PALE BLUE DOT
SERMON September 16, 2023
When God saw how corrupt the earth was, for all flesh had corrupted its ways on earth, God said to Noah,
“For My part, I am about to bring the Flood—waters upon the earth—to destroy all flesh under the sky in which there is breath of life; everything on earth shall perish.” (Genesis 6:17)
And on the seventh day the waters of the Flood came upon the earth…
All the fountains of the great deep burst apart,
And the floodgates of the sky broke open. , (Genesis 7:10,11b)
We all knew the flood was coming. We were told. Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962. Bill McKibben published the End of Nature in 1989. Since 1989, we have put more carbon in the atmosphere than we did in all of human history before that year.
We knew it was coming. A thousand modern Noah’s standing next to a thousand arks warned us that we need to change our ways before it’s too late, or face consequences that we can only imagine.
And now having put off taking action, having lost our chance to prevent the flood, or to get on the last ark, or to build our own ark, having waited too long, we stand here and it is starting to rain.
It has certainly been raining in Vermont this summer, and when it wasn’t raining, it was over 90 degrees in the shade. The floods in Vermont, the heat across the country, the clear days turned to haze by smoke from immense forest fires in Canada all brought it home; this year it became impossible to ignore the reality of changing climate, not “out there,” but right here in the Shire.
Of course, a bunch of our newer members already knew this, moving here as climate refugees from the fires and drought out west. But some of us are just internalizing the reality of what is coming.
The Torah tells us that after Noah’s flood, God promised never to destroy the earth again.
עֹ֖ד כּל־יְמֵ֣י הָאָ֑רֶץ זֶ֡רַע וְ֠קָצִ֠יר וְקֹ֨ר וָחֹ֜ם וְקַ֧יִץ וָחֹ֛רֶף וְי֥וֹם וָלַ֖יְלָה לֹ֥א יִשְׁבֹּֽתוּ׃
So long as the earth endures,
Seedtime and harvest,
Cold and heat,
Summer and winter,
Day and night
Shall not cease.”
God places the rainbow in the sky after a rainbow as a sign of this promise.
But this time, it is not God who is destroying the earth and the life upon. This time, it is us. We have done this. This time, God did not stop us from building the Tower of Babel and our hubris has reached to heavens and the corners of the earth. We did this to ourselves and to the thousands of species that are facing extinction.
Rosh HaShanah is called the Birthday of the World, the day we Jews celebrate the miracle of this world and the life all around us.
Rosh HaShanah is also called Yom haDin, the Day of Judgement, where we judge our actions and ask forgiveness for the ways we have failed.
When it comes to being stewards of this planet, we have sinned. We have transgressed. We have strayed. I don’t know if God will forgive us for this, but I feel certain our grandchildren and their children will not.
I don’t know about you, but it is hard to feel hopeful that somehow, the global human community will rally, put aside our distrust and come together to make the sacrifices needed to turn the ship of climate out of the rising storm and back toward the calmer waters and the safety of harbor.
I question why I haven’t personally been more actively engaged. Intellectually, I’ve known this, in that way we all know we are going to die, but we rarely actually behave and live as if that’s true. I mean, it seemed abstract, far away, while other things felt much more real, be they gay rights, or the rise of authoritarian populism, or reproductive rights, or hunger, or antisemitism. The list is long, and all need our attention, and somehow those issues, large as they are, seem easier to do something about than climate change. Sure we can compost, stop eating meat, buy an electric car, put solar power in our homes, and those are important and we must continue, but we also know they aren’t enough. Nothing we do as individuals is enough.
It is overwhelming, and I want us to just acknowledge that sitting here in the community on Rosh Hashanah. Overwhelmed. Powerless. Just to hold that together.
And so, like Jonah in the Bible, in the midst of life-threatening storms instead of helping to row toward safety, many of us have gone down to the hold of our ships, pulled his blankets over our heads, and gone to sleep. We have been sleeping in a deep sleep of denial, and this summer it finally got too hot to sleep that sleep. It was the hottest summer on record, and science tells us it was the hottest summer in 125,000 years.
We are all Jonah now and it is time to wake up and start rowing. Like Jonah, we must take responsibility for our part in causing this and make the sacrifices needed to help everyone survive the waves crashing all around us.
To address this is going to take unprecedented political pressure, and I’m not a politician. As a rabbi, I can see that we will need one another to face what’s ahead. We will need community, and we will need the Jewish resilience and stubborn perseverance I spoke about last night.
We need to stand on firm ethical foundations, and not let fear move us away from caring for one another, and giving support to the most vulnerable, and in this, Jewish experience and Jewish ethics provide a clear bedrock of the obligation to feed the hungry, house the homeless, and protect the vulnerable, because we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.
As a rabbi, I can see that to face this future with love, equanimity and generosity, we will need to tend to our spiritual lives and deepen them. We can get powerful emotional and spiritual strength from a strong sense of connection to God, or to Higher Power, or to whatever it is that is eternal and ineffable and ties us all together.
And a deeper spiritual life comes from more regular spiritual practices. It is not great to wait until the crisis is here to start thinking of developing those habits, so this New Year is a great time to start that.
Let me suggest Jewish prayer as one excellent practice. Seriously, the predictable ritual of daily morning and evening prayer, however brief, can be incredibly grounding and calming, and remind us of the beauty of this life and this earth, even when storms are raging all around us. It is the practice, the habit of opening up to the sacred around us that gets us through the most turbulent times. And if Hebrew is in your way, try wrapping yourself in a tallit and just breathing while taking in the world around you.
