Earth Day Sermon
Rabbi Daniel Swartz
Sunday, 22 April 2007
Ms. Joyce Palmer: On this Earth Day, I’d like to introduce to you Rabbi Daniel Swartz. Rabbi Swartz has worked in the social justice field for the past decade, combining his religious training with his fervent love and respect for the environment. He served for two years as the Coordinator for the Greater Washington Interfaith Power and Light, an organization that works with congregations and other religious institutions to address moral and tactical dimensions to energy use. We welcome Rabbi Swartz to All Souls Church. [Applause]
Rabbi Daniel Swartz: I’ve got to bring the mike down a little; I don’t think I’m going to be making the All Souls basketball team any time in the near future. [Laughter] A student once asked a rabbi, “Rabbi, why do so many rabbis answer a question with another question?” The rabbi considered this carefully, muttering to himself and consulting numerous learned texts. Finally, he looked up and said, “Why not?” [Laughter] So, in that tradition, I want to start with three questions.
First, with apologies to Ross Perot’s former running mate: Why are you here? Now, don’t worry; I don’t mean this in a fundamentally existential sense. Rather, why are you here at All Souls this morning? You’re busy people. I’m sure there’s work just crying out for attention, let alone errands long overdue for completion. And then, there are surely more spectacular entertainments available in town. No, I’m guessing that something more important brings you here, a search for . . . But more on that later.
The second question is the obverse of the first: Why, besides today, am I no longer here? That is, here in Washington, rather than in this church. Our family had been in D.C. for 13 years, in a comfortable home in a great neighborhood, in lovely People’s Republic of Takoma Park. [Laughter] But we left because we too were searching, searching for . . . But more on that in a moment.
And now my third question which is, in part, an exercise. I want you to all close your eyes for a moment, just a moment, not going to sleep yet. Picture the first image that comes to mind when you hear the word “environment.” Okay? Get that image firmly in mind. Now, open your eyes and raise your hands if there were any people in that image. . . . This is a problem. [Laughter] In fact, in many senses, it is the problem, the one that connects my three questions. Indeed, connection is what it’s all about. For we are displaying – and this is not unusual; every time I ask this question, I get the same result – a profound lack of connection, not only with the world around us but in a variety of other dimensions as well. For I would bet that one of the major reasons that you come here is to find connection, a connection to the transcendent, a connection to a sense of meaning in your life, a connection to a caring community, a connection to friends. And I left here in part because of the ways that this area can make it hard to connect.
This search for connection within a religious sphere is not too surprising. The root of the word “religion,” after all, is ligere, “to connect,” like our ligaments connect parts of our body. But, more precisely, religere means to re-connect, for something within us remembers connection, whether or not we seem to have found it yet on this planet. This spiritual disconnect has very practical consequences; indeed, I think it is at the heart of significant environmental problems, from global climate change to over-fishing in the oceans. How so? How does this affect the world around us?
Well, there are two flavors to this disconnectedness, each with their own set of consequences and ways forward. The first might be described musically as “I drink muddy water and sleep out in a hollow log,” spiritually as “Ezekiel, Chapter 37,” and grammatically as the disconnect between us and them. The second flavor can be sung to “I think to myself, ‘What a wonderful world,’” read in Psalm 148 and parsed by the disconnect between what we do and who we are. Let me start with the first, the more obvious if no less intractable disconnect which lies at the intersection somewhere of Environmental Avenue and Justice Way.
When we arrive at that corner, we see us and them are disconnected in at least two ways. The first is through ignorance that expands into sheer obliviousness. Think back on our own little exercise about what the word “environment” conjures up. Not seeing ourselves as a part of the environment means that we are apart from it. Us here, it there. And thus, what we do doesn’t affect it and its health or lack thereof does not affect us. But in fact the environment is where we live, where we learn, where we work, where we play, where we grow, where we pray. So when we foul it, we muddy our own water. Or more accurately, people muddy the waters of those with the least economic and political power. We leave on lights, not thinking that this little light of mine might come from some dirty coal plant spewing out deadly fumes in neighborhoods that are disproportionately poor and of color.
