The Los Angeles fires this month have been shocking and destructive. The moment that struck home for me was hearing, through the Masorti movement, about the destruction of the Pasadena Jewish Temple, a Conservative synagogue in LA. Their Torah scrolls were saved, but their unique ark doors, and their home, were lost.
Yet as horrific as the fires are, they’re not a surprise, resulting as they do from climate change caused by humans. Climate change is something my generation has always been aware of, and we learnt in school that this is the kind of catastrophe it brings. As Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the UN, says, we are close to tipping points that will dramatically accelerate the impact of climate change. Somehow, we continue to underestimate the risks.
We also find unheeded warnings in this week’s parashah, Vaeira. As the year turns, so we too move from the book of Genesis to Exodus. We have left behind the enormity of the world’s creation and the lives of Judaism’s matriarchs and patriarchs. In Exodus, we find ourselves at the very beginning of a biblical history that stretches through the exodus to the land of Canaan; from tabernacle to temple.
That history begins with the Israelites in slavery, the victims of baseless hatred. The Egyptians feared them, as immigrants, saying that the Israelites were too numerous; fearing they might betray them and join their enemies; suspicious of Israelite women, who ‘were not like Egyptian women’.
After Moses sees God at the burning bush, he becomes the revolutionary leader of the Israelites, with a mission to lead them out of Egypt to freedom. It is a dream that requires the acquiescence of Pharaoh, whether granted freely or under duress. And, after Pharaoh rejects Moses’s initial approaches, God punishes the Egyptians with plagues. They are warnings, but also represent a chance to do the right thing, by releasing the Israelites.
The first plague is blood: the Nile, the lifeline of Egypt, transformed into a horrific sight. Egypt is known in Hebrew as Mitzrayim, ‘the narrows’, because practically its whole territory hugs the Nile, as it snakes hundreds of miles through inhospitable desert. As the Nile turns into blood, the Egyptian Empire becomes infeasible; the Egyptians are forced to dig down to reach groundwater instead. It is an environmental disaster on a massive scale. Yet Pharaoh begs Moses for help, and the Nile turns back to water.
But somehow, once the disaster seems to have passed, Pharaoh becomes nonchalant. He forgets the crisis he has just experienced, and about the root of the problem. Perhaps it is simplest for him to put it out of his mind. So too with the plague of frogs that follows: as frogs fill every corner of the land, Pharaoh cries out for help. Yet once God has removed them, Pharaoh becomes stubborn once again, even while stinking piles of frogs lie all over Egypt.
The plagues bring waves of environmental disasters, and each one brings the Egyptians’ shock, terror and desperation; yet after each plague, they return to their lack of concern. The end only comes with the final plague: the killing of the first-born. It is only this absolute darkness that shakes the Egyptians out of their insouciance.
I can’t shake the connection between plagues and climate change. The world experiences climate disasters of ever-increasing severity and destruction, and yet humanity fails to act. Each one is an avoidable disaster.
Jeremiah provides a vision of where the human depravity has the potential to lead:
I look at the earth, It is unformed and void; at the skies, and their light is gone. I look at the mountains, they are quaking; and all the hills are rocking. I look: no human is left, and all the birds of the sky have fled. I look: the farmland is desert, and all its towns are in ruin. (Jeremiah 4:23)
Like the Egyptians, we have endless warnings, not just from climactic disasters, but from decades of scientific expertise.
Many of us also have the power to act: with our votes, with our voices; with the companies and banks we entrust with our money; with how we choose to travel; the foods we eat. Our society is made of millions of people, and between us we have enough strength to make change. It is essential that we do.
As the Israelites wandered through the desert, after their escape from Pharaoh, they received water from the miraculous well that followed the prophetess Miriam. It was a source of life in an inhospitable land; a wellspring on which the Israelites depended. However, we only learn about the well after Miriam dies, when the Israelites do not have water to drink (Ta’anit 9a). While they had access to the well, the Israelites took its bounty for granted; only once it was gone did they realise what they had lost. We too should be grateful for the bounty of our planet before it is lost to us.
We are privileged to belong to a generation with the opportunity to turn off the path of environmental breakdown; let’s make the most of it. Frustration and indignation is a start; let’s follow it with concrete actions to change minds.
We should mourn the destruction in Los Angeles; the loss of life; and the huge injury done to so many communities. Afterwards, when the fires are put out, and scaffolding marks the beginning of rebuilding, we should not make the same mistake as Pharaoh and the Egyptians. We must act, with urgency, before even greater calamity strikes us.
Tim Motz, LBC rabbinical student
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.