our quest is realized. We don't need to own anymore for all that we have is sufficient. We don't need to work anymore for all we sought is accomplished. We don't need to fear for everyone has all they need.

But the commandment to observe Shabbat has not one part but two: "Six days shall you labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord. You shall do no work."

The Shabbat commandment teaches us not only about the quality of our "rest" but the quality of our work. We get to enjoy Shabbat because we earn it through the work of our week, the work of our lives.

Ortega y Gasset said: “Living is nothing more or less than doingone thing instead of another.”

Living in the light of Shabbat helps us choose what to do: to live in a way that leads to a world of fullness and contentment, a world of Shabbat.

Are we there yet?

2012-02-01T04:24:00.003-05:00

"We used to teach technology as a subject. [Today,] it's no longer the 'something' that we teach; it's the platform on which we deliver information." Shaindle Braunstein-Cohen on iPads in Jewish Day Schools, by Rabbi Jason Miller (quoted from eJewish Philanthropy)

This is true with so many fundamental tasks of life: walking, reading, writing ... The techniques that we once labored so hard to master ultimately become merely platforms upon which we build creative worlds.

So too with sustainability. We teach sustainability as a subject today. We will know we have arrived at a sustainable world when it is no longer something we teach but something that forms, quite naturally, the "platform", the given, upon which we build the production, consumption and "waste" of our society.

2012-01-27T07:48:00.001-05:00

Remembering Apollo 1

On January 27, 1967, Apollo 1's crew--Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Edward H. White II and Roger B. Chaffee--was killed when a fire erupted in their capsule during testing. Apollo 1 was originally designated AS-204 but following the fire, the astronauts' widows requested that the mission be remembered as Apollo 1 and following missions would be numbered subsequent to the flight that never made it into space.

Image credit: NASA

For those of us old enough to remember, this was a horrific moment. It reminded us how dangerous was the irresistible romance of exploration. And for a moment, our dreams were consumed on that launch pad. But the human spirit is remarkable and the endeavor went on. My the memories of the Apollo 1 crew encourage our dreams to soar - and may we make a world down here as awesome as the world in space that they dared to explore.

Maryland Legislative Summit

2012-01-25T14:53:00.000-05:00

The annual Maryland Legislative Environmental Summit was held yesterday in Annapolis. Hundreds of people, really, a lot, (I'm waiting for the official count) packed into the Miller Senate Building to hear activists, elected officials, and me (!) make brief (5 minute) talks as this year's legislative session kicks off. It was an honor to be a voice from "the faith community" speaking to such an august and passionate crowd, a group of people who work so hard on behalf of all of us. There is much to do, what with issues such as wind energy, water quality, a bag bill, and more. To keep abreast of issues, you can always check the Maryland League of Conservation Voters site. Or better yet, become a member and get updates sent to you.

I attach my presentation below, fyi:

We live in the midst of a 4-billion year old mystery, an on-goingmiracle that we call Earth. For all weknow, no such miracle exists anywhere else. Whatever we may be skilled enough to find out there, there is likely notto be another Planet Earth, or another you, or another me, or another Bay or theparade of moonrises and sunsets, or the cascade of creatures that have filledour air and seas and land and made our world what it is today.

We are the chosen ones, blessed with being alive at this awesomelyrich and perilous time. We didn’t ask for this moment, we didn’t create it, wedid not earn it, and we don’t even understand it.

What we do understand, however, is that something very dangerous– even wicked - is happening out there – and we are doing our share to causeit.

But the good news is, we can do our share to stop it.

We are Earth’s most aware beneficiaries and its most powerfulstewards.

We are not its masters, we are not its owners. We are itstenders. We are called upon to use it, take care of it, and give it – healthyand robust - to our children, just as our ancestors gave it to us.

Thomas Berry, the Catholic theologian – taught that eachgeneration has a Great Work. It is a work that we do not choose, but that weare dealt by the hand of history. It is a work that drives our ultimate purposeand inspires our days, a work that all future generations will judge us by, awork that is bound to “the larger destinies of the universe.”

Our generation’s Great Work is to learn to thrive withinlife’s sustaining cycles. Our Great Work is to build a world that is resilient,ever new and ever fresh to each generation, that matches our desires andconsumption, our use and our waste, our progress and our joys, to theuntransgressible bounds of nature.

We must do this and we can do this, for we are not alone.

It is crowded in here.

It is crowded with your passion and persistence, your hardwork and hopes, your wisdom and commitment.

And it is crowded with the concern and confusion, the hungerand the worry, the needs and prayers of hundreds more, thousands more, millionsmore who have never heard of you, but who depend upon you, and who need you topursue this sacred work.

For all of us work on behalf of everyone who takes a breathof air, who wants a sip of clean water, who works to put food on their table, whotakes refuge from the cold, seeks a good day’s work today and tomorrow, anyonewho relies upon this awesome, giving world for their manifold, mundane needs. And that is everyone.

The names we use to describe our work might be throwingpeople off. It seems to me that Senator Carter Conway’s and Delegate McIntosh’scommittees might need to be renamed:

Perhaps something like the: Education, Health and Environment, Economy,Jobs, Energy, Equity, Life’s Well-being, Earth Stewardship and Children ofTomorrow Committees.

The world of tomorrow will not be the world of yesterday. Itwill take more than science and knowledge, more than money and regulations toget us from here to there. It will take our trust, it will take our will, andit will take our faith.

We are not engaged in an us-vs-them agenda. It is not about jobs vs the environment;enviros vs progress, government vs the people.

Our task can be stated simply:

It is about us taking care of nature so nature can take careof us.

There is a great future waiting for us; we must find the way,and we must all get there together.

That is our Great Work.

That is our sacred work.

And that is why you are here.

Thank you for what you do.

2012-01-23T18:27:00.002-05:00

Counting enough

There is something odd, and instructive, about manna.

It was, by all accounts, miraculous. Accompanying the Israelites from Egypt to the Promised Land, it was not like other food. It did not grow from the earth and it did not fall from the sky (despite the poetic vision of Exodus 16:4) . It appeared after the dew of the morning had worn off on the ground and, if not harvested promptly, vanished into thin air.

It was to be collected and eaten everyday. Hoarding was not allowed. It rotted if left til the following morning, though it lasted two days, from Friday to Shabbat. (Shabbat, after all, was the day of rest and no collecting could be done.)