We drive and consume goods trucked in from a distance by dirty diesel, not thinking about the poisons coming forth from our tailpipes, or how they might be exacerbating asthma in the children in the city poor. Obliviousness at this late date seems pretty inexcusable, but hey, you know, our species has a long history of utter obliviousness. Humanity invented the plow and domesticated the oxen and the horse at roughly the same time, in roughly the same part of the world and it took several hundred years after that for someone to put the two together. Or, if you prefer a more modern example, look at what was considered fashionable in the 1970s. [Laughter] So please practice a bit of patience with our obliviousness, but also, persevere in your prodding until, poof, people pop awake. Then, perhaps, they will learn the environmental equivalent of the Golden Rule, that is, “Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do to you.” [Laughter]
What really is inexcusable, however, is when we recognize that we affect them and use that recognition to exploit them, for whether we are talking about the segregation and subjugation of people or the despoiling and destruction of land, the same dynamic unfolds. Certain “us’s” see “thems” with less power and so, knowing that they can get away with it, they profit while forcing others to pay the price. So what if our profligate waste of energy floods some distant island; what are they going to do, sue us? As long as profits can be made by moving factories to exploit cheap labor or lax environmental laws, factories will be moved, and waters will be muddied. And so it is that to counter the voice of profit, we need a prophetic voice, an Ezekiel speaking for those downstream as he does in Chapter 37 where he talks about the fat sheep of the land who not only get the choicest harvest and the best water but then go and muddy up that which is left over for the lean, the hungry, the poor, the weak. Or a Martin, calling on the whole flock together to become a beloved community, breaking down walls, separating people from people, poor from rich, people of color from people of pallor, developed countries from those developing, even congregations united in one faith from Unitarians.
Sometimes that voice, that prophetic voice, will turn a heart. Or, if they are heartless, it may move them to shame. Or when they have no shame, it will call for justice to be established through law so that the fat sheep and the wall-builders can’t get away with it anymore and waters once more will run clean.
But the thing about prophets is that you’re not supposed to sit on your tush waiting for one to show up. When the bush is burning, you’re supposed to shout out hinneni, “Here I am, ready to speak truth to power on behalf of a beloved ecosystem, for there are still plenty of us’s pushing around all sorts of thems, plenty of waters still being muddied. How many Katrinas will global warming have to spawn before we realize that, while hurricanes don’t discriminate against race or class, they surely shine a bright light on societies that do. How many of God’s splendors, from flocks of passenger pigeons that could darken the sky for hours but now exist only in memories, to great whales sounding in depths that sing no longer, to oceans once brimming with life that have become watery deserts, to glaciers once cloaking granite mountains as if they were soft clay, vanishing. How many will disappear before our hearts break with longing? How long will the us of the present steal from the thems of the future before we realize this is our own children and our children’s children whose very futures are going up in smoke as the Capitol power plant burns coal, as low-occupancy vehicles, behemoths, guzzle gas on the Beltway?
For those of you who have some representation with your taxation, [Laughter and applause] it’s more than time for Congress to move on a climate bill. And for those of you living in the nation’s colony, oops, I mean capital, the City Council has introduced a clean cars bill here, modeled after laws passed in California and a half-dozen other states, designed to keep today’s children from choking on car exhaust while protecting the future by reducing carbon-dioxide emissions and we can push that through.
In my people’s scriptures, the Torah, we are taught that God is faithful, l’olam va ed, usually translated as forever and ever, but, more accurately l’olam means to the end of time and space and va ed means and then even further. Can’t we be faithful at least till tomorrow? Reconnecting us with them, emblazoning to the minds of all that we are, indeed, all a part of the same small globe whirling through space will not be easy, but at least we can be stirred up for the task through anger and guilt, a powerful combination. And at least the solutions come in modes we’re comfortable with, familiar with, such as passing legislation.
But the other disconnect, the one between what we do and who we are, poses a very different set of challenges, and to remake that connection we will need miracles. Now, before you go accusing me of asking Unitarians to take something on faith, [Laughter] a proposition almost as dubious as asking Jews to be in unanimous agreement, let me explain what I mean by miracles. For there is a well-established rabbinic school of thought that miracles are not special-effects spectaculars, as they are often portrayed, but instead are purely subjective and often quite quiet phenomena. More suited, say, to chick flicks than the latest George Lucas saga.
Listen for a moment to a midrash, a story about a story designed to seek out the truth about what certainly seems to be one of those big special effects, the tale of the parting of the Red, actually the Reed but that’s a different story, Sea. Our rabbis wrote “As they crossed the sea, there were those who only looked down. Yuck, they said; look at this mud! It was bad enough in Egypt, we had to bake bricks out of mud; now we have to walk through it? And what is that smell? Who does this Moses character think he is anyway?” For them, this midrash concludes, there was no miracle. You see, miracles are supposed to be measured not in grandiosity, not in how expensive it would be to bring it to the screen, but how much they change a heart.