The spiritual gifts of a rich Jewish life come with a rich daily Jewish practice. Imagine doing yoga once a year, or meditating once a year, and expecting that to enrich your spiritual life in meaningful ways.
Now, many of you have said to me, rabbi, I don't get much out of prayer. I find God in nature.
So do I. So did the rabbis, and to think Judaism isn’t about connecting deeply to the natural world is to miss one of the most central aspects of Jewish prayer. Half of our prayers are about recognizing the awesome nature of the world around us and remembering to be thankful for creation.
To be a religious Jew is to remind ourselves every day through the words of our prayerbook what a gift it is. Every morning I read: “uv’tuvo m’chadesh b’chol yom tamid ma’aseh vreishit. In your goodness you make new each day the works of creation.”
Or this beautiful passage from the Nishmat prayer, one of the oldest in our Siddur:
Even if our mouths were full of song as the sea…and our lips full of praise as wide as the sky’s expanse, and were our eyes to shine like the sun and moon, if our hands were spread out like heaven’s eagles and our feet swift like young deer, still we could never thank you adequately, God and God of our ancestors, for one ten-thousandths of the blessings you have given us.
Prayer can help us remain spiritually grounded but the point of Jewish liturgy and prayer is to spur us to action in the world, and this action must also become a daily and weekly practice – a habit.
As an editorial in the New York Times last week by Auden Schendler and Andrew P. Jones suggests we need to turn our work on the climate into practice, like Jewish daily prayer or yoga.
They write:
This practice starts with a deep understanding of the problem, so it will mean reading a little about climate science. Our actions must be to scale, so while we undertake individual steps in our lives, like retrofitting light bulbs, we must realize that real progress comes from voting, running for office, marching in protest, writing letters, and uncomfortable but respectful conversations with fathers-in-law. This work must be habitual. Every day some learning and conversation. Every week a call to Congress. Every year a donation to a nonprofit advancing the cause. In other words, a practice.
I want Temple Sinai to join ADAMAH, the Jewish Climate Leadership Coalition and the Jewish Climate Action Network which helps organize Jewish political activism on behalf of the environment. I will need some of you to step forward to be our liaison to these organizations and to work through the Social Action Committee to help our community become active in this arena.
I think one practice that is essential in the coming years is to go out into nature and breathe it in and love it fiercely. In order to save ourselves, we must love the earth more fiercely for we protect what we love. And given what we are facing, our spirituality must turn toward the earth and what we are facing.
I admit I didn't always love this earth. I was a nerdy kid with terrible allergies and I dreamed of space. I watched Star Trek twice a day for many years. We lived near the border between Georgia and Florida so even then, we got two different network stations so I could watch two different episodes every day. When I was a bit older, my grandmother, a schoolteacher, gave me one of those “make your own transistor radio kits” from Radio Shack, and somehow I ended up getting several more of them, so I put them all together and connected it to an old rabbit ear antenna and I would go out in the yard, look up at the stars, and try to contact the Enterprise with my little radio, praying they would beam me up and take me away from my life in rural Georgia, with my parents always fighting, bullying at school, and few friends because we moved every year.
Back then I took it for granted that there were all sorts of intelligent life forms out there, and that they were buzzing overhead regularly. Carl Sagan said there were billions of suns with planets older than ours so there must be civilizations far more advanced than we are. I wanted to get as far away from this earth as I could. In high school, I went to a summer program called Governor’s Honors in Science, and we had to do a big display about what our careers would be. The other chemistry kids had the careers you would expect, but mine? Mine was “ Rabbi in Space.”
But now as telescopes and techniques are so much more advanced looking out into the universe, it is becoming ever more evident that our earth is a rare find. Sure there are lots of planets, but so far none with the right combination of elements and long-term stability to allow advanced life forms to evolve.
We might get first contact tomorrow, but even so, this planet is a miracle, we are miracles. Imagine it: it takes supernovas to even create the elements required to make our bodies, and the dust from those vast nebulae must condense into a star that is the right size, and have a planet with lots of water just the right distance from the sun, one not too big that the gravity would crush us, one with a moon big enough to slow down our spinning, stabilize our wobble, and cause mile high tides to wash across the earth over and over, churning up the possibility of amino acids, then life, then oxygen and the right atmosphere and temperature must be stable over millions of years to allow advanced intelligent life to evolve.
Today, Rosh HaShanah, is the birthday of the world, and it is a day to celebrate the miracle of the world around us, and let the Shofar wake up our hearts to love this earth.
Or I should say “these earths.” Scientists tell us we live in a multiverse, with infinite numbers of universes bubbling up in a great quantum foam. They tell us that every choice we make creates a new universe, in what they call “bubble nucleation.”
Every choice we make creates a new universe, and all our choices together create the universe we inhabit right here and right now.
I can’t come close to grasping that science, much less the math, but as a Jew, it seems true to me that we share the responsibility for the universe we create and live in by the choice we make every day. That is the foundation of the High Holy Days, that our decisions shape the world, and so we need to feel the responsibility of our choices keenly that we might choose life.
With the new Webb telescope, we have come a long way from the first pictures of earth from space, floating there as a pale blue dot in a black expanse but it still reminds us of our precious vulnerable home.
Reform Rabbi Carl Sagan captured the impact of that image with these words:
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena…
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, and the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand…
There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. [ Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994 ]
L’Shana Tova Tikatevu. May we be written in the Book of Life and Blessing.