When first introduced after the miraculous events at the Red Sea, and the sweetening of the bitters waters, Moses instructed the Israelites in what it was and how to collect it:

“It is the bread the LORD has given you to eat. ¹⁶ This is what the LORD has commanded: ‘Everyone is to gather as much as they need. Take an omer for each person you have in your tent.’”

In teaching this recently, I saw that this law could be confusing. If I take as much as I need, I might require more, or less, than an omer for each person. So I might not be able to gather as much as I need if I gather it by the count. How is the commandment to be fulfilled? By need or by set measure?

Then we are told:

¹⁷ The Israelites did as they were told; some gathered much, some little.

This just extends the dilemma. Does that mean the Israelites gathered only an omer for each person? And those with large households gathered their large share of manna and those with small households gathered their small share?

^{Or does that mean that they gathered according to need and not according to measure? It seems like - through some alchemy - both were true: the gathering was by measure and need.}

¹⁸ And when they measured it by the omer, the one who gathered much

did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little.

Everyone had gathered just as much as they needed.

One possible solution is that the omer was a fluid, flexible amount here and not yet standardized. It might have referred to the amount each person needed to become sated daily, before it got ossified into a straitjacketed measure.

Or perhaps it meant that while a household of nine, say, consumed the total of nine omers, each person in the household ate what they needed, some more and some less. And it all evened out to nine.

Whatever the answer, the story of the manna is food for thought. It is an ethical tale of enoughness. It asks us to be grateful every day for the miracle of food; to guard against selfish hoarding, but know when to save; to count equitably for everyone's needs, but acknowledge our differences; to be mindful of earthly and divine gifts, and share them with each other.

^{So the question is: how many miracles do we count here? The manna itself? That the omer was a magical measure, bulking up like wheat in water, to fit the stomach it was destined for? That there was an omer for everyone? That there was always enough? That it defeated hoarding and required trust? Or that households, tribes, and the entire Jewish people were able to share, learning to gather just enough to satisfy their needs, and rejoice in this vision of enoughness?}

Seeds

2012-01-06T07:26:00.004-05:00

In Genesis 1, on the sixth day, God creates man and woman after having created all the rest of Planet Earth. In a gracious effort to provide some guidance, some instruction to these bewildered, befuddled neophytes on how this novelty of life could possibly work, God says, "Look around. All this grandeur is there for you."

²⁸ God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

"All this is at your disposal. But, and this is a huge But, you have to learn how to use it well so you don't mess things up. (I am paraphrasing from the midrash here.)

"Let's begin with the basics.

²⁹Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. ³⁰ And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.

"Though I said to you" (interpreting God here), "that the earth is yours, your food shall be its plants. Not the animals and not just any plants, but the stuff that comes with seed, zorea zera, those things that fertilize, renew and regenerate themselves. To the animals and all the other creatures I give green plants for food. To you I give grains and fruits and vegetables of all kinds that carry this harvestable gift of regeneration.

"Regeneration. That is the key. Without that, all this ends. Even you. You need to know that, for you are the one species whose imagination will lead you to assume great powers. You will learn how to tame fire and subdue infections, travel great distances and send messages across the galaxies. But you will also learn how to wrest millions of years of stored energy (stored sunshine!) from the earth and consume it in a flash, to cut down forests faster than they can grow, to drag the seas clean, scraping all its life into your nets.

"To you I say, consume only that which has 'seed' in it, that which can regenerate itself. Harvest the fruit, preserve the seed, plant it and let it grow. Do not consume it all so that it is unable to renew itself."

It seems a simple enough task. Use only what can be recycled and healthily reused. Consume only the stuff and the amounts that allow renewal. Yet we are failing at it.

There is one message we need to repeat over and over again til it sinks in and changes our thoughts, our values and our behavior:

We can't get there from here (to a renewable, resilient world).
We can eventually get there.
But we can't get there from here.

We need to step off this path and move to another. We can do it. We can survive it. We can thrive in it. Indeed, it is the only way we can. But we need to change paths, and it all begins with a change of spirit, of will, of desire.

And that is where we, the faith community, comes in. Spread the word.

Perfection and Contentment

2011-12-27T07:40:00.009-05:00

(Photo from potter-sculptor.com)

While the philosophers and rabbis of old lost themselves in labyrinths of logic like: "Can we have free will if there is an All-Knowing God," mothers of old (or so I imagine) struggled with the very real question: "How can I raise my child to reach for excellence but be content with their best?"

That is, how can we, how do we, hold together two sides of an irreconcilable coin: actively seeking perfection and being content with less?

How do we avoid feeling like failures, like we are living lesser lives, when we come up short? How do we not give up, slump in our chairs, be washed in despair, and set our sights lower next time so we are not so disappointed again?

This is hardly an idle question. It is one we must all grapple with throughout our lives. It is the question that determines the essence, and difference, of religious traditions, and the difference between a content life and a unsettled one.

Judaism answers in a pithy aphorism, and in the ways we are taught to live.

"Rabbi Tarfon said: You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to ignore it." (Pirkei Avot, Ethics of the Fathers, 2:21) Our task is not to achieve perfection but simply strive for it.

Shabbat agrees, but teaches more sweetly. We learn from the ebb and flow of Shabbat and workweek that for six days we are to work, chasing perfection, never achieving it. Yet, once a week, we get Shabbat, a taste of perfection. The candles we kindle, a midrash tells us, are sparks from the primordial light of the first day of creation. A pure light, different from the sun (which was created on the fourth day), this first light was set aside for the end of time, but it dips into this work-a-day world once a week in the form of our Shabbat candles to inspire and refresh us.

So every seven days we get a taste of perfection, a respite, a balm that celebrates our good-enough workday achievements, soothes our sagging spirits and sends us stronger back into the frail, imperfect world to keep striving for better.

Hanukkah, too, offers us a way forward. We sing of the miracle of the oil, when what was enough for one day lasted for eight. The true miracle, though, was not the oil but the faith of those who bothered to light it. The work needed to restore the Temple was beyond the task of one day. Or one precious cruse of oil. To light it would be a waste at best and a folly at worst. Yet they lit.

So too we light our Hanukkiot in the midst of darkness for eight days, even though we know that when the week is over, the darkness again follow.

We know that when we start. But we light anyway. We must. For while the lights are burning, we are buoyed. And when they go out, we start our work again.

(My thoughts on this subject were stimulated by a conversation I had with Elicia Brown who is writing an article on this subject for Jewish Women International's Jewish Woman magazine. Check out JWI, their important work and their wonderful magazine.)

on resilience

2011-12-25T11:55:00.003-05:00

on resilience, from The Post Carbon Reader Series. Thinking "Resilience". William Rees.

page 6: Resilient thinking recognizes that: "resource management efforts must shift from reshaping nature for the purpose of satisfying human demands to moderating human demands so that they fit within biophysical limits."

