September 19, 2009

It was horrible. Last year, as we hurried home to prepare for Rosh Hashana and ready our tables for the guests we would soon welcome, we had CNN on or listened to the radio for Wall Street’s closing bell and the bad news. It was even worse than we had anticipated. The blackest day for the stock market since the 1987 crash! It wasn’t much better as Yom Kippur arrived the following week.

As Cantor Lieberman prepared to chant the time-sanctified words of “Kol Nidre,” many of you gave voice to less lofty sentiments when you saw the market had lost more than 500 points that day.

In the 1920’s an adage arose on Wall Street, “Buy on Rosh Hashana and sell on Yom Kippur” …as if Jewish traders really knew something… But last year, following the exact opposite advice – “Sell on Rosh Hashana and buy on Yom Kippur” would have been much smarter for all…Jew and non-Jew alike.

Then Bernard Madoff grabbed the headlines with his unconscionable Ponzi scheme. He changed the lives of his wealthy clients, wiped out the more modest investors and, most upsetting, severely harmed and even closed down a number of Jewish charitable foundations. Now the name “Bernard Madoff” has finally receded from the news. But what about the plight of those nice, ordinary hard-working people whose names we do not know who were forced to leave their homes as a result of severe economic problems?!

More than 850,000 families lost their homes to foreclosure last year! Surely there are people here who lost their jobs this past year.

Our hearts go out to you. And if you are still in need of employment and have not yet accessed the resources of our Jewish community, I hope you will contact Jewish Family and Career Services following the conclusion of Rosh Hashana. Undoubtedly there are people here whose financial condition may be precarious and who have concerns they could not have imagined as recently as two years ago. As you deem appropriate, I hope that you will allow us to try to help.

The fact is that all of us who have investments lost money this past year, probably significant amounts. But the economy appears to be heading in the right direction now. The stock market is up. And we are forgetting, or never even learned, what must become an enduring lesson of this financial crisis.

We are failing to grasp a fundamental spiritual lesson…namely that “stuff is not salvation.”

That’s how former Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen framed it in a column last December. Let me remind you about the horrible incident that triggered Ms. Quindlen’s column. It occurred on the day after Thanksgiving at a Wal-Mart Store in Valley Stream, New York…

“Black Friday” as the day has come to be known in retail circles, the day that puts those retailers “in the black” and sets the course for what they hope will be a very profitable holiday shopping period. But this year in that Wal-Mart Store in New York it really was a black Friday. Pre-dawn shoppers barged through the doors with such force when the store opened that they trampled a Wal-Mart employee to death. We recoiled in horror when we heard that story.

Surely none of us could see ourselves in those shoppers and their unimaginable actions that day. Yet there is a common element that many of us do share with them…the desire for “stuff” - for the latest technology, for fine clothing and jewelry, for a new car, for… You fill in the blank with whatever stuff it is that you desire.

Think about it. Most of us will be able to come up with something. I know that I could fill in that blank with a thing or two. We all know better; yet that knowledge does not curb our appetite and, very often, our buying habits. And all the while, we know deep down that all our stuff doesn’t and can’t bring us a deeply-felt, profound sense of contentment.

This year some of us realized that we simply can no longer afford to make the kind of purchases we have made in the past. We may not be able to share material resources with our children or grandchildren in the manner we had hoped or planned. So what is the spiritual lesson we should glean after a year that may have painfully taught us that “stuff is not salvation?”

The lesson, of course, is that lasting meaning in our lives lies elsewhere. Real meaning, worthy meaning, the kind of values and commitments we would like to pass on to our children and grandchildren and hope they will inculcate in their lives are many and varied. Our tradition offers no shortage of such commitments in word and in deed. But this day, about which we have just proclaimed three times “hayom harat olam” – “Today is the anniversary of Creation,” begs us to commit ourselves to one particular set of actions and a general orientation - namely to protect God’s world.

If this past year has painfully taught us about the precariousness of our financial resources and possessions; if it has raised questions about the material well-being that we will be able to share some day with those we love most; let us answer the following question differently than we may have done only a few short years ago -

What can we genuinely pass on to our children and grandchildren that will make a difference to them?

What gift of meaning may we bequeath to them and, through them, to subsequent generations?

The answer on this day when we celebrate the anniversary of Creation is the gift of environmental responsibility.

If 5769 was a year in which we lost financial resources, let the new year of 5770 and every year thereafter be a time when we clearly commit ourselves to protect the resources of the world that God has created for our enjoyment and use. It is time to hear, internalize and then inculcate within our lives the message that responsible use of our earth’s resources is truly salvation for the generations that will forever succeed us. It is that commitment, a commitment to securing an environment whose non-renewable resources we do not recklessly deplete, that we must bequeath to our children and grandchildren.

Some among us misunderstand the very first biblical text that speaks about our relationship with the earth’s resources. It is arguably Judaism’s foundational statement about that relationship.

God created Adam and Eve, and the Holy One blessed them and said – “Be fertile and increase; u’mil’oo et ha’aretz ve’chiv’shuhah – fill the earth and master it and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on the earth.”

It sounds like a prescription for human beings’ unfettered use of the earth’s resources, doesn’t it?! After all, we are the greatest of God’s creations! It is our place to utilize our God-given abilities to master the earth – It’s right there in the Torah! But that is hardly our tradition’s last word on how we are to interact with our environment.

How fitting it is that this year’s Sisterhood/Women’s League for Conservative Judaism Torah Fund pin bears the words of Torah that shape the meaning of the Genesis account of creation.

“God took Adam and placed him in the Garden of Eden – ‘le’ovdah u’leshomrah” – to till it, to work it and to protect it. Use of the land must go hand-in-hand with proper protection of the land itself.