The prayer of thanksgiving that is traditionally said thrice daily – Jews give thanks for the miracles that surround us evening, morning and afternoon. What?! You’re telling me you don’t see miracles surrounding you each day? Then perhaps you would have missed Joshua Bell. As you probably heard or read about in what I found to be a miraculously moving Post article, Joshua Bell, one of the world’s top violinists, posed as a street musician at a Metro stop. And almost all the adults looked down at the mud and didn’t see the miracle, although every child did.
How many other miracles do we walk on by? Psalm l48 tells of a world chorus with everything from the great creatures of the sea’s depths to the mountains themselves singing together. Now forget for a moment that scientists, obviously not paying attention to Psalms, discovered whale songs less than 50 years ago. Ask instead how many of us have ever heard a mountain sing? How often have we even been quiet enough to listen to whether a mountain is singing? There is an idea in my tradition of saying one hundred b’rachot a day. B’rachot are usually translated as blessings, but in this context, it might be more accurate to call them miracle markers, or odes, to this wonderful world. There are b’rachot for rainbows and mountains, for seeing the first flowering tree in spring, or seeing a shooting star, for seeing a beautiful creature, an unusual creature, for seeing a scholar, for hearing good news, for hearing bad news. There are separate b’rachot for smelling fragrant spices, fragrant herbs and fragrant fruits. There are, in fact, b’rachot for almost everything, except for helping another which is considered to be an act so sacred, so miraculous, that it doesn’t need a blessing. But you can’t say one hundred b’rachot a day without noticing one hundred miracles a day. And you can’t notice a hundred miracles if you’re always rushing about.
So what do we do to solve this disconnect? Ahh, that’s the problem. We do too much. Our lives, especially in this city of Blackberries and 80-hour work weeks, where one proves one’s value by being busier than your neighbor, where it is a rare introductory conversation that doesn’t have, “So, what do you do? So what do you do?” Our lives are over-filled with doing.
And yet, somehow all of that doing leaves us feeling hollow, with an aching longing at our core. So we turn instead to consumer therapy, shopping, which yields plenty of consumption, yes consumption that eats up forests and muddies vast waters, but therapy? Not so much. Try as we might, we can’t shop or legislate our way out of this one.
Instead, we need to start undoing. Over the centuries, my people have developed ever more complicated rules governing what can and cannot be done on Shabbat, the Sabbath. But all these rules can be summed up quite simply: If it’s useful, don’t do it on Shabbat. [Laughter] Spend the day, instead, undoing, accepting, reconnecting. Now, that’s not easy, especially here. I woke up some mornings when I lived in D.C. starting at negative-twenty b’rachot. But even here, many can and do find stillness, can tune in to the songs of hill and street, and find new psalms arising.
So, experiment a little. Try doing nothing useful for – start small – five minutes a day, maybe ten. Try stopping every now and then and, wherever you are, try to see somewhere in your line of vision a miracle happening right then. Turn off the news every now and then and think to yourself, what a wonderful world. And all of this, not as something unconnected to your activist souls, not as some hermetic isolation, keeping yourself safe while letting the rest of the world go down the drain, so that you can release a DVD called “The Secret of Undoing.” No. Undoing and doing should be as connected as breathing in is connected to breathing out. Shabbat, the day of undoing, is supposed to be the breath that reinsouls ourselves, so that we are ready, connected once again to call our hinneni, “Here I am,” when we see that bush burning, or that water about to be muddied.
Connection. I began with questions and one exercise about it. Let me close with one final question and exercise. This is something Martin Buber used to do with his students. I want you to take the hand of those next to you. Hold their hands. Okay? This is a Unitarian church; you can do that. [Laughter] And now, I want you to tell me what you feel; I’m not asking this rhetorically, and you don’t have to raise your hands because they’re holding somebody, right. Just shout out what you’re feeling, somebody. Okay. Energy, connectedness, life. Martin Buber did this in Germany, remember, so of course, he would always wait until one of his students said “Hands!” [Laughter] And then he would say, “How many?” Think about it. If you’re holding hands, you actually feel four hands, not two. Your own hands, you can’t feel them by yourself. It is only when we are connected, when we are in relationship, that we can even know ourselves. This is because, fundamentally, we are made to connect. And when we do, when we make that connection, we can see, despite all the horrors unfolding in it, that truly, what a wonderful world this is. Stay connected. [Applause]