Lessons from the Darkness

2011-12-16T05:44:00.001-05:00

We are deep into the season's darkness, hurtling toward the shortest day of the year. Our days will continue to shorten and our nights will continue to lengthen until the welcome solstice (Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 12:30 AM here in Baltimore). Then, the sun will cease its southern recession, pause and begin its northern trek again. On that day, night in Baltimore will last 14 hours, 35 minutes and 59 seconds. That is way too much darkness.

My interfaith study group has begun delving into the nature of night, as found in the Bible. We imagined that we moderns could not begin to know the full experience of night (how it could evoke awe, depth, terrors, thickness, cover, refuge) as did those who lived before the easy flip of a switch. Our experience of darkness and our fabulously easy ability to create light right here and now strips out the rawness of unrelenting darkness. Back in the day, the dark must have felt as much like a creature, a presence, as a duration of time.

So we are reading narratives of night in the Bible. We began with Genesis 1 - a good place to start.

When God began to create the heavens and the earth - the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep, and a wind from God sweeping over the water - God said, "Let there be light." And there was light. (New Jewish Publication Society translation)

Or, in the creatively faithful translation of Everett Fox:

At the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth, when the earth was wild and waste, darkness over the face of the Ocean, rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters - God said, Let there be light. And there was light.

It is our good fortune to have both a sailor in our study group, someone who has logged thousands of hours on the water, day and night, and a theater director. So we read and saw this text through their eyes.

The beginning of time began in water and darkness. That was the setting: darkness and water. Imagine that, our director said: all darkness, all around. You can see nothing. You know nothing about space, place, orientation. You have no sense of what "here" is. You just sense your body but don't really know what it looks like. And then you feel a whoosh.

The sailor explained to us that not seeing on the water is different from not seeing on land. One's exposure, lacking of bearings, leaves one feeling vulnerable.

You can walk in the darkness, count your footsteps, feel the rise and fall of the land, find a tree or rock to serve as a marker. There is a way to ground and orient yourself, even if only minimally. Not so in the dark at sea. You can stay put on land, know that you wake up at the same place you lay down on land. Not so at sea. (Yes, there are anchors for larger boats in shallower areas but not for all boats and not deep at sea and not here in the story.)

Even more, our sailor told us, it is not the water that is most attended to on the open sea. It is the wind. Water is water, he said. It is when it is whipped up by the wind that you notice it and must respond. The responsiveness of the sails, sense of security, ease, confidence - all are determined in some measure by the wind. A sailor is ever attentive to the wind's speed, force, direction, waxing, waning. It is the wind that will determine the quality of the trip. And at night, in the darkness, exposed and drifting, the wind can feel like the whooshing, rishrushing of God.

With this understanding, the "rushing spirit/wind of God" takes on new resonance. In the midst of the chaotic, watery mass of creation, the text is telling us, there appears a constant, flowing wind that soothes and calms and fashions the world.

Perhaps even more, we can learn from this text that when we find ourselves adrift, afraid, in the dark, at a loss, we should pause, stay still, and attend to the spirit/wind that blows over the depth. Then, perhaps, the light will come.

Desire

2011-12-15T06:25:00.003-05:00

(This is my column, written for the Bay Journal News Service, that appeared in the Baltimore Sun earlier this week:)

Ever since Adam and Eve took a bite of the apple, we have been haunted by Desire, that shape-shifting seducer who promises us beauty, understanding and fulfillment if only we chase after More.

On the one hand, that is a blessing. We would still be clumsy, clueless creatures huddling in caves — or naked in the Garden — without it.

Desire and appetite drive our ambition, fire our curiosity and lead us to discover in ways that complacency and fullness never can.

It is Desire that propels culture forward, urging us to explore, to dare, to persevere so we may uncover all the wisdom, comforts and delights that make life grand.

It is Desire that gives rise to the dignity of human achievement. Science, mathematics, medicine, the arts all depend on curiosity, appetite, the drive for more. It is these that have enabled us to recognize the awesome, intricate elegance of creation. What a pity if there were this grand universe and no one to gape in awe and wonder.

Should God ask us, as He asks Job in the Bible, “Can you tie cords to the Pleiades or undo the reins of Orion? Can you send an order to the clouds … or dispatch the lightning on a mission?” It is Desire that would have us answer, “Not yet, but we are trying.”

On the other hand, Desire is a curse. If left unchecked and undisciplined, it will drive us to excess, consuming both our resources and our spirit, and still not make us happy.

Unchecked Desire propels us right past Enough and straight toward the never-attainable More. We believe that if we just had one more handbag, one more car, one more bathroom, one more franchise, one more road, one more mall, we would be happy. Never mind that the last time we tried that it didn’t really work. This time, it will be different.

Even more, consumer desire, we are told, fuels the economy. But the dark secret is that it does so by fanning our discontent. Unhappiness is the currency that keeps the marketplace humming. “If the consumer forgets,” Jean Baudrillard said, “he will gently be reminded that he has no right to be happy.”

That is not good. Such a reckless Economy of More wreaks havoc on both the spirit and the environment, and ultimately back on the economy itself. The current world-wide crisis was not brought upon us by people buying too little but by people grasping for too much.

Once upon a time, the earth could absorb our reckless habits of consumption. No more. We are now 7 billion strong, growing at an astounding rate of 1 billion every 12 years. As the eminent Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson teaches us, humans have now become a geophysical force. Our numbers and our capacity can overwhelm global systems.

We may not [yet] possess the keys to the vaults of heaven or be able to call the wind to give birth to spring, but with our unchecked appetites we can foul the air and spoil the oceans and strip the Earth of fertile soil. We can destroy whole ecosystems, harvest the very last speck of nature’s bounty, rip the earth to shreds by desperately digging out the last crumbs of energy and metals. If we are the stewards of God’s creation, as many of our traditions say we are, presiding over global degradation and species extinction is not a good thing to have on our resume.

The solution may lie in the concept of Enoughness, in balancing the urge of Desire with the peace of satisfaction, the restlessness of curiosity with the quiet of contentment. The solution lies in knowing when and where we are full enough, and when we need more, to proceed humbly. It lies in creating systems that breathe in sync with the systems of the Earth so that discovery, creation, consumption and dissolution happen within the bounds of nature’s way.