You know, it’s a funny thing – God’s instruction to Adam and Eve to master the earth appears in the first chapter of Genesis while God’s added caveat to Adam to protect the earth is found in the second chapter. For a variety of reasons biblical scholars discern two creation accounts here – one quite different from the other – one found in chapter one and the other found in chapter two…

As if God realized, “No, if I tell the human being only to master the earth, he will do so at a cost to it and ultimately to himself and to the rest of My creations.” “I must therefore re-instruct him. I must tell him also to protect the earth and the gifts it provides him.”

No greater expression of that necessary rebalancing of relationship between the human being and nature is found than in Shabbat, the day of divine rest that followed God’s final act of creation. For six days, the Torah tells us, God did on the grandest scale what the Holy One soon instructs human beings to do – chiv’shuhah – God mastered the void by forming the earth, its constituent parts and all of its inhabitants. But then – “va’yechal Elohim bayom hashivii melachto asher asah…” (Gn 2:2) – On the seventh day God ceased to create.

From that point on human beings, you and I, would join God as co-creators. But like the Holy One, we, too, are called upon to cease dominion over the world on this single day each week. Shabbat is the paradigm for our protective relationship with the earth.

However, one day out of seven is insufficient to preserve our world today because human needs require that we continue to master its resources on all other days. How shall we do so?  How can we live with this paradox of “masterful” creation on the one hand and replenishing rest on the other? How can we use the earth’s resources, as we surely must, yet still preserve them for generations to come?

The answer lies in incorporating in our lives a specific value the Rabbis found rooted in the Book of Deuteronomy – “bal tashchit.” “When in your war against a city you have to besiege it for a long time in order to capture it, ‘lo tashchit’ – you must not destroy its trees…” (Dt. 20:19)

On the face of it, this wartime mitzvah is absurd. Everyone knows that in conducting short-range warfare even in modern times, removal of trees and vegetation that protect the enemy is a common battlefield strategy. But the Torah says, “No!” And the Rabbis elaborate upon this single statement concerning destruction of trees to develop a whole category of things that one cannot thoughtlessly destroy.

Why? Because the Rabbis were attuned to a truth that too few of us ever consider, let alone prioritize.

In the words of Psalm 24, words we read at the conclusion of our Morning Minyan service every Sunday – “The earth is the Lord’s and all that it contains, the world and its inhabitants.”

That verse means that we are stewards of God’s world…here to enjoy it. But here, ultimately, to pass that world on to subsequent generations in as beautiful a fashion as when we entered it.

Most of us are not fulfilling that responsibility. The world in which we live has become progressively more disposable... We get rid of things often times not because we must do so, but because it is convenient and seemingly inexpensive to do so. Such ways are insidiously corrosive… not only to our earth’s resources, but also to our understanding of our proper place in this world. We are not only to use; we are not only to master.

In God’s world, we are called upon to be responsible stewards.
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Friends, a Rosh Hashana sermon is hardly the appropriate vehicle in which to share a litany of specifics about how we must curb our needless destruction of resources. But it is precisely the right time to lift up the concern itself and our obligation to respond.
“Hayom harat olam” – “Today is the anniversary of Creation.”

The year that has ended was a difficult one for many of us. Hardships continue. Surely we must come away from it holding fast to a common truth. The most enduring and certain resource we can enjoy and share with our children, grandchildren and generations to come is the world itself…a world in which we join with the Holy One as co-creators and faithful stewards.

Today, the start of a new year, is the moment for each of us to begin to alter our mindset. If you pay no attention now to recycling, it is time to start. Act to preserve resources, even if only a little bit at first. It will become a habit.

If you presently recycle but pay little attention to the products you purchase and to their effects on our environment, it’s time to pay attention. It’s getting easier for all of us to buy “green.”

Start doing it. It will become a habit.

There are many things you can do. After the holiday, you will find an information pamphlet here for you to pick up. You will also be able to access it from our congregation’s website. The most important thing you can do is start.

If you have impressionable children or grandchildren, be a “dugma.” That’s what they always told me when I became an officer in my congregation’s USY group and then in the region – Be a dugma – be an example. Let your children and grandchildren see what you are doing. Talk to them about the importance you attach to protecting non-renewable resources in God’s world.
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“God led Adam around all the trees of the Garden of Eden.  And God said to Adam: ‘See My works, how good and praiseworthy they are!  All that I have created, I made for you.  Be mindful then that you do not spoil and destroy My world – for if you spoil it, there is no one after you to repair it.’”  (Midrash Kohelet Rabbah 7:13)

That source is not a modern midrash authored by someone who wished to convey a message about the environment today. No, it was included in the text, Kohelet Rabbah, over 1200 years ago! The author knew Torah and the Book of Deuteronomy, in particular.

The phrase “lo tashchit” - “Don’t needlessly destroy nature” stuck in his head, I’m sure. Back in the 8th century the author already recognized that his community was not taking the message to heart… so he wrote “…for if you spoil God’s world, there is no one after you to repair it.”

What he meant was that if the present generation showed little concern for the non-renewable resources in God’s world, neither would the next generation or the one after that…

History has born out the truth of his assertion. But awareness of our responsibilities in God’s world is growing. More and more, people are acting – recycling, reducing consumption and “greening” the use of products and resources.

There is one to repair the world today, and it is you…every single one of us!

On this day when we have repeatedly said, “Hayom harat olam” - “Today is the anniversary of Creation,” let us commit ourselves to become responsible stewards of God’s world.

Let us be faithful examples to our children and grandchildren so that they, like Adam and Eve and all subsequent generations, will be fortunate enough “le’ovda u’leshomra” – to work, preserve and forever enjoy this hallowed place we call “God’s world.”

Amen.