Humans have never been good at this balance. Adam and Eve can tell you that. But we can learn to do it better than we ever have before, and today we know we must. For with all the upset caused by eating the apple, Adam and Eve had somewhere else to go. For us, there is nothing outside the Garden.

Cisterns or Trees

2011-12-13T14:52:00.003-05:00

There is a wonderful teaching in the Jerusalem Talmud which reads: "Rabbi Yohanan, speaking on behalf of Rabbi Yossi, says: 'Just as they (the other rabbis) believe that civilization depends on cisterns, so I believe that civilization depends on trees.'"

The work of blending civilization and nature has always been a challenge. In this "man vs nature" tug of war, we must ask, who wins? What has precedence over what; what should yield to what?

Gray infrastructures - the built environment of houses, streets, marketplaces, and water systems are often seen as more essential than Green infrastructure - trees, wetlands, swales, hills, bees, bats and more. (Think cutting down 40-year-old trees to make way for a 3-day Grand Prix.) Nature is seen as either plentiful or wild, or otherwise able to be pushed around and manipulated and superseded by humanity's better management.

This discussion has echoes in old rabbinic texts exploring the rights of neighbors, landholders and trees.

In the case Rabbi Yohanan commented on above, the rabbis ask, how far apart must a tree on one neighbor's property be planted from a cistern (a pit dug to hold water) on an adjacent neighbor's property?

The answer was 25-50 amot, depending on the type of tree. (This way, the cistern would be reasonably safe from intruding roots.)

What if the tree and cistern are found to be too close? The rabbis answer: if the cistern was there first, the tree should be cut down, and the tree owner compensated. If the tree was there first (or if you are not certain which came first), the tree remains.

But Rabbi Yossi objects: not so. Even if the cistern came first, you do not cut the tree down.

Rabbi Yossi seems to be arguing for property rights: I can do what I want as long as it is in the domain of my property.

Okay, truth be told, I am not enamored of this position if Rabbi Yossi would also say that you can just as easily choose to chop down all the trees on your property on a whim. I am hoping that Rabbi Yosi would say even personal property rights have their limit when it comes to preserving nature.

So I am going with Rabbi Yohanan who interprets Rabbi Yossi as meaning: grey infrastructure depends on green infrastructure. Civilization, and the grey infrastructure that defines it, cannot survive without nature; nature will survive (battered and changed, perhaps, but ultimately triumphant) without civilization.

Cisterns are invaluable, after all, only so long as rain and water flow. Trees bring shade and bring water, hold the soil and protect your crops.

Good trees, good nature, make good civilization. We do need civilization to make nature usable to us, to turn grain into breads, wool into coats, stone into buildings, wood into homes, rain into captured water. And we need civilization at times to protect us from nature: wild animals, illness, the rawness of weather.

But we cannot abuse, push around, ignore or sacrifice nature and believe civilization will survive. We need to live within the tides of nature, mine the wisdom of biomimicry, yielding our forceful ways of civilization to the more efficient, elegant ways of nature. Then it will not be a question of who wins. We all do.

Filthy Banking

2011-12-06T06:21:00.002-05:00

You would hardly know that in Durban, many of 194 party members of the United Nations Framework for Climate Change are meeting for the 17th COP (Conference of the Parties) to continue to explore how to save the planet from itself.

This is the group that brought us the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 which sought to limit the amount of greenhouse gases the world emits. The UNFCCC has posted videos of key presentations and links to various reports. And more are coming.

In concert with this annual event, four environmentally-concerned organizations have issued their own Bankrolling Climate Change report, which studies the coal-heavy investments of many of the world's leading banking institutions.

Truth be told, it makes only the tiniest difference if your bank says it is "green" as it saves millions of pieces of paper (and millions of dollars) through on-line banking services if it still invests billions in dirty, destructive, dislocating coal-mining practices that destroy millions of acres of trees, foul the air with coal ash, force abandonment and relocation of tens of thousands and continue to spew CO2 into the atmosphere instead of investing in the next generation of essential life-sustaining energy.

This study is chock full of frightening information, such as, if China alone continues on its present pace of increasing the mining and burning of coal, by 2030 it will be spewing out as much CO2 emissions into the atmosphere as the whole world is doing now.

The report is a call to investors like you and me around the world to hold our banks to account.

Find out if your bank is one of the main investors in continuing to promote this fatal technology. And if it is, put your money where your mouth is.

Wealth and Worth

2011-12-01T19:20:00.008-05:00

The Maryland Chapter of the American Jewish Congress is developing a Green and Just Celebrations Guide for the Jewish community of Baltimore. Inspired by a guide of the same name published by Jews United for Justice in Washington, DC, it will be available (fall 2012) through synagogues and on the web, designed to make events and celebrations environmentally friendly, socially responsible, affordable and fun.

This is not the first time in Jewish history that the Jewish community has tried to wrestle with excessive and indulgent celebrations. "Sumptuary Laws" (provisions that sought to control extravagant personal spending and consumption) popped up over the centuries. From Rabban Gamaliel 2000 years ago (who sought to take the financial sting out of funerals, making them simpler and more affordable for the 99%) to the Rhine community in the 13th century to the Frankfort community in the 17th century to the Italian community in the 18th century.

The quest to control excessive consumption had two goals: (1) to relieve the social pressure on individuals and families who otherwise would spend more than they could afford; and (2) to avoid the waste of communal resources.

The challenge was how to do that. How does, how should, a community measure wealth and create just expectations for appropriate levels of spending?

Clearly, the definition of "excess" varies depending on financial capacity. The poor should not compete with or emulate the rich in their celebrations. But the rich should not flagrantly flaunt and waste their riches either. How, then, to figure out the right amount of whoopie?

The Council of the Four Lands (in the area of Poland today), came up with the following rules:

A. "The leaders of the community have agreed to deal severely with excessive and wasteful spending for festive meals...It is decreed that the number of participants at a simcha (celebration) be in accordance with one's financial position."

Clear enough. The expense of a celebration increases with the number of guests, so if you limit the number of guests, you limit the expense. And, the number of guests one can invite depends upon one's wealth.

Now the question was, how to assess a person's wealth, always a sticky task. But there was one way in which people's wealth was publicly known. Through their philanthropy.

B. "One who pays two golden coins [to the community chest] can invite 15 people [to a bris]; one who pays four coins can invite 20 people; one who pays six coins can invite 25 people... And every 10 invitees must include at least one poor person." (quoted from Meir Tamari, With All Your Possessions: Jewish Ethics and Economic Life)

One's wealth was known by the amount one gave away. Having money, building great big houses and wearing expensive clothes and jewelry was not the measure by which you earned rights to large celebrations. Rather, if you had all that money, you were obliged to help the community, commensurately with what you were "worth". One's "worth," this law reminds us, is not wealth kept, but wealth given to support the needs of one's community.

The Jewish communities of old knew that wealth conferred obligation, and it was the fulfillment of this obligation which in turn conferred privilege, and helped strengthen community.

And more, in the midst of the celebration, one must remember and care for the poor.

It is a lesson we are struggling to remember today.

So perhaps we can learn more than just good consumer habits from these sumptuary laws. Perhaps we can learn good citizenship.

Erev Thanksgiving

2011-11-20T09:49:00.008-05:00

I love Thanksgiving, perhaps because it is so different from Judaism's standard, classical, biblical holidays.

All our pilgrimage holidays, for example, happen away from home, toward home, longing for home. They teach us how to create a sense of place, of pride, of belonging in the midst of wandering and dislocation. They teach us how to be centered in mobility; how to weave stories into platforms of place; how to celebrate "here" when that is all we have. What they don't speak of, given our long history of exile and exclusion, is the celebration of home. Understandably.

Passover is about leaving a home of horrors, shedding a past and journeying to a better tomorrow while in the midst of a volatile, meandering road to Home.

Sukkot is about accepting the security of in-betweenness. Neither in Egypt nor Israel, at home or on the road, we nonetheless are bidden to set up a hut to serve as our place of surety in this most unsure world. (Oddly, even the most misanthropic among us turns into a gracious host this holiday, for the liturgy recited before each dinner has us invite our ancestors, among others who might be present, as our honored guests.)

Shavuot, in the Bible, was the holiday marking the homecoming of Israel, yet somewhere in the presence of the long years of exile, it morphed into a celebration of Covenant instead, marking the law-giving in the wilderness of Sinai.

The High Holidays, too, are moments of spirit, not place. Purim and Hanukkah are about survival through wit and force.

We are ready, though, especially 63 years after the establishment of the State of Israel, to have a day that celebrates home. Yes, of course, we have the weekly Shabbat, a day of renewal and family, when the world shrinks down to habitable size and home looms large in the celebration. But perhaps because it comes every week, it does not have the lustre or homebound command of a once-a-year celebration like Thanksgiving.

Like many ethnic Americans, my family has added our particular, Jewish twist: we celebrate the night before, erev Thanksgiving. Everyone comes home Wednesday and that evening we have a boisterous brouhaha dinner with four generations, and a singularly unique combination of guests.

The centerpiece is a sculpted Tofurkey (yup, marinaded tofu molded into a turkey shape) but the real fun is being all together once again.

Thanksgiving is our one shared non-denominational American home holiday. We are not expected to fly to Cancun or the Bahamas on Thanksgiving. Airline commercials are not luring us to exotic places. This holiday's travel is not about adventure but about getting home.

The backlash about Black Friday creep - with stores opening at midnight or even 9:00 pm on Thanksgiving Thursday - reveals that many Americans believe home is where people ought to be and America's commerce can rest for one shared day.

For me, I love the festive, food-filled, flush of family. And then it only hurts a little when they are off on Thursday to their "other" family and friends.

(written beside the warming oven, in between batches of my Bubbe Ema - grandmother's - cookies prepared for the holiday)

The shared nature of nature

2011-11-17T11:22:00.002-05:00

In the mid-19th century, Calvert Vaux created the iconic images of the American urban landscape, including the grounds at the White House, the Smithsonian Institute and (with his newly hired young recruit, Frederick Law Olmsted) Central Park. Though Vaux started in landscape design, he later moved into designing buildings and homes that would occupy these landscapes.

A populist of sorts, he believed that access to natural beauty was a right shared by all. And that natural beauty should not be marred by ugly architecture or blocked by aggressive private ownership.

In his classic book entitled Villas and cottages: a series of designs prepared for execution in the US, 1857, Vaux makes available to the general public (at least those of a certain means) drawings for what he believes are attractive houses that can appropriately grace various natural settings and landscapes. (He believed, no doubt, that the house should be made to suit the setting and not the setting manhandled to suit the house.)

In this book, he quotes N P Willis of Idlewild, a defender of the public's access to the grandeur of nature and the limits of private ownership of public goods:

To fence out a genial eye from any corner of the earth which nature has lovingly touched with her pencil, which never repeats itself – to shut up a glen or a waterfall for one man’s exclusive knowing or enjoying – to lock up trees and glades, shady paths and haunts among rivulets, would be an embezzlement by one man of God’s gift to all. A capitalist might as well curtain off a star, or have the monopoly of an hour. Doors may lock, but outdoors is a freehold to feet and eyes. (p. 250)

One wonders what Willis and Vaux would say about how we can restore the blessings and shed the excesses of capitalism today.

Do something about fracking

2011-11-14T04:35:00.004-05:00

I recently purchased and viewed Gasland. It is a documentary exploring the hazards that come in the wake of hydraulic fracturing (aka, fracking) to loose natural gas from pockets within shale formations around the country.

One of those formations is Marcellus Shale. It covers nine states, including most of West Virginia, half of Ohio and Pennsylvania, large chunks of New York, Kentucky, Tennessee and just nipping the very western tips of Maryland and Virginia and northern Alabama. It is huge, the biggest shale region in the United States.

And it is in the cross-hairs of the big gas companies.

The problem is that extracting this gas through fracking causes alarming and irreparable destruction to the land, water, air, animals, land values, crops and, of course, people. Oh, and it might be the cause of earthquakes that are beginning to damage dams and upset other fragile natural and built infrastructures.

Exactly what damage and how much damage it does, we do not know, in large measure because, courtesy of then-V.P. Dick Cheney, fracking was made exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Superfund Act, the Resource Conversation and Recovery Act (hazardous waste act), and the Environmental Policy Act. Which not only means the drilling companies needn't comply with these protections but that no one has the authority to monitor them.

We do not know what, exactly, the gas companies are pumping into the earth to release the pockets of natural gas or how such drilling is affecting the environment and the lives around the thousands and thousands of wells. But we do know this:

Drinking water and ground water in areas where fracking is taking place are becoming contaminated. (The EPA recently reported that fracking contaminants were found in a Wyoming aquifer.)
80,000 pounds of chemicals, most of which are toxic, are injected into each well under high pressure and remain in the ground migrating who-knows-where
Poisonous gases are emitted into the air through the fracking process
Millions of gallons of water are used to flush out the gas
Thousands of miles of roads with only one short-lived destination and one purpose have to be built to get the water, chemicals, building materials, people, etc to and from the well pad sites.
Land values are declining where fracking is occurring.
Banks are beginning to disallow their mortgagees from signing on with gas companies for fear that it will compromise the resale value of the house.

Perhaps not everything awful that is being said about fracking is true. But we don't know because the industry has drawn a shroud of secrecy around its operations. Two things I believe are true:

when big business hides behind the skirts of non-disclosure, claims exemption from the major environmental laws that have been on the books since the days of Richard Nixon, and demands that the people it leases land from must sign non-disclosure (gagging) clauses, something is very wrong.

if our enemies were threatening or compromising our water supply and destroying our ecosystems the way Big Gas is, we would call them terrorists.

We can do something. The Frac Act (to repeal exemption and require disclosure) was introduced in both the House and the Senate. HR 2766 and S1215. (OpenCongress is a great way to find out what is going on in Congress and tracking bills of interest.)

Senator Cardin and Congressman Sarbanes are both co-sponsors of these bills. Check on the status of your representatives. If they are co-sponsoring or supporting these bills, thank them. If they are not, tell them why they should.

To become even more involved, check out and consider joining any of the anti-fracking efforts in our region, including jewsagainsthydrofracking on Facebook.

This is that scary and that important.

Fall

2011-11-07T03:42:00.008-05:00

The season of the long nights has returned, when the days seem to run out of steam before we do. The sun is up for only 10+ hours now. That is five hours less than the high at the summer solstice. We are losing light at an average of 2 minutes a day.

As if that isn't enough, the sun once again sets one stolen-hour earlier. The hands of our clocks had stealthily snatched the light from the morning and tacked it onto the evening. The perfect pinch, though we get caught every year. It was time to give it back.

Still, the time-change hardly changes anything. We moderns, addicted to the drug of artificial light, set our days by GMT.

And yet, the older I get, the more I feel the flow of nature's time. I am becoming like the birds: drape the cloth of darkness over my cage and I am ready to quiet down, settle in, cozy up on the couch with a cup of tea and call it a day.

Night is not just a dark version of daylight, and it cannot fully be chased away with glowing globes. Folks with Seasonal Affective Disorder have to fight to maintain their summer-level perkiness in this abundance of darkness. Throughout human history, time has been a character, an agent, a place, an opportunity, a call, a fear.

It is the messenger of love and a multiplier of loneliness, a midwife to birth and death, to feasting and celebration, to sorrow and loss. It had its own demons - Lilith being one, that seducer of men and snatcher of babies.

In the Bible, the Tanakh, it is where dreams appear and lovers tryst: where Jacob met the angel and Ruth met Boaz.

I spent this season's first long night preparing the nest, cooking, laying in stocks for the winter: applesauce from a bushel of apples, an armful of calzone for a month of Shabbat meals, a batchful of cookies (hint: don't get creative and tamper with a generation's-old family recipe).

I washed the floor and did our laundry listening to earth-songs on Pandora.

And now it is morning - with fall's sun blazing fully in the big sky, no longer fighting with the summer foliage.

Yesterday, sitting in silence at the Gunpowder Friends Meeting and seeing the wind blow up and shuffle all the leaves, one member of the service was moved to say: I am thankful for eyes that can see this shower of gold outside our window.

Small moments of grand pleasure. We need them more than ever.

(Photo image: Flagstaff Dark Sky - what our ancestors saw)

Return on Luck

2011-10-31T07:53:00.009-04:00

If ever there were a time for the faith community to raise its voice about what we are doing to the environment, how we conduct business, and the mean-spirited incapacity of the government, now is the time.

In their new book, Great by Choice, Jim Collins and Morten Hansen, investigate how some of the most successful companies in the world got that way. They tested the belief that timing and luck were large players in success. Their conclusion: not luck but seizing the moment that luck provided was the key.

Everyone experiences both good luck and bad luck, they argue. The question is: do you squander it or ride it? get flattened by it or renewed by it? They call the bump after the luck: Return on Luck.

So, consider this:

The world-wide environment is in a most degraded state largely caused by human behavior.
The planet now hosts 7 billion human inhabitants, just 12 years after welcoming 6 billion, severely taxing our capacity to enable all of us to live well. (One billion people already live with food and water insecurity, meaning they often go hungry, under-nourished and with insufficient and tainted water.)
We are experiencing something new under the sun: never before have humans had the capacity to so alter the earth's systems imperiling all humankind.
We have precious little time to respond.
Some of the greatest environmentalists (Gus Speth, eg) and economists (Jeffrey Sachs, eg) see the problem as a spiritual failure or "a moral crisis". That is, they believe that the scientific, industrial, economic technical fixes that can be employed to turn the tide will only be taken if the human-spirit and public-will will endorse them, fight for them, demand them.
The most trusted institutions by far in the American landscape are the religious institutions. In a Pew 2010 poll, banks, congress, the federal government, large corporations, the news media, federal agencies, even the entertainment industry and the unions, were perceived as part of our nation's biggest problems. The faith community was seen in powerfully positive light, bested only by small businesses and technology companies.

Add to that the fact that hard news - news we would otherwise choose to dismiss, belittle or outright deny - is best received, sometimes only received, if heard from someone who is trusted.

If ever there were a time when the faith communities were in a position to speak up with a strong, moral, loving and fair voice, and guide America to the right path, now is the time.

If ever we were positioned to help American regain the civility and the environmental health that all personal, communal, economic, and national prosperity are based upon, now is the time.

And perhaps by embracing this signal challenge, the one by which our generation will be judged for all time - whether we chose to save the world's ecosystems while they are still recoverable or whether we chose to plunder them til we could plunder them no more - our stumbling congregations who are losing membership and worrying about their purpose and their own futures will be able to be rejuvenated, reclaimed and revived.

This might be a Return on Luck moment not only for the nation but our religious communities as well.

It is a moment we should not squander.

Questions

2011-10-28T08:44:00.003-04:00

Economist Tim Jackson, in a Ted Talk, offered the following "koan" of sorts:

We are people being persuaded to spend money we don’t have
on things we don’t need
to create impressions that won’t last
on people we don’t care about.

This is one version of the modern story of consumption that helps explain how we got in our current mess. Like all bold statements it is not entirely true. And yet, it is true enough.

The challenges we face are enormous, and the questions they raise equally so:

1) How do we resist the seduction of the marketplace, of allowing "want" to morph into "need"?

2) What is the difference between appetite and hunger? That is, how do we know when "want" becomes "need", and when not? When is "too much"?

3) Yet, if we stop buying, what happens to the economy? How do we build a robust economy, a dynamic R&D sector, and fulfillment ("enoughness") all at the same time?

4) How do we live within the planet's bounds and still set our sights on the far reaches of the universe?

5) How do we learn to read beyond impressions?

6) How do we build real community?

7) How do we, in other words, re-center ourselves and our society?

It is fine, indeed essential, to focus on resolving the particular issues that are pulling us down: the bay, peak oil, soil erosion and degradation, and more.

But the only way we will heal all these retail problems is to look wholesale, upstream, at the root cause, which, as so much in life, lies in the human spirit.

The question to ultimately ask, then, is:

How shall we choose to live so that all of us may thrive, materially and spiritually, on this glorious but finite world we share?

The Signs of Fall

2011-10-23T09:23:00.006-04:00

When we lived in the northern hinterlands of New Jersey (in what now seems lifetimes ago), we knew that summer had arrived when Gene, our gentle next-door neighbor, opened up his above-ground pool.

He would clean and remove the leaf-laden cover, wash off the sides, and unshock the water. (I don't even want to know the chemical composition of the water, after a decade or more of being shocked and unshocked, shocked and unshocked. Though it did save thousands of gallons of water!)

If he did this on a weekend, we all would have the pleasure of seeing fall, winter and spring peeled away, layer by layer. If on a weekday, we would come home - greeted by this long hoped-for sign of summer.

We all need these signature moments, these small acts that help us set down markers in time's indivisible trek; these signposts that signal to us - amid our demanding distractions - that we have crossed from here to there; that we are part of an folding mystery so much deeper than our daily affairs allow us to pause and note.

Now, it is true that on a wooded lot, you would think the signs of fall are obvious enough. I rake the leaves off my gravel path one morning and by the next, they are back, thicker than before.

But there are other, more telling signs, that truly herald the presence of fall.

1) The sun now enters our home through windows it missed in summer. Both because of the height of the summer sun's journey and the presence of full foliage, the front rooms of our house get only a dappling of direct sunlight from June to September. But in the fall, the sunlight comes pouring in, so much so that I cannot see the images on my computer screen.

2) The sky is bigger now. This comes with the falling foliage. We can see so much more of the sky. We can see the daily drama of sunrise and sunset played out not only in the rise and fall of the day's light, but in the changing canvas of the heavens themselves. And in dusk's reflection on the stalwart, remaining golden leaves of our poplar trees, our woods are bathed in a light almost as glorious as Jerusalem's ethereal sunsets (without the soft pinks).

3) The noise. If you strain in the summertime, with the air laden with moisture and leaves, you can just make out the hum of I-695 about a mile away. And you never hear the freight train whistle that rolls by two miles away. Not so in the fall. In the dry, crisp, naked air of fall, you can hear the trucks whizzing by, and the whistle of the hundred-car train ferrying goods from town to town.

The buffer between our home and the mad dash of civilization is peeled back every fall. Laterally, it is a reminder - which we occasionally wistfully veer toward forgetting - of the indivisibility of nature, action, and humanity.

And even more, vertically, it is a reminder that from where I stand, looking up, beneath the still-proud congregation of shedding tulip poplars, it is a straight shot up to the heavens. Nothing obscures or interrupts my connection to the grandest galaxy in the universe except the nuisance of space.

Green Eggs and Us

2011-10-18T07:49:00.007-04:00

We can learn a lot from Dr. Seuss, or a local CSA, or a child's coloring book.

That is: there's a lot more variety in the world than we think.

Not all carrots are orange; not all potatoes are white; not all watermelons are red; not all bananas are yellow.

According to Plants for a Future, there are 20,000 edible plants in the world today. Yet, fewer than 20 species supply 90% of what the world eats.

It seems that in our rush to be food efficient, we have stripped the grand diversity of nature down to a narrow, pre-digested list and thus suffer the illusion of good-world sameness which leads us to question difference. I will explain.

Food limits lead to three deficits, it seems to me.

1) We are being deprived of many delightful and fascinating food sensations, experiences and nutrients. Even for those of us who keep kosher! All edible plants - in and of themselves - are kosher.

2) We are straining our soils to grow the same food over and over again, draining the land's energies and nutrients in the process. We know the path that global monocultures lead us down. Not good and potentially devastating. (Chocolate and bananas lovers, too, beware.)

3) We learn from our food. As we eat, so we think. If we need our food to be predictable and unblemished, so too, we may be teaching ourselves that other stuff in the world needs to be predictable and unblemished.

Health food establishments such as Whole Foods and Trader Joe's reject fruits and vegetables that have blemishes or are misshapen, arguing that their customers won't buy them. But there is no obvious positive correlation between appearance and taste or value. Just the opposite. We now know that selecting food or flowers for looks often sacrifices flavor (and nutrition?) in food and smell in flowers.

Even more, lots of good food gets wasted (but hopefully processed) both in the industry and in our homes if it is less than perfect looking.

Does this habit of rejecting imperfect affect how we view life altogether? Does it affect how we view "blemished" or "misshapen" people, or how open we are to opinions and beliefs that are different from our own?

As we limit and homogenize the world around us, do we also limit and homogenize our sense of what is right and proper? Are our agricultural monocultures encouraging us to build cultural monocultures (even as the internet opens up unprecedented possibilities of mixing)? Are we increasingly building fortresses around our homes, neighborhoods and nations so that the richness (contamination?) of the "other" is kept at bay?

Even more, are we increasingly seeing our neighbors who deviate from us as the "other": the Tea Party, the Occupy Wall Street, Republicans, Democrats?

There is no doubt that this country is being riven by incivility and efforts to outright delegitimize, denigrate and occasionally demonize the other. I wonder if those who are more accepting of blemished food are more open to honoring the "other"?

(photo: a dozen eggs from Kayam Farm CSA, with one green egg in it)

The Gardens of Antwerp

2011-10-16T16:30:00.001-04:00

This is the city of Antwerp, circa 1572. It was one of the most cosmopolitan, creative, commercial cities of the 16th century, and home of some of the era's most impressive engravers and printers.

I found this particular map in a charming book called Imagined Corners: exploring the world's first atlas. It offers a treatment of the political, social, economic, religious, intellectual and cultural trends that gave rise to this new format - a unified, portable, bound collection of maps of the entire known world. This "atlas" (the term would not be coined til a few years later by Mercator) was called Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theater of the Countries of the World), created by Abraham Ortel, and it was a runaway best-seller.

(Yes, now you know, I am one of those folks who loves maps, especially old maps, and can spend hours looking at them and reading about them. A wonderful thing to do over yomtov, the holidays! One of my pet peeves is that most of our mental maps today are of political boundaries - cities, states, nations - and streets. That is because they are based on our road maps. We use maps mostly for traveling than staying, for getting from here to there rather than recording and mapping what is here. Try to find a stream or watercourse on most common maps, never mind the stream's name, and you will be sorely frustrated. Yet, we need to know the course of our rivers just as we know the turns on our streets. How different it was when land claims were marked in legal documents by, literally, "landmarks," the markings of the earth itself: the old sycamore tree or the rock with the split in it or the north bank of the local creek. How wonderful it would be to carry those maps around in our minds once more.)

But what I found most riveting about this map (at least given my present pre-occupation with urban orchards) is the way their houses were laid out. And what happened with the space in between. You can see this better on the full resolution map found here. (Click on the map to enlarge it even more.)

Throughout Antwerp, houses ringed the edges of city blocks, with open spaces occupying the land inside. Farms, orchards, (vineyards?) and perhaps even playing fields were nestled between the homes, creating a common place of food production, family gardens, as well as pastoral refuges in the middle of the city.

Commercial farms existed on either side of the city (beyond the moat on the north, east and south and along the river on the west). But the pocket farms were urban gardens, tended no doubt for the self-same reasons we tend community gardens today.

We can learn from this model. As we begin to re-imagine the design of our cities, as we begin redraw the lines between nature and home, green and built infrastructure, Antwerp of old offers us a wonderful alternative. We can build fields among buildings, farms alongside businesses, gardens nestled amid the courtyards of condos.

It sounds like a wonderful place to live.

(map from wikimedia commons)

Wangari Maathai and a billion trees

2011-10-03T08:51:00.002-04:00

In the run-up to the New Year, a bit of news may have escaped noticed:

"Wangari Muta Maathai died on September 25 (1940–2011). She was a Nobel Peace Laureate; environmentalist; scientist; parliamentarian; founder of the Green Belt Movement; advocate for social justice, human rights, and democracy; elder; and peacemaker. She lived and worked in Nairobi, Kenya."

Her pioneering work, her unquenchable pursuit of justice, her unending optimism inspired millions around the world.

She died at a time heavy with meaning in the Jewish tradition. This week and next, during our Yamim Noraim, these Days of Awe, we celebrate the creation of the world, circle back to the freshness and promise when all was new, when both we and the world were young.

Every year, no matter the disappointments or losses or frustrations we knew, our tradition infuses us with daring, with hope, with what we can do tomorrow.

Such, too, were the native attributes of this remarkable woman. Every day a new day in this astonishingly awesome, unique and fragile world of ours.

In her memory, in your yard, at your congregation, in Israel or somewhere else around the world, plant a tree. Give the world a little more life to remember, in gratitude, one grand life.

Not turtles all the way down?

2011-09-27T12:15:00.000-04:00

When the rabbis-of-old mused about the nature of the universe, their telescope was the Tanakh (the Bible), their philosophical society the pathways of Yavneh and Babylon.

Without advanced technology, with no peering devices beyond their own eyes, they used the latest - which is to say the earliest - source of knowledge they had, the texts of their tradition.

They asked: "On what does the earth rest? How does it stay up, stay put, stay stable? What supports it?" (Even framing the question was a leap of faith, what with the physics of globes and planets and space and gravity being such a grand mystery. Which it remains today, even with all we know.) For answers they turned to the words in the Bible.

"The world rests on its pillars," they answered, "for it says: 'God shakes the earth from her place till her pillars tremble.'" (Job 9:6)

But if so, the more curious wondered, what do the pillars rest on? "Upon the waters," they replied, "for it says: 'He spread forth the earth upon the waters.'" (Psalm 136:6)

And what do the waters rest on? "The mountains, for it says: 'The waters stood above the mountains.'"(Psalm 104:6)

And the mountains? "On the wind, for it says: 'For, lo, He formed the mountains and created the wind [which supports the mountains] . (Amos 4:13)

The wind in turn, rests upon the storm, for it says: "The storm gives the wind its substance." (Psalm 148:8)

The storm, in turn, rests upon the arm of the Holy One, blessed be He, for it says: "And undergirding [all creation] are God's everlasting arms." (Deuteronomy 33:27)

Finally, Rock Bottom (tzur olamim); a place that requires no other place; a support that requires no other support.

Ever curious, and eager to be more precise, the rabbis circle back to the beginning of this cascade of speculations, and wonder just how many pillars, in reality, held up the world? Some said twelve, one for each tribe. Others said seven, as in Proverbs 9.

But these answers did not satisfy R. Eleazar b. Shammua. He sought not the physical, but the metaphysical truth of existence. Material integrity allows the world to exist, he conceded. But it is spiritual integrity that enables it to thrive.

So, he asks, what is the spiritual foundation of the world? He answers, "The world rests on one pillar, and its name is ‘Righteousness’, for it is said: ‘The righteous form the foundation of the world.'" (Proverbs 10:25)

Rosh Hashanah is when we celebrate the birthday of the world. It is an appropriate time to speculate on what holds it up and what keeps it going.

It is humbling and exalting to imagine that the righteous tasks we do, both large and small, day in and day out, form the foundation that keeps this world going. But be certain that they are, for in truth, nothing else can.

Shana tova. Have a happy, healthy, peaceful and prosperous new year.

And may it be filled to overflowing with righteous tasks.

(Based on the Talmud, Hagigah 12b)

Nature's answers

2011-09-21T11:03:00.003-04:00

Janine Benyus is widely known for her pioneering work promoting biomimicry, that is, answering our technological needs by mimicking nature's ways.

Nowadays, industry makes things by "heating, beating and treating." Which may get the job done but often leaves destructive residues, gobbles up enormous amounts of financial and energy resources and only gets us half-way there.

Nature, on the other hand, has been field-testing the best ways to build things, dissolve things, grow things, arrest growth, and altogether thrive in the most efficient and enduring ways.

If we can conduct our industry in ways that are cheaper, enduring and better, why wouldn't we?
That is the promise of biomimicry.

As Benyus says, "Learning about the natural world is one thing, learning from the natural world... that's the switch."

Brew a cup of tea, sit on a comfy chair and take 20 minutes to watch her TED talk. It will inspire you, and give you